Visual Effects 2: A Golden Age

With 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick showed the way to a new level in film special effects. His techniques opened a door. Nearly a decade later, George Lucas walked through that door. George followed the Stanley playbook in some very important respects, among them: he didn’t farm out his special effects to specialized outside companies. He created his own ad-hoc team of effects experts, but unlike Kubrick, Lucas kept the gang together after the film, incorporating it and giving it a name: ILM, Industrial Light and Magic. He hung out a shingle and offered its services to the rest of the industry.

With the unprecedented success of Star Wars as its best salesman, and all of Hollywood clamoring to get in on the special effects bandwagon, ILM booked tens of millions of dollars of contracts. After decades when visual effects were usually an afterthought and its artists were modestly paid backroom technicians, suddenly these arcane skills were in limitless demand. Truly, a “golden age” in more ways than one.

One of the first to cash in was tech wizard John Dykstra, creator of the Star Wars cobbled-together Dykstraflex mobile camera system. (“Dykstraflex” was more of a nickname than an actual brand name.) An evolutionary improvement of the motion control system that made Kubrick’s gigantic scale models look so good, the Dykstraflex could execute precision programmed camera moves in multi-axis turns. 2001 could give you stately, straight line travel; Lucas wanted spaceships with “aero”-batic agility, and kept his crew at it until he got it. It wasn’t easy, much to his impatience.

Ironically, George’s experience would parallel Stanley’s in a rueful sense: after achieving great success, they fell out with a prominent member of their special effects team, over issues of public credit and of money. After 2001, Douglas Trumbull went off in a decades-long huff. After Star Wars, John Dykstra was so irritated with George Lucas that he ostentatiously signed a contract with Universal to do the effects shots of an upcoming ABC television series to be called Star Worlds. After some due consideration by attorneys, Universal prudently renamed it Battlestar Galactica.

Now that Trumbull and Dykstra, Richard Edlund and a handful of other VFX stars were freelance guns for hire, the gold rush was on. Even low budget movie king Roger Corman took the plunge and hit it big with Battle Beyond the Stars in 1980. Shrewd as always, Roger gave the helm to amiable Jimmy Murakami, an animator who knew who to stretch a buck, maximizing the value of simple, effective trick shots.

Few realized how quickly effects scenes involving detailed scale models would spread from their original home in science fiction, to spy action (Moonraker, 1979; Firefox, 1982), police thrillers (the helicopter in Blue Thunder, 1983), or comedy (Spielberg’s 1941 (1979) Ghostbusters (1984), and the DeLorean in Back to the Future (1985, ’89, and ’90).

How do you match up your scale model vehicle in motion with a moving backdrop? One of the oldest ways is rear projection, just what it sounds like: background film shown on a translucent screen behind the main subject. It rarely looked very good and was over-used, especially in car scenes. The Austin Powers films later made justified fun of this visual cliché, that once upon a time audiences barely noticed.

The much rarer front projection method was another forgotten special effects technique that Stanley Kubrick rediscovered and dramatically improved. If a slide or film is projected exactly, but exactly from the camera’s position onto a highly reflective screen, it can look very real on film, much better than rear projection can. It provided the prehistoric backdrops to 2001’s Dawn of Man scenes, and the illusion of flying among the massed bombers in Catch 22 (1970). “FP” was a promising newcomer to the special effects toolbox, but it had rigid limitations. It was hard to do camera moves. An Eighties adaptation called Introvision provided inexpensive, in-camera effects for television’s Inside the Third Reich (1982), which showed Adolf Hitler (Derek Jacoby) walking around “inside” colorized actual photographs of rooms that Albert Speer had designed, as well as 1981’s Outland, in which a terse Sean Connery re-enacts High Noon while orbiting Saturn’s moons.

When pro movies are made on film, that means color negative film. It can be confusing keeping track of the negatives of positives of negatives that have to be made for effects shots. With each additional layer or generation of film, quality suffers, so you try to minimize those losses. It’s always best if you can do it all on one strip of film, whether with glass shots, mirrors, two-way mirrors, trick sets, or multiple camera passes over the same shot.

But sometimes you can’t. Compositing, or using laboratory tricks to combine things that don’t exist together into a film shot, has long been a Hollywood special effects necessity. It’s generally called making a matte shot. A matte is a mask, that can be as simple as a shape carved in plastic or metal that blocks part of the film from being exposed. But most of the time, a matte is formed by the image of the scale model or object in the foreground. For decades, the most common way of making matte shots was called blue screen.

You’ve probably seen it used. The person or object is normally lit, but behind them is an intensely bright blue screen (or green; we’ll get to that). The camera has a prism behind the lens that sends the image to the usual place, where it’s photographed in color, and an identical image that’s split off to the side, filmed on high contrast black and white through a color filter that renders that intense blue as white. That’s your matte, a blocking shot that isolates the foreground from the background.

Run the film of the Back to the Future DeLorean model and its blocking matte through the optical printer once. Then run the printer’s camera back to the beginning of the shot, and run the film of the background going by, blocked by the negative of the other matte. Process the film and you’ve got yourself a finished matte shot of the DeLorean flying over Hill Valley.

Kubrick’s and Lucas’s production workflows went through great contortions to figure out how to achieve effects with as few layers as possible. Kubrick disliked blue screen. Its characteristically ragged outlines were, to him and many others, a dead giveaway to cheap, hack effects work.

So which high-tech solution did Kubrick pick for scenes of his astronaut floating in space? A roomful of women at easels, tracing the matte outlines by hand. It would have been a sight little different than seeing Disney’s armies of animators in 1937, hand-tracing film of an actor to provide a quick, reasonably credible Prince Charming to finish Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in time. For moving shots of 2001’s many spacecraft, the amazing precision of Kubrick’s motion control system made it possible for a photographic “pass” across a backlit model, its reflective areas covered in black tape, to film its own matte.

George Lucas went for motion control, but on the other hand he was also willing to settle for blue screen, being unwilling to go to Kubrick’s levels of trouble and expense to avoid it. But he was determined to make it the best blue screen work that had ever been done. He largely succeeded, and even after digital effects took over, his kind of revived, improved blue screen has been used. (By the way, what’s green screen? The same thing. Although green has picked up in popularity, they’re both still used today, depending on the colors of the subject to be matted in.)

The years after Star Wars were the golden age of photomechanical visual effects, as we’d known them from the earliest years of film. Scale models, camera tricks, and laboratory wizardry reached a zenith of quality and believability that delighted world audiences. As the Eighties progressed into the Nineties, Hollywood special effects jumped another level, morphing into a digital business. That’s next week’s story.

In 2000, I had an on-stage talk with producer Roger Corman. I asked him about his low-low budget special effects, so effective for the spaceship models in Battle Beyond the Stars. It was something he clearly enjoyed talking about. “One of the new assistants in the editing department wanted to work on the models. He was just minimum wage, so I gave him a chance, and he did great!…his name was James Cameron”. He smiled at my reaction. “Ah”, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, “You’ve heard of him!”

Related articles:

• VFX 1: Classic Visual Effects
• VFX 3: Morphing to Digital