'Chronicle' Flying Effects Revealed In New Video

Making a movie about kids with superpowers on a budget of $ 12 million is no easy feat, especially when you're trying to make sure your effects look convincing. But that's exactly what director Josh Trank managed to do when he put together this year's surprise hit, "Chronicle."

One of the biggest surprises in "Chronicle" was how convincing the special effects looked. A new behind-the-scenes video -- courtesy of The Daily -- shows how the special effects team managed to make the flying look so realistic with the help of the visual effects company Rhythm & Hues. Turns out that the biggest problem the team had was trying to make main characters Andrew, Matt and Steve look as realistic as possible while soaring through the air.

"They actually worked with the director to make some decisions about speed. They did some time ramps on the footage to actually kind of speed up in certain areas, and they did some slight animation of the 2D card that the green screen footage was put onto to kind of get a rough blocking. So that's where we started from," said Rhythm & Hues visual effects supervisor Raymond Chen in the video. "We started from the rough blocking. We actually matched it. Once we did that, we also did a 3D track, so we actually did a match move of the character, and for some of the interactive effects elements such as trails coming off of the body, punching through clouds and actually getting some kind of interaction."

He continued, "One of the big problems we had with the flying sequence, as with anything where you have people suspended on rigs, is the unnatural motion that you get with the body when you're an actor and you're sort of reacting against the rig or hanging, you can sort of see and feel the weight and you don't feel like it's flying. So, it's pretty subtle, but it actually helps to really convey the idea of flying."

Do you think Chen and his team did a convincing job making the characters in "Chronicle" fly? Tell us in the comments section below or on Twitter!