Special effects

 

Motion pictures have always been largely illusion: artificial realities convincingly created by assorted designers, craftspeople, cinematographers and actors.

But these days, what you see on screen is less “real” than ever. Today special effects rule the movies, thanks primarily to computers.

That’s not to say there were no special effects before computers came along. In fact, special effects are as old as the movies themselves. A French magician-turned-filmmaker, George Melies, invented special effects in A Trip to the Moon, filmed in 1902, in which he shot a spaceship from a cannon into the eye of the Man in the Moon. In other short films he cut people in two and changed humans into beasts.

Three techniques he pioneered formed the basis for most of the effects of the next seven decades: mechanical models, painted backgrounds and multiple film exposures.

Mechanical models are used when it is far too expensive–or simply impossible–to shoot the real thing. It’s a lot easier to film a model train crashing than a real train crashing.

Mechanical models of living creatures can even be brought to life by moving them a little bit at a time, shooting one frame of film each time the model is adjusted. This technique, called “stop-motion,” gave us the original King Kong.

Painted backgrounds, the second basic element of traditional special effects, can create the illusion that something being shot in a soundstage was actually shot somewhere more exotic. (Such backgrounds work even better in film than on stage because film, like paint, is a two-dimensional medium.) A variation is the “rear-projection” background, in which the actors are filmed in front of a screen on which a moving image is being projected. And then there’s the “matte painting,” which ties in with Melies’s other basic tool: multiple exposures.

Multiple exposures can combine two elements shot at different times into a single frame. Melies’s original “in-camera” multiple exposures, however, have mostly been supplanted by the optical printer, which allows you to combine various shots from various cameras onto a single piece of film. It allows you to “matte” actors into a painting, not just place them in front of it. Miniature models can also be integrated into the matte painting and made to appear life-size or larger.

Once each element of the final shot is filmed, blank spaces have to be created in each frame the exact shape and size of the other elements to be added. This process is simplified by shooting the actors in front of a blue screen. The blue is easily removed from the finished print, leaving clear space for the insertion of the matte painting.

(ADDENDUM, 2005: It’s been pointed out to me that technically, effects achieved in post-production through the manipulation of the film image are called “visual effects,” to distinguish them from effects achieved during production.  Thus, a computer-generated scene of a ship tossing in an ocean is a visual effect; a filmed scene of a model tossing in a wave-tank is a special effect.)

These techniques reached their pinnacle in the Star Wars movies. Enormous numbers of matte paintings, miniatures and actors were combined into spectacular scenes that became more complex with each successive Star Wars film. And what made such complexity possible was the computer.

Industrial Light and Magic, formed to create the Star Wars effects and now the undisputed special-effects leader, invented a computer-controlled camera mount that ensured that as each separate element was filmed, the camera moved in exactly the same path is it had when previous elements were filmed. This is what allowed spacecraft to swoop and roll and dodge in such numbers on the screen. But it was just the beginning of the use of computers in creating special effects.

Miniatures, matte paintings and optical printing are still part of the stock-in-trade, but more and more effects are entirely computer-created, thanks to the invention of the Solitaire Image Recorder by Management Graphics Inc. five years ago.

Intended to translate charts into slides for business presentations, this device proved to have another use: it could digitize 35-millimetre motion-picture film. The digitized images could be altered by a computer, then printed back onto 35-millimetre film, with almost no loss of detail. That opened the floodgates to both enhancing footage and adding visual effects in the form of computer-generated images, such as the astonishing herds of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park; the huge crowds in Braveheart‘s battle scenes, or the launch of a Saturn V rocket in Apollo 13.

The next step: digitally synthesized actors, or “synthespians.” Such synthesized actors, indistinguishable from the real thing, may be only two to five years away.

The day may come when entire movies will be computer-generated, from actors to costumes to sets–and audiences won’t know or care.

When that happens, the illusion of motion pictures will be complete.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/1995/07/special-effects/

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