[HN Gopher] Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
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Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
Author : exvi
Score : 91 points
Date : 2026-02-19 06:43 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (singlemindedmovieblog.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (singlemindedmovieblog.blogspot.com)
| xfeeefeee wrote:
| Really cool to see this here. I always loved these in movies.
| There are a bunch of really interesting artists making use of ink
| ink liquid, oils, chemical reactions etc that create beautiful
| abstract pieces. Fitting for HN, Roman De Giuli even creates his
| own machines. Check out Emitter https://youtu.be/VMd608zCEWc
| dylan604 wrote:
| I have a couple of friends really into paint pouring, and I've
| tried to make interesting videos of it in the past. It never
| comes out well because they are still trying to make a finished
| art piece instead of making a video art piece. I feel like
| Roman here decided the video was the art. The spillage at the
| end of one of these shoots must be pretty interesting as well.
| The pooled paint will retain the patterns in a compressed form,
| but the paint will be pretty thick that when dried becomes an
| interesting sculpture in itself. I'd love to see some of those.
| mgot wrote:
| Great article, big fan of stuff like this. (Recommending
| Corridors VFX series, for ppl who want something similar).
|
| However, checking the authors "Top/Worst films of the year",
| being called the "Single Minded Movie Blog" seems fitting, and
| not in the way they think. Some of the worst movie takes I've
| seen hahahahh
| whycome wrote:
| What makes a take bad?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Apparently thinking _One Battle After Another (2025)_ is
| "without a doubt THE most insufferable movie of the year" (<h
| ttps://singlemindedmovieblog.blogspot.com/2026/01/bottom-10..
| .>)
| thinkingQueen wrote:
| It looks like he's confusing Paul Thomas Anderson with Paul
| W. S. Anderson. The latter directed Resident Evil, which
| the author refers to.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| If you are interested in old school vfx work there is a great
| documentary about the early days of vfx called "Light and Magic."
| dblohm7 wrote:
| I really love VFX in the period between Star Wars and Jurassic
| Park. To me it will always be the "golden age" of VFX.
| steve1977 wrote:
| The 80s have been the golden age of many things I think.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ was indeed when I first
| noticed this effect. It was dramatic and cool and all that, but
| pretty obviously an effect. Coupling it with _Raiders of the Lost
| Ark_ and the effect almost pigeon-holes a film to be of that era.
|
| I'm unsurprised Douglas Trumbull was behind the _Close
| Encounters_ effect since his work on _2001: A Space Odyssey_
| captured his earliest experiments filming tanks of liquids with
| fluids added. They were fairly effective in Kubrick 's film when
| they appeared to resemble fantastic nebulae, globular clusters...
|
| (And never mind the mind-bending cleverness of how the slit-scan
| shots were created for _2001_.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Growing up my mom pointed out that she could tell it was a
| Spielberg movie by the cloud effect. It wasn't until I was
| older and rewatched them to see she wasn't wrong. I'm pretty
| sure it was the first time I learned about little signatures
| like this, or how a director will use the same camera move in
| every movie. But the Spielberg clouds was one of the things
| that really got me interested in the magic of movie making.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree.
|
| In fact, ha ha, when I was a teen, I set up a window pane as
| level as I could with a Super-8 camera beneath pointing up. I
| added water to about an inch in depth (about all I could
| manage for the window frame) and then poured milk in to
| create the cloud effect.
|
| I don't have a recollection of seeing the resulting footage,
| making me wonder if I bothered filming it. Perhaps from the
| camera point of view all I got was reflections--or perhaps
| the whole thing was underexposed. Regardless, it was fun to
| be young and experimenting like that.
|
| My best low-budget effect (not counting the stop-motion
| animation I experimented with--of course) was when I set my
| Super-8 camera upside down on a tripod outside at night. I
| had a piece of glass (the same glass window frame?) and had
| painted the silhouette of a house in black paint. The windows
| of the house were left clear but with white paper backing.
|
| The camera was set up to film the glass-painted house outside
| at night with the sky/trees/stars that were outside as a
| natural backdrop through the glass. With the camera rolling I
| had a small light on behind the glass that made the windows
| of the house appear to be on. I turned it off after the
| camera rolled for a few seconds. Then I briefly kicked on a
| very powerful light that caused a quite a flash behind the
| silhouetted house.
|
| The last thing to film was a thread I had hanging behind the
| glass that I set on fire with a lighter. It quickly burned up
| the thread as the camera rolled.
|
| When the film came back I flipped it around end for end,
| splicing it back into the final roll of film. The inverted
| camera footage was now right-side up but with the film
| playing in reverse.
|
| And so the thread had become instead a flame like a meteor
| crashing to the ground--resulting in a bright flash. Seconds
| later the lights in the house come on.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I love that story. It illustrates perfectly what fascinated
| me so much about visual effects as a kid, and maybe also
| why I lost some of that fascination when CGI took over.
| Even though I was also very interested in computers back
| then (and I really loved Tron).
|
| There was so much creativity involved and out of the box
| thinking about physics and time and optics, to craft
| something that in the end resulted in a nice optical
| illusion. Like a magic trick (interestingly, in German
| visual and special effects are (or were) also called
| "Filmtricks").
|
| Now with CGI, everything is possible and paradoxically,
| that makes it more boring somehow. And sometimes practical
| effects still look better IMHO.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I wasn't that young, but we tried with a cheap plastic 20
| gallon fish tank which gave us a bit more depth. It was
| before LEDs, so all we had were hot lights that wound up
| needing to be very close to the tank to get the amount of
| light needed. Over the course of the day, that heat
| actually melted the tank which meant we no longer had a 20
| gallon tank but whatever the volume was below the melted
| part where it would start to leak.
|
| I love your attempt at a practical to that level. I have
| one that I'm still working on with long exposure timelapse
| and motion control, but I just can't ever get my schedule
| to let me do it. I have models of flying saucers with
| little aliens at the helm that I've rigged up with LEDs
| connected to an Arduino. That also controls the motion
| control slider I have, and the camera shutter. The idea was
| to turn on the UFO lights for a very short duration while
| the shutter is open to keep from over exposing during the
| long exposure to capture the night sky in the background.
| There is no point in doing the shot, except just because. I
| have the problem of when I have free time, the weather is
| shite or the wrong time of the year for the part of the sky
| I want.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I vaguely remember having tried this myself with a very small
| aquarium and liquid latex (IIRC), filmed with my Super 8 cam in
| slow motion (which meant 36 frames instead of 18).
|
| The results weren't that impressive, but it was fun, as was all
| the Super 8 stuff. I kind of miss those times and I see at least
| one other poster seems to have similar recollections :)
|
| To add another nice example of this effect, which is where I
| learned about it, is The NeverEnding Story (1984). There it's
| used for the "nothing"
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPfQogtS2Eo) and also in the
| opening of the US release
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCgfRC6gHtI). The original
| German release only had text on a black background.
|
| It might not look the most realistic, but IMHO it still looks
| beautiful.
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