Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

An extremely common special effect in any action adventure movie is a large avalanche of some sort. Whether it's a mass of zombies plummeting around the world mindlessly, a natural and believable avalanche of snow or rock, a mass of garbage inside of an impossibly gigantic incinerator or a starship full of organic tennis ball critters, large amounts of small particles or objects get thrown around quite a bit in television and theater, live action and animated features. Large scale slides of small objects overwhelm and carry characters, and it's always fascinating to watch when countless pieces of rubble or debris that would crush or suffocate characters, because the phenomenons are so large and uncontrollable. One prime example of this is from Pixar's "Toy Story 3"; the incinerator scene where Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the toys fall into a pit amongst great amounts of crushed and chopped up garbage, being carried by the flow of garbage towards an incinerator in the middle. Another, and personal favorite of mine, comes from the original Star Trek television series, Episode 15, season 2, "The Trouble with Tribbles", where an avalanche of Tribbles (small, round bodies of fur with no visible head or extremities) fall out of an overhead storage hatch which once contained grain by the thousands, and buries Captain Kirk in many tiny tribble bodies. Both of these scenes required many special effects to be used to create the illusion of millions of individual items or bodies, while actual production means meant only a handful of items could be created or directly controlled.

For the Toy Story 3 incineration scene, which was undoubtedly one of the most powerful in animated film, the secret was making you believe that the entire room was full of individual and unique trash items, while rendering limitations meant they needed to create as few pieces of CGI trash as possible. According to Side FX.com, a popular website dedicated to decoding CGI methods, "Pixar VFX artists treated each item of trash as an individual particle that could be procedurally animated using Houdini particle networks", meaning that en masse the trash pieces were assigned to react like individual snowflakes or clods of dirt. The effects teams then wrote in codes that produced several more "trash particles" around each individually manipulated trash so that manipulating one particle would affect many others surrounding it. The meant that in foreground scenes with thousands of pieces of trash, groups of trash could be animated and manipulated at a time, drastically cutting down on both the animators' and rendering computers' workload. Shading and single-flow animations were used for mid and background garbage, which is what made what appeared to be millions of individually moving pieces of trash on the sides of the incinerator pit; an otherwise impossibly expensive task requiring far too many computers to completely render. In fact, only the garbage in the close-up shots which were immediately touching the actual characters were unique and manipulated individually; Pixar hand created all of the trash that came in direct contact with the characters to lend credibility to the rest of the background debris. The result was a highly detailed close-up shot which let you automatically accept all of the simpler, more uniformed background to be as unique and dangerous.



On a more old-school shooting set that had, originally, almost no computer graphics added in whatsoever, the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode of Star Trek, the Original Series, featured thousands of tribbles created and stored in a bottom-opening storage area. Rumor has it that at the last moment the episode's directors requested the props department create thousands of small creatures that supposedly replicated by the tens as soon as they were fed. Frustrated by the impossible task the props manager grabbed two circlets of fur and sewed them together, creating a fuzzy ball in moments. Still, only a certain number of these creatures could be made in time and on budget, and when a scene called for the show's hero to be buried up to his shapely pectorals in the critters some careful editing and on-the-floor tricks were used. Firstly, the hatch was moved to be above the hero, so that just before a commercial break it could swing open and an initial flood of tribbles could come pouring out. Return from the commercial break and the hero is already pec-deep in the little beasts, most of whom are concealing a tent-like contraption beneath, which seems like a mass of fuzzy bodies but is actually only one glutenous critter deep. From the initial shot to a closeup waist-up, where they could be deeper to allow him movement, the only last touch was to occasionally thrown single tribbles out of the hatch, as is there were so many in the hatch that they  are still coming out. Not only was this a low tech, low budget solution to the problem of lacking a horde of animals, but one can only imagine how much fun stage hands had chucking fuzz balls at the overly dramatic actor's face during filming.

 

In conclusion, if they're tumbling down from a height or slowly sucking the characters along a slope, made up of organic cooing fuzz-balls or unsightly, unpleasantly mashed garbage, avalanches are powerful, fun, intimidating story telling devices that often am up the stakes in a story line. Whether or not they're CGI or creative camera angles and prop effects, the key to pulling off these shots is making the foreground custom, varied, and flexible, while keeping the background both complex enough to not be repetitive but simple enough to not overwhelm the rendering farms or underpaid prop interns. As far back as Star Trek's Original Series and as modern as the recent Pixar films, as high tech as computer CGI or as low tech as a man with fuzzy fabric and a hot glue gun, the principles of creating a believable  avalanche sequence have remained unchanged, and the results have only gotten more exciting. The mindlessness and loss of control that are associated with such masses is a story telling device that can raise the stakes of any action sequence, but only if done correctly, and ultimately the medium is far less important than the principles, and will be successful as long as the same rules are followed.