Shanks FX

Follow-up to our "Creating Dry Ice Comets" episode where we show the step by step process of how to create your very own comets.

A main ingredient to a comets core is dry ice. As it gets closer to the sun the ice sublimates into the vacuum of space. Putting dry ice into a shallow pool of water will produce a similar reaction.

If it has wheels, there's a pretty good chance I'm going try and make a dolly out of it. So after our baby shower, I started looking at our very nice new stroller (thanks sis!), and took some test drives around our wood floors.

We attempt to create the Aurora Borealis with a sheet of fabric and a handful of fans. We discovered that throwing the image a little out of focus really creates a believable visual effect that can be composited into a scene to create the Aurora.

I attempt to make planets with food coloring , milk, and dish soap.

I found this skeleton animation on my computer doing the dance from Michael Jackson's Thriller and turned it into a hologram using a steamer for clothes.

Watch us try and recreate the Millennium Falcon shot from the teaser trailer to STARS WARS "The Force Awakens" using stop motion animation.

An in-depth look at Creating the Cosmos. In this episode I break down my process of creating cosmic backgrounds with my "sheet of glass" technique. Hopefully you guys will get a better understanding of how this process works by watching me break the steps down.

Watch us rebuild the INTERSTELLAR black hole with all "In-Camera" elements. I've been looking forward to seeing INTERSTELLAR for some time now, and figured this would be a very timely & fun topic to tackle.

Our third installment deals with the post production process in achieving our "time slice effect" & "forced perspective" seen in the previous two episodes.

In our second Back to the Future installment, we tackle the technique of "Forced Perspective". Forced Perspective is a visual effect that can make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is.

After doing the Ghostbusters proton streams I came up with an idea to re-create the time slice effect from Back to the Future using stop-motion animation & light painting techniques.