Clip of Special Effect Movies

Just Imagine (1930) - Descent to New York penthouse

David Butler's 'answer' to Germany's Metropolis (see below) apes Fritz Lang's astounding imagery whilst jettisoning its social message with utter abandon. This Buck Rogers-like tale finds briefly-popular US comedian El Brendel catapulted into New York, 1980, where the numbered citizenry get around in flying cars and where marriage is arranged by the state. Though the movie's early visuals are spectacular, they are strictly there to establish period, and Just Imagine soon descends into a poorly-written (and notoriously anti-Semitic) musical. One advancement on Metropolis is in evidence in this shot, however, as the camera actually begins to move around the city. Unfortunately the remarkable model-work and good camera-movement is unwisely used as a projection backdrop for a full-sized flying-car prop that is obviously too heavy to be suspended on wires. Nonetheless, the amount of motion in this shot, combined with excellent and mobile miniature-work, makes it perhaps the earliest predecessor to the 'Spinner' sequences in Blade Runner.

King Kong (1933) - Kong wrecks the subway.

This shot, with inserts of screaming citizens removed, is one of the most elaborate in Willis O'Brien's fantasy classic, and a veritable masterpiece not only of animation but of compositing. Every part of the frame is alive with action - check out the strangely loitering gawpers at the windows, stage right. Note also that fleeing crowds pass both in front of and behind Kong. Also notice the animated passengers in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame who succeed in climbing down from the wrecked subway train and flee their furry persecutor. It's a shame no-one thought of the go-motion approach for the first train, which passes in a particularly stiff manner, but that doesn't take away credit for the evident weeks or months of work which went into this one shot.

The Ten Commandments (1956) - Moses parts the sea

Cecil B. DeMille's second chance at parting the red sea (which he had first done with his prior version of The Ten Commandments in 1923) provides one of the great spectacles of the 1950s. Water had proved the bugbear of many an SFX artist, and here DeMille follows a similar technique as tried in The Dambusters (1955). The technique involves isolating suitable footage of cascading water in moving matte areas, and this it is that provides the great backward-moving flukes that reveal the impressive 'parted sea' model (a Hollywood attraction for many years afterwards). Considering that SFX artists were getting equal or worse results 20-30 years later, this is a ground-breaking and ambitious piece of footage greatly assisted by reverse photography.

The Birds (1963) - Destruction of Capitol Oil garage

An extraordinarily complex piece of compositing (shown in the clip with inserts removed) which demonstrates Hitchcock's continuing urge to push the lackadaisical state of the art. The flapping of the birds' wings caused too much fringing for conventional blue-screen work to be utilised, and Hitchcock was forced to turn to the 'yellow screen' or 'sodium vapour process'. Only Walt Disney studios have ever been equipped for this process, and indeed only one camera has ever been rigged for it. SVP involves filming the subject against a screen lit with powerful sodium vapour lights utilising a very narrow spectrum of light. Unlike most compositing processes, SVP actually shoots two separate elements of the footage simultaneously using a beam-splitter; one reel exposed is regular photographic stock and the other an emulsion sensitive only to the sodium vapour wavelength. Very precise mattes are obtained from the latter, allowing the subject to be pulled out of the background and combined with any other in a later run through an optical printer. The fringing or 'matte line' effects are negligible compared to blue-screen work, but the very precise conditions under which the footage must be shot mitigated against its wide usage. Disney, to whom many shots in The Birds was farmed out, used the process in numerous films including Mary Poppins (1964), Freaky Friday (1976)and The Black Hole (1979).

Jason and the Argonauts (1963) - Fighting the skeletal warriors.

Ray Harryhausen's most celebrated feat of stop-motion remains enduringly impressive, not only for the sheer invention of the skeletal warriors that rise from the 'seeds' of dragons' teeth, but for the sheer number which the grand master assembled for a series of enormously complex shots. The shot seen in the video is a composite of one single set-up with the inserts removed.


When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth (1970) - Leading the dinosaur.

Jim Danforth - twice nominated for an Oscar - was the powerhouse matte painter and animator called in by Hammer Films when Ray Harryhausen was too busy with The Valley Of Gwangi (1969) to take part in the studio's sequel to One Million Years BC (1966). Though not as quick as Harryhausen, Danforth - pre-empting 'go-motion - experimented with motion blur and got better results out of his flying pterodactyls than the master himself. However, that's not why this shot is in here. What's exceptional about the dinosaur's pursuit of Victoria Vetri is how optical wiz Les Bowie has really inserted him into the environment, whereas so much stop-motion animation of the 1960s was clearly divided between freeze-framed background/foreground plates and the animator's work. It's a challenging piece of matting, particularly on one of Hammer's notoriously penny-pinching budgets.

