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Chapter 4: Cinematography

Essay: A Short History of Special Effects

One of the greatest misconceptions about modern movies is that visual effects are generated by computers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Human inventiveness is the most important ingredient and it always will be. Computers offer amazing new possibilities, but the underlying challenges of movie illusions are the same today as they were nearly a century ago when the industry was young. People, not machines, drive the craft of visual effects.

Piers Bizony, Digital Domain: The Leading Edge of Visual Effects

Special effects are understandably vital to a medium dedicated to transporting and dazzling its audiences. But what exactly is a “special effect”? The illusion of movement generated by projecting twenty-four still images per second could itself be considered a special effect. In the early days of cinema, sound and color were thought to be special effects. But these days the term refers to any onscreen image or effect that is not captured on set by conventional means and is usually employed for action impossible to stage for the camera - killing people, blowing stuff up, creating otherworldly locations or nonhuman characters.

Origins

Early effects were done primarily “in-camera,” which is to say that the effect was achieved before the film ever left the original camera for processing. For example, one of the earliest credited special effects was in the 1895 short “The Execution of Mary Stuart,” which as the title suggests, featured a beheading. The camera was stopped mid-shot just before the executioner’s ax hit its mark, the actors froze in place, and the actor playing Mary Stuart was replaced with a dummy. When the camera was restarted and the ax finished the job, the resulting in-camera “substitution shot” showed what appeared (at least to the forgiving eyes of its unsophisticated audience) to be an actual beheading.

This same trick-photography technique was employed seven years later in George Méliès’s groundbreaking “A Trip to the Moon,” an early science fiction film that also pioneered split screen, double exposure (essentially running the film through the camera twice to combine images), stop motion photography (a technique in which animated action is captured one controlled frame at a time), matte backgrounds (using elaborately painted backgrounds to suggest location), and miniatures (substituting detailed models for full-scale props and figures).


A Trip to the Moon Matte	A Trip to the Moon Model

The following year, Edwin Porter’s decidedly more “realistic” western “The Great Train Robbery” included a substitution shot at the moment the engineer is tossed off the speeding train, as well as a composite (the layering and/or combining of separately shot elements) in which a moving train can be viewed through the open window of a studio set.

The Great Train Switch

Double exposure, stop motion, matte backgrounds, models, and compositing are still used today. As successive filmmakers strove to out-dazzle their predecessors, Hollywood has continuously improved these basic techniques. The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) used stop-motion animation to create convincing giant moving creatures, often composited with live-action characters.

King Kong, 1933

Orson Welles exploited detailed mattes painted on glass to create jungle and beach backgrounds, as well as the famous Xanadu estate, in his 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane

A 1955 science fiction flop called Conquest of Space was widely panned for its inane story and bad acting, but featured advances in effects and design that provided the technical inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As advanced as the film looks, 2001 used well-worn special effects methods employing models, stop motion, compositing, actors and objects suspended on wires, and rear projection (a decidedly imperfect technique that projects previously shot material on a screen behind foreground actors, used often for driving scenes, and was first employed in 1933).


Conquest of Space

But Kubrick and his team greatly improved - some say perfected - these old technologies. Their models and mattes were realistic and seamless. The famous “stargate” sequence - considered the pinnacle of pre-computer special effects sequences - was shot with a “slit-scan” technique using a device similar to an optical printer, a device that links one or more projectors with a camera and allows for rephotographing and thus manipulating footage one frame at a time.

The Advent of Computers

George Lucas revolutionized special effects in 1977 when he formed the special effects company Industrial Light and Magic and used computers to create the effects for a little movie called Star Wars.

Star Wars Model

But the success of ILM’s computer-driven effects for Star Wars had very little to do with Computer Generated Images (CGI). In fact, the film features only one CGI effect, a three-dimensional representation of the death star “trench” featured in the rebel forces battle-briefing sequence. CGI had been around for a few years already, having first surfaced in the otherwise forgettable Westworld (1972) to represent the infrared point of view of a gunslinger robot.

With Star Wars, ILM’s major contribution to computerized special effects was to wed a custom-built microprocessor (this was in the days before PCs), to a mechanized “Motion Control” camera so that the camera’s frame-by-frame movement over and around miniatures and models could be duplicated exactly on multiple passes to allow for the perfect registration of multilayered composites. This blending of old and new technologies allowed for the seamless integration of separately photographed miniature X-Wing and TIE Fighters battling over the model Death Star.


