A trick of the 'Twilight' trade
Posted by Lorrie Lynch
Our look at the Twilight movie continues today with an inside peek at one of the film's special-effects tricks. Our Brian Truitt caught an early screening of Twilight last night (look for his full report tomorrow), and of the many superhuman things about vampires in the film — the way their skin sparkles like diamonds, the way they climb trees and fly across the forest with exceptional ease — one of the niftier aspects he saw was how the evil coven of vamps (played by Cam Gigandet, Rachelle Lefevre and Edi Gathegi) speedily cover a lot of ground by seemingly walking normally. How'd they do that? Click read more below for the secret.
To show vampires walking with superhuman speed with little difficulty, the FX guys created this thing called "Magic Carpet": a 5-by-50-foot piece of plexiglass that the actors walk on while it's being pulled at 20 mph by a wench. "So the ground underneath you is literally moving at top speed and you're walking in slow motion," Lefevre explains. "They didn't want to do CGI for us to be looking like we moved inhumanly — they wanted to try and create the effect. We had a full day of learning literally how to walk: First you start on your knees, then you stand a little more with a rope, and then you let go and learn how to walk all over again on this thing. It looks like you're walking at 30 mph when all you're doing is taking single steps."
Gigandet, for one, fortunately never fell. "The only time people would actually fall is when the thing stops, because then your body's still going forward," he says. "So that's when it got a little messy."
(Photo by Peter Sorel)
Comments (2)
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