Star Wars (1977) - Into the trench

Though the opening shot of Star Wars remains the most iconic, it suffered sniffy criticism from some quarters for being a higher-speed re-run of Douglas Trumbull's initial pan on the Jupiter mission in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This shot, on the other hand is not only equally exciting but far more original, as we take the point of view of a rebel fighter diving into the Death Star's trench to take a shot at the reactors. The vast scale of the Death Star is revealed as soon as we have made our dizzying descent downward, and we see the walls of the trench extend for miles ahead. This three-element shot (model, laser-bolts and star background) relies on the flexibility (rather than the repeatability) of the Dykstraflex motion control system, and is still a stunner.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) - Heading for Stromberg's Lair

Possibly the first successful example of match-moving in motion pictures, Derek Meddings' audacious attempt to co-ordinate the aquatic lair of Bond's latest adversary into hand-held footage was a real eye-opener at the time, and another extraordinary achievement for a franchise which has frequently pushed the boundaries of optical effects.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) - Entrance to V'Ger

The entrance to the inner heart of TMP's monstrous space-urchin follows the organic motif established so impressively in Douglas Trumbull's (perhaps excessively-used) footage of V'Ger. The thing is, it's very hard to tell how that organic aperture is actually working. Is it an iris of some kind or are the 'petals' actually changing shape? Truth is that the gate segments are actually cones spinning in unison. Since the camera remains perpendicular to the circular bases of the cones, the secret is hard to guess.

Blade Runner (1982) - Spinners in the rain

Douglas Trumbull's work on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) took him out of the airless freedom of space and into the need to make flying saucers glow in the misty plains of Ohio. It was on CE3K that Trumbull perfected the very long exposures needed to get adequate and convincing depth-of-field in low-light conditions, combined with the use of a custom-built machine that dispersed fine oil mist into the air at a strictly regulated rate, which allowed the lights of the models to cut through a dense, Earth-like atmosphere. These techniques surfaced again in creating Philip K. Dick's bleak vision of the future for Ridley Scott, with flying police cars '('Spinners') floating through smog-drenched Los Angeles. Many beautiful city shots emerged, where Trumbull made the superimposition of stock rain footage realistic by obscuring areas of it that did not correspond to light sources in the background plate. For this particular shot Trumbull went the extra mile, and added a windshield with rain droplets as a foreground element to Deckard's journey to meet Eldon Tyrell. Such a shot should not have been possible in the days of photo-chemical SFX.

Return Of The Jedi (1983) - 'There's too many of them!'

To give some idea of how hard a composite matte shot with 40+ elements was in the days of photochemical special effects, check out our interview with John Dykstra (he discusses this at the bottom of page 1). Even with ILM's improved compositing techniques, getting that many elements to combine when the failure of only one could mean starting from scratch, is a huge achievement.

The Last Starfighter (1984) - Starfighter leaves orbit

SFX wizard John Dykstra marks Nick Castle's CGI-laden adventure as the moment that it was clear where optical effects were heading. Only two years after TRON (see #9), even the Cray X-MP computer couldn't hope to integrate non-stylistic live footage seamlessly with computer-generated special effects, and the film's 'computer game' link (TRON's excuse for the low-res effects) was too tenuous to bridge the gap. Nonetheless we see advancements here in rendering phong shaders, huge advancements in transparency shaders and also diffused shadow rendering. There's still only very limited bitmap-texturing, but this shot is one of the most ambitious in Starfighter and it foreshadowed the SFX revolution of the 1990s by over six years.

Brazil (1985) - 'Harry' Tuttle makes a dramatic exit

Robert De Niro's improbably heroic plumber (and 'freelance subversive') makes two exits-by-guy rope in Terry Gilliam's enjoyable perversion of Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, but the second one is the real jaw-dropper. Gilliam stands with James Cameron (himself once a successful effects artist for Roger Corman) in the role of exemplary old-school FX guru, with a preference for build-and-film rather than adding anything later.

Howard The Duck (1986) - The Dark Overlord rises

Just as there haven't been any fundamental changes to the principles of the internal combustion engine in the last 100 years, neither has a century wrought that much change in the art of stop-motion animation. Legendary creature-maker Phil Tippett added one wrinkle, however, with his 'Go-motion' technique, which is rather unscientifically explained as 'twanging' the model armature at the moment of exposure when motion-blur is needed. Tippett's go-motion dinosaurs were the first to become extinct when ILM began some interesting CGI experiments for Steven Spielberg and Jurassic Park. Tippett himself evolved very nicely as a specialist in CGI creatures with an unparalleled reputation for realistic movement inherited from years as a stop-motion animator. Star turkey Howard The Duck benefited from go-motion with an impressively animated finale.


