Invisible Man...

bump

Chase these clouds away, I hate this Sunless Saturday

I honestly have no idea, for that day and age those are some VERY impressive effects, I remember when I first saw it I was blown away by how they made you actually believe there was an invisible man in the room rather than camera trickery.

In my teens I read a book called "Movie Magic" about special effects. The author interviewed John P. Fulton, head FX guy at Universal in the 1930s and '40s. He explained that many scenes involved traveling mattes, using black screens in the days of B&W film. Claude Rains or a stand-in would wear a bodysuit made of black velvet and perform the "invisible" scenes, which would be composited into the film.
The scene where his footprints appeared in the snow was done thus: a board was laid into the studio floor with the footprints already cut out, and the cutouts were inserted back into the holes with ropes attached to their undersides. This was covered with fake snow. On cue, the cutouts were pulled out one at a time, thus forming the footprints. Unfortunately, they did not take into account the fact that Rains' character was supposed to be barefoot.
And in the end when Rains was in bed dying and slowly became visible again, his pillow and blanket were made of plaster!

That is what I've heard/read/seen also. I'm not 100% sure, but for the sequence in the room at the inn where the shirt is running around, I believe they built two sets. One was covered in black so that when they did the composite it would look like he was actually running around the chair and through the room and not that he was just pasted on.

One spectacular segment of the film is when he is unwrapping his bandages in front of the mirror. I don't remember exactly how they did this, but I think what they did was film Rains unwrapping the bandages in front of a blacked out mirror (using the black velvet traveling matte technique as before to make him seem invisible), then they filmed him from the opposite angle (as if looking in the mirror, also using the traveling matte black velvet effect), then they composited the main shot with the mirror shot which created the effect that an invisible man was unwrapping bandages while looking at the same invisible man in the mirror. Pretty cool. The Invisible Man is probably my favorite effects film from the 30s... except for MAYBE King Kong. The Invisible Man is prettttty awesome though.

From “The American Cinematographer” (September 1934) and reprinted in the book “Universal Horrors” , Fulton explained "The wire technique could not be used, for the clothes would look empty, and would hardly move naturally.”


“So we had recourse to multiple printing…with variations. Most of these scenes involved other, normal characters, so we photographed these scenes in the normal manner, but without any trace of the invisible man. All of the action, of course, had to be carefully timed, as in any sort of double-exposure work. This negative was then developed in the normal manner. Then the special process work began.”

“We used a completely black set…walled and floored with black velvet, to be as nearly non-reflective as possible. Our actor was garbed from head to foot in black velvet tights, with black gloves, and a black headpiece rather like a diver’s helmet. Over this, he wore whatever clothes might be required. This gave us a picture of the unsupported clothes moving around on a dead black field. From this negative, we made a print, and a duplicate negative, which we intensified to serve as mattes for printing.”


“Then, with an ordinary printer, we proceeded to make our composite. First we printed from the positive of the background and the normal action, using the intensified, negative matte to mask off the area where our invisible man’s clothing was to move. Then we printed again, using the positive matte to shield the already printed area, and printing in the moving clothes from our "trick" negative. This printing operation made our duplicate, composite negative to be used in printing the final master prints of the picture.”

“The two principal difficulties, photographically speaking, were matching up the lighting on the visible parts of my shot with the general lighting used by Arthur Edeson, A.S.C., for the normal parts of the picture; and eliminating the various little imperfections, such as eye holes, etc., which were naturally picked up by the camera. This latter was done by retouching the film, frame by frame, with a brush and opaque dye. We photographed thousands of feet of film in the many ‘takes’ of the different scenes, and approximately 4,000 feet of the film received individual hand-work treatment in some degree."

It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me

Thanks for the explanations here, I was also interested in knowing. The Invisible Man still impress me even though it's that old.