George Lucas	Star Wars Model

Computer-Generated Characters

George Lucas has the reputation as a director more comfortable with computers than actors, so it’s no great surprise that ILM is a leading innovator in computer-generated characters. In 1985, when computer animation juggernaut Pixar was just a CGI arm of ILM, the animators created the first completely computer-generated “photorealistic” character - a stained-glass knight come to life for a thirty-second hallucination sequence in Young Sherlock Holmes.

Young Sherlock Holmes

Four years later, James Cameron’s The Abyss boasted the first 3-D CGI character, a “pseudopod” able to shape its watery form into any shape. This fluid creature style would be updated and improved for Cameron’s next film, the special effects blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 1993’s Jurassic Park brought us CGI dinosaurs (but also heavily relied on old-fashioned animatronics, or mechanized puppets - another ILM specialty).

Jurassic Park

Casper (1995) became the first CG character in a leading role, followed by other CG title characters Godzilla (1998) and Mighty Joe Young (1998), a remake of the 1925 stop-motion classic. As computers grow ever more sophisticated, the list has expanded to include everything from the endearing (Stuart Little) to the obnoxious (Jar Jar Binks), but the greatest computer-generated character thus far owes much of his dramatic impact to a human actor.

Stuart Little

Well into production on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Andy Serkis was auditioned to dub the Gollum character’s voice.

Andy Serkis

The actor was so physically expressive that director Peter Jackson and special effects company WETA were inspired to scrap two years of work creating an all CG “computer puppet” Gollum and instead redesign the character to resemble Serkis.

Gollum Remake

The actor performed on-camera “reference pass” takes with co-stars Sean Astin and Elijah Wood, allowing the performers to interact with a living, breathing co-star. Animators later superimposed their computer-generated Gollum onto Serkis’s image, mimicking his motion frame by frame for a lifelike, integrated performance.

Gollum Superimposed

Serkis would then be “painted out,” leaving only his digital alter ego. Director Jackson admits this process is nothing new; Walt Disney animators used filmed actors as a reference as early as 1937 in Snow White. For scenes in which reference pass takes were impractical, Jackson and WETA used motion capture, a process that involves an actor wearing a suit fitted with reflective dots at key movement points.

Motion Capture Suit

Gollum Superimposed Over Serkis

Gollum’s facial expressions were created using CG animation. Andy Serkis collaborated with Peter Jackson again in 2005, using a similar combination of motion capture, reference pass, and digital key-frame animation to create the title character in King Kong. Serkis’s performances show that perhaps the best animators are actors capable of delivering a performance one frame at a time.

Effects No Longer Special?

Once upon a time, relatively primitive special effects were a special treat for easily impressed audiences. Made for $19 million dollars in 1985, the blockbuster Back to the Future dazzled audiences with three hundred special effects shots. But as sophisticated computer software and hardware become more accessible, the effects that astounded movie audiences one summer often can be seen in commercials by the following spring, resulting in a constantly growing demand for bigger and better effects.

King Kong Special Effects, 2005

Today’s summer extravaganzas routinely spend $100 million on special effects alone and boast more than two thousand shots featuring effects. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) employed approximately five hundred special effects artists, necessitating a total budget reportedly approaching $225 million dollars.

But not all special effects are meant to dazzle audiences. Effects are often used to alter and enhance background settings in films not necessarily associated with big-budget spectacles, such as the Steve Martin movie Shopgirl. Painted background mattes have been around since A Trip to the Moon (1902), and digitally manipulated backgrounds have been common since Die Hard 2 (1990).

Die Hard 2

Recent films such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) and Sin City (2005) take place in entirely digital worlds.

Computers are also routinely used not to add but to remove images. Wires used to move suspended actors and objects were first digitally removed in Howard The Duck (1986) and the practice is now common. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and The Matrix (1999) would look somewhat less spectacular if viewers saw the wires that make air-born acrobatics possible.

The Matrix

Other memorable film images made possible because of this technology include able-bodied actor Gary Sinise as a double amputee in 1994’s Forrest Gump. More recently, the special effects team of Greg and Colin Strause removed wrinkles and reshaped the faces of actors Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart to make their characters look twenty-five years younger for flashback sequences in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006).