Home » Film & TV » Science Fiction Films » It's All in How You Look at It: A History of F/X

It's All in How You Look at It: A History of F/X

© Elizabeth Burton

From Georges Méliès's rocket plunging into the Man in the Moon's eye to the computer-generated wonders of Final Fantasy, special effects have mrpitted filmmakers to create new worlds, generte new levels of cinematic reality and spawn lifeforms limited only by the imagination.

It's probably logical that the man usually given credit for "inventing" special effects began as a magician. In his youth Méliès haunted the Theatre Robert-Houdin (which he later came to own), where the the great French magician and illusionist performed. As an adult, Méliès offered feats of prestidigitation in Paris before acquiring his first movie equipment in 1896. Between then and 1912, he made more than 500 films ranging in length from one minute to more than ninety, and is credited with being the first to use elements that are now standard, including fades, double exposure and, of course, stop-motion. He was writer, director and, usually, performer.

"Most of Méliès' more celebrated films depended on illusion, comic burlesque and pantomime," writes Roger Manville in The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia¹. "As an artist of stage and screen, Méliès was at once illusionist and pantomimest; in his films, human beings became comic creatures with fantastic costumes and make-up, liable to disintegrate or reshape into anything."

Méliès is said to have claimed he discovered trick photography by accident. His camera jammed in the middle of filming a street scene, and when he reviewed the resulting film a bus appeared to turn into a hearse². Once of the basic tools of the SF/F/Horror film genre -- stop-motion -- exists because of a quirky camera.

Stop-motion, says The Complete Film Dictionary³, is "Any cinematic technique that utilizes the constant stopping and starting of the camera to allow for a change in the subject during the interval the camer is not shooting which will produce some effect when the printed film is projected continuously."

There are, according to the dictionary, five basic kinds of stop-motion photography:

1. When single frames are snapped over a period of time to record a process with lengthy pauses between shots, when the frames are shown at regular speed the process that was being recorded occurs rapidly. This is time-lapse photography. When Disney used it during the 1950's and early 1960's in such documentaries as The Living Desert blossoming flowers turned into a floral ballet.

2. Méliès' transforming bus falls into the second category, where the camera is stopped, the scene is changed, perhaps by the removal of an object or actor, and filming resumes. When the film is run, the object or actor seems to disappear.