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Special Effects on TV

© Allan Lee

The early days of television didn't call for much in the way of special effects. Most of what was available was physical or mechanical in nature - such as bottles made of sugar that break painlessly over an actor's head (well, less painfully that a glass bottle, anyway). Programmes that were shot on film might, if the budget could stand it, use a travelling matte to paste in passing scenery behind the window of a studio mock-up vehicle. It was all pretty basic. Monsters in TV science fiction programme were generally men in suits (even imaginative suits, like Dr Who's Daleks). The concept of a computer-generated character was science fiction itself.

But audiences became more sophisticated as time wore on. They had become used to more sophisticated special effects being used in big-budget movies. Charlton Heston parted the waters of the Red Sea in Cecil B De Mille's The Ten Commandments - so why couldn't TV shows do the same?

They tried. This picture shows a still from a 1964 episode of the BBC's Doctor Who. It features a flying saucer spinning on a string suspended in front of a large photograph of London. And that's exactly what it looks like.

Probably the first TV programmes to make a success of special effects were the puppet productions of Gerry Anderson. He used big-budget techniques, scaled down for the miniscule budgets available on TV. His models were painstakingly made and detailed, his sets likewise. Almost without exception, Anderson's special effects experts ignored the blue screen process in favour of detailed models shot at high speed with scaled down backgrounds.

On the plus side, the finished special effects still hold up today as fine examples of model work. On the minus side, it's not always possible to recreate the real world in miniature: water always looks oddly 'blobby' because surface tension remains the same however big or small the model; explosions can look distressingly like fireworks going off; and small sets have to be very, very well filmed if they are not to give away their size because of issues of perspective and the depth of field of the lens being used on the film camera

The special effect of choice in the sixties and seventies was the travelling matte - or blue screen process - even though it has a number of inherent problems. Each element of the finished picture is shot separately against a bright blue background. The blue background is then used to produce a travelling matte - that is, a 'shadow' that exactly blocks out the background where the subject should be, and its reverse, which blocks out any extraneous objects surrounding the subject. When you sandwich all the elements together, you end up with a shot which places the foreground subject neatly over the background object.

Men in Dalek suits seemed scary in 1963

Bad model being badly strung across photo blowup

Can you spott the matte line round the Enterprise?

A stunning visual from DS9 - Emissary

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