Image courtesy of Deron Yamada. © 2004 DYA367.

So, there’s this thing about visual effects: so much about them is incredible; the people who create them are tirelessly inventive, able to weather storms of producers, executives, directors, supervisors and artists who, like themselves, stay and create for all hours of the day and night, weekends, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries… kind of astonishing. But I often find myself wondering why. To serve the story (if there is one)? To serve their own curiosity, creativity and artistry? To chase elusive rewards and awards? To pay the bills? Maybe it’s a bit of all these. Years ago it must have been for the chance to create something we’ve never seen, something that would change the way we perceived reality. As we’ve pretty much shown we can create anything now, though, the days of being able to get away with producing something that merely looks cool are over. We have to create indelible images that resonate; we have to fulfill our unwritten job description of making magic of mediocrity, or else what’s the point?

Did we love Spider-Man and its sequel for the explosions, the superhero himself or the story? © 2002 Columbia Pictures. All rights reserved.

I remember a conversation around 1996 with a writer/director whose name I’ve long since forgotten. He wanted to know what he could do with computer-generated visual effects; specifically, he wanted to know if he could incinerate New York. Well, at the time digital fire wasn’t quite possible, so he would have needed practical fire. Both solutions were impractical and would have cost way too much to solve his hypothetical problem. Now that we can, in fact, create anything we want with CGI, including torching the Big Apple, I wonder why we would want to? I mean, we’ve just covered the poor city with an apocalypse of ice and snow for a story that I’m sure paled in comparison to the finals reel. If someone is going to burn New York, I hope they don’t burn the screenplay first.

Visual effects are a means to an end; a way to bring imagination to the screen, but the imagination has to be there in the first place. As I’ve stated before, we can look way back to the origins, to Melies and The Lumiere Brothers, to the man in the moon, and the tiny ballerina dancing and disappearing in a whiff of smoke. We can look at Gertie the Dinosaur and see why Winsor McCay wanted to stun his audience into thinking he was interacting with his dinosaur friend. We can marvel at Edwin S. Porter’s Great Train Robbery and imagine the audience shrieking as the great train barreled towards them. Looking forward a bit to Darby O’Gill and the Little People, we see an incredible feat of forced perspective and rear projection barely contested until the magnificence of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Rocketing to space, we remember the slitscanning techniques invented by John Whitney and put into practice by Doug Trumbull, Bob Abel, Con Pederson and others whose work gave us the distinct feeling we were actually taking that journey. And then, of course, Star Wars shattered all barriers in every galaxy.