Visual Effects

Totally charmed by some of the older clips used in the video above. I remember being thoroughly unsettled by Ray Harryhausen‘s bestiary of monsters as a kid, when Jason and the Argonauts (1963) was repeated on Sunday afternoon TV. As far as I’m concerned, a lot of the earlier effects have stood the test of time brilliantly – from Ray right the to something like Return of the Jedi (1983). They’re just as watchable now, tapping into the same emotions and reactions as first time I saw them. And that’s ignoring the various remasterings and reboots, natch.

One of the reasons I’m so excited by Gentlemen Broncos (2009) is the way the film sections look and feel. The production team are pitch perfect on the late-analog aesthetic. Look at the pyrotechnics.

And then, well, there was that awkward stage where the studios were shooting for photorealism, which lasted right through to the 1990s. At the time, it looked pretty good, but – in retrospect – it’s clear they aimed too low, and fell, limbs flailing, straight into the the uncanny valley.

But starting with, say, The Matrix (1999), there are a number of  more recent films which have made impressive use of the digital tools at their disposal, either in the service of spectacle (as with the oldest clips, above), or – alternatively – in a ways that circumvent or support the more mundane aspects of film-making: generating large crowds, filling the gaps in partial sets, and so on.

Disagree with my choice of bookends if you want; haggle over the precise dates when things got good or bad, but it doesn’t really matter. Far more interesting than any one of these films, dates, or opinions is the way visual effects (of all stripes) have rippled outwards – jumping shipping from film to computer games, Time Team, CAD suites, augmented reality, and the weirder technologies where all these come into contact. Project Natal, anyone?

There’s definitely something big to be said on this subject; something analytical woven from the locative art subplot in William Gibson‘s Spook Country, online gaming, the uncanny return of 3D cinema, and the vice-like grip of virtual reality on the collective unconscious (other than the flying car, is this the legacy future of our times?). I’m not yet sure quite what it is, or how to say it, but I’ll be back.

Until then, here’s a video of The Hoosiers being thematically appropriate.