The Abyss (1989) - loss of tension

The idea of suspended fluid losing tension has been dabbled with in a number of science fiction movies over the years, including Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) and Event Horizon (1997). It's an effective trick which usually involves little more than a milliseconds' distortion of the composited element (sea-snake, blood droplets, water droplets, etc) before cutting into a horizontal split-screen where prop-water hits the floor, but it's one of those cases where a valuable connection is formed between an 'alien' (i.e. artificial) element and the real world. For The Abyss, James Cameron got to know all about transparency algorithms in 3D modelling, whereas the subsequent Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) was an object-lesson in reflection-mapping. One wonders what his third-stage would have been if Jurassic Park had not taken up the lead.

Back To The Future Part II (1989) - Landing the DeLorean at night

The secret to a good effects shot (at least one where you know that the shot is impossible in the real world) is psychologically integrating the impossible element with the parts of the scene that are manifestly real. Here the ever-ingenious Robert Zemeckis uses a street-lamp to mask the transition between model and real DeLorean. The matching of shadows and lights is extraordinary, and if it weren't for the fact that the car's headlights only have a road-reflection after they pass the street-light, it would be a perfect SFX illusion.

Total Recall (1990) - Doing her nails

This is an example of a simple effect that could probably have been achieved in the 1950s, if anyone had written a sci-fi script where a woman could change the colour of her nails with a tap on some future-gizmo. The nails are rotoscoped to provide an area for an animated colour transition to take place, and that's all there is to it. It's an elegant and not terribly expensive SFX shot that is 100% convincing.

Jurassic Park (1992) - T-Rex investigates the light

One of the oldest clips from the world of bitmap-textured CGI animation, and - to my mind - simply the most convincing 'impossible thing' ever committed to celluloid by Hollywood. The segue between the withdrawing of Stan Winston's animatronic head and the appearance of the CGI version is effective and seamless, playing both technologies to their strengths. The movement of the musculature in the T-Rex combines with the very prosaic illumination of the car headlights to sell the Rex, and the camera judder combines perfectly with the footfalls of the massive beast. Rain and darkness have sold many a special effect before, and they certainly do no harm here, but the result is pure movie history.

Forrest Gump (1994) - Picking up Lt. Dan Taylor

Once again Robert Zemeckis' knack for combining good storytelling skills with SFX know-how finds him deservedly in this list again. Presenting fully-limbed Gary Sinise as an amputee for this shot required Sinise to keep his blue-stockinged lower legs dangling through two holes in the bed, which were later substituted with a combination of plate and CGI model material, whilst the areas around his knees were elaborately substituted with CGI stumps. You can see the bed dip and rise as Sinise is lifted off, so it's no easy matte substitution, and the sheets even respond to the passing of one of his 'stumps'. Totally convincing.

Apollo 13 (1995) - Blast off

Derek Meddings (#5) has launched more orbital payload vehicles than NASA, but his efforts (in such films as Moonraker and Doppelganger) were finally capped by Digital Domain's superb recreation of the launch of ill-fated Apollo 13. Footage of the Apollo launches is part of the planet's iconography, so the challenge to recreate that experience is immense, and ultimately it's only the curse of the 'roving 3D camera' that turns an astonishingly detailed recreation slightly 'plastic'.

The Lost World (1997) - T-Rex takes a drink

Here the T-Rex from the hugely successful dinosaur franchise is so perfectly integrated into its environment that one initially assumes it is the Stan Winston animatronic. Only when its movements become a little bolder in warning off the barking dog do we realise that it must be CGI. Selling an element so incongruous in an environment so familiar represents an extraordinary work of lighting and movement. The Rex shifts its weight superbly, and there's very little to give it away, even on close examination.

Private Ryan (1998) - Bullets in the water

Just as efforts such as Cube (1997) and Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her (1992) and Forrest Gump (1994, see #13) were beginning to bring 'body horror' into the CGI age, Steven Spielberg turned CGI mutilation to arguably its most serious use in recreating the visceral horror of the Normandy landings. If not the most violent film ever made, Saving Private Ryan must be in the top 10 somewhere, but has so sombre an ambit as to inspire respect instead of disgust. The shot in question was - at least for me - educational, since I had wondered before just how lethal a bullet could be through water. Soldiers fleeing into the sea from their decimated landing-craft found that the ocean was no protection against suitable artillery, and the zipping projectiles, complete with foamy trails, are totally convincing here.

