Fantastic Flesh

So I've always been a believer in real, live special effects in movies.  Unfortunetly there's a growing number of movie productions that only use CG to show special effects.  I don't have a dislike for CG, I just think there's a time and a place for it.  Horror movies are not usually that place.  I found a special on netflix about horror movie effects and how a lot of the directors feel about what to use and when. Fortunetely a lot of the major directors in hollywood agree with me that 'real' special effects have a better screen prescence than CG.

 
This behind the scenes special shows a lot of the props and devices used to create creatures in movies over the last century.  It has fantastic interviews from directors and make up artists from recent movies such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Grindhouse.
One of the best examples of combining real effects and CG is shown in the movie The Mist that was made a couple years ago. To get the desired tentacle effects they used real objects on green screen, then overlayed the textures in CG.
They didn't have a large budget, so the tentacles aren't amazing looking, but I think straight CG would have been much harder to make convincing.

Face-Off new show coming...

So I was flipping through the channels on the tube and there was a commercial for a new show coming on the SyFy channel. Its a competition for the best make-up artists in the country, so American Idol for people who are makeup artists. The judges on the show look a little more grungy than J-Lo but comparable to Steven Tyler because he's scary looking. Anyway, If your interested in how people can be transformed into ridiculous characters through makeup and wanna watch the process then check the show out. I believe it starts on Wednesday. Link to the website is the title there's some cool stuff on there to check out.