Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)

2/19/2026 at 5:28:43 PM

I vaguely remember having tried this myself with a very small aquarium and liquid latex (IIRC), filmed with my Super 8 cam in slow motion (which meant 36 frames instead of 18).

The results weren't that impressive, but it was fun, as was all the Super 8 stuff. I kind of miss those times and I see at least one other poster seems to have similar recollections :)

To add another nice example of this effect, which is where I learned about it, is The NeverEnding Story (1984). There it's used for the "nothing" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPfQogtS2Eo) and also in the opening of the US release (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCgfRC6gHtI). The original German release only had text on a black background.

It might not look the most realistic, but IMHO it still looks beautiful.

by steve1977

2/19/2026 at 8:50:45 AM

Really cool to see this here. I always loved these in movies. There are a bunch of really interesting artists making use of ink ink liquid, oils, chemical reactions etc that create beautiful abstract pieces. Fitting for HN, Roman De Giuli even creates his own machines. Check out Emitter https://youtu.be/VMd608zCEWc

by xfeeefeee

2/19/2026 at 4:10:05 PM

I have a couple of friends really into paint pouring, and I've tried to make interesting videos of it in the past. It never comes out well because they are still trying to make a finished art piece instead of making a video art piece. I feel like Roman here decided the video was the art. The spillage at the end of one of these shoots must be pretty interesting as well. The pooled paint will retain the patterns in a compressed form, but the paint will be pretty thick that when dried becomes an interesting sculpture in itself. I'd love to see some of those.

by dylan604

2/19/2026 at 1:34:45 PM

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was indeed when I first noticed this effect. It was dramatic and cool and all that, but pretty obviously an effect. Coupling it with Raiders of the Lost Ark and the effect almost pigeon-holes a film to be of that era.

I'm unsurprised Douglas Trumbull was behind the Close Encounters effect since his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey captured his earliest experiments filming tanks of liquids with fluids added. They were fairly effective in Kubrick's film when they appeared to resemble fantastic nebulae, globular clusters…

(And never mind the mind-bending cleverness of how the slit-scan shots were created for 2001.)

by JKCalhoun

2/19/2026 at 3:54:02 PM

Growing up my mom pointed out that she could tell it was a Spielberg movie by the cloud effect. It wasn't until I was older and rewatched them to see she wasn't wrong. I'm pretty sure it was the first time I learned about little signatures like this, or how a director will use the same camera move in every movie. But the Spielberg clouds was one of the things that really got me interested in the magic of movie making.

by dylan604

2/19/2026 at 5:01:13 PM

Agree.

In fact, ha ha, when I was a teen, I set up a window pane as level as I could with a Super-8 camera beneath pointing up. I added water to about an inch in depth (about all I could manage for the window frame) and then poured milk in to create the cloud effect.

I don't have a recollection of seeing the resulting footage, making me wonder if I bothered filming it. Perhaps from the camera point of view all I got was reflections—or perhaps the whole thing was underexposed. Regardless, it was fun to be young and experimenting like that.

My best low-budget effect (not counting the stop-motion animation I experimented with—of course) was when I set my Super-8 camera upside down on a tripod outside at night. I had a piece of glass (the same glass window frame?) and had painted the silhouette of a house in black paint. The windows of the house were left clear but with white paper backing.

The camera was set up to film the glass-painted house outside at night with the sky/trees/stars that were outside as a natural backdrop through the glass. With the camera rolling I had a small light on behind the glass that made the windows of the house appear to be on. I turned it off after the camera rolled for a few seconds. Then I briefly kicked on a very powerful light that caused a quite a flash behind the silhouetted house.

The last thing to film was a thread I had hanging behind the glass that I set on fire with a lighter. It quickly burned up the thread as the camera rolled.

When the film came back I flipped it around end for end, splicing it back into the final roll of film. The inverted camera footage was now right-side up but with the film playing in reverse.

And so the thread had become instead a flame like a meteor crashing to the ground—resulting in a bright flash. Seconds later the lights in the house come on.

by JKCalhoun

2/19/2026 at 8:09:51 PM

I wasn't that young, but we tried with a cheap plastic 20 gallon fish tank which gave us a bit more depth. It was before LEDs, so all we had were hot lights that wound up needing to be very close to the tank to get the amount of light needed. Over the course of the day, that heat actually melted the tank which meant we no longer had a 20 gallon tank but whatever the volume was below the melted part where it would start to leak.

I love your attempt at a practical to that level. I have one that I'm still working on with long exposure timelapse and motion control, but I just can't ever get my schedule to let me do it. I have models of flying saucers with little aliens at the helm that I've rigged up with LEDs connected to an Arduino. That also controls the motion control slider I have, and the camera shutter. The idea was to turn on the UFO lights for a very short duration while the shutter is open to keep from over exposing during the long exposure to capture the night sky in the background. There is no point in doing the shot, except just because. I have the problem of when I have free time, the weather is shite or the wrong time of the year for the part of the sky I want.

by dylan604

2/19/2026 at 5:45:44 PM

I love that story. It illustrates perfectly what fascinated me so much about visual effects as a kid, and maybe also why I lost some of that fascination when CGI took over. Even though I was also very interested in computers back then (and I really loved Tron).

There was so much creativity involved and out of the box thinking about physics and time and optics, to craft something that in the end resulted in a nice optical illusion. Like a magic trick (interestingly, in German visual and special effects are (or were) also called "Filmtricks").

Now with CGI, everything is possible and paradoxically, that makes it more boring somehow. And sometimes practical effects still look better IMHO.

by steve1977

2/19/2026 at 10:15:24 AM

If you are interested in old school vfx work there is a great documentary about the early days of vfx called "Light and Magic."

by BoredPositron

2/19/2026 at 4:36:38 PM

I really love VFX in the period between Star Wars and Jurassic Park. To me it will always be the "golden age" of VFX.

by dblohm7

2/19/2026 at 5:47:11 PM

The 80s have been the golden age of many things I think.

by steve1977

2/19/2026 at 9:02:36 AM

Great article, big fan of stuff like this. (Recommending Corridors VFX series, for ppl who want something similar).

However, checking the authors "Top/Worst films of the year", being called the "Single Minded Movie Blog" seems fitting, and not in the way they think. Some of the worst movie takes I've seen hahahahh

by mgot

2/19/2026 at 10:31:07 AM

What makes a take bad?

by whycome

2/19/2026 at 12:26:09 PM

Apparently thinking One Battle After Another (2025) is "without a doubt THE most insufferable movie of the year" (<https://singlemindedmovieblog.blogspot.com/2026/01/bottom-10...>)

by DoctorOW

2/19/2026 at 12:37:56 PM

It looks like he’s confusing Paul Thomas Anderson with Paul W. S. Anderson. The latter directed Resident Evil, which the author refers to.

by thinkingQueen