How is owning a 20-year-old 10-speed bicycle like using non-digital effects in the digital age? If we sidestep the"bells and whistles" punchline, the answer is that they both still do the job.

The well-used bike will get you to most of the same places as a new graphite-frame, gel-seat, shock-absorbing, knobby-tire mountain bike. Similarly, special effects done in the camera are not as cutting edge as the digital effects that most nonlinear-editing computer systems can deliver. But in some instances the manual effects can be cheaper, easier, and more convincing than their digital counterparts.

Shooting an independent movie with a digital camera doesn't mean you have to abandon a century of special-effect techniques when you conjure up the magic for your production. In fact, as audiences become more attuned to digital effects, sometimes old-style effects look more authentic.

In the course of producing one digital feature, two low-budget shot-on-film features, and many videos, we have used a variety of time-tested special-effects tricks. Not only did these effects boost the apparent production value of our movies by $50,000, but they were budget-conscious alternatives for scenes which could have been expensive to create.

Even if the following non-digital effects aren't right for your digital movie, they might spark your creativity to design special-effects solutions for your particular production challenges.

Miniatures Miniatures have long been used to create settings and objects that aren't possible in real life . . . or on real budgets. If you have model-building skills (or friends that do), a visit to the local model shop and a few evenings of work can produce a three-dimensional miniature that passes for the real thing. (Hint: It's easier to make realistic miniatures for night shots.) To model a realistic three-dimensional image on a computer would take a lot more people time and processing time, and the result is likely to look less than fully realistic.

A foreground miniature is one particularly effective technique. In this instance, the miniature is placed close to the camera to give it the appearance of being a large object in the scene. This can be a sign, a set piece, the top of a building, or an overhead object as long as the actors in the scene don't cross behind this foreground object. It's critical that the foreground miniature be in focus – soft focus is a dead giveaway that an object is small and nearby. The lighting of the foreground and the background must also match to complete the illusion. In one case, we needed to create a large sign over the set of a game show. A 10-inch sign that we hung a few feet in front of the camera was completely convincing.

While foreground miniatures most often are stationary objects, there's no reason that you can't have live action in them. Put your dog in a miniature set that matches half of a room, and put people terrorized by the giant canine in the full-sized other half of the room. Some excellent examples of this effect can be seen in the movie Honey, I Blew up the Kids.

Chemistry Some very convincing chemical effects can be created on screen with less than $10 of supplies from the grocery store – baking soda, white vinegar, liquid food coloring, milk, and liquid soap.

You need a beaker to boil over when a scientist mixes two volatile chemicals? Start by dissolving baking soda in a beaker of water. Stir until the water is clear. Fill a second beaker with white vinegar. If you want the clear liquids to be tinted, add food coloring. If you want the liquid opaque or translucent instead of clear, add milk. When you pour the two liquids together, they will bubble over violently, and the bubbles will dissipate in a few seconds. For smoother, smaller bubbles that last longer, stir in a drop of liquid soap

The reaction between the vinegar and baking soda can be used in many ways. For instance, you can create the appearance of fingers being dissolved in a powerful acid. Just wet the side of the fingers that won't be seen by the camera. Dip the wet fingers in baking soda so chunks adhere to the back of the fingers. When you dip the fingers into a container of vinegar, bubbles will appear to rise from the fingers as the"acid" reacts with the flesh.

Of course, this same trick can be done with other objects as well.

If you need more bubbles, make a packet of one ply of toilet paper (It falls apart fast in liquid.) wrapped around baking soda. Attach the packet to the back of an object, and a large amount of bubbles will boil up from the object as long as the baking soda lasts. The best thing about these chemical reactions is that they are harmless except for producing a small amount of carbon dioxide.

Speaking of carbon dioxide, the solid version of this gas called"dry ice" has long been a staple of the special effects area. You may have to search a little to find it, but it is available for very little cost in most communities. Put a chunk in hot water, and it creates a great low-lying fog. Weight some small pieces to the bottom of a container of water, and it creates a pretty convincing boiling liquid.

Here are a couple of cautions. Dry ice is cold enough to give you frostbite (-110° F), so wear gloves whenever handling it. The fog it creates is carbon dioxide, which you can't breathe, so plan for proper ventilation or an adequate air supply.

Because dry ice converts from a solid to an expanded gas, you can drop some in a plastic container and watch it puff up the container or blow off the lid. For mini-explosions, perhaps on a miniature set, put it into plastic 35mm film canisters. The tops will blow off with a satisfying"pop," but there's no real danger (unless you're hit in the eye with the lid), and there's no mess to cleanup.

Glass and mirrors

Putting a piece of thin glass at a 45-degree angle in front of your lens will let you produce a variety of superimposed effects. Usually the glass is placed in a black box with openings on three sides. The lens points though one opening and out the opposite side. The glass is placed so it will reflect any image placed on the third open side of the box. This technique can be used to create all manner of ghostly issues/42/images or semi-transparent glows and issues/42/images on the live performance that is happening in front of the camera. For example, we've used it to create a glow around an object that was becoming highly"electrified."

Mirrors are also very handy for doing special camera angles without having snorkel lenses and other expensive rigs. To get a shot on the level with the bottom of a sink, we've placed a mirror on the side of the sink. A bit of adjusting of the camera and the mirror gave us a shot that looked like the camera was sitting in the sink. (Remember that the image will be reversed unless you use two mirrors.)

