Motion Pictures: Special Effects

Motion Pictures: Special Effects

Digital technology

During the 1990s, digital sound, editing, photography, and special effects revolutionized movie making, creating the biggest change in how movies are made since the introduction of synchronized sound in 1927. The use of digital editing in Forrest Gump (1994) demonstrates the enormous strides made in motion-picture technology during the 1990s, Gary Sinise plays a character whose legs are blown off in battle. While in earlier movies an actor would have played his scenes with his lower legs taped behind his thighs, digital technology could remove Sinise's legs after the footage was shot. Moviemakers used a blue screen and 3-D digital technology—developed by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, the special-effects division of Lucas Film—to create the illusion of a legless actor so successfully that viewers could not tell the scene was digitally enhanced. Also in Forrest Gump, director Robert Zemeckis, who was already well known for his successful blending of live action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), used computer graphics to put Forrest Gump, played by Tom Hanks, in scenes with presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as George Wallace and John Lennon.

Blending Science and Fantasy

In 1977 the first Star Wars movie amazed moviegoers with heretofore unimagined special effects, but by the 1990s technology had advanced so rapidly that the movie seemed dated and amateurish. When Lucas re-released Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983) in 1997 he not only added new scenes to the trilogy but also recreated many of the special effects using technology that was not available in the 1970s and 1980s. Steven Spielberg used digital imaging in Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World; Jurassic Park (1997) to create amazingly realistic dinosaurs, while director Ron Howard used it successfully in Apollo 13 (1995) to recreate the liftoff of a Saturn V rocket, adding ice, vapor, fire, and burnout. The critical failure of Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace (1999) illustrated an unbending rule of storytelling: special effects are nice, but they can never substitute for interesting characters and compelling story lines. Still, the new technology has major implications for moviemaking. As French movie maker Jean-Jacques Annaud put it, "The cinema was built around an animated picture. It has the option of becoming an animated painting."

Blockbuster

In 1997 James Cameron, director of the action hits The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and True Lies (1994), released the technological blockbuster of the decade, his version of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. The movie opens with filmed underwater footage of the wreck, filmed by a camera unit that operated outside a submarine, capturing images of corroded woodwork, wall paneling, ornately carved doors, and the grand staircase. For scenes of the Titanic before its fateful collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic, Cameron used computer imaging to capture the ship leaving port, as smoke coiled around hundreds of people moving on deck. Then he employed what he called "reconstructed realism" to simulate the ship listing, splitting in two, and sinking while her doomed passengers rolled down the decks and into their watery graves. At Fox Studios Baja, Cameron built a seventeen-million-gallon oceanfront tank in which an almost full-size exterior model of the ship was erected against a 270-degree background of uninterrupted ocean horizon. For ship interiors every detail was meticulously researched and recreated. Yet, technology was not an end in itself for Cameron. He wanted to "use hard-core technological means to explore emotions" and spent more than $200 million in the attempt. As Titanic neared, and missed, its deadline, rumors circulated that the movie was in trouble. In December 1997, however, it had a triumphant world premiere in Tokyo, and one critic called it a "marriage of imagination and technology in the Hollywood tradition of well crafted epics." Titanic went on to overtake Star Wars as the top-grossing movie of all time, reaching a domestic gross of more than $500 million in only fourteen weeks, where Star Wars had grossed $461 million in 1977 and 1997 together. Newsweek researchers discovered that 60 percent of the tickets sold were bought by women, many of whom saw the movie several times. After years of male-oriented action movies, Titanic was a big-budget action movie that attracted female moviegoers with a tender love story. Titanic won eleven Oscars, including best director and best picture, but many critics were not enthralled with the movie. The Village Voice complained that it mixed "hokiness and hokum" and argued that the story line relied on a cliché-ridden love story. Other critics were kinder, and a few saw Titanic as the Gone With The Wind (1939) of the 1990s.

Sources:

Gina Hahn, "Menace to Society," Atlantic Unbound, 19 May 1999, online at <www.theatlantic.com/unbound>.

J. Hoberman, "The Iceberg Cometh," Village Voice, 23 December 1997, p. 79.

Peter Kramer, "Women First: 'Titanic' (1997), Action-Adventure Films and Hollywood's Female Audience," Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 18 (October 1998): 599-619.

Ed Marsh, James Cameron's Titanic (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997).

Scott McQuire, "Digital Dialectics: The Paradox of Cinema in a Studio without Walls," Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 19 (August 1999): 379-397.