Special effects, a short history lesson
Special effects are an ensemble of techniques which allow the simulation on-screen of an action or a situation in any of three cases:
- If the scene is too costly to film
- If the scene is too dangerous to produce
- If the scene is impossible to film
For example: gathering 60,000 characters for a battle scene, rebuilding the Coliseum or showing what happens between an actor and a fawn. The use of special effects produces the same result at less cost and with no risk. Effects can create images which are impossible to obtain directly: airplane crash, the destruction of a monument, monsters and other creatures, spaceships, paranormal phenomena, etc.
The first special effect in the history of cinema was already an “impossible” scene. In 1895, in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, we see the queen walking to the block and being beheaded. The producer stops the camera to replace the actress with a dummy for the decapitation. Coming from the theatre and illusions, the magic of special effects entered the world of cinema.
Film-makers quickly realised that it was useless to build costly scenes showing whole buildings when most scenes only showed the bottom part. By creating the rest of the background with a painting, the team got the effect of a large space at low-cost. The art is nothing more than matte painting. It gave rise to compelling images such as the mythical Xanadu from Citizen Kane, the house on the cliff of North by Northwest, the immense hangar at the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark or the futuristic scenes from the first Star Wars trilogy.
When painting alone cannot produce a realistic result, film-makers use another common special effect technique: models. From his Voyage dans la lune (1902), the pioneer of special effects, George Méliès, used a miniature to show the earth rocket poking into “the eye” of the moon, thus creating an image which became world renowned.
The arrival of talking films (1927) marked an initial explosion of special effects. From then on, film-makers had to record sound from specific directions, and as the majority of films were made outdoors, this caused enormous problems of ground noise. The answer: film as much as possible in the studio and use special effects to simulate outdoors action. This would be the golden age of transparency, an infamous technique which consisted of projecting the images of an outside scene behind actors filmed in a studio. Numerous car, boat, plane scenes, etc. were filmed in this way.
The other great age for “classic” special effects was the Second World War. To keep up moral, Hollywood produced dozens of war films showing the exploits of intrepid pilots or heroic sailors. These exploits were produced with the help of miniatures which were often very elaborate. The techniques were further perfected in the golden age of science fiction in the 1950s. Films such as War of the Worlds (1953), Forbidden Planet (1956) or The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) stretched the limits of the genre. Until, 2001 A Space Odyssey, they constituted the absolute reference for special effects. In 1968, the release of Stanley Kubrick’s space epic was like a bomb going off. Even today, after the advent of digital film, the special effects of this film form a perfect illusion. A feat due to Kubrick’s perfectionism.
The special effects industry carried on without any real innovation until the 1960s, a pivotal period when the traditional system collapsed. In effect, producers of the new wave, filming outdoors no longer needed special effects to reproduce reality.
When he produced the first Star Wars in 1976, George Lucas was faced with a technological desert. He had to start from scratch in the art of special effects and with his team, produce their own innovations. His studio produced techniques which revolutionised the discipline. They are still in use today.
During the 1990s, computers became common and gradually began to create images. In 1993, Jurassic Park showed the whole world that computers can do just as well as cameras. Since then, the applications for digital processes in the cinema have multiplied: creating hyper-realistic scenery and backgrounds, animating virtual characters, removing undesirable elements, and above all, the possibility of changing an image post-production. Today, more than ever, special effects contribute to the magic of cinema.
The complete version of this text is available on the French version of this website.