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Classic Visual Effects
Films have always relied on visual magic, on camera and laboratory tricks, never more than today. Special photographic visual effects existed for a century before the advent of computer-generated imagery, and often play a part in our fondest memories of favorite movies. There were few electronically created effects of any kind before the Eighties, and we’ll eventually get to the CGI era, but first, a guide to the classic processes and trade secrets that made the magic that most of us loved, from Metropolis through 2001, from Inside the Third Reich through Back to the Future. It’s the story of a distinctive twentieth century craft that still has relevance today.
Every history of special effects starts with George Melies, who was a fairground illusionist who brought trick photography to audiences in Paris. Other early films mostly ignored effects, except for a perennial fantasy favorite, ghosts, easy to do with a double exposure. Silent films began using glass shots: painting an elaborate setting on a sheet of glass and filming through it. Simple, but if you’ve ever seen the YouTube clip of Charlie Chaplin roller-skating in a department store, getting “dangerously” close to a “sheer drop”, you’ve seen how good it could look, even back then, if you lined it up right.
The Germans elaborated on the idea with the Schuftan process. Imagine a mirror on front of the camera, at (let’s say) a 45-degree angle. It reflects a detailed miniature set, the size of a model train layout and just off to the side of the camera, of a city in the distant future, with tiny blinking lights and a moving monorail. An expert technician carefully scrapes a rectangular hole in the mirror’s silvering. The camera will film costumed actors straight through that opening. If the exposure and the focus is balanced between the actors on set in front of the camera, and the scale model off to the side of it, you have a finished shot of night club guests seen through the window of a penthouse on the 200th floor of a 25th century building. No further work needed; it was all done in the camera. In 1926.
Note that in those days, and for most of film history, there wasn’t a hard-and-fast distinction between in-camera photographic tricks and what we’d now called mechanical, or practical special effects. Many big “effects scenes” combined the approaches for whatever worked on the screen. It’s also useful to remember that for decades, color films were rare. It was easier to do effects in black and white, where you could do simple things like use colored filters to darken or lighten the sky. To this day, Europeans call filming in daytime using blue filters to make it look like nighttime “American Night” (“La Nuit Americaine.”)
When you’re dealing with models of battleships, surfaced submarines, three-masted schooners, just about anything on water that you want to film in a studio water tank, you have a special problem: water doesn’t “miniaturize”. In business-speak, it doesn’t “scale”. You can make a perfect small model of the HMS Bounty, but you can’t make the waves in the water of the tank behave like the ones in the open sea. They’ve tried, using slow motion and mixing the water with gelatin, but it still looks fake, even when they spent the time and money to try to get it right: Tora, Tora, Tora couldn’t make it look good even for $20 million in 1969 dollars.
Alfred Hitchcock used a lot of ingenious tricks and model work in his films (one could even say he had an unfortunate penchant for falling in love with his models), as well as glass shots and rear projection. In the climax of Foreign Correspondent (1940), in the first days of WWII, a German U-boat shoots down a British airliner over the Atlantic. The scene begins with a detailed model of the flying boat-style plane. It dissolves to the inside of the cabin. The set of the cockpit had “windows” made of paper, with back projection of ocean waves racing up to them. At the moment on that film when the wounded craft hits the ocean, Hitch released 500 gallons of on-set water through the “windows”, instantly flooding the plane. It’s a scarily convincing effect even 83 years later.
Two of the most famous effects scenes of Fifties movies also involved water, lots and lots of it. The subject matter of When Worlds Collide is about as grim as it gets: the literal end of the world. But days before rogue planet Bellus slams into our globe, its wayward twin, planet Zyra, will swing by close enough to cause catastrophic worldwide destruction of every major city. Arrivederci, Roma. Big Ben tolls for thee, London. Sayonara, Tokyo. (Indignant Japanese people, accustomed to monster movies: “What? Us? Again??”) But the crowning scene was the impressively realistic tidal wave hitting Times Square—yeah, go laugh it up, you anti-NYC fuzzballs!—which startled 1951 audiences, because that model of midtown Manhattan is just large enough to allow realistic looking flooding.
