Favourite Special Effect

[Jawscvmcdia]

Mine’s this:

Yours?

Topic

[bloodteller]

If we’re talking actual favourite special effects and not Jawscvmcdia’s Shit Jokes, i’d say it’s way too hard to choose. Red Dwarf is full of amazing special effects, picking just one seems cruel.

[Ben Paddon]

I really liked a lot of the visual effects in VI. There was some surprisingly sophisticated stuff going on there.

[GlenTokyo]

>I really liked a lot of the visual effects in VI. There was some surprisingly sophisticated stuff going on there.

Series VI is the best looking series by miles, even the visfx look better than a lot of the stuff in modern Dwarf to me. The Legion tractor ball for example. And the teleporter.

Models are almost beyond reproach.

[Warbodog]

[Pete Part Three]

Probably Abel’s crash in Beyond A Joke, which seems especially good because it’s surrounded by wall-to-wall shite.

[Dave]

The crashed Starbug in Dimension Jump always looked utterly believable to me.

[International Debris]

Lister chloroform in Give & Take.

[Plastic Percy]

The various laser beam, teleport and hologram effects from VI. I liked that the bazookoids now fired an energy beam instead of just sparking and making a bang noise.

[tombow]

star bug in the rats bottom. It’s the only time I can think of where I thought “what a cool effect” and wasn’t just taking it as part of the story.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

[Bargain Bin Holly]

The dust storm in Confidence and Paranoia, the Polymorph in… Polymorph, and the crash in Back to Reality are also highlights

[International Debris]

Even in that screencap, the whole image looks really CG and false to me. Gimme an old fashioned model crash any day.

[bloodteller]

It’s rather astonishing how the Starbug crash sequence in Twentica looks worse than the Starbug crash sequences in episodes made 20 years earlier

I think it’s partially down to the use of CGI/bluescreen backgrounds in the Twentica crash, which add a certain fakeness to it all

[GlenTokyo]

It’s everything being a little off that makes the new model shots look a whole lot terrible.

Frame rates – there’s an equation. Square root of the scale x the frame rate you’re showing the footage in, which helps add mass to the objects. You also have to take into account the weight of the models because gravity doesn’t scale. So if you have a light and bouncy model or a heavy and stationary one, it’s not going to look right. I think at times they ignore both of these things. The models look like they’re in an arbitrary slowmo not like they have mass, this was not the case when Peter Wragg (RIP) was in charge.

The models themselves are worse.

There’s no interactive lighting. Look at Series VI and the Starbug flybys for example, red sun? Red light on Starbug from the correct direction. Dave Dwarf model lighting in general is poor but there’s absolutely no interactive lighting, look at the scene where Starbug is fleeing the exploding station in Give & Take. The fireballs have no effect whatsoever because they’re not there with the model, which is fair enough but they haven’t been accounted for in the model shoot, which is the kind of attention to detail that Red Dwarf model shots used to have.

Compositing shots that don’t have enough movement within the shot or no movement is also another sin in Dave Dwarf, say a Starbug flying away shot, it’ll fly away a certain distance from camera but then it’ll stop looking like it’s flying away and just start getting smaller. It looks like PowerPoint.

Focal distances are also off. Everything is in sharp focus, in real life you wouldn’t be able to resolve all of something the size of Red Dwarf, foreground should be sharper than background.

The models really get on my tits to be honest. It’s a sort of do it properly or don’t do it at all situation for me

[bloodteller]

The FX shots that really annoyed me in the Dave era were the ones where they wanted to do a shot of Red Dwarf from a distance but didn’t actually record any model shots for such an instance, so it’s just a stock .png of the ship (the exact same one each time, and also the same one used in all the promo images) slowly being dragged across the screen. I mean come on, I could put that together in Flash in 5 minutes. It just feels a tad lazy.