To create the shot we've all seen where an object such as a large rock falls directly into the camera – put a mirror in the path of the rock, and then aim the camera's telephoto lens into the mirror from a safe distance. Better to smash a $10 mirror than a $2,500 camera for your shot. If you bring an extra mirror, you can even afford to do a retake – although that will result in 14 years of bad luck, instead of the standard seven.

Wind

For raking leaves, leaf blowers are one of the most wasteful uses of technology ever invented, but as a portable wind machine for independent moviemakers, they are a great special-effects tool. We've used them to hit our actors with the concussive blast of an explosion and to create the air stream that made an actor look like he was hang-gliding. You could also use a leaf blower to create a wind that blows the sand from a mummy's tomb; run the footage backwards, and the mummy will be covered up for another 2000 years or until the sequel. Aim a leaf blower at an actor standing in the door of a stationary freight car, and it will look like he's being buffeted by the air flow as he zooms down the track.

Heat

If you live in a northern climate, you can have some fun with snow and heat guns. Heat guns are those industrial-strength hair dryers that are used to strip paint off walls. To create an interesting title, we made the words with plastic letters and then covered them with snow. A heat gun was trained on the snow while the camera was rolling. The snow turned to water and revealed the hidden title. If you want to do something bigger, such as melting an alien body out of a block of ice, you can get a"torpedo" style space heater and aim it at your soon-to-be-thawed alien-cicle. Just make sure the alien body isn't flammable because this style of heater gets hot enough to burn off your shoe laces. (Don't ask how we know this.)

Magnets

A couple of good magnets can do wonders for moving objects. If you need to animate a miniature car as it drives around a map, just mount the map on some thick card stock, and lay it flat. Attach one magnet to the bottom of the car. Put the other magnet under the card stock and below the car. When you move the bottom magnet, the car with its magnet will dutifully follow along.

Need a picture frame to fall? Attach one magnet to the frame, and then hold it in place with another magnet on the back side of a thin set wall. Just pull away the magnet behind the set, and the picture will fall.

Physics

Here's a chance to finally apply some of that stuff you learned in high school. There's a concept in physics called"frame of reference." An example of two different frames of reference can be seen when riding in a car. You can sit with a bowl of goldfish in your lap while traveling in the car (frame of reference #1) because you, the fishbowl, and the car seat are all in the same frame of reference and are sitting still compared to each other. However, your friend on the street corner (frame of reference #2) sees you, your fishbowl, and the car seat go past at 40 miles per hour. From his frame of reference, you are all in motion.

This example shows the principles that can be applied to create special effects using different frames of reference.

A big-budget example is the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which an astronaut jogs around the rotating interior ring of the spaceship, held in place by centrifugal force in the weightless environment. This would really work if shot in space. Shot here on earth, the set was actually like the inside of a Ferris wheel.

The actor was always jogging on the bottom of the wheel as it rotated. However, the camera, which was mounted to the set, moved with the wheel, so from its frame of reference, the actor jogged up overhead and back down.

You probably aren't going to be building Ferris-wheel-sized sets, but you can do some pretty cool stuff with smaller set pieces. Say that you want to foreshadow eerie happenings by having the water dripping from a faucet suddenly defy gravity. Build a small framework with a sink, faucet, and background wall all attached to it. It only has to be as large as the shot that will be seen. Mount the camera and any lighting to this same framework so that they become part of the set's frame of reference. Attach a pressurized water supply (such as a garden hose from a real spigot) to feed the water to your dripping faucet. Now tilt the set/faucet/camera/lights unit. If you tip it forward, the drips will appear to gradually change from dripping down to dripping out laterally. If you continue and turn the whole rig upside down, the water will appear to drip skyward out of the faucet. Because it all happens for real, there are no telltale digital signs to break the reality of the effect – though you will need to mop up when you're done.

Split Screen

This final example demonstrates the beauty of combining new digital effects with old-fashioned technology.

Current digital editing programs make creating split screens a snap. But while it may be easy to create a split screen in editing, keeping the footage in sync on both sides of the split can be tricky. Imagine a standard phone-call scene with an actor on each side of the split screen. If you have two cameras, two crews, and two lighting packages, and you can get the two actors to the two locations at the same time, you could shoot the scene simultaneously. But how often does that happen?

The reality is that you'll probably shoot one actor at one location and then days later shoot the other half of the conversation at another location. Put the two pieces of video side by side, and you be amazed at how quickly the two conversations fall out of sync.

When we were making our latest feature, Grown Men, we used a very simple solution. Both of the actors in our scene were seasoned industrial pros. We simply had them bring in their ear prompters and record the scene together. When it came time to shoot the scene (on two locations on different days), each actor just popped in an ear prompter and played the scene . . . in perfect sync with their counterpart. When the two takes were placed in the digital split screen, they fit together perfectly.

None of these effects requires a big budget, stunt doubles, or fire crews on standby, which means they are perfect for independent movies. Even though you may have digital-effects tools at your disposal, a digital effect won't always work better or even as well as a manual effect. One of the best features of non-digital effects is that you can play back the digital video to check the results immediately rather than putting in many hours creating a digital effect that may or may not work.

We're not saying that digital effects aren't valuable. We've done our share of digital wizardry, too. However, when you start planning out your special effects, don't rush to a digital solution without considering the time-tested techniques that have created movie magic for the last century. MM

Dale Newton and John Gaspard created the ultra-low-budget feature films, Beyond Bob and Resident Alien, and are currently finishing their first digital feature, Grown Men. Their latest book, Digital Filmmaking 101, was just released by Michael Wiese Productions (www.mwp.com).