Pendragon Cycle Production Diary 9 Includes Serious Special Effects

DailyWire+ continues to add to the Pendragon Cycle's behind the scenes series, now on week 9. This one gives us a sort of closeup of what their practical effects are accomplishing in this story. It's quite impressive when you imagine that you must simulate interactions with real-life bulls to achieve the proper effect.

Special Effects (SFX) often called practical effects, do not include the visual effects or digital effects that often get included later during editing. Special Effects Makeup is one example of this, or puppetry, or Animatronics. Filmmakers like Jim Henson and his production house are a great example of this. They have graced the screen with their puppeteer magic for a generation.

But now this artform is growing lame in Hollywood, and being forgotten. Nothing captures the imagination like practical effects, though. This is because the brain can often tell the difference between an actual object the actor must interact with, and a phantom that resides only on a computer monitor. So, while it has become efficient and often cheaper to accomplish effects through green screen or keying out the undesirables, what we are seeing now is a far more holistic or combined effort to get better results on screen. Often that means returning to the tangible and legendary crafts of years past.

You really want the audience to question "what is real and what is not" at first, and then to conclude that it feels viscerally real. But what you do not want is for the actors or the stuntmen/women to question if that bull in front of them is real or not. Often it is. And this is the magic you are capturing on screen, that very authentic belief which comes from knowledge, and shines on the face of the actor.

But to be as honest as possible, when filmmakers put out a film, they don't want anyone questioning anything. They want an audience to suspend disbelief entirely, and simply "live in the story" as much as possible. This is the true goal, and removing this extra layer of unreality is often the best way to get there.

Special moment for me:
If you notice in the video, there is a moment that you see what happens to the bull idol, and this is something you will sincerely enjoy, especially if you've read the books. It's a powerful moment in the story, but I do not desire to give away too much, even though there is much I could say here.

It's these key moments that make this story (or will hopefully make this story) a potential mythopoeia masterpiece, which Tolkien and Lewis hoped we would make more and more!

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