Blood Transfusions and Anti-Alien Bias in Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

The following post contains a not too outrageous spoiler for Edge of Tomorrow (2014) so if spoilers are not your thing, you should see this movie and then possibly read this.

In a moment, we will discuss the importance and semiotics of blood transfusions in Edge of Tomorrow (2014) that epic alien invasion Groundhog Day film.   But first, I must protest Hollywood's endless hate-filled diatribes against peace loving alien invasion species.   How do we know that these aliens are not actually our friends?  Why do we always have to fight a war against something that looks like about 100,000,000 gigantic, mutated metallic spiders on crack?  Can't we just love each other while they are eating us?

So getting back to Edge of Tomorrow (2014), it is a fundamental plot point that it was the intermixing of alien and human blood that causes the plot device that the hero can now use the time reset ability of the alien with some loose ends left loose, but thats ok. What is made explicit is that the human must not receive a blood transfusion because if you do then the spell, I mean the plot device, is broken. And you are really dead the next time things happen.

So two things, first.

A lesser spoiler must be that when one receives a transfusion, that the recipient must really know that the spell is broken in some intrinsic way otherwise they are just going to get themselves dead but this time it really is game over. And the situations that our hero or heroine are in are so dire that it is very, very easy to get yourself dead.

No blood, please.

But, and I hate to pick nits, but why not, everyone who goes into battle these days, at least any human that goes into battle, contains a hard to remove tag to indicate blood type and any special instructions to the attending physician while the patient is unconscious (and possibly having limbs removed, etc).  Most transfusions in battlefield conditions are often plasma-only transfusions which still require knowing the ABO blood type, but not RHD. Thus, it would be perfectly possible to have a dogtag that indicated that it was the patients wish to receive no transfusion even to the point of death. It would not be normal, but it would be possible. What would be less clear is whether the technician or doctor would follow the instructions on the tag given the death of the patient from blood loss and shock.

But maybe that would not have been as fun.

It may be also worthwhile pointing out that a film that depends so heavily on the issue of blood shows you so little of it, and what you do see is obviously alien blood and therefore on some level does not count.  Yes selfishly we do not seem to care about the vast suffering on the part of the misunderstood aliens in this film.

It is implicit in this spoiler that I would care enough about the film to even think of or worry about such a thing in contrast to most films, for example, Pacific Rim (2014), where it is not even worthwhile to find plot issues, its just not worth your time.

How To Make Someone's Head Explode

[This will be one of the many posts that include details about famous effects shots that I have picked up over the years.   It is all anecdotal information, believed to be true, but I wasn't there.  When this film was shot, I was in a dark room at Robert Abel & Associates writing their raster graphics system.]

As an exercise, I want you to think for a moment about how you would make someone's head explode.

As it turns out there are many ways to do this (in visual effects, of course, not in real life) and they all work with varying degrees of realism and at various costs.

Many of the films that might want to cause someone's head to explode are also low-budget horror films, those with the least amount of money to execute their vision. So I think we can say that one attribute of a method to make someone's head explode is that it should have a modest price and hopefully contribute a lot of value to the film.

Generally speaking, these are the things we are looking for.

1. That the head that explodes looks as much as possible as the real person's head. 

2. The audience should not notice the switch from the real to the standin.

3. The explosion itself should have character and not be a generic explosion.
4. The exploding head should interact with the set in some suitable way, e.g. brains, skull parts, etc. 

Although there are many ways of doing this kind of shot which could use any number of different techniques (miniatures, prosthetics, all digital, etc), best of all would be that it was "practical" in some way. "Practical" is a visual effects term of art that refers to an effect that you can use on the stage and when it is shot in live action it is in some sense done. There is no more to do. A radio controlled squib that spurts blood in simulation of someone being hit by a bullet is an example of a practical effect.

Arguably the best solution of this cinematic problem was realized by the movie Scanners (1981) as directed by David Cronenberg. The script describes a war between a small number of telepaths who are trying to take over the world and who have the power to read minds and also, with some effort, to cause someone's head to explode. Near the beginning of the film, a security organization gives a demonstration of telepathy to an audience of security professionals and, not realizing that they have been penetrated by a "bad telepath", played by actor Michael Ironside, the "good telepath" and the "bad telepath" struggle.   Evil wins in this case, and our victim telepath explodes.   Or rather, his head explodes.

As you can see, the telepath on the right seems to be reaching for a certain, climactic head position.

The solution was completely practical. A life mask of the good telepath in an expression of great pain was made, as well as a dummy of the rest of the body, dressed in the same suit. The live action of the scene was shot with the good telepath emoting his great unhappiness and reaching the same position and expression of the mask. A second sequence is shot with the camera in the same (or a similar) position, but instead of our actor we have a dummy, whose hands are gripped in an indication of great stress.  The mask on top of the dummy is given appropriate makeup and appliances, such as the eyeglasses, and filled with fresh chicken skin and Technicolor Blood #2. Then a shotgun is placed behind the dummy and pointed to the back of the head, out of sight of the camera, bolted into position, and rigged to be fired remotely. They then start the camera, set off the shotgun, and record the results for a few seconds. I am guessing that they use a high speed camera.

Then the two different takes are edited together such that the cut to the dummy happens a frame or so before the shotgun goes off. Of course they had to find a place to cut where the real actor had reached the head position and facial expression to match the dummy and mask.

