digital effects:
their history, their makers, their use
The development of digital effects takes us back to the early days of cinema. To give audiences a better appreciation of modern techniques and their applications a host of film clips are used to demonstrate such traditional techniques as the stop-camera effect, multiple exposure, mirror tricks, matte painting, miniatures, optical printers and their digital enhancement. Digital techniques such as digital compositing, 3-D, tracking and motion control are explained with the help of examples from current productions.
Most special effects are still engineered with the help of conventional methods. Stop motion, the forerunner of digital animation, was first presented to astounded cinema audiences in 1923 in the film, ‘The Lost World’, for which some fifty different models of dinosaurs were photographed in single frames, accelerated to 24 images per second and thus made to look real. Today, stop motion animation has been brought to perfection in ‘Wallace & Gromit’, the children’s series, 'Pingu’, and the MTV hype, ‘Celebrity Death Match’. One of the problems in visual conversion using stop motion animation is the lack of sharpness due to movement. Animation technicians at ILM solved this problem by using ‘go-motion’ technology. The film, ‘Dragonslayer’, was a great innovation for ILM in 1981. Thirteen years later it was elbowed aside by the computer-generated dinosaurs in ‘Jurassic Park’. A simulation based on algorithms replaced the traditional models made of rubber. The preference for hairless creatures generated by computers is a result of the difficulty in providing a realistic depiction of the skin and hair of animals. For computers the unordered chaos to be found in nature is a computing is still a largely unresolved problem. Again it was the pioneers from ILM who achieved a breakthrough in this field with ‘My Big Friend Joe’. These and other milestones in digital effects are the subject of the presentation entitled ‘last exit matrix’.