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A Practical Special Effect: The BatCam

In the Fall of 2018, UT Austin created a course that would consist of students from a range of fields, including Studio Art, Engineering, Film, and Entertainment Technologies. Through interdisciplinary teams of students, the goal is to create practical special effects and showcase them in a short film reel.

Project Overview

During the Fall semester of 2018 at The University of Texas at Austin, a new class was taking form. One that would teach students skills they will be able to apply in collaborative settings after graduation and receive an opportunity to work with students from different disciplines. A second-iteration for a new type of collaborative and interdisciplinary course, Professors J.E. Johnson and Karen Maness created this course in which students from across the University would get the opportunity to come together with one goal: to design and build a practical special effect.

Within the first week, students pitched their ideas, and teams were formed consisting of three to five students. Each team was created to consist of students from the School of Engineering, Fine Arts, and Communication.

What is the Goal?

J.E. Johnson and Karen Maness received the Faculty Innovation Center Grant for their work with this course.

Below, Professor J.E. Johnson details the expectations and final deliverables for this course.

Meet The Team

Natalie Broussard

Art and Entertainment Technolgies

Taylor Travis

Theater and Dance

Ashley Perez

Mechanical Engineering

The Pitch

Pitched by Taylor Travis, the practical special effect we will be making is what we are calling a "Bat-Camcorder" or "Bat-Cam" from a WebToon Story entitled "Refund High School" which you can read here. Created by LICO, Refund High School takes place in the afterlife and allows those who have died to improve their karma and be reincarnated.

Below is the scene that we will be re-depicting as well as our inspiration for the "Bat-Cam." These images, along with a few others throughout the comic, are what we will be using as our guide for the semester.

Our goal for this project is to create the functions you see above in a digital format so that it is operable by the push of a button. Taylor describes the goals and problems we hope to address in this blog post, here.

The features we hope to accomplish include...

Eye Shutter: The physical shutter that closes over the "eye" when it is not on and opens up when the power button is pressed.
Digital Eye: The "lens" of the camcorder which has the appearance of an eyeball. We hope to make this aspect electronic and code-able so that it can potentially have the ability of dilation and movement just like a real eyeball.
Wing: The ability for the screen of the camcorder to automatically pop open with the turning on of the camcorder. While we do not expect to have an operable screen due to the time constriction of the semester, we still want to have the illusion of such.
"Whaang" Sound Effect: An audible noise to signal the power turning on.
Organic Look, Mechanical Operation: While we understand this camcorder is a fictional object, we interpret this object as both organic and mechanical, and in the universe where this story takes place, that you often cannot have one without the other. We aim to make him organic yet mechanical to embody what we see in the comic.