Flooding, in fact, is the essence of the next special effects triumph of Hollywood in the Fifties, the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956). For many years, this was regarded the greatest movie magic of all time. The buildup uses every visual tool of golden age Hollywood, Before the big moment even happens, you see the skies darken and swirl. Nothing less than a miracle is about to take place right here on Earth, in front of your eyes. Moses raises his arms, and God causes the parting of the sea, allowing the people of Moses to escape. The memory of that awesome moment echoes a generation later in the climactic minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as his and George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The basic idea of what made that stunning image in The Ten Commandments was actually pretty simple. Imagine three pools of water side by side, each with their own drains and water pumps, a long skinny one flanked by two large squarish ones. Leave the center one empty. Now, while “overcranking” the camera (filming at high speed so it will be in slow motion when played at normal speed), flood the side pools so the water spills over the walls into the center pool until it’s full. Now run that film in reverse, and what do you get? Walls of water rushing upwards out of the middle until you see the bottom of the trench.
How do you get that shot into reverse? A tool called the optical printer. It looks like a bench lathe. It’s basically a workbench with a movie camera and a small projector facing each other. You’d run the parting of the Red Sea through the projector backwards, and film it forwards. You can make the image bigger or smaller by moving the two closer or farther away. You can use the optical printer to do all sorts of tricks.
There’s a pro wrestling term, “kayfabe.” “Staying in kayfabe” is sticking to your story, not revealing inside secrets to the audience. For a long time, Hollywood avoided disclosing how effects were brought off. As Bagehot once said about monarchy, too close an examination of the realities would be like “allowing sunlight to intrude on magic”, which would have been a vivid and dread metaphor for a studio camera crew, zealously devoted to protecting the Kodak contents of the black “Mickey Mouse ears” on top of a 35mm movie camera from the slightest touch of sunlight.
Then the most influential special effects movie ever made went into production, and after it opened, director Stanley Kubrick allowed American Cinematographer magazine to document how it was made, as the ASC said, “holding back nothing”. It seemed ironic or surprising that of all people, Kubrick, popularly seen as a super-secretive recluse, would be the film magician who finally broke kayfabe.
Why did he do that? My guesses are: professional pride in raising the level of the craft, and confidence that his shots hold up even after you know how they were done.
Thomas Carlyle wrote “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.” Kubrick had that quality in spades. He methodically listed the unique challenges of space movies, and researched previous attempts to solve them on film.
Contrary to what most people thought in 1968 and in the years since, 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t depend on inventing new processes, but on carefully studying and improving old, even forgotten ones, to the point where Stanley’s way of doing things became the basis for the next twenty-plus years of big-time, special effects-laden movies.
One requirement of a space movie (usually) is being able to depict weightlessness. Despite Kubrick’s dismissing Destination Moon, an Arthur C. Clarke favorite, he didn’t come up with anything new: he still used “flying” spacemen on wire rigs, sets that rotated so it appeared that actors were standing on the ceiling, and the easiest dodge of all, grip shoes (magnetic ones in Destination Moon; Velcro ones in 2001) to establish that there was no need for the actors to float around in that scene.
Two of 2001’s major sets, the airline terminal-like Space Station One, and the centrifuge-like living area of the Jupiter-bound Discovery, are round or are segments of curves that are (supposedly) rotating fast enough to give them a semblance of “gravity.” This was one of the eminently reasonable, but to this date, at least, missed guesses by Kubrick and Clarke. People have stayed in space for more than a year in zero-G; few proposals for long-term spaceflight have suggested anything like the elaborate carousels of 2001.
Kubrick was determined not to have cheesy-looking spacecraft that looked like toys hanging by strings. His MGM film would be a co-release of Cinerama, the IMAX of its day, and 2001 would be showing on some of the largest movie screens in the world. The space ships were going to have to stand up to the closest scrutiny. Kubrick made them among the largest scale models ever made for a film. They were incredibly detailed, using the contents of many plastic model kits to give his ships a look of engineered reality. He’d used a couple of English special effects men on airplane shots for Dr. Strangelove and brought them back, with some new reinforcements, to film the various spacecraft.
