In its original form, the movies have always been about illusions. Unlike many other art form, movies strive hard to fool the audience into belie🦹ving what they're seeing, and nothing has ex﷽emplified that mission more than the ongoing evolution of visual effects. Throughout movie history, some movies have pushed the envelope - and some of them deserve singular recognition.
Alfred Clark's 1895 picture The Exec𓆉ution of Mary, Queen of Scots is believed to be the movie that began cinematic visual effects history, with its innovation of… stopping the camera to replace a human actor with a dummy, and then resume filming to create the illusion of Mary's beheading by an executioner. It's crude and primitive by modern standards, but hey, that's how history works. Someone's gotta be the first.
The subsequent history of movies was marked by amazing leaps in visual effects development, from Georges Méliès to George Lucas. The rise and fall of stop-motion animation, the introduction of rotoscopi♎ng, and the big bang that were computers, you can practically trace humankind's technical sophistication entirely th✃rough how popular movies changed thanks to technology.
With visual effects more commonplace ꧟in movies than ever, here are 32 movies that revolutionized visual effects, or VFX.
32. Metropolis (1927)
Almost all visual effects-heavy movies owe a debt to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The 1927 silent film sci-fi classic was based on Lang's sights of New York City skyscrapers, a cutting-edge architectural marvel when Lang visited Manhattan in 1924. An inspired Lang combined the progressive Art Deco movement with the ancient Biblical story of Babel to envision a distant dystopian future plagued by class warfare. The movie fittingly pioneered many techniques picked up from generations of filmmakers after Lang, including miniatures, camera rigs, and the Schüfftan process, an illusionary technique, mirrors make actors appear to occupy miniature spaces. Though♑ Lang's film predates the existence of computers themselves, Metropolis undoubtedly foresaw the things to come.
31. Superman: The Movie (1978)
On the poster for Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie, the tagline promised: "You'll believe a man can fly." Thanks to the movie's revolutionary visual effects, audiences sure did. Shepherded by Colin Chilvers, Donner's movie convinced audiences that Christopher Reeve could actually fly up, up, and away thanks to state-of-the-art techniques in practical, miniature, and optical effects. In a 2018 retrospective interview with VFX Voice, Chilvers - who recalled that the movie's flying sequences were achieved through a combination of wire work and front and rear projections - observed that Superman's blue suit actually posed a problem for bluescreen compositing. Chilvers credits Roy Field, Creative Supervisor of Optical Visual Effects, for coming up with changing the color of Reeve's Superman suit to a different shade of blue, which wouldn't conflict with the bluescreen and could be e🧸dited to its original color in final grading.
30. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The thought of traversing deep space is exciting as it is frightening, and no movie has ever captured those sensations quite like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Among the many sequences the movie is known for, it's the "Stargate" sequence that still inspires filmmakers today. The movie's VFX supervisor was Douglas Trumbull, who figured out a way of producing a ps🌌ychedelic ♑corridor of lights and shapes that engulfed astronauts (and perhaps audiences) to the point of madness. Trumbull achieved the effect using a setup he called "Slit-Scan," which involved shooting moving footage composed of back-lit artwork while the camera lens shutter stayed open as the camera itself moved in the physical space.
29. Independence Day (1996)
The 1990s is an era betwee🔯n eras: The old school ways of matte painting and miniatures were still in predominant use, but computers were beginning to make all cinematic possibilities endless. Enter: Roland Emmerich's sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day. In its story🎐 about a modern day, large-scale alien invasion, the VFX team behind Independence Day - supervised by Volker Engel, Doug Smith, and Tricia Ashford - combined both tried-and-true techniques along with then cutting-edge computer work to create the movie's sensational setpieces, particularly the dogfighting action scenes and the final explosion of the Mothership. In a 2021 interview at Befores and Afters, Rob Bredow, who worked on the movie, described creating a program called Sparky, a procedural animation system written by himself and Peter Shinners that, in layman's terms, helped speed up work that used to be done entirely by hand.
28. The Abyss (1989)
澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:James Cameron is a passionate diver in addition to being a master filmmaker. His admiration for the ocean is felt throughout his movies, like Titanic (1998) and the Avatar series, but his 1989 epic The Abyss broke new ground. While The Abyss has loads of practical effects (like the use of small black beads floating on the surface of a giant pool to control light), it's still a VFX marvel in how the movie's artists replicated the feeling and sensation of an unpredictable moving element for one of the movie's most haunting moments: When aquatic aliens appear before the characters and imitate their likeness. Dennis Muren, with the rest of Industrial Light & Magic, were the artists who made the water look as real as can be in 1989. In a 2007 interview with Animation World Network, Muren recalled working on The Abyss: "Well, is it even possible to do th🐓at? That was the big thing I remember. And we ended up doing 13 shots in six months and it was pretty close to on budget. And it was amazing for that time that we could do it for that quality where it had to be perfect."
27. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
When Evan Peters' Quicksilver cranked up his Walkman to stop bullets from hitting Wolverine and Magneto, he stopped everyone in their tracks. The mesmerizing slow-motion set-piece of the 2014 X-Men sequel turned a lot of heads around Hollywood, not only because of how cheeky it is ("Time in a Bottle" by Jim Croce is truly an inspired choice) but because it showed that even superhero tentpoles are a space for innovation. The scene was pulled off by VFX studio Rising Sun Pictures, along with The Third Floor who worked with director Bryan Singer on pre-vis. In a 2014 interview with TechRadar, Rising Sun Pictures' Adam Paschke said the team referenced the growing popularity of super slow-motion videos on YouTube. "We wanted to try and tap intoಞ the familiar high speed photography the everyday audience would be familiar with," Pasc♔hke said.
26. Starship Troopers (1997)
Paul Verhoeven's biting satire of facism is felt throughout his sci-fi romp Starship Troopers, in which human militaries fend off hordes of alien bugs. While Starship Troopﷺers may not hold up as well as other movies, it doesn't change the fact th🦄at it was still a technical achievement when it was released in 1997. In the 2015 book Masters of FX by Ian Failes, Failes details VFX supervisor Phil Tippett, who had experience on Jurassic Park, and his collaboration with Verhoeven to pull off the movie's large-scale battle scenes with thousands of gigantic bugs. "Jurassic Park in some ways was actually easier to do than Starship Troopers because for the movements you have a paleontological record," Tippett said. "All the design work’s been done for you. But when you’re doing a fantasy character you have to back up and say, 'How does it actually work?'