The shotgun blows away both the mask and the contents, which then fall heavily, showing both excellent gravity and a sense of "follow through", onto the chest of the dummy. The effect itself makes good use of the animation principles of replacement animation, gravity, anticipation, follow-through and appropriate sound effects to enhance the visuals.

Its a beautiful effect which truly accomplishes what it needed to accomplish, which was to blow someones head off in a way that was dramatic and memorable and yet be very economical.   You could use the same technique today and it would work very well. 

Here is the trailer on Youtube, unfortunately in poor quality. It captures the essence of the scene in context however, if you want to see the blood more clearly there are other examples on Youtube that show that, but this shows the context, which is so important.   Please ignore the stupid music and graphics at the beginning and end of the trailer.  This was 1981 after all, a more primitive time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmJC3ZaXBEc&feature=fvwrel

I have found a much better trailer, this one for British audiences.  Unfortunately, it does not show the head explosion as well, but it is superior in all other ways.   On review, I have decided that this is probably a completely different head explosion from that found in the movie.  I wonder if it wasn't made especially for this trailer.   Some other post will discuss the context of how trailers are made, it is probably different than you expect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6GNs6MthtU&NR=1&feature=fvwp

I have left out a picture of the exploding head, because it is too disgusting, and I am very sensitive to images of former people who have been turned into a bloody mess.   

The IMDB page for Scanners:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081455/

Orion Slave Girls, Makeup Effects, Sexism and Color Timing

Color timing has always been a part of the film making process, from the earliest days of color technology.  It is the process used to see to it that the final film has a consistent look from shot to shot and the color palette of the film overall matches the vision and goals of the director and cinematographer, to the extent the technology, budget and schedule allows.

In recent years, the extremely arcane early forms of color timing has been replaced by digital processes, including the "digital intermediate" and the uses and abuses of the 3D color lookup table, a tool that can be used for both good and evil, which is true for pretty much all tools.

But in earlier, more primitive days, the process of color timing was less exact and had more issues because it generally involved sending tests and film to the lab and seeing the results the next day.  But the system worked, it worked well, and some of the most fabulous films in the history of cinema used these now archaic processes.

There are some funny stories, however, and this is one of my favorites.  To understand the story, you have to know something about makeup effects, some of the reasons they are so helpful to the film making process, and also something about the difficult schedules associated with episodic television.

Makeup effects are a form of special effects that are based on the theatrical art of makeup.  Although the technologies behind it continue to advance with new materials and new approaches, it has a history that goes back directly to the earliest days of stage.  Most of the use of makeup is not for special effects however.   All actors seen on stage or on film wear makeup to make them look natural under the very unnatural lighting and to achieve certain effects depending on the distance of the audience and, for film, the effects of photography on the end results.   An actor that did not wear makeup would often look incorrect and take away from the story.  This is a very important part of the normal film making process.

Less often used, although it seems to be used a lot these days, are makeup effects which attempt to achieve something outside the normal process of makeup.  The classic examples are vampires, with their teeth, or Vulcan's with their pointy ears, and so forth.  Pretty much all of the classic villains of Batman have used makeup effects of one type or another to achieve what is special about their character.  One of my favorite characters in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy is a young actress whose outfit seems to be blue makeup. One of the great advantages of makeup effects is that once they have been photographed, and then color timed, you are (hopefully) done.  No more post production necessary or that is the idea.

Makeup effects in the service of the creation of character from Guardians of the Galaxy

But films and television did not always have so many green or blue women, and people were not always so used to seeing them, and this is my favorite story about such things.

A long time ago, episodic television was shot, and still may be shot, on a brutal schedule.  Each hour long episode needed to go into production with a script, and be completed in one month, on film, which was then broadcast.   There were usually four episodes in production at any one time.  This usually meant that each episode had one week on the stage with the actors for shooting and three weeks for post production.  There were exceptions to this rule, and the process made allowances for special episodes and special problems.  But it could not do so indefinitely, and when they screwed up they had to repeat an episode or do something else they did not want to do, and it was a big deal.

An episode in the third season of the first incarnation of Star Trek involved a very well known young actress and dancer, Yvonne Craig.  Although best known for her role as Batgirl in the original TV series, she was also an alumnus of the Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo, and among other things, the famous green exotic dancer and slave girl in an episode of Star Trek.  This story comes from what happened when they shot that episode.

Presumably they would get her in early, spend hours putting on her makeup, shoot her few scenes, and then move on.  But when they got dailies back the next day, to their dismay they came back wrong.  She was not green, she was some kind of weird yellow.  Unusable.   So they called her in the next day, went through the makeup process, shot her scenes and sent her home.  And it came back from the lab a weird yellow.

Now at this point we are nearing disaster.  The episode can not keep on just shooting as long as it wants, it pretty much has to wrap within a day or two.  But someone got the bright idea to call the lab and ask if anything unusual was going on that might have caused this.  Perhaps that is the first thing they should have done, in hindsight, but it did not occur to them, or so the story goes.

And it turned out that the lab was convinced that the green dancer they were seeing was some sort of mistake they had made in processing, that of course the show would not have shot a nearly naked woman in full-body green makeup, and so they color timed the result to make it looks as much like flesh tones as they could and hoped it would be good enough. Today of course we would not blink an eye at green exotic dancers who are also Orion slave girls, but those were a more innocent time.

Anyway, the problem was solved, and one of the more famous sequences involving Star Trek's sexist exploitation of women was famously born.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvonne_Craig

revised 6/8/2015