[bloodteller]

The awful greenscreen on the Planet Rimmer scene in Timewave really annoys me too. I realize that’s not a model shot, but it is a crap Dave era special effect, so I feel like it’s worth mentioning. You can clearly tell they’re just standing in front of a green cloth, and it’s painfully obvious where the actual sand used in the scene ends and the composited-in background starts. The actual sand foreground used is so small too, that the characters never actually move around in the shot. They’re all stood in a perfect line with each other along with the flag, which creates a complete lack of depth. You can definitely tell they only have about 5cm of ground to stand on

I realize maybe it’s not cost-effective or worth going to a quarry to shoot that one small scene, but there are surely ways of making it look less like 3 men in front of a greenscreen

[Dave]

I like how quickly this has become the ‘most hated special effects’ thread.

[Toxteth O-Grady]

A notably excellent Dave-era special effect is the moment Lister steps on an invisible beer can in M-Corp, which then spews its contents. It’s utterly flawless and convincing, and arguably the most perfectly executed visual effect the show has ever done.
It’s nowhere near my favourite Red Dwarf special effect, but in terms of being visually realistic and authentic I can’t think of a better one.

[GlenTokyo]

One of my favourite special effects that I actually really like is the Starbug approaching Red Dwarf shot in ‘The Inquistor’.

Not flashy but executed perfectly. I like how the model is tracked as it flies parallel to the camera and then off towards Red Dwarf.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I don’t think I’ve disagreed with that many consecutive comments before

btw, unpopular opinion, the chase in Bodyswap has always looked like shit

[Paul Muller]

The shot of Nova 5 crashed on a lunar surface. Everything works perfectly; the camera glides smoothly, the focal depth is somehow spot on, lighting moody and atmospheric and a great spaceship miniature as well. Also lots of little details like the scattered debris, the visible name markings and the dimly lit interior window that help to tell a story.

[GlenTokyo]

RoboCop Lister throwing the lager is quite impressive even though the scales are all over the place and there’s some 1970s Doctor Who level bluescreen artifacts just because they must have built a 4 foot tall lager can and it’s identical to the prop.

[bloodteller]

>btw, unpopular opinion, the chase in Bodyswap has always looked like shit

Why?

>A notably excellent Dave-era special effect is the moment Lister steps on an invisible beer can in M-Corp, which then spews its contents. It’s utterly flawless and convincing, and arguably the most perfectly executed visual effect the show has ever done.

Yeah, the invisible stuff in M-Corp is pretty excellent. It’s one of those scenes in Red Dwarf that you look at and think ‘how the hell did they manage to do that?’. Right up there with the ‘full-sized’ Starbug in Psirens in terms of cleverness

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Why?

It’s Starbug and Blue Midget flying in a straight line for the first half than they show you the same shot of Starbug crashing into a rock twice. The crash look good tho, and the wreck looks great, but like I said its the chase that looks like shit.

[Paul Muller]

Also, the Mill’s Red Dwarf movie test shot. Lighting, compositing, tiny floating astronaut, some nice lens flares on the boosters – all good. I’m not going to mourn The Pencil, but it really did look excellent in that one shot.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

The crash of Starbug hitting the ground I mean

[GlenTokyo]

That movie shot is worth the price of the Bodysnatcher DVD alone. Gorgeous.

[Ben Saunders]

There are one or two fucking shite model shots in VI and probably V, where they just bluescreen/composite a Starbug flyby on top of some Dwarf model footage, and you can see the outline around the ‘bug. Happily it only happens once or twice, though.

[International Debris]

The awful greenscreen on the Planet Rimmer scene in Timewave really annoys me too.

It’s worse than the Deathday party scene in Thanks for the Memory, which again shouldn’t really be the case with two shows made almost 20 years apart.

[bloodteller]

Even VII with its (mostly) absolutely dreadful special effects managed to pull off a more convincing other-planet scene, in Blue.

That said, the one in Blue isn’t great either. But the one in Timewave is so much worse. Everything looks so flat and two-dimensional- it’s incredible how bad they managed to make it look.

[GlenTokyo]

The moon scene in Thanks for the Memory is fantastic. I’d put that up there with favourite special effects.

