There
will always be stories when you go to the movies, but it’s special
effects that truly mark the passage of time in the annals of cinema.
These groundbreaking visual effects opened the door to new eras of
innovative filmmaking. Do you remember the first time you saw them?
Relive the magic moments…
The film: ‘A Trip To The Moon’ (1902)
The effect: Georges Méliès puts a man on the Moon
Cinema
itself was a special effect back at the turn of the 20th century,
thanks mainly to innovator and technological pioneer Georges Méliès, who
ushered in a new era of filmmaking with his 1902 short film. This was
sci-fi before Christopher Nolan’s great-great-great-great grandaddy was
but a twinkle in his great-great-great-great-great grandaddy’s eye: the
13-minute short tells the tale of a group of astronomers who travel to
the Moon in a cannon-powered rocket, complete with special effects
considered lavish for the time. The crowning moment – a scene imitated
for over 100 years – sees the rocket land in the man in the Moon’s eye.
Okay, so it’s no 'Gravity’, but bear in mind this was cinema with one
eye on the stars at a time before even the first manned flight had taken
place.
The film: 'King Kong’ (1933)
The effect: Stop-motion animation
Animation
is a medium modern audiences taken for granted, but it has come on
leaps and bounds since its first baby steps. Stop-motion animation – the
act of posing a model, shooting one frame, moving it slightly then
shooting again ad infinitum – had been used in movies before Merian C.
Cooper’s creature feature, most notably 1925’s dino pic 'The Lost
World’, but none used it quite so memorably as he in 1933: no mere man
in a monkey suit, Cooper’s King Kong was a fearsome beast that felt
every bit as alive as Peter Jackson’s CG creation over 70 years later.
The technique was later refined by the likes of Ray Harryhausen, who
used it to thrilling effect in adventure movies like 'Jason And The
Argonauts’, but they key was always emotion: animators would only move
the characters if they knew the characters would move us.
The film: 'Star Wars’ (1977)
The effect: Creating a galaxy far, far away
It’s
hard to fathom a world before 'Star Wars’ existed – for certain younger
generations it has been nothing less than ever-present. Older
generations, however, will remember the sheer giddy thrill they felt in
the opening seconds of George Lucas’s space opera, when the Blockade
Runner zooms into view, swiftly followed by the gargantuan Star
Destroyer vessel hoving into the picture, dwarfing the Rebel ship in its
sights. Lucas has long been a visual effects pioneer and in founding
Industrial Light & Magic in 1975, laid the groundwork for several
stunning special effects benchmarks to come. 'Star Wars’ represented the
perfect blend of miniatures, practical effects and digital inserts: the
sense of immersion was total and all-conquering. Love him or hate him,
Lucas is the grandfather of modern movie VFX.
The film: 'An American Werewolf In London’ (1981)
The effect: Werewolf transformation
There
is no sub-genre of movie that better argues the case of practical
effects versus digital effects than the werewolf movie. When was the
last time you saw a werewolf movie with a truly shocking transformation
scene? Chances are anything made in the last 20 years has relied on CG
to turn man into wolf, painting over the pain with pixels: it’s just not
the same. John Landis’ lupine adventure, however, expertly utilised
practical effects to create a werewolf transformation that still makes
audiences uncomfortable 34 years later. Rick Baker was the man who made
the magic happen, with all manner of prosthetics and animatronics; the
Academy were so creeped out by the infamous scene, they dusted off the
category of Outstanding Makeup in its honour. Baker has won the award
six times since.
The film: 'Tron’ (1982)
The effect: CGI
“Without
'Tron’, there would be no 'Toy Story’,” says John Lasseter, who knows a
thing or two about animation milestones himself. Computer-generated
imagery – or CGI in today’s parlance – was still in its infancy in the
early 80s; it was more of an experimental technique than a proper tool
in the filmmaker’s arsenal. 'Tron’ changed all that. The
painstakingly-created digital world – an aesthete’s dream of jet black
and neon reds and blues – was a marvel of modern technology and opened
the doors for those forward-thinking filmmakers willing to take their
computer experiments further. Bizarrely, the Academy refused to
recognise Tron’s achievement in the field of special effects; they
thought the use of computers was “cheating”. And people think the
Academy is out of touch…
The film: 'Young Sherlock Holmes’ (1985)
The effect: The first CGI character
Not
even hardcore Holmes fans will own up to loving this 1985 flop, but
'Young Sherlock Holmes’ will always have a place in cinematic history.
