Making movies with added special effects

[psi20]

I've been making movies for school and they're pretty cool. I use Windows Movie Maker and Nero and the movies turn out cool. There are special effects so I can make it an old 1950's movie, slow motion, etc. But I want to be able to add in stuff that I can't videotape in real life, like a UFO coming in and abducting me or have a giant godzilla destroy a city. How do I add in special effects. What program is best for this and where do I get it?

[aaronmyung]

You'll need to go past windows movie maker. Try something like sony vegas that lets you add aditional layers.

 

eg, you could have a background on 1 layer, an image of a ufo with a transparent background on the one above.

some programs like Adobe Premiere even let you bluescreen stuff.

[mezarashi]

A very common program known among anime movie editors like myself is Adobe After Effects. A trial download is available at the Adobe website. After Effects is very effective at adding effects, while its cousin Premier is better for clip compiling. Although having the software itself will not instantly create you wonders, you will need to learn how to use it (quite a learning curve). Many of these effects are achieved using pricey professional plug-ins, but for the casual artiste, you might need to churn out some extra creativity on how you will achieve certain effects using the built-in default features.

 

Another hot program under speculation is Discreet Combustion 4. They claim that it has better effects capabilities, but I have yet to try it.

[Klaynos]

Depending how seriouse you are, the way to get the best effects is to model objects and render them in 3d applications and add them to your move frame by frame. (The last scoobe doo film was done using 3d models for all the special effects using free opensource software running on linux)