The History of Special Effects

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The History of Special Effects
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• Of all the areas of film production, special
  effects and CGI have see the most dramatic
  developments in technology over the last 25 to 30
  years.

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• Special effects were always the province of
  science fiction or monster movies.
• Today CGI, Time-slice and the vast range of
  digital effects open to the filmmaker has meant
  that special effects appear in a huge range of
  films in all genres.

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• The French filmmaker Georges Méliès, a
  professional magician, is often credited as being
  the father of special effects in cinema.
• He had become interested in the illusionist
  possibilities of the Cinématographe in the mid
  1890s.

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• When the Lumières refused to sell him one, he
  bought an Animatograph projector from in 1896 and
  reversed its mechanical principles to design his
  own camera.
• He was one of the first film-makers to recognise
  the power of film to convey limitless fantasy
  worlds by exploring all the capabilities of the
  technical apparatus of film-making.

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• The following year he organized the Star Film
  company and constructed a small glass-enclosed
  studio on the grounds of his house.
• He produced, directed, photographed, and acted in
  more than 500 films between 1896 and 1913.

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• Initially,Méliès used stop-motion photography to
  make one-shot "trick" films in which objects
  disappeared and reappeared, or transformed
  themselves into other objects entirely.

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• By 1902 he had produced the influential 30-scene
  narrative Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the
  Moon).
• Adapted from a novel by Jules Verne, it was
  nearly one reel in length (about 825 feet, or 14
  minutes).

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• The first film to achieve international
  distribution (mainly through piracy), Le Voyage
  dans la lune was an enormous popular success.
• It helped to make Star Film one of the world's
  largest producers (an American branch was opened
  in 1903) and to establish the fiction film as the
  cinema's mainstream product.

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• Melies used the theatrical tradition of painted
  backgrounds in his films.
• Many examples of this technique can be seen in
  early Hollywood films where actors are filmed
  directly in front of a painted landscape to
  create a sense of a location.

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• This then developed in the technique of matte
  painting.
• A form of image compositing whereby a physical
  set is composited with a 2-D painting, enhancing
  the set or adding to the space what's not
  physically there.

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• The painting is painted by a matte artist onto
  glass and then the glass is either placed in
  front of the camera lined up to the set and
  filmed, or through optical printing.

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• Famous examples of matte paintings are the final
  scene from Planet of the Apes, where Charlton
  Heston is shot in front of the fallen statue of
  liberty.
• Or perhaps best of all the final scene from
  Hitchcocks The Birds.

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• Matte painting was often then combined with other
  special effects such as stop motion to produce
  some dramatic pre-digital cinema.

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• The technique of stop motion that Melies
  developed, was to be used for the next 90 years
  as the basis of creating fantasy and monster film
  effects.

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• Defined as the way in which a static model is
  moved every few frames of film which when played
  back at normal speed creates the illusion of
  movement.
• It is however incredibly time consuming and
  laborious.

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• The Lost World (1925), for instance, needed 960
  separate movements of one or more creatures - a
  ten hour working day that, at best, might result
  in 13 seconds of moving dinosaur.

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• Classic (?) films like Valley of the Gwangi
  became huge hits and put the monster movie at the
  forefront of popular cinema.

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• This film was one of the many created by the
  great Ray Harryhausen, the man responsible for
  such classics as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,
  Jason and the Argonauts and many others.

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• Despite success in early movies such as King
  Kong, the technique had its weaknesses. The
  miniature sets were expensive to construct and it
  was very difficult to combine live action in the
  same frame as the stop-motion creatures.

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• While working on a low-budget film called The
  Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Harryhausen came up
  with a technique he later named "dynamation" that
  eased both of these problems.

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• The technique used a split screen, with rear
  projection. Split screen had been around as a
  special effect from almost the beginning of film
  itself. One early clip from France shows a
  bicycle rider sailing over the city of Paris.

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• The photographer had shot it by covering the
  bottom half of the lens of the camera with black
  tape, then filming the bicycle rider through the
  top half. The mask was then reversed and the film
  rewound inside the camera.

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• The film was exposed again, this time
  photographing the city of Paris through the
  bottom half of the lens.
• When the film was developed, the rider appeared
  to be sailing across the Paris skyline.
  Harryhausen's dynamation used the same basic idea
  with some additional twists.

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• The first step in dynamation was to film the
  background image. For this example let's say the
  scene is to show a dinosaur in a big city
  emerging from behind a building into an
  intersection.

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• The camera would be set on a real street and the
  actors would be filmed running towards the
  camera.
• The camera is locked so it does not change
  position at all while filming the background. The
  background film is then developed and loaded into
  a projector back at the studio.

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• The projector then projects the first frame onto
  a back projection screen. The back projection
  screen is a thin piece of plastic stretched
  tightly across a frame.
• Unlike a regular screen, the image appears on the
  front when illuminated by a projector from
  behind.

