Special visual effects, or SFX, is a visual trickery created to look like something not immediately achieved within a singular live frame. If the trickery has done its job well, we know nothing about it. Did you realize that when flying through the asteroid belt in Empire Strikes Back, many of the asteroids were potatoes thrown in front of a blue screen to keep the budget low? No? I didn’t think so. SFX is movie magic at its most magical, but it did not poof from a cloud of smoke overnight to get to where it is today. The magic potion needed time to brew and develop from the day of its first ingredient…
1895, the same year that birthed cinema, also brought the first visual effects in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots when the actress playing Mary, kneeling at the guillotine, was replaced with doll for the next frame where the blade takes ‘Mary’s head off. This is now known as the ‘stop trick’, but unknown at the time- quite a few viewers were in shock over the actress’ commitment to lose her head for the role… not realizing it was the dummy who gave up an appendage. How things change and stay the same – Historical dramas have yet to go out of style.
It wasn’t long before the early filmmakers set their goals high enough to touch the sky and beyond. George Méliès, who’s long been referred to as the ‘Father of Special Effects,’ made crater size impact when he brought movies like A Trip to the Moon (1902) to the theaters. In his fantastical vision of our journey to the stars, he uses “split screen, multiple exposures, and mechanical stage tricks” to create otherworldly illusions of the world’s first off-planet adventure. Méliès made “some 4,000 films in all,” and his filmmaking inventions were the groundwork for so many effects to come.
The following year The Great Train Robbery took audiences and their awe back to Earth, grounding the story in a truer-to-life setting and utilizing, for one of the first times- a scrolling matte painting. It gave the illusion that the train under siege was speeding in motion along the track, raising the stakes of adventure.
In D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance in 1912, glass shots and miniatures joined the visual effects tool belt to make the massive walls of Babylon appear even more immense. These tactics would be perfected in the years to come, with Metropolis and Ben-Hur in the 20s. At this time, audiences were not only entranced by the sweeping sets but by the crafted performance work as well.
In the 20s, makeup effects became notable in creating characters, particularly creature characters, with the marvelously performed and transformed John Barrymore in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Following suit, Lon Chaney, using makeup kit that would fit in the everyday makeup bag of 2023, was able to manufacture iconic creature costumes for Quasimodo and The Phantom. Through trial and error application and appropriate light placement, he created complex characters from the outside in and back out again.
Then RKO’s King Kong stormed onto the screens in 1933 (and never left). It was teaming all the tricks of Melies, Griffith, and Lange, King Kong layers live action, miniatures, painted glass, mechanics, and stop-motion from the brilliant Willis O’Brien. Half century later, stop motion is still being used to incredible effect today, i.e., Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which took home an Oscar earlier this year.
In the 50s, many historical events were recreated with miniatures to educate the public. The Battle of Manila, for example, was recreated using miniatures on a little tub of water, with members of the effects team creating oceanic waves with hand-cranked egg beaters and smoke for explosions by puffing out an inhale from a tobacco pipe. By using the miniatures for action movies, war epics, and science fiction adventures, studios could decrease their budget for epic explosions by an epic percentage.
Much later, and with a lot of money to (literally) burn, Demolition Man’s (1993) special physical effects crew was able to set up their fire canons all along the front of an abandoned Department of Water and Power building in downtown Los Angeles. Using the perfect concoction of fuels, the pyrotechnics crew set off their controlled fireball displays, allowing the smoke and flames to dissipate in ideal timing for the second crew to release the explosives that would send the entire building crumbling to the ground. It’s a one-time, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime shot (times 13 cameras). Gone are the days when slingshot chalk on a wall was the explosion effect.
But before we get too far ahead, let’s circle back a bit to the 60s. 1968 brought 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Through rotoscoping and motion control coupled with practical effects like the rotating set, they were able to create the feeling of zero-gravity outer space. 2001 not only created the feeling of outer space but started fire in the heart of George Lucas whose upcoming trilogy creation might not have been possible without it.
Lucas’ Star Wars in 1976 used new filming technique created by John Dykstra at ILM that enabled the camera and miniatures to dance around each other and achieve the look of motion through space. Building on their inventions in Empire Strikes Back, they upgraded to “graduate-level compositing.” They needed to eliminate the black matte lines that could be seen in the original movie for the sequel that required ships flying over a bright, snowy tundra of a planet. By taking an optical printer (a development created in WWII that was due for an upgrade), they could specialize it for this issue. The cameras (a stacked four) take in multiple pieces of film and various fragments of matte to then compress the background and foreground images one frame at a time.
Do you remember the shot of the Millennium Falcon zooming off into the distance? The effects team couldn’t get the camera far enough from the model, so Richard Edlund, the visual effects supervisor, took a Polaroid photo of the model, printed it, tacked it to a piece of glass, and pulled the camera back on that image. After being run through the ‘Star Wars Printer’- That two-second cheat shot of the Millennium Falcon got a round of applause from the movie theater audience.
A round of applause should also be given to The Abyss (1989) and, for this article, particular nod to the deep sea creature it created. Because the animal is supposed to move and morph while being made entirely of seawater, it couldn’t have been made in any other way than CGI. James Cameron took the CGI technology of the time to its max, and to the effect that The Abyss was the first to win an Academy Award for a computer-generated image.
By the time Jurassic Park (1993), many studios had begun outsourcing their visual effects to independent visual effects studios. These indie effects studios had grown monumentally since the days of Méliès, now carrying under one roof an; “art department, production office, shooting stage, model shop, matte painting department, film processing, animation, optical, editorial, projection, engineering (electronic and mechanical).” – (Richard Edlund, Boss Film Corporation). These effects houses have played a massive role in creating the biggest box office movies for decades.
Every one of the latest blockbuster movies has built upon the basic building blocks set by King Kong and Star Wars to erect the skyscrapers of VFX today. In 2001 the first Lord of the Rings was released, showcasing the incredible motion capture work by Andy Serkis. Later, Serkis’ mo-cap performance in King Kong would reportedly be the inciting signifier to James Cameron that the technology was ready for him to make Avatar. Cameron used FX giant Weta behind the King Kong VFX (look at that King Kong making moves in the effects game since ’33!), as did the most recent blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3.
We’ve come so far in these creative visual endeavors that we can have a world of giant blue people interacting with human counterparts and alien sea creatures underwater in 3D. We have a world of humans, humanoids, talking dogs, raccoons, and trees, among other various aliens, and a stampede of 500 animals all jumping from a flaming mega-spaceship to another un-flamed mega-spaceship in the depths of another galaxy, and they all SOMEHOW look genuine.
What does the road ahead look like for visual and special effects now that we’ve come this far? If the ride since Execution of Mary Queen of Scots has only taken 125 years, and technology is only ramping up faster every year… well, where we’re going, we probably won’t need roads.
Leave a Comment