Hannibal (2001) - Brains for dinner

Though utilising similar motion-capture/CGI combos to Terminator 3's 'ruined face' effect (see #24 ), it's fairly unlikely that any use of the technique has wrung more horror (or dinner) out of people than when a drugged Ray Liotta is served his own brain-tissue to eat in Ridley Scott's horrific sequel to Silence Of The Lambs (1991). An animatronic head was used for certain close-up sequences not directly involving Liotta's face, but this shot is all CGI and mo-cap. The only thing that potentially diminishes the effectiveness of the shot is the dark background, which rather gives the impression of sleight-of-hand or a magic show, when in fact the CGI doesn't need it in order to work.

Terminator 3 (2003) - Arnie's ruined terminator face

It's not every ILM shot that makes it into arguably the most esteemed show reel of any effects house on the planet, but the sight of Arnold Schwarzenegger's half-man/half-robot face in T3 is unfaultable and a sure candidate. The camera lingers on it, and it can afford to. Similarly astonishing work was achieved with Aaron Eckhart's mutilated visage as Two Face in The Dark Knight, but unfortunately common sense kicks in after the shock and one realises that there's no way Eckhart's lower lip could maintain tension with that much damage to the left cheek. Here there are no such issues. With lighting, textures and fusion between actor and illusion absolutely pristine, it's a perfect 'trick', selling the reality of the Terminator character as never before.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) - Manhattan floods

Roland Emmerich continues to destroy the world in this ecological disaster-movie, and VFX house Digital Domain turned out some outstanding fluid simulation work in the flood sequences. For the shot in question, however, the fluid sim was provided by Tweak Films, with Christopher Horvath and Day After Tomorrow VFX supervisor Karen Goulekas overseeing the shot (one of five which Tweak contributed to the movie). Depicting water is one area of SFX where the CGI luddites tend, wisely, to shut up. SFX debacles such as those in Raise The Titanic (1980), The Dambusters (1955) and the 'Hoover Dam bust' in Superman (1978) only go to prove that water simply does not scale at anything but 1:1. Calculating (or impersonating) the confluences and counter-collisions that an incoming flood of water will make against the maze of Manhattan is a mind-bogglingly difficult task, and we can only pay this shot the compliment of saying that it 'looks right'.

War Of The Worlds (2005) - Destroying the bridge

This ILM shot was used to sell Spielberg's reimagining of both the 1953 George Pal production and H.G. Wells original book, and it's a marvel of frightening destructiveness custom-made to tap into the horrors of post-9/11 culture. The supposed camera operator sensibly moves towards areas of interest whilst not over-doing the manic camera shake. WoTW is actually quite a close-set and intimate film, and the relatively small clutch of 'hero' shots like this are intended to sell us the scenario so we'll understand the claustrophobia of Tom Cruise's plight as he searches for shelter. No-one could afford to make a film with very many labour-intensive shots like this, but WoTW could've used another 10-15. Nonetheless, you can really see where the money went in this footage.

Transformers (2007) - Slow-motion motorway pursuit

This is the only robot SFX shot in Michael Bay's harmless technological bash-fest that I totally buy, and the reason, I think, is to do with motion blur. Since this shot has been designed and rendered for slow-motion, the blur effect has been omitted (or at least greatly reduced, as one commenter suggested), and suddenly the robots really seem to be there, rather than impressively superimposed. Along with kinetics and physics, it's very early days yet for CGI artists as regards an understanding of motion blur in anything but a solid object constantly moving in one direction.

Special Effects

In 1895, Alfred Clarke created what is commonly accepted as the first-ever special effect. While filming a reenactment of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, Clarke instructed an actor to step up to the block in Mary's costume. As the assassin brought the axe above his head, Clarke stopped the camera, had all of the actors freeze, and had the person playing Mary step off the set. He placed a Mary dummy in the actor's place, restarted filming, and allowed the assassin to bring the axe down, severing the dummy's head. “Such… techniques would remain at the heart of special effects production for the next century”

During the 1920s and 1930s, special effects techniques were improved and refined by the motion picture industry. Many techniques were modifications of illusions from the theater and still photography. several techniques soon developed, like the "stop trick," Animation, creating the illusion of motion, was accomplished with drawings for example by Winsor McCay in Gertie the Dinosaur and with three-dimensional models by Willis O'Brien in The Lost World and King Kong.