One reason that scale models in films look fake is depth of field; large objects that are distant from you look sharp in a way that small ones that are close to you don’t. One way around the problem is “stopping down the lens.” If you want to make something look sharper, squint. That’s what setting a lens at f/96 does. It makes everything supernaturally sharp. Now, a double-decker space station that’s no more than eight feet in diameter can stand up to a super-closeup on a hundred-foot screen.
Of course, that causes another problem: getting a decent exposure at f/96. There’s only so much light you can throw on the model spaceship before it melts, so you use another way. You “undercrank” the camera, so instead of filming 24 frames a second, you’re only filming (say) four frames a second. You can do that, if everything moves in extremely slow motion so when it’s speeded up six times, it looks normal.
And here’s one of the cases where 2001’s refreshed Old Tech paved the way for Star Wars and Close Encounters, Blue Thunder and Back to the Future: motion control. It means being able to automatically repeat every move of a shot exactly, so you can go over the same shot multiple times, adding things in each pass, without blurring the image. It’s what made the famous, iconic opening shot of Star Wars possible.
Motion control existed before Stanley Kubrick rediscovered it, but 2001 set the pattern to this day. Machinists familiar with NC, numerically controlled machine tools, will understand the concept: a long screw drive drags a camera along a track, while a smaller, sideways screw drive mounted under the camera moves it from side to side. Each drive, both forward and sideways, had a Veeder-Root style counter to confirm that the camera motion had reached the end of its cycle. Primitive Seventies-era automation reset the track after each take and used phone landlines to send out a page to a beeper when it was done.
This meant that the camera could make one pass of the “target”, one of the film’s main spaceships, lit to make the image as perfect as possible, then reset the undeveloped film to the first frame to film a second identical pass on the same strip of film, this time only to get the small running lights and activity at the tiny windows. Then the ship model is covered in black tape and unlit as the camera makes yet one more identical pass, this time to get just the subject’s outline so the shot can be combined with others, later.
George Lucas loved 2001 and when it came time to make his own rather substantial mark on the art of special effects movies, as he said in a Rolling Stone interview, when humanity heads for the stars, “We will go in Stanley’s ships, but hopefully with my laser sword at our side”. In the same interview he also conceded, good-naturedly, “If you put his shots and my shots on a light box, yeah, his are better.”
But Lucas was being too modest. He’d learned a lot from Kubrick, and as we all came to know, his own shots were special enough to enchant the world. Large screen film format, large, detailed models, motion-controlled camerawork, deep wraparound sound mix; the whole Space Odyssey visual and sound effects package. Plus Lucas had one crucial tool at his disposal that Kubrick didn’t: thrilling action. You don’t have time to notice the seams here and there in an action movie. You don’t care. To get those exciting shots, your viewpoint has to be more mobile, more flexible. In the final twenty years of film-based movie special effects, the craft would reach the peak of its pre-digital brilliance.
Next week, the next chapter.
Author’s note: It’s August. Late summer is usually quiet on Ricochet. No matter how hot the topics in the outside world, many people are not going to be around for a few weeks. Special effects are sort of the toy department of filmmaking, so this brief August series is our lightweight way to acknowledge film history’s flashier side.
Published in General
Maybe if we limit Hollywood to black and white, we’ll be able to see Godzilla in the next movie.
Thanks, @garymcvey, for this marvelous essay. I have loved movies my whole life, and enjoy talking and thinking about them the same way an untrained but enthusiastic “foodie” approaches culinary arts.
I’m looking forward to your next entry on the topic.
Cool post!
I recently went to a science fiction convention in Winston-Salem, and one of the sessions I couldn’t attend (wanted to) was titled Hollywood Explosions – Fake or Really Really Fake. The speaker’s take was that Hollywood explosions look like nothing in real life. Could you elaborate? I’m curious . . .
One aspect will be that most Hollywood explosions are gasoline bombs, going whoosh with orange flames and lots of black smoke. The only explosions that actually look like that are gasoline bombs. For example, high explosive goes bang! with a white flash.