The film, directed by Barry Levinson with special effects provided by a
young John Lasseter, was the first to contain a photo-real
computer-generated character. The effect of a knight formed from the
pieces of a stained-glass window is still an eye-opener today, but back
in 1985 it was nothing less than a revelation: proof that CGI could and
would revolutionise blockbuster filmmaking. Some years later, James
Cameron, with the help of ILM, took the techniques learned on 'Young
Sherlock Holmes’ to create two more terrifying CG characters: the
pseudopod in 1989’s 'The Abyss’, and the liquid metal T-1000 in 1991’s
'Terminator 2: Judgement Day’. And the best was yet to come…
The film: 'Jurassic Park’ (1993)
The effect: CG makes stop-motion extinct
The
story goes that upon seeing the CG dinosaurs created by ILM’s Dennis
Muren, 'Jurassic Park’’s stop-motion animator Phil Tippett remarked to
director Steven Spielberg “I think I’m extinct!” Computer-generated
imagery had evolved beyond Hollywood’s wildest dreams in less than a
decade, and 'Jurassic Park’’s dinosaurs – particularly the rampaging
T-Rex – rubber-stamped the new technology, announcing that it was here
to stay. When combined with the animatronic work of Stan Winston, the
ILM dinosaurs looked realer than real – even today it’s difficult to
differentiate between the digital and practical effects. Like 'The Lost
World’ in 1925, 'Jurassic Park’ did the impossible and brought dinosaurs
back to life, to the delight of audiences worldwide.
The film: 'The Matrix’ (1999)
The effect: Bullet-time
The
Wachowski siblings had lofty ambitions indeed – they wanted to free
their movies from the shackles of traditional filmmaking and to set
their camera free. 'The Matrix’ was a movie of many a great achievement –
perhaps the most impressive was making Keanu Reeves a star again – but
the bullet-time effect was the best of the lot: an impossibly dazzling
360 degree shot that circled its star in slow-motion as he limboed under
bullets. Bullet-time was achieved by setting up a circular rig of
several dozen cameras, all poised to shoot sequentially, allowing the
camera to appear untethered. As technologically advanced as the
technique was, the most important thing was that it looked bloody cool.
The film: 'The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers’ (2002)
The effect: Motion-capture
Arguably,
George Lucas was the first man to commit to a fully-CGI lead character
in a mainstream movie, but the fact he did so with Jar-Jar Binks kind of
diminishes that achievement. Three years later, however, and Peter
Jackson’s WETA took the throne with Gollum: an eye-rubbingly realistic
CG addition to Tolkien’s fantasy epic. The reason Gollum worked where
Jar-Jar did not was down to the pioneering use of motion-capture, or
performance capture, as the pros prefer to call it. Andy Serkis suffered
the indignity of wearing a suit covered in ping-pong balls while on
set, but the finished product was jaw-dropping. Gollum kickstarted the
performance capture craze of the 00s and Serkis became the go-to guy for
breathing life into digital creatures such as King Kong and Godzilla.
The film: 'Avatar’
The effect: 3D comes of age
3D has, of course, been around for donkeys years, albeit in the crude
form of crappy paper spectacles and blurry blue and red visuals. James
Cameron doesn’t roll like that. The director actually had to wait for
technology to catch up to his vision of a 3D fantasy epic: 'Avatar’ was
the first movie to create a three-dimensional world it actually felt
like you could step into and explore. Combining bleeding edge
performance capture with state-of-the-art 3D – using brand new
techniques created specifically for the film – 'Avatar’ proved itself to
be more than just a gimmick and went on to become the highest-grossing
movie of all time. It is the sole reason you still have to pay £1.50 for
glasses every time you go to the cinema, but few movies give you your
money’s worth quite as much as 'Avatar’ did.
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