Special Effect

It's Special, It's an Effect, It's the Special Effect!

What is the Special Effect?

As stated in the problem guide, the special effect indicates when the performance goes into VR. It can be anything, but it must be seen and/or heard by the judges (and audience), and it is allowed to be completed using direct human power.

Development of the Special Effect

These are some traces of our first ideas for special effect! Back then, we thought of it as a set transition of sorts. We had the idea of portraying the nefarious creature, which was a computer bug at this point of time, as the set, and having it capture the protagonist aka Chad as part of the special effect, hence the hands. The feedback from our coach was that it would be “visually stunning”, so we stuck with this for a pretty long time. And when we say a long time, we didn’t touch on the special effect until some time later. Somewhere in between, we had changed the plot to have the VR world be a painting, instead of the original idea of a computer (see plot section), so we did away with the “hands coming out of set/set expanding” idea, and had the idea of a set separating to show a change from the real, 2D world to the 3D VR world (we were still using this idea!).

In the initial brainstorming stages (December 2020), we’ve always toyed around with the ideas of using a mechanism like this:

But we didn’t really touch on it until later on. As we developed our first plot, we wanted our real world setting to be 2D, a cartoonish setting of sorts, and our VR world to be 3D, instead of having it the other way around like it is conventionally. Hence we worked on it in relation to a transition of sorts, since it is supposed to signal the change in setting from the real world to the VR world.

(The stage setting for “Sunday in the Park with George”, which references George Seurat’s famous painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatt”. We thought of something like this, and wanted it to be layered to show the “3D” effect of the VR world)

And then the expanding set idea was born. Hence at this point in time (Late January 2021), our special effect was still a set transition. And then came the final idea.

Final idea (and how it came about)

With the decision of using a painting as our VR world, and the feedback that a set transition as a special effect would not be enough, we went back to the drawing board. One day, in the midst of a place that was probably the Makerspace, it hit. “You know how there’s always birds flying in forests in those Disney princess movies,” said a genius member of P2D3. Back then, the first part of the VR world was a forest, and what better way to introduce it than to have birds? That was truly a big brain moment.

Process Time! (Development of The Bird)

At this point in time, we had different ideas on how to execute “the bird”. One was to attach the bird on a rod and have it fly past the set, letting it bop up and down like that of a baby mobile. Another was to mechanise the motion of the bird, attach it to a base with wheels and roll it past the stage as the performance transitions into the VR world. At one point in time, we kind of went “You know the forest seems kind of random now. Let’s just do away with it,” to which we also thought “NOW WHAT DO WE DO FOR THE SPECIAL EFFECT?”

We have a museum, we have a bird, boom. The bird is a statue at the museum and when the performance transitions into the VR world, the bird starts coming alive and moves. This Night at the Museum-esque idea was a brainchild of a post FDR night Google Meet, and maybe our combined fatigue does do wonders.

(The frame for the bird was made from wire and magazine shreds taped together, over the wire frame, with masking tape!)

We based the design of the bird on a blue tit bird (as shown below)! And since we wanted to show that the bird was a transient stage between the real and VR world, we left the wings black and white, similar to the other parts of the real world, and painted its body with colour, like that of the vibrant environment of the VR world. To add texture, we also plucked and pasted feathers from an abandoned Chapteh toy found in the OM store on the wings of the bird (which was then spray painted over haha. Still! We got that texture!!)

Time to get Technical! (Mechanisms)

We wanted to use this mechanism in making the bird move, in which it flaps its wings, similar to the dragon? Bird? In the gif below. Similar to the mechanisms below, our bird required three “rods” to be attached to it, one attached to the body and one attached to each wing. The parts are arranged in an order in which during a turn, the middle one would go down and the other two would go up, and then vice versa. By attaching them as such, we were able to create the effect of the bird flapping its wings, giving it motion.

(before) (after)

We originally used wires and chopsticks in the prototype, taking reference from the Pinterest posts above. However, the problem that arose from this was that it could not support the bird well, resulting in the bird moving forward constantly. To combat this, we decided to attach more wires to the chopsticks and then to the box, in order to support the moving bird. This was pretty effective, but the bird was still not stable enough. In addition, the wires were also wonky, which meant, yikes! We can’t show this for competition! It was time to result to Plan B.

With days left to spare and taking inspiration from Automa toys, Plan B was similar to this and/or this. The mechanics were still similar, however instead of using a main wire as the handle, as well as the thing that was determining the heights of the chopsticks, we switched to using a “pushing” method. In this, we used a wide wooden rod as the main handle base, and glued three circular pieces of cardboard at different intervals, so that when turned at any time, either the two circles at the side or the middle circle would be on top, and have the other part(s) at the bottom. This would hence push the $2 Daiso wooden rods (which we later got on a Daiso run at Thomson Plaza) that were attached to the body and the wings of the bird! I’m not really good with explaining it in words, so here are some pictures:

Since the rods attached to the bird were not directly attached to the circular cardboards, the cardboard pieces were able to push the respective parts up when the handle was turned, hence allowing the bird to flap its wings!

In order to make the movement smoother, we also lubricated the side surface of the cardboard (the part the rods would come into contact with) with oil (which we got from one of the canteen stall owners. Thank you Auntie!), and sanded the bottom of the rods so that they were at an angle!

Last but not Least (Final Thoughts)

The final product proved that the effort was all worth it. Considering how we constantly had mixed feelings about it, from thinking it was an amazing idea, to wrecking our brains to figure out a way to fit this in our performance, to also scrapping the whole idea, I guess everyone was really proud of the final product. It’s really our child, even if we all hate it from the pain it has brought all of us (To illustrate: we were actually still working on it 30 mins before our recording… and we also went “how do we support this?” “let’s do this” (referring to taping the cardboard box it was contained within to a stool in the Makerspace.)) Our problem child, if I must say, has wowed audiences, such as the coaches during FDR and the seniors during internal nationals, and has also achieved great heights. May it continue to soar, even as it collects dust in the Makerspace.

Click on the video to see the bird in action!!