This is so interesting and ingenious I can hardly stand it.
Maybe you’ll touch on this in part II, but do you think that the expansion in use and capabilities and sophistication of digital effects has in some ways limited/deterred/decreased filmmakers’ creativity? I mean, it takes a lot of imagination and planning and engineering to come up with the analog effects you described (I really need to see that Foreign Correspondent flood scene!), but now they can just get the digital design team to put in whatever they need after the fact.
Half the time they don’t even bother with costumes or sets anymore.
My love of movies, and my interest in filmmaking, both started with special effects. I can still vividly remember sitting in a movie theater in 1977, being blown away by the effects in Star Wars, and then a few months later by Close Encounters. I knew a good movie when I saw one, but I’d go see a bad one if I heard it had good effects.
Almost more than the movies themselves, I loved watching the many making-of documentaries that started to appear around this time. Whenever I became aware that there was going to be a making-of special about Star Wars or Tron or whatever, or even a five-minute segment on the news, I’d make a point of recording it so I could watch it again and again. (Somewhere I probably still have that VHS tape, though probably no way to play it.)
And in my own filmmaking hobby, I started experimenting with the very rudimentary effects that I could achieve: things like simple in-camera matte effects and animating laser beams by scratching directly on the film (quite difficult to do with tiny Super 8 frames). A couple of friends and I developed over-ambitious plans for a science-fiction parody film we wanted to make, and I was going to be the effects guy.
It’s an aspect of filmmaking where progress has also meant that we’ve lost something. It is now pretty much the baseline assumption that visual effects are going to be spectacular and photo-realistic. (That doesn’t mean they will be good, mind you: artists are still limited by their own artistry.) But one of the things I enjoyed so much back in those days, watching those making-of shows, was marveling at the clever way the effects people achieved things that seemed impossible. Some of the effects haven’t aged well, but I’m still impressed with the way they were made.
I find that practical effects hold up far better than CGI. They are as good now as when they were done. The only question is how good they were then. And in many cases, quite good.
Yeah, the depth of field challenge is real with miniatures – or Stanley Kubrick’s “bigatures.” I think the biggest filming model of the Discovery XD-1 was 50 feet long.
I’m a scale modeler and I shoot the camera tethered and use focus stacking to get good depth of field when photographing my completed projects. An aperture at f32 and long exposures doesn’t cut it for the scales I work at. The end result is better and there’s less work to do in Lightroom afterwards.
I highly recommend the “Light and Magic” ILM documentary on Disney plus. The early pre-CGI episodes are the best. The modeler bias is speaking loudly here.
Warning: anything I add to Gary’s threads is, I assume, something he left out for brevity’s sake, or saved for comments. Ain’t no way these additions are meant as anything but addendums, since his know-how (and know-what) is astonishing. That said:
One of the more interesting flooding sequences was from Deluge, a 1933 sci-fi movie. I became aware of it when I was studying old serials, because RKO bought the rights and used the scenes a couple of times, and I thought there’s no way the serial guys paid for that.
It’s impressive for 90 years ago, no?
It’s a matter of personal taste, I suppose, but personally I resist any such blanket statements. CGI is just another brush for artists to paint with, and like any other visual-effects technology, it can be used well or used poorly. The problem (in my opinion) is overreliance on CGI, and without sufficient human artistry.
And I think sometimes the backlash against CGI goes too far, with some filmmakers insisting on using practical effects even when the results aren’t great. The Mandalorian uses plenty of CGI, but they also go overboard with the puppetry sometimes; there was a scene in the most recent season, with Din Djarin in a room full of tiny alien creatures that were obviously puppets, that looked like a scene from The Muppet Show.
Fascinating and excellent as always.
And Douglas Trumbull (who worked on the effects for 2001) went on to direct Silent Running, which is not a great film but has some terrific effects. I have a vague memory of reading an interview with Trumbull decades ago in which he talked about the techniques he used to avoid depth-of-field issues with that film. Not only were the spaceship models huge, but I seem to recall that he would sometimes film a single shot of a ship in multiple passes, each with a different part of the model in focus, and then matted them together.
