In the blockbuster movie Titanic, producers did not rebuild the ship. Apollo 13 did not film actual space travel. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are not real.
Special effects create the illusion of reality in movies to realize scenes that cannot be achieved by normal means. Special effects are also used when creating the effect by normal means is prohibitively expensive. For example, it would be extremely expensive to construct a 16th century castle or to sink a 20th century ocean liner, but these can be simulated with special effects.
With the advent of computer graphics imaging, special effects are also used to enhance previously filmed elements by adding, removing or enhancing objects within the scene. The computer-generated images are merged into actual shots taken by cameras. In the movie The Matrix, developers used a combination of state-of-the-art techniques to create the scene where Neo dodges bullets.
Many believe that George Lucas, with his groundbreaking epic, Star Wars, marked the beginning of a new era of special effects. Before Star Wars, the only visual trickery seen in movies involved the actor driving a car while the surroundings flew by behind him. Star Wars changed all that. Using innovative new techniques, Lucas created a whole new world with spaceships, robots and aliens from other planets.
“George Lucas deserves a lot of credit for what he achieved with Star Wars. He introduced the use computer graphics to generate special effects in movies,” said Douglas Reeves, a professor of computer science-engineering. “When you see spaceships or a city in a cloud on a different planet with bizarre creatures walking about like normal human beings, it makes the story so much more believable. Star Wars would never have made it big, had it not been for the special effects.”
Indeed, the success of Star Wars comes down to the visual wizardry that went in to making it.
“George Lucas not only had the vision and imagination to come up with characters and a storyline, but he actually developed ways to present them,” Reeves said.
The resounding success of Star Wars encouraged movie directors to think outside of the box, and George Lucas gave them ways of realizing their imaginations.
These dreams of special effects grandeur sometimes led to flops that failed in their attempt to sell simply on visuals. Over the years, only a few movies made lasting impressions.
Patrick Shanty, a grad student, has vivid memories of how as a kid he marveled and was in total awe of the alien in ET. “At the time, I thought it was all real — the alien, the bicycle trip where they fly into the sky. I used to wonder why I can’t get my bicycle to fly,” he said.
The movie Forrest Gump shows Tom Hanks shaking hands with former president John F. Kennedy. The blue screen technique created this visual trick.
“The blue screen is the most commonly used method to produce special effects in movies,” Reeves said. “The effect is easy to create and is very convincing.”
The blue screen technique involves the use of superimposing the foreground or the actor on a background which is usually the scene or environment.
“Let us say for example, that the director wants to shoot the heroine hanging from a rope off a cliff. The heroine will be made to hang from a rope two feet from the ground, in front of a blue screen and a video will be shot,” Reeves explained.
“Next, the actual cliff will be shot as the second video. You can then merge the two videos and simply tell the computer to ignore the color blue from the background of the video taken with the heroine. The tricky part is that you can’t have the heroine wear blue colored clothes. Because then, they would appear as holes in the final shot. Also, as the entire shot is a sequence of frames, the merging of the two videos must be done for every frame. This is a lot of work if done by hand, but that’s where computers help.”
Many different visual tricks can be achieved using this simple technique. Star Wars employed this to show large spaceships traveling through space.
Movies like Star Wars and Jaws stunned moviegoers. But as the audience got accustomed to the one kind of visual trickery, moviemakers needed to produce something bigger and better.
With The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers introduced a string of new visual effects, the most notable being the one where the camera pans 360 degrees around the actor in freeze frame. To create this visual effect, they used a revolutionary new setup.
These scenes required dynamic camera movement around slow-motion events that approached 12,000 frames per second. The Wachowskis called it “bullet-time photography.” They placed a series of sophisticated still cameras along a mapped path, each of which shot a single still photo and created a strip of still images. The completed series of images could be passed before the viewers’ eyes as quickly or slowly as the filmmakers wanted without losing clarity.
The Academy Awards recognizes how much work goes into making special effects for movies with an Oscar, and many of these movies attracted following because of their wonderful special effects.
One Lord of the Rings fan, grad student Nilesh Kulkarni said, “I am still amazed by how they created the fully animated character Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. His expressions are so real. Unbelievable!”
