How to Make Special Effects for a Horror Movie
Film night scenes during daylight., Play with light balance to tint your shots., Control light and darkness with flags., Try moving flags for spooky effects., Use cookies to cast weird patterns.
Step-by-Step Guide
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Step 1: Film night scenes during daylight.
Making this look authentic on screen might sound difficult, but for indoor shots, it's surprisingly easy.
Simply turn the gain down on your camera so that it doesn't pick up very much light, and then use hard lighting as needed to control shadows in your “darkened” room.
The camera will produce a very passable nighttime effect.
To create hard-edged and clearly defined shadows, you'll need powerful lights, which are easier to reconcile with daylight anyway.
Using bright, powerful lights at night only makes it even harder to adjust the gain properly to produce a night effect. -
Step 2: Play with light balance to tint your shots.
A great way to add a sense of sickness or desolation to your horror scene is to tinge it with just a bit of color.
Your video camera should have a white light balance setting that can be adjusted; this will cause it to pick up colors a bit differently.
Combined with deliberate lighting, you can use balance to produce a great effect without using a gel or post-production filter.
Adjust the white balance setting to tungsten.
The tungsten setting, called “indoor” on some cameras, adjusts the camera so that it treats bluish halogen lights as neutral white lights.
In the absence of halogen lighting, this has the effect of tinting ordinary incandescent illumination a subtly eerie blue.
This also allows you to use your halogen lights to make crisp shadows without being obvious, since the camera will treat their light as neutral.
Add fluorescent lighting.
Leave the camera's white balance uncorrected, and the fluorescent lights will produce a subtle, sickly greenish effect.
You may be able to slightly tweak the white balance to create a more pronounced effect.
Fluorescent lighting is fairly harsh, making it useful for particularly horrifying sets such as blood-stained basements or old hospital rooms. , For a classic film noir horror effect, you'll want most of your room wrapped in shadow, with the ability to define specific subjects with harsh, unforgiving light.
Cheap halogen shop lights are great for this effect, but they tend to flood too much light into a room, ruining the shadowy background.
Compensate by making flags for your lights.
Flags are simply panels that can be adjusted to direct the flow of the light.
Flags can be made of simple corrugated cardboard, or practically any other opaque material.
You or an assistant will have to manually hold them in place midway between the shot and the light source to properly control where the light goes.
The farther away you hold the panels from the light source, the harsher and clearer the shadows it casts will be, so set up the light well away from the action to produce the sharpest contrast between areas of light and darkness on your subject.
Halogen lights are phenomenally hot when lit.
Keep yourself and your flags well away from them while filming.
If you want to, you can attach barn doors to your lights by making them from metal or another flame-proof material.
Barn doors act like flags, except that they're attached to the light, so they don't sit far enough away to sharpen its edges.
Instead, they're used to control the overall amount of light escaping from the source.
Use them in conjunction with flags for the best effect. , Slowly angling flags across a scene causes the shadows cast by the hard light source to slowly move, creating a sense of motion and unease.
Flags can also be fully or partially flapped closed and then open again to create an unnerving blink or sputter effect.
In close shots, turn your flags horizontally to light up one strip of a face or object, such as a grinning mouth, while leaving the rest in shadow. , Cookies are shaped filters that go over your light source.
By using squiggly or segmented cookies, you can add visual noise in the form of strange and unnatural-looking patterns of light and shadow in the background of a shot.
Try placing them close to the light source for a subtle, static effect, or use them in conjunction with your flags to cast sharp shadows on a wall or ceiling. -
Step 3: Control light and darkness with flags.
-
Step 4: Try moving flags for spooky effects.
-
Step 5: Use cookies to cast weird patterns.
Detailed Guide
Making this look authentic on screen might sound difficult, but for indoor shots, it's surprisingly easy.
Simply turn the gain down on your camera so that it doesn't pick up very much light, and then use hard lighting as needed to control shadows in your “darkened” room.
The camera will produce a very passable nighttime effect.
To create hard-edged and clearly defined shadows, you'll need powerful lights, which are easier to reconcile with daylight anyway.
Using bright, powerful lights at night only makes it even harder to adjust the gain properly to produce a night effect.
A great way to add a sense of sickness or desolation to your horror scene is to tinge it with just a bit of color.
Your video camera should have a white light balance setting that can be adjusted; this will cause it to pick up colors a bit differently.
Combined with deliberate lighting, you can use balance to produce a great effect without using a gel or post-production filter.
Adjust the white balance setting to tungsten.
The tungsten setting, called “indoor” on some cameras, adjusts the camera so that it treats bluish halogen lights as neutral white lights.
In the absence of halogen lighting, this has the effect of tinting ordinary incandescent illumination a subtly eerie blue.
This also allows you to use your halogen lights to make crisp shadows without being obvious, since the camera will treat their light as neutral.
Add fluorescent lighting.
Leave the camera's white balance uncorrected, and the fluorescent lights will produce a subtle, sickly greenish effect.
You may be able to slightly tweak the white balance to create a more pronounced effect.
Fluorescent lighting is fairly harsh, making it useful for particularly horrifying sets such as blood-stained basements or old hospital rooms. , For a classic film noir horror effect, you'll want most of your room wrapped in shadow, with the ability to define specific subjects with harsh, unforgiving light.
Cheap halogen shop lights are great for this effect, but they tend to flood too much light into a room, ruining the shadowy background.
Compensate by making flags for your lights.
Flags are simply panels that can be adjusted to direct the flow of the light.
Flags can be made of simple corrugated cardboard, or practically any other opaque material.
You or an assistant will have to manually hold them in place midway between the shot and the light source to properly control where the light goes.
The farther away you hold the panels from the light source, the harsher and clearer the shadows it casts will be, so set up the light well away from the action to produce the sharpest contrast between areas of light and darkness on your subject.
Halogen lights are phenomenally hot when lit.
Keep yourself and your flags well away from them while filming.
If you want to, you can attach barn doors to your lights by making them from metal or another flame-proof material.
Barn doors act like flags, except that they're attached to the light, so they don't sit far enough away to sharpen its edges.
Instead, they're used to control the overall amount of light escaping from the source.
Use them in conjunction with flags for the best effect. , Slowly angling flags across a scene causes the shadows cast by the hard light source to slowly move, creating a sense of motion and unease.
Flags can also be fully or partially flapped closed and then open again to create an unnerving blink or sputter effect.
In close shots, turn your flags horizontally to light up one strip of a face or object, such as a grinning mouth, while leaving the rest in shadow. , Cookies are shaped filters that go over your light source.
By using squiggly or segmented cookies, you can add visual noise in the form of strange and unnatural-looking patterns of light and shadow in the background of a shot.
Try placing them close to the light source for a subtle, static effect, or use them in conjunction with your flags to cast sharp shadows on a wall or ceiling.
About the Author
Nicholas Richardson
Committed to making DIY projects accessible and understandable for everyone.
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