Five Awesome Pioneering Special Effects in Movies

Before the advanced stages of CG and other computer technology it was plain old special effects that were used in movies to achieve certain goals for the screen.   Before blues screen technology and other such effects, it was quite difficult to achieve things like flying sequences or body doubling.

Hell even the simple effect of having a character look like a giant took hundreds upon hundreds of man hours.  Nowadays?  Now it’s usually a command here and a button there and all of a sudden you have an entire world at your disposal.

But you can bet when these effects first hit the scene they were talked about time and time again.  Here are five worth noting…..

Terminator 2 – Liquid (Morphing and Warping)

Robert Patrick’s T-1000 character could not exist without computer effects such as morphing and warping. The T-1000 changes from one form to another via a computer process which is generally known as morphing. Some may think Terminator 2 is the first movie with such computer generated morphing, but that is simply not the case. The Fantasy movie Willow featured the world’s first morph onscreen. Termintor 2 however took morphing to a whole new level. The T-1000 does not just change from one thing in the real world to another. In some scenes the T-1000 changes from a computer generated form, “liquid metal” into a humonoid structure.

The Fading Person into Nothing – Field of Dreams

I’m not 100% sure what you call this effect but I’m sure you guys can recall the scenes where people would go into the corn field and basically fade into nothing as they would walk.  I remember having never seen this before.   Turns out these effects were done by the crew at ILM (George Lucas’s facility).   I’ve heard this is called the “Ghost Effect.”

The Twin Effect – Double Impact (Split Screen Technology)

The technology of the split screen was used well before this movie, however Double Impact was definitely the movie that saw this technology become 100 times better.  In the early 80’s we would see this and you could almost “see” the split screen.  Nowadays technology is so good that they replace faces on bodies if they want to do the twin effect (Social Network) and don’t even need to use a split screen.   I can’t believe I’m mentioning Double Impact as a pioneer in this effect.

Making Anything Look Giant – King Kong 1933

It is one of the most memorable examples of early experiments with special effects. King Kong himself was an animated model, brought to life on screen using stop-motion filming. It is a very labor-intensive method: models have to be moved a fraction of an inch, their facial expressions changed, and then shot, with 24 different shots being taken for just one second of film.  Then of course you see this going further in movies like Godzilla (not the American version) and then of course now, with computers making object look huge requires no models at all.

Flying or Levitation

Now this is pretty awesome.  I had to take an entry from Wikipedia for this one.  This shows how flying was achieved in the movie Superman from 1978.

The first test for the flying sequences involved simply catapulting a crash test dummy out of a cannon. Another technique had a remote control cast of Superman flying around. Both were discarded due to lack of movement. High quality, realistic-looking animation was tried, with speed trails added to make the effect more convincing.

As detailed in the Superman: The Movie DVD special effects documentary ‘The Magic Behind The Cape’, presented by optical effects supervisor Roy Field, in the end, three techniques were used to achieve the flying effects.

For landings and take-offs, wire flying riggings were devised and used. On location, these were suspended from tower cranes, whereas in the studio elaborate rigs were suspended from the studio ceilings. Some of the wire-flying work was quite audacious considering computer controlled rigs were not then available — the penultimate shot where Superman flies out of the prison yard for example. Although stuntmen were used, Reeve did much of the work himself, and was suspended as high as 50 ft in the air. Counterweights and pulleys were typically used to achieve flying movement rather than electronic or motorized devices.

For shots where the camera is stationary and Superman is seen flying towards or away from the camera in the frame, blue screen matte shots were used. Reeve would be photographed against a blue screen. While a special device made his cape flap to give the illusion of movement, the actor himself would remain stationary. Instead, the camera would use a mixture of long zoom-ins and zoom-outs to cause him to become larger or smaller in the frame. The blue background would then be photochemically removed and Reeve’s isolated image would then be ‘inserted’ in to a matted area of a background plate shot. The zoom-ins or zoom-outs would give the appearance of flying away or towards the contents of the background plate. The disparity in lighting and colour between the matted image and the background plate, the occasional presence of black matte lines (where the matte area and the matted image — in the case Superman — don’t exactly match-up) and the slightly unconvincing impression of movement achieved through the use of long zoom lenses is characteristic of these shots.

For shots where the camera is tracking with Superman as he flies (such as in the Superman and Lois Metropolis flying sequence) front projection was used. This involved photographing the actors suspended in front of a background image dimly projected from the front on to a special screen made by 3M that would reflect light back at many times the original intensity directly in to a combined camera/projector. The result was a very clear and intense photographic reproduction of both the actors and the background plate with far less of the image deterioration or lighting problems than occur with rear projection.