During one of the creepiest scenes in The Craft, one of the girls is lying on the floor
screaming as snakes are writhing from her head, roaches are crawling on her
body, assorted creatures (including maggots, yech!) are scurrying over her
face, and her fingers have turned in to snakes. And YES!, those are real
snakes.
The creation of the fingers to snakes effect was conceived by Kelley Ray, the visual effects supervisor. He believed that real snakes, although much more difficult to work with, would be far more dramatic than rubber prosthesis or computer graphic snakes. He certainly was right!
In order to achieve the effect, we had to build a hollow model of the
actresses' hand and insert plastic tubing where the base of the fingers
would have been. The snakes
(all five, at the same time) were threaded through the tubing in a manner
that allowed them to wriggle around while remaining stuck inside the "hand."
They were shot
"greenscreen," meaning that both the model hand, and the background, were
painted
green in order to isolate the snakes.
The isolated snake images were then positioned on a still frame of the live action background plate, later to be tracked to the motion of the actress s hands during her performance for that shot. Her real fingers had to be removed (not from her hands) from the shot to make way for the snakes, which was done by painting over her fingers and using Elastic Reality software to warp the base of the snakes to match the width of the knuckles so it would look like her fingers actually became snakes. The finished snakes were then composited onto the live action plate of the actress with a painted blend area from her hand to the snakes' bodies. Voila.
The snake effect in action!
Quicktime or AVI, Approx. 548K