Video tour through the history of SFX
This short video is a "5th-grader-friendly" tour through the history of special effects from 1900 to 2008:
1900 - The Enchanted DrawingVisual Effects: 100 Years of Inspiration (via Kottke)
1903 - The Great Train Robbery
1923 - The Ten Commandments (Silent)
1927 - Sunrise
1933 - King Kong
1939 - The Wizard of Oz
1940 - The Thief of Bagdad
1954 - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1956 - Forbidden Planet
1963 - Jason and the Argonauts
1964 - Mary Poppins
1977 - Star Wars
1982 - Tron
1985 - Back to the Future
1988 - Who Framed Roger Rabbit
1989 - The Abyss
1991 - Terminator 2: Judgement Day
1992 - The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
1993 - Jurassic Park
2004 - Spider-Man 2
2005 - King Kong
2006 - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
2007 - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
2007 - The Golden Compass
2008 - The Spiderwick Chronicles
2008 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
the latest
latest episodes
I would have thought Toy Story would have been a milestone worth including. I seem to remember being awed in theatres by a movie entirely created on computers. Toy Story came out in 1995 which would help account for the 11 year gap between Jurassic Park and Spiderman. Cool visualization though.
Surely the Matrix should also be on this list?....the first to do bullet time.
Surely the original Nosferatu would make the list? Not much to us today, but as the Great train Robbery is on there for a camera that can pan and swivel, I'd think an evaporating Vampire would be right up there.
Bullet time was a photography trick with stiching,
Toystory was not the first all CG render, Tron was.
In all a nice video, music by blueman group
#4
-movies are a photography trick (move photos real fast)
-Except, you know, the people in neon suits, on movie sets, who took up a lot of the screen time
Where is Mellies' landing on the moon? Where is the Exorsist's possesion? Where are the crappy ufos of Plan 9 Form Outer Space (it's a milestone in it's own way after all)?
There are lots of important things missing here.
I really missed something out of The Lord of the Rings too. Weta rescued the use of miniatures (or biggatures, as they called them) in an age of almost cg-only.
Ah... By the way. I don't think Toy Story counts in as SFX. Special Effecs are "effects", the are not supposed to make out an entire movie. Even Tron had people acting and stuff added later. Toy Story is animation, not SFX (my point of view).
Fail, fail, FAIL!!! for including the Death Star explosion from the computer-edited re-release of Star Wars, instead of the one from the original film. The sequential nature of the video is now invalid.
Also, no love for Gollum? No stained-glass window from Young Sherlock Holmes? So many omissions...
Also, I'd put Dragonslayer on there, too, for the first use of "Go-Motion", and I agree bullet time in The Matrix is worthy of a nod, too.
Not sure what was so special about Back To The Future, though. Good movie, but how were the FX groundbreaking?
The omissions are semi-forgiveable, but the Death Star explosion nearly had me throw my monitor out of the window in a fit of rage at just how wrong that was. This isn't inspirational or educational, this is a blatant attempt to cause mayhem by enraging geeks the world over!
(Ab, V'z abg orvat frevbhf, fvyyl!)
Love the effects in Sunrise..
I was surprised that Jurassic Park has aged so badly (both visual effects and the film entire). I found The Lost World much more fun to watch.
Came here to say what #5 said.
I think we peaked with Davey Jones/Bill Nighy. wasn't all that impressed with the CGI in the last three films on the list. Also, no Gollum?
Still, a very nice effort.
As impressive as some of today's CG FX can be, I still can't help but be overwhelmed by just how good practical effects were back in Hollywood's golden days. Watch the tornado scene from The Wizard of Oz on a big screen and then remember it's all being done on a sound stage. It's pretty amazing, really.
Id say its pretty far from a comprenensive list, with glaring omissions like 2001 and Young sherlock homes (Awful movie, cg milestone).
Regarding some comments:
I beleave Toy story was the first 100% CG feature film. Tron used a combination of CG, optical effects and traditional animation - If memeory serves theres only a few minutes of pure CG in Tron.
I often get annoyed about peoples crediting time freezing 'Flow-mo' to the matrix. Sure they patented the word 'bullet time', but the technique was used before in music videos, Advertisments, films like Blade and even the awful 'Batman and robin'
Either way im greatful to this video for introducing me to 'Sunrise', that really is spectacular.
Obviously I don't know about everyone else but, personally, one thing that stood out for me watching this was the way that special effects don't seem to have the same "effect" on me any more. When I saw the clips from The Ten Commandments and Sunrise I was genuinely impressed and wondering how they would do this and that back when the films were made (or even today without cgi) but by the time we reached The Abyss I felt the rest of the films (ignoring the misuse of Star Wars SE) were far too obvious. Nothing was particularly impressive by that point. Innovations may have been made (and I like many of those films and their effects) but the sense of wonder is lessened when you don't even bother trying to work out what was done. This isn't to say that I'm not impressed by many effects I see today. That would be a lie. It's more a case of seeing them in this "historical" context that makes you think about them. I guess that the closer they get to their purpose (i.e. creating a realistic effect impossible under "normal" circumstances), the more aware you become of the fact that there are certain scenes that are completely unnecessary and just there to show they can do it (Dead Man's Chest being the best example I've seen from these films of a complete lack of necessity, adding nothing to the film and just an excuse to have a series of particularly elaborate set-pieces).
Obnoxious soundtrack music makes it almost unbearable to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOL8-qIYemg
Forbidden Planet was the best! The effects when the "Monster from the Id" is trying to break through the force field is utterly incredible, and the electronic music soundtrack...wonderful!