And then there’s Just Imagine, America’s version of Metropolis, except it’s a musical comedy about a Swedish immigrant thrown into the future. Otherwise, sure, just like Metropolis.
(FF to 2:10)
If there is anything that could save the theater going – cinema experience, it ought to be visual effects. Those who watch a movie on their phones are philistines! I love watching beautiful imagery filling my entire field of view.
There are some things that just don’t translate to even a large screen TV. I saw The Hitcher in a theater, and remember when the menacing Rutger Hauer was having a nose to nose conversation with C. Thomas Howell. I could see the sweat running down Hauer’s face, but it was not visible years later on a large screen TV.
Watching the “making of” featurettes about The Hobbit, especially the banquet scene in Bilbo’s hobbit home where Gandalf is so much larger than the dwarfs is amazing. Gandalf was on a separate green screen stage scaled to make him seem larger, and footage was seamlessly combined. AND it was done in stereo vision!
Yes!
The Judge brings down the gavel. (and thanks, Stad.) In 1986, a Jon Voight picture called Desert Bloom used gasoline to fake a nuclear explosion. The start of the explosion didn’t look good, but a few seconds in, it looked surprisingly good–the fireball and mushroom cloud were reasonably close to the real thing.
When I was a projectionist on Times Square, I frequently showed films that dispensed with costumes altogether.
And there are a lot of visual effects being used nowadays that nobody even notices, because they aren’t meant to be noticed. Something like an ordinary street scene might actually be an effects shot. With CGI, a director can remove distractions, replace background buildings to make Albuquerque look like Chicago, or even combine multiple takes in a single shot. A lot of movies and TV shows that you wouldn’t think of as having any effects actually have a lot of them.
It must be a bit of an odd profession. Most people want their work to be noticed, but for most visual effects, that’s exactly what you don’t want.
I hope you like the next part, too, Hop! The Eighties were the golden age of non-digital effects. And the way CGI entered the industry holds some interest.
Cool. That’s similar to focus stacking with a still camera. I take multiple exposures focused on different points of the subject from front to back and they are rendered into one image to get the desired effect.
I agree that Silent Running is not a great film, but the production design and effects work are pretty cool. The not-so-subtle enviro message and Joan Baez warbling during the end credits is enough to make me hurl.
Trumbull’s work in Blade Runner is fantastic as well. Some consider it to be the one of the last films to have the effects entirely done in camera. When I saw it as a teenager I could swear I could feel the heat from the fireballs coming from the screen.
Also a big tip of the hat to Syd Mead’s fantastic world building production design.
In 1930’s version of 1980, everyone has a number instead of a name, and the government assigns you a spouse.
In 1988, we hosted Rutger Hauer at a screening of an Italian film he starred in, The Legend of the Holy Drinker.
I’ve always liked that title.
You patronage is always appreciated, Clavius! Like BXO and @DrewofWisconsin, among others around here, you’ve actually threaded a movie camera. We are a slowly vanishing breed.
Generally, I believe in any filmmaking tool that does the job, and there are some jobs that CGI tackles best. But any tool that can make things possible can also make them easier, and the filmmakers lazier.
Here’s that scene from Foreign Correspondent (and the last 11 minutes of the movie) Charlotte.
Trumbull’s VFX facility was in an industrial area of Venice, CA. I was there a few times to see Showscan, his IMAX-like screen system. The Blade Runner city display was photographed with the help of oil foggers, stock agricultural ones, that allowed the back of the display to look distant. Those models are now at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.
You’d think Syd Mead would drive a very futuristic looking car, wouldn’t you? But he was a Detroit fan; he ordered plush Lincolns straight from the factory, COPO. (Central Office Production Order). He paid Ford directly, and chose to have it delivered to whatever Lincoln dealership was nearest where he was working; Burbank if he was at Warners or Universal, Culver City if he was at MGM (later Columbia/Sony). I saw his car; beautiful deep metallic green, with green leather seats. It didn’t look anything like a flying Spinner from Blade Runner, but it was a nice looking ride.
I saw 2001 premiere at the Uptown in DC back in 1968. It was an amazing experience.