That stop motion effect from the well girl in the Ring 2

zoostory

zoostory

Well-known member
Anyone know how they created that effect where the creepy ghost girl is speedily climbing up the well at the end of the Ring 2. It looks almost like old school stop motion, where they shot it frame by frame. But I doubt they took the time to do that, so it must have been a post effect, right?
 
..not sure how they did it, but my first thought at trying to recreate it would be to have the scene (actors..ect) move slowly at sort of half to 3/4 speed, and then in post make a bunch of really short cuts in small intervals within the clip, and speed up every short cut in the clip by about 300-600% or so. that should cause them to look like they are moving slowly and sort of "stuttering" along with that breakdancing pop n lock look the whole time. the larger the small cuts are, and the faster they are sped up, the more jittery it will look. should be a decent start.

man.. now youve got me creeped out thinking about that girl from the ring..
 
Yeah that girl is creepy!! I have been wanting to try this film style , but I am afraid I would never look at my daughter the same if I pull it off.
 
probably multi-pass motion control, say one pass for the clean background plate, then the same motion control rig pass with the talent in shot, moving to the speed of the motion control rig moves (probably consider blue/green screening the area with the talent performing the 2nd pass, then composite and manipulate the image and time stretch/drop frames trippy layer effect to your liking). A lot easier for lighting continuity to do the 2nd pass there and then, imo, though 'The Ringu' creepy girl was totally alien to that environment, heavily CC'd, contrasty, from memory.

To make it more creepy, I would consider shooting the scene by having the talent perform the motion backwards, from end to start, then reverse the footage for forward play back. Human motion performed like is kind of creepy, coupled with the time-warp drop frame manipulation in post. Be careful of shutter speed being too slow though. If fast motion moves are performed by the talent in reverse, you don't want the potential motion blur smearing on the wrong side of the motion in the talent's performance, when played in reverse, making it forward moving, if you know what I mean.

The key to this shot is, the clean camera move does not stutter/jump, just the talent does, which is indicative of a 2 pass composite, imo.

Alternative poor persons fx shot would be a number of locked down camera shots, doing the 2 passes, then cut to the next locked down setup, 2 passes, etc, makes up for lack of motion control. Some slightly wider shots to perhaps make up for the lack of pan/tilt/dolly available when using a motion control rig. Then start difference keying the 2 passes and roto-masking to make a clean key, ready for time-warping up and down in speed the creepy girl layer, etc.

Just some thoughts that come to mind, if I would approach it, though I hardly remember the actual scene in the movie...
 
nicholasraeburn said:
Did they not film actors movement in reverse then reverse film in post?
Click to expand...

They definitely did that in the first one, but I'm not sure about the sequel.
 
I know this doesn't fit your description exactly, but we did a creepy short for the ACL 64seconds contest.

http://www.tavproductions.com/steve/Retrogression_Lehmann.wmv

It has some similar effects that you are talking about. Basically we flimed all of the actions backwards, reversed the footage, and slowed it all down to 80% using a plugin in After effects called Twixtor.

All of the color correction and visual effects were done 32bit AFX 7.

The sound was designed by our buddy named Steve Lehmann, and let me tell you, watch this first without the sound. and then watch it with the sound.

The sound is like 80% of the picture. Without the sound, this just looks like random speedups and slowdowns (which is what it really is)
 
they did it having the actors do it in slow motion and filming with strobe lights, it's tricky to match the shutter speed to the strobe though with tweaking it works.
 
Sorry to muddy the waters here, but I just watched the extras on the Ring 2 DVD and in the directors own words (albeit paraphrased) :

"To create the way Samara moved in the well we went back forty years, before the arrival of digital effects, and changed the speed of the camera".

But of course he was using film.

Ian . . .
 
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