I thought this picture was great in black-and-white, but seeing it in color...wow.
This movie is dated in some minor respects. but I think would still interest *any* sci-fi fan these days.
That they could make this movie in 1956 is incredible. LONG before any CGI.
@takuan, thanks, great video.
I wonder ... Why was Willow, the first movie to use morphing tech, left off the list? It looks so cheezy now but it was major awesome at the time of release.
@JU2TIN, word.
(Dang why I hafta sign in every five minutes on this site!)
What #5 said and I think Metropolis should have gotten a nod.
Yeah! Dragonslayer, the Adventures of Young Sherlock Holmes, and anything early by Ladislas Starevich.
My immediate, curmudgeonly reaction is that it's poorly edited. Some of the clips are captioned; others are not.
Just to add a couple for whatever reason...
1946 La Belle et la Bête. Jean Cocteau - People still wonder how he achieved some of the SFX in this one. Keep in mind this is the movie that Disney ripped off with their "take" Beauty and the Beast.
1923 - 1928 everything by Buster Keaton - the "original hangman". Disney ripped him off too.
Come to think of it, just about every movie Disney ever made was ripped off except maybe Cat from Outer Space.
it's always an opinion thing about the omissions. my beef was the inclusion of back to the future. that scene where michael j fox and christopher lloyd turn around with the fire under their legs is downright pitiful. with everything that went into that film, that effect is a travesty of film.
#4, Tron did have live actors in it. And even some full live-action scenes. Every bit of every frame of Toy Story is CGI.
And I'm with #5: As a fellow SFX enthusiast (Anyone else here tape dozens of episodes of "Movie Magic" in the 1990s? Wasn't that an awesome show?), I feel that the lack of the stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes is a major omission.
Total Recall should probably be up there somewhere too. I don't think it had any "first"s but overall the effects were amazing.
And The Great Mouse Detective. First time 3D CGI was mixed with traditional hand-drawn animation.
As someone who has studied fluid mechanics and who cringes at how badly free-surface interactions (e.g. water splashes) look when done in CGI for most movies (even as recently as Finding Nemo and Castaway), I feel that the list should include the few movies who do it right, such as Shrek and Poseidon. Shrek should be on there not just for the amazing water/lava splashes and other great physics modeling, but also because it was the first movie with CG people who didn't look weird. (They're just on the left (cartoony) rim of the uncanny valley, IMO).
Here's what some Googling turned up:
http://www.filmsite.org/visualeffects12.html
SFX geeks will probably prefer this to the video, given how complete it is. Twenty pages with lots of screenshots and explanations.
(And it reminded me that Total Recall did have a "first" in its use of motion capture to animate the CGI skeletons).
The Last Starfighter?
That was a big leap.
Shrek?
Wasn't it the first animated movie where the characters had actual skeletons that helped determine their range of motion?
Too many more to list... and I agree with the Nosferatu suggestion earlier in the thread.
Shrek?
Wasn't it the first animated movie where the characters had actual skeletons that helped determine their range of motion?
Not even close. Dreamworks animation has been playing catch-up to Pixar from the get-go.
@airshowfan:
nice find.
#4 posted by Anonymous:
Toystory was not the first all CG render, Tron was.
Tron was not an all-CG render. It had CG sequences. But it was mostly traditional compositing, mattework, rotoscoping. Toystory was the first all-CGI feature-length film.
See wiki:
@TRON-NOT-CGI-SUBTHREAD
If it had been an all CGI movie, they'd probably still rendering the final cut, if they were still using the original hardware.
Agreed entirely about Young Sherlock Holmes - it's a large milestone in Special Effects history. The first computer generated character is important, far more than others on that list - everything from 2004 onwards seem a little superfluous. Just an excuse to have clips of popular films.
Am I the only one who misread the hed as "History of S-E-X?"
And yet when I pressed the play button, it all made perfect sense from that perspective.
Nice, but one glaring omission kills it: The big gap between Mary Popins and Star Wars where 2001 should be. The effects at the time for 2001 were light years beyond anything that had been done previously. Many of those who worked on 2001 later worked on Star Wars, which in many was an equal to 2001 in effects, but did not exceed it. (I’m talking about the original 1977 release and not the CGI violation Lucas did later.) Compare the effects in 2001 to any of the George Pal scifi films (Conquest of Space comes to mind) and you can understand the massive technical leap that 2001 made. It’s kind of like the huge leap in effects made with computer graphics in films like Abyss, T2, and Jurassic Park. (And no, Tron and Last Starfighter are too crude to count.)
Back to the Future was a great movie, but the special effects were nothing to write home about, even in 1985...
until you consider that they went BACK IN TIME!
Otherwise, I'm with a lot of you above on omissions. Voyage to the Moon, Metropolis, 2001, Young Sherlock Holmes, Willow, Matrix. They should have included Gollum and not bothered with anything else since.
And count me in with those who find pre-CG effects much more impressive. I remember as a kid always trying to think, "How'd they do that?" But now the answer's always the same. "Gee, they did a nice job with the computer graphics there."
Any short retrospective is going to, by necessity, miss a ton of good stuff. The Blade Runner cityscape, the Hoth battle from Empire, Genesis Planet from Star Trek II, Last Starfighter, Flight of the Navigator, DI process from Pleasantville. Muybridge is missing from the beginning. Luxo Jr instead of Toy Story. That said, it's a fun retrospective. Props to whoever put it together.