The History of Movie Special Effects

Movie Special Effects as such had very humble beginnings. Technicians and cameraman, while tinkering with their equipment, sometimes unexpectedly came up with some new effects. For instance, film editing was supposedly invented by sheer accident. It is said that a Frenchmen named George Milies, invented (or rather discovered) editing while filming footage for his documentary about the Place de l‘Opera in Paris in 1896, using a hand-cranked camera.

While he was busily cranking away at the passing traffic, his camera suddenly jammed, forcing him to pause for a couple of minutes to free the jammed film. After setting the film right, he started to crank again without realizing what the resulting film would look like.

When Milies developed and screened the film, he was stunned to see an amazing transformation take place in the street scene at the point where his film jammed. Men suddenly became women, a coach suddenly turned into a tram car. By complete accident, the basic principle of editing was discovered. The era of Movie Special Effects had begun.

Melies immediately began to exploit the commercial potential of his discovery by shooting hundreds of short “trick films”. Melies would start cranking the camera as a girl took her seat before the camera. Then he would momentarily stop cranking, replace the girl with a skeleton and then start cranking again. When screened, the audiences were fooled into thinking that a young girl had suddenly turned into a lifeless skeleton. Milies obviously must have used his technique until the audiences got used to it and the effect lost its novelty.

At the turn of the century, cartoon animation started gaining prominence. Stuart Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” in 1906 was one of the earliest films to use drawings rather than live actors. Then came newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay with his own cartoon creation “Little Nemo in Slumberland” in 1911. He was a successful cartoon animator, responsible for instant hits such as “Gertie the Dinosaur” and “The Sinking of the Lusitania”.

During these times, each frame of the cartoon was drawn from scratch, including the foreground and the background, which made things expensive and time-consuming. It was Earl Hurd in 1914, who came up with the ingenious idea that stationary portions of the picture can be painted on a sheet of paper, while the moving images painted on a separate transparent celluloid sheet and placed over the background. This way, the animators would have to paint only the movement of the cartoon characters while a single background painting can be placed under every foreground celluloid sheet. This gave rise to the name Cel Animation, cel being short for “Celluliod”. With the invention of Cel Animation, cartoon animation entered main-stream cinema and has captivated the hearts of movie goers generation after generation.

Some animators, instead of using drawings, used clay models or puppets and photographed them in progressive stages of movement to create their cartoon films. So cel animation and model animation evolved almost simultaneously. This technique was pioneered by Willis O’Brien, who in 1914 made a 1-minute short film about a caveman and a dinosaur. The models usually had a jointed wooden or metal skeleton to offer strength, stability and flexibility to the model. Clay was then molded over the skeleton and finally a fine skin of canvas was stretched over it. With this technique, color and texture could be applied to the models, which made them look very realistic. And since the models were 3-dimensional in nature, the play of light and shadows over the models gave a very dramatic effect to these films, taking them to a very high level of realism.

O’Brien collaborated with Herbert Dawley in 1918 and filmed "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain". This five-minute short film is generally regarded as the first dramatic stop-motion movie. The film was so successful that O’Brien was hired to work on a feature-length adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s "The Lost World" in 1925. This movie was a great breakthrough in the history of movie special effects because it showed dinosaurs and live actors together within the same frame, almost interacting with each other. O’Brien went on to make "King Kong" in 1933, which was another major hit. O’Brien’s other hits include "Mighty Joe Young" in 1949 and "The Black Scorpion" in 1957.

In the early 1930s, Walt Disney started refining the current cel animation techniques and finally came up with his first full-length animated movie, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs in 1936. Disney’s cartoons were a smash hit wherever they were screened. Their techniques were so advanced for their time that their animation skills were even employed in a live action film, the science fiction epic "Forbidden Planet" in 1956 by MGM Studios.

The year 1956 also witnessed the making of one of the best special effects movies of all time, The Ten Commandments. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and starring all-time greats like Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, it features the most spectacular special effects scene ever created by Hollywood; the parting of the Red Sea by Moses, the journey of his people through the sea and the destruction of the pursuing Egyptian army in the Red Sea. In my opinion, this movie is a must for every special effects enthusiast. Its amazing to see that they could create such dramatic and realistic effects back then in the 1950s when color had just entered film and no one had any idea what a computer was.

During the 1950s and 60s, special effects made rapid strides in the stunts arena. Spectacular and seemingly dangerous stunts were made possible by the use of sophisticated props and specialized equipment. Movies like "Ben Hur", "El Cid" and "The Greatest Show on Earth" were the blockbusters of this period, all of them starring Charlton Heston. “Yakima” Canutt was the stunt co-ordinator for Ben Hur and El Cid and was largely responsibly for the success of the amazing chariot race and other outrageous stunts in both films. He employed both his sons “Tap” and Joe Canutt for the major stunts in the films. But sadly, stunt men were not duly recognized for their work back in those days. Even though Ben Hur went on to win 11 Oscars at the 1959 Academy Awards, the Canutts were never awarded a prize.

Ray Harryhausen was another famous model animator and had worked with O’Brien on Mighty Joe Young. He also worked on a lot of Voyage of Sinbad movies. In 1981, his major blockbuster hit was "Clash of the Titans". All these pioneers were relying on the technique of stop-motion animation where the action was frozen and captured one frame at a time. But since the action was frozen at each step, the resulting film looked a little jerky. This was the biggest drawback of stop-motion animation. This hurdle was overcome by Phil Tippet with his technique called go-motion animation. The go-motion technique introduced a slight motion-blur in each frame by slightly moving the models at the precise time of film exposure. The joints of the models were moved using servo motors. This motion-blur smoothened the action and the resulting film looked extremely realistic.

The late 1970s witnessed the start of a new era in movie special effects. George Lucas founded a new special effects studio called Industrial Light & Magic to enable him to complete his 6-part epic science fiction saga, The Star Wars. He started filming Episode IV - A New Hope which was released in 1977. The largest contribution to the success of the effects in the movie came from the extensive use of motion control cameras. The use of computers to control the precise movement of the cameras enabled the effects technicians to film spectacular battle sequences involving huge spaceships.

The spaceships were actually highly-detailed miniature models, except when actor had to sit inside them in which case life-sized mock ups were used. The fly-bys and dog-fights were the result of motion-control cinematography coupled with compositing layers and layers of footage of explosions, cel animated laser beams, star fields and other spaceships. John Dykstra was the inventor of this technique and was awarded an Oscar for developing this system, and a separate Oscar for the range of effects work on Star Wars.

This system was a vast improvement over earlier techniques used in spaceship films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the camera was stationary and showed spaceships flying across the frame. This gave a very static feel to the shots. In Star Wars on the other hand, the camera went right into the action and participated in the dogfights from one of the spaceships. This was very similar to World War footage shot from one of the fighter planes and this took the film to new heights of realism. Star Wars set very high standards for other effects films to follow, including its own sequels and prequels.

The rest of this article will be featured in Part II.