The Golden Age of Hollywood

The 1930s decade (and most of the 1940s as well) has been labeled "The Golden Age of Hollywood" . The 30s was also the decade of the sound and color revolutions and the advance of the 'talkies' It was the era in which the silent period ended, with many silent film stars not making the transition to sound (e.g., Vilmy Banky, John Gilbert, and Norma Talmadge). By 1933, the economic effects of the Depression were being strongly felt, especially in decreased movie theatre attendance.

Special-effects processes were advanced by the late 1930s, making it possible for many more films to be shot on sets rather than on-location (e.g., The Hurricane (1937) One of the first 'color' films was by Thomas Edison's Annabell's Butterfly Dance. Two-color (red and green) The first short film in three-color Technicolor was Walt Disney's animated talkie Flowers and Trees (1932) in the Silly

As the industry progressed, special effects techniques kept pace. The development of color photography required greater modification of effects techniques. Also, color enabled the development of such travelling matte techniques as bluescreen and the sodium vapor process. Many films include landmark scenes in special-effects accomplishments: Forbidden Planet used matte paintings, animation, and miniature work to create spectacular alien worlds. In The Ten Commandments, Paramount's John P. Fulton, A.S.C., multiplied the crowds of extras in the Exodus scenes, depicted the massive constructions of Rameses, and split the Red Sea in a still-impressive combination of travelling mattes and water tanks.

Visual effects (vfx)

is the term given to a sub-category of special effects in which images or film frames are created or manipulated for film and video. Visual effects usually involve the combination of live-action footage with CGI ‘Computer-generated imagery’ or other elements (such as explosive or model work) in order to create environments or scenarios which look realistic, but would be dangerous, costly, or simply impossible to capture on film. They have become increasingly common in big-budget films, and have also recently become accessible to the amateur filmmaker with the introduction of affordable animation and compositing software.

Visual effects may be divided into at least four categories:

• Models: miniature sets and models, animatronics


• Matte paintings and stills: digital or traditional paintings or photographs which serve as background plates for keyed or rotoscoped elements


• Live-action effects: keying actors or models through bluescreening and greenscreening


• Digital animation: modeling, Computer graphics lighting, texturing, rigging, animating, and rendering computer generated 3D characters, particle effects, digital sets, backgrounds, etc.

Optical Printer


An optical printer is a device consisting of one or more film projectors mechanically linked to a movie camera. It allows filmmakers to re-photograph one or more strips of film. The optical printer is used for making special effects for motion pictures, or for copying and restoring old film material.

Common optical effects include fade-outs and fade-ins, dissolves, slow motion, fast motion, and matte work. More complicated work can involve dozens of elements, all combined into a single scene. Ideally, the audience in a theater should not be able to notice any optical printers work, but this is not always the case. For economical reasons, especially in the 1950s, and later in TV series produced on film, printer work was limited to only the actual parts of a scene needing the effect, so there is a clear change in the image quality when the transition occurs.

The first, simple optical printers were constructed early in the 1920s. Linwood G. Dunn expanded the concept in the 1930s, and the development continued well into the 1980s, when the printers were controlled with minicomputers.

In the late 1980s, digital compositing began to supplant optical effects. Since the mid nineties the conversion to digital effects has been virtually total. Consequently, optical printing today is used most widely by individual artists working exclusively with film. As a technique, it proves particularly useful for making copies of hand painted or physically manipulated film.

Clip of Special Effect Movies

Clip information of Special Effect Movies

Computer-generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is the application of the field of computer graphics (or more specifically, 3D computer graphics) to special effects. CGI is used in films, television programs and commercials, and print media.

Video games most often use real-time computer graphics (rarely referred to as CGI), but may also include pre-rendered "cut scenes" and intro movies that would be typical CGI applications. These are referred to as FMV.
CGI is used for visual effects because the quality is often higher and effects are more controllable than other more physically based processes, such as constructing miniatures for effects shots or hiring extras for crowd scenes, and because it allows the creation of images that would not be feasible using any other technology. It can also allow a single artist to produce content without the use of actors, expensive set pieces, or props.

Recent accessibility of CGI software and increased computer speeds has allowed individual artists and small companies to produce professional grade films, games, and fine art from their home computers. This has brought about an Internet subculture with its own set of global celebrities, clichés, and technical vocabulary.

Between 1995 and 2005, the average effects budget for a wide-release feature film skyrocketed from $5 million to $40 million. According to one studio executive, as of 2005, more than half of feature films have significant effects.