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• A motion picture camera is loaded with film and
  locked into position in front of the screen so it
  can rephotograph the film clip as it is projected
  onto the screen.
• This camera will be used to capture the new
  action.

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• A piece of glass is then put between the camera
  and the screen.
• The glass is painted with black paint so that
  portions of the image on the screen that are to
  be in front of the dinosaur (the foreground) are
  blacked out when seen by the camera

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• In between the glass and the screen a table is
  set up on which the miniature dinosaur is placed.
  
• The dinosaur is carefully positioned so that it
  is matched for size and position with the image
  on the screen as seen through the camera.

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• The film in the projector is advanced one frame
  at a time. With each frame the dinosaur is moved
  to simulate walking out from behind the building.
  
• After the position of the dinosaur is correct,
  the camera captures one frame.

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• After the entire scene has been filmed both the
  projector and the camera are rewound back to the
  beginning. The glass is removed and another sheet
  of glass is inserted.

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• The new glass is the reverse of the first one,
  though, as the portions of the glass that were
  clear now have been painted over and the sections
  that were blacked out are now clear.

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• The model dinosaur and the table are cleared
  away. The film is re-shot again, this time
  exposing the foreground part of the image which
  had before been blacked out.

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• When the film from the camera is developed and
  viewed it will show the dinosaur apparently
  moving out from behind the building.

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• Because the model was animated directly in front
  of the screen that was showing the human actors,
  it was possible for Harryhausen to synchronize
  the movements of the models with the
  previously-filmed action.

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• This allowed sword fights between humans and
  skeletons, where each could parry and thrust
  convincingly.

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• Harryhausens films had and continue to have a
  major impact of special effects artists today.
  The makers of Jurassic Park were so impressed by
  the dinosaur fight sequence in Valley of the
  Gwangi that it was studied in order to
  authenticate the dinosaurs' movements on that
  movie.

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• Many important SPFX creators were inspired and
  influenced by Ray Harryhausen.
• One of his proteges, Phil Tippett, joined George
  Lucas newly formed Industrial Light and Magic
  where he animated the alien chess pieces in Star
  Wars

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• Further involvement in the Star Wars series came
  when he was asked to animate the Walkers, huge,
  four-legged war machines from The Empire Strikes
  Back (1980).

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• The creation of the Walkers marked a new phase in
  FX animation. This was ILM's 'motion control'
  process.
• Pioneered on Star Wars and also known as
  'go-motion', the process utilises puppets
  (attached to rods) which are, in turn, connected
  to computer-controlled stepper motors.

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• In the case of virtual elements, the movement of
  the camera must be reproduced in the graphics
  environment to achieve the correct shift of
  perspective.

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• Motion control is now providing the solution to
  these difficulties.   The positional accuracy
  offered by todays systems enables any camera
  movement to be defined as a series of
  co-ordinates, which in turn can be used in a
  virtual environment to animate any virtual
  object.

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• In the long run, this means that movements can be
  stored in the computer's memory and, with
  modifications, repeated each time an effect is
  required.

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• The best Motion Control rigs are "frame
  accurate". 
• This means that on multiple passes, at any given
  film frame on a camera pass, the camera will be
  in an identical position to that of previous
  passes, regardless of the physical speed of
  movement of the camera. 

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• This means that matching up passes in the
  post-production phase to produce the composite
  image becomes very fast and painless, and
  consequently cheaper.

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• Motion control systems are often used in
  conjunction with blue-screen or chroma-key
  techniques.
• Since it was first used in films in the 1950's
  chroma key is a production process that has
  remained largely unchanged.

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• Creating a blue screen composite image starts
  with a subject that has been photographed in
  front of an evenly lit, bright, pure blue
  background.

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• The compositing process, whether photographic or
  electronic, replaces all the blue in the picture
  with another image, known as the background
  plate.

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• Blue screen composites can be made optically for
  still photos or movies, electronically for live
  video, and digitally to computer images.
• Until very recently all blue screen compositing
  for films was done optically and all television
  composites were done using analog real time
  circuits.

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• Blue or green screen techniques have become
  widespread in cinema over the last 40 to 50 years
  and although the process is basically the same,
  the accuracy and quality of the effect has
  increased dramatically.

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• Most recently, blue screen has been used with
  another recent development in special effects
  known as time-slice, or as in the case of the
  creators of The Matrix Bullet Time.

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• Still cameras along a spline results in a much
  smoother motion than if you place them
  individually.
• Note the tighter camera placement at the
  beginning and end of the spline this speeds up
  and slows down the end motion

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• Ideally two cinematic camera (one at the start
  and another at the end) should also be used, but
  depending on the requirements, this isn't all
  that necessary.
• In Keanu's 'rooftop bullet dodge' sequence, 120
  cameras and two motion picture cameras were used.

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