Get some cool drag & drop VFX here! ► https://www.famefocus.com/go/getvfx/ ◄ Recently, it seems you can't go anywhere online without seeing something about Jenna Ortega's dance choreography for Wednesday, and while that's all very nice and... dancey, it kind of distracts from the pretty awesome (and surprisingly simple) vfx used throughout the series. Like the music in this video? I made it! Support me by getting it on any of these sites :P Get it on iTunes: ► https://apple.co/2ENGfu9 ◄ Listen on Spotify: ► https://spoti.fi/3boTfCl ◄ Buy it on Amazon: ► https://amzn.to/2QVJZfk ◄ Thing. T. Thing has come a very long way since his television debut back in 1964. Originally, Thing's effects were rather crude and simple, and that was because the only real methods to create the effect of a disembodied hand that were available, were to hide the actor under a table and have the hand come out of a box, or to have the actor hidden away out of the frame of the shot. However, as Visual effects evolved, so did Thing. The development of the optical printer and early computers opened up the possibilities of what could be done with Travelling Mattes If you think of a shot as multiple images layered on top of each other, each of these layers is a matte, and each has a negative area through which with can see the layer behind it. A traveling matte is a matte where the subject we wish to isolate is in motion and therefore the negative area around the subject must also move, or "Travel" along with it. The Addams Family used the Two-Pass method, First, they locked the camera in position and shot the background alone, this is known as a clean plate, then after that, they shot the live-action plate with the actor performing, the actor's body was then rotoscoped to produce the traveling matte Then, when they composite both plates using an optical printer, the space left by removing the actor in the live-action plate will be filled in with the background on the clean plate. This method opened up a whole new world of possibilities for what Thing could do and where it could go, but it also brought two rather difficult problems. The first was how to hide the shadows cast by the actor playing Thing... It may have been relatively easy to remove 95% of an actor's body from a shot but the actor's shadows were a different story. The shadow problem continued with Addams Family Values in 1993, but here, they constantly changed the direction from which the actor playing Thing was lit in order to cast his shadow either onto the area that would be rotoscoped or onto an area that wasn't in the shot. Surprising as it may be, even though Visual Effects have evolved tremendously since the 1990's, and the end results, in general, are more realistic and easier to achieve, for Tim Burton's hit series Wednesday, the VFX teams still used the same techniques and had to overcome the same problems! They used the two-pass system, but the Optical Printer is no longer necessary for compositing because now it can be done digitally. They Rotoscoped, but this was also done digitally, and the mattes were created using chroma keying. They also had to overcome the problem of the shadows, which they did the same way they did for The Addams Family film, by hiding the actor in different places on set to reduce the shadows he cast and the laborious rotoscope work required to remove them. and by changing the direction of the light source on the set so that the actor's shadow wouldn't appear in the frame. and they had the same problem of putting Thing in places where the actor couldn't reach, and, just as their predecessors had before, they too used puppets, but, in addition to physical puppets, they used digital ones too, this meant using a Gray ball, Chrome Ball, and chip chart to measure the light's tone, intensity, and direction at the time they shot the scene, in order to match their digital hand to it later on and giving Jenna Ortega something to interact with to help sell the connection between reality and the digital. With Wednesday they didn't just achieve Netflix watch-time records or a viral dance choreography. With Wednesday they achieved something much more impressive. They achieved a level of visual effects that freed Thing from its box and let it roam freely in a world where it wasn't just some guy's hand, but its own individual character, a sentient being, capable of making us fear for it, capable of making us empathise with it, capable of making us laugh, and yes, even capable of making us cry. The above ActionVFX link contains a Special Fame Focus Discount. We also earn an affiliate percentage of each purchase. Read more here: www.famefocus.com Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/focusfame