DIY Movie Knife Throw Special Effects Are Easy to Do Safely at Home

In the movie Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (above), which stars Rhona Mitra, there are lots of bladed weapons being swung and thrown.

In horror movies like this (left picture is a scene from Halloween), there's almost always the popular knife-throw special effects. You know, someone throws a bladed weapon and it sticks into something - like a wall.

Well, one way of duplicating this effect is to have the blade already placed beforehand in the spot of impact. It works quite well with long, thin blades, like those used in wushu, because you can make the blade quiver before the camera pans to it from the direction of the blade thrower. This is ideal if the sequence starts with the thrower and the camera "follows" the flight of the blade (which should be just for an instant), unti it hist the target. It takes timing, but it's doable and easy.

Another knife throw effect that's easy to do is to prepare the point of impact to receive the blade. Only this time, the blade would be coming from the other side of the target (like a thin wall). The thrower pretends to throw the blade, but what he really does is to drop it behind him and just goes through the motions. In time with the action, a stage hand drives the "real" blade from behind the wall, giving the illusion that it was the one that came from the thrower's hand. This technique is a favorite of stage magicians, but if also sometimes used in movie shoots as a mechanical effect.

Here is a video where you can learn more about do-it-yourself knife-throw special effects in filming.



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How to Summon a Ghost to Scare People Using Visual Effects

What's a good thing to do for Halloween? Make something scary of course. Here's a trick that's been used by stage magicians and movie makers for decades to produce an illusion of ghosts. Mind you, this trick has scared audiences due to it's convincing effect and some of the magicians have been jailed for practicing black magic - even though it's simple movie special effects magic!

In old magical stage shows, there used to be this trick in which a ghost is summoned in a box (sometimes it's a coffin). Sometimes, this ghost changes form, it's flesh seemingly dissolving until only the skeleton is left.

Other times, the ghost transforms into a monster with fangs and all! It's a trick that has scared young and old alike and is indeed very convincing if there is a crowd that reacts to it. How is this done?

It doesn't take much to do this as long as you have a digital camera, a computer, a slide projector, some way to generate flameless dry ice smoke (or a large sheet of transparent plastic), and the slide of your "ghost." What you do is to take a picture of a really scary ghost with a dark, plain background (you can paint it yourself if you have the talent, otherwise, get one from an obscure book).

Take your computer and projector and pick a nice, scary place for your ghost to appear at night (preferably beside a private but scary-looking private "haunted" house). Make some dry ice smoke (or set up your plastic sheet), turn on your projector, and make the image of the ghost appear on your improvised smoke or plastic screen!

Note that the dry ice smoke generator should be set up at an elevated place since the curtain of smoke will flow down to the ground and not upwards.

Now that you know how to do the trick, you'd probably like to know how you can make things convincing. That's simple. Just perform your scary trick when people least expect it. That makes it more believable. Just don't do anything that can get you shot for being mistaken as something dangerous!

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