[bloodteller]

I’d put the Observation Dome scene up with favourite special effects as well. Maybe not the most extravagant or flashy sequence, but it’s one of the rare scenes in Red Dwarf where I’m convinced that it’s a genuine life-sized object rather than quite a small model which some actors have been composited into. The scenes it features in are absolutely excellent too, so that raises it up even further in my opinion.

[Jawscvmcdia]

I always liked this sequence from Ouroboros

[Ben Saunders]

Oh I like that one too. I like the opening of Quarantine as well

[RickLee84]

Starbug taking off from the Low ship in Demons & Angels with the explosions around it.

Starbug flies towards and under the camera and the camera spins above and then flips to a shot of Starbug flying away from the camera

Starbug landing in the lava in Gunmen. You expect to cut away and not actually see the ship impact the surface but you actually do, which is a nice surprise as you’d expect them to be able to pull up in the nick of time but yet they don’t.

V and VI really did have some gorgeous model work. Shame it’s actually rubbish now in comparison.

[Taiwan Tony]

Not a special effect but I’ve always wanted to eat that cake in Balance of Power. Looks delicious.

I like the boots in Justice. Funny.

[Ben Saunders]

The grey cake? With far too much whipped (shaving?) cream on top? I’ve always been rather put off by that. Did they really have to paint everything grey, including the food?

[Jawscvmcdia]

Why was this effect so dodgy?

[Moonlight]

I always loved the shot from Psirens of the scouter knocking down the door of the derelict. The _only_ thing that betrays the scale is the way the door hits the ground, but other than that I can basically buy it as real. And I say that as someone who always just see models in model shots.

[GlenTokyo]

>Why was this effect so dodgy?

Because they zoomed out on a shot of the Red Dwarves(?) with one out of the frame and put the scanner around it instead of having a shot of the Red Dwarves where they’re both in frame and zooming into it with the scanner effect on top.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I think you can just say Red Dwarfs and not Red Dwarves when referring to multiple copies of the ship really

[bloodteller]

>V and VI really did have some gorgeous model work. Shame it’s actually rubbish now in comparison

Why is it “rubbish” now?

[GlenTokyo]

And what’s it rubbish in comparison to? Because if you think XI and XII has better models I want some of what you’re taking.

[GlenTokyo]

Psirens crash scene is fantastic. Both the flaming going down bit and the hitting the rock bit.

[Hamish]

> And what’s it rubbish in comparison to? Because if you think XI and XII has better models I want some of what you’re taking.

I am pretty sure the point he was trying to make is the exact opposite of this.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I think the special effects of the Dave era get a pretty bad rap, yeah I love the model effects of the first six series as much as the next guy but nothing is especially bad about the new series’s effects. Hell, I think they reach greatness in several episodes such as the one I pointed out earlier in Twentica where you really feel the weight of Starbug as it bounces off the ground.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Not even speaking strictly effects, the sets and makeup work of the Dave era can be so good too. The mechanoid battle arena in SIliconia, the moist corridors in Can of Worms, the expansive shot of the hanger in Back to Earth Part I and the camera trickery they used to make the corridors seem longer (I wouldn’t mind if they brought that back)

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Also that Polymorph corpse in Can of Worms, how slimy and disgusting it looks, you can see the ooze dripping of it. Fantastic

[International Debris]

Hell, I think they reach greatness in several episodes such as the one I pointed out earlier in Twentica where you really feel the weight of Starbug as it bounces off the ground.

That final crash sequence actually made me cringe the first time I watched it, the compositing of it looks so plasticky and fake.

But you’re right, the non-model stuff in the Dave era is generally excellent. As I mentioned above, the Lister chloroform moment in Give & Take is superb, everybody’s also mentioned the invisible stuff in M-Corp, and the general look of the show is strong, including a lot of the fantastic CG ships. But almost all of the model sequences just look really, really badly put together.

[Stabbim the Skutter]

That split-second effect in Gunmen of the Apocalypse as Kryten plugs himself into the mainframe is absolutely stunning, and it looks impossible for its time.

I’m also stilled wowed to this day at the shot where Cat high-fives himself.

[Author]

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