Favourite special effects of all time

[Grand Moff Muffin]

What are your favourite special effects of all time?

For me, they remain Babylon 5. Despite my utter contempt for all attempts to make CG animated cartoon characters that seem as alive as hand-drawn animation or puppetry, and despite all the advances in CG effects in film over the last decade, I consider the space battles in Babylon 5 to be the most beautiful special effects that I've seen to date - and an example of precisely what CGI is good for. For characters like Yoda, stick to puppets. For spaceships - models can't compete with this in terms of grace and fluidity of movement.

And the nebulous backgrounds inspired by images from the Hubble Space Telescope are just sublime.

Post your favourite SFX here in this thread!







Martin

[The Doctor]

Star Trek II Battle scenes: the joy of good model work.



-Ralph

[Bogatan]

For some reason I've always found the shot traveling over the roof tops of London in A Muppet Christmas Carol really magical. Since I met one of the guys responsible for filming it I've also come to appreciate the complexity of it in its pre computer graphic production. In fact I think many of the effects in that film are wonderful.

Purely because it was the first shot I completed by myself (and was happy with the result) the shot of Peter and the Gryphen hiding on the roof of the castle tower at the beginning of the castle assault in Prince Caspian. the CG of the night time castle from that birds eye view is really effective.

Andy

[Deleted]

I really enjoy the special effects that Ray Harryhausen created for films such as Jason and the Argonauts and so on. They look very dated to todays standards but they were cutting edge at the time and took many a person's breath away.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

This is pretty neat:



Martin

[Cullen]

Probably in Jurassic Park when the dinosaurs are revealed for the first time. CGI in films has been all down hill from then on for me.

[Deleted]

I can't watch CGI movies in the same way that I used to. When they were introduced to the mainstream they were something new and exciting but these days they are taken as the norm. Furthermore, all of the CGI movies I've seen of recent seem to be putting the effects before a decent script and thus we have a film with excellant special effects but a poor story and I wind up not bothering to watch the end of the film.

Jurassic Park still remains my favourite CGI film of all time and is far superior to the two sequels that followed it.

[legios]

Difficult for me to really single out a single special effect as an "all-time favourite", for a start I don't tend to think of the varying categories as always being directly comparable.

That said, I do have a few sequences that I think are cracking. I would second Ralph's mention of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", there is some truly beautiful model work in that film. I'd also sight the opening shots of "Star Wars", where the Dykstra-flex camera created a new grammar in terms of what was possible. The whole sequence where the rebel ship passes overhead, looking pretty big as models go - and then the Star Destroyer passes by the camera as if to say "no, no. Bigger than that" is still one of those shots that is burned into my memory.

In terms of suit-mation then clearly Gojira's nighttime assault on Tokyo in "Gojira"(1954) remains the bar in many ways. Never winking at the audience, and always pushing hard the reality of "this is a nuclear-spawned nightmare, and it has come for your capital city". The shot through a roof-top aviary at the roaring head of an enraged Gojira is one of the truly iconic shots of the giant monster genre.

One of my favourite "special effects" of the moment is one that I'm not even sure deserves the term, and certainly wouldn't be recognised as such. It is in, of all places, the first season of "The Wire". They used modern technology to add a pair of tower blocks to the location that they were using for scenes set in the Housing Projects, actually a retirement development, recreating a sense of a Baltimore that is now vanished with the demolition of the last of the high-rise Projects. It is one of those effects that no-one really thinks about, but serves its purpose wonderfully in creating the sense of the environment that drives the story.

(In terms of "Babylon 5"'s effects work I think it has suffered from the march of technology - there is a lot of stuff being done these days which is far more fluid and detailed. However, where it does stand tall is in the shot composition, especially in the seasons where Ron Thornton's firm was still working on the show. There are lots of lovely little bits of business going on in the scenes which add to the sense of reality, and it was one of the few shows that really treated space as a three dimensional environment. There was a sensibility to a lot of the shots that "down is negotiable" that you just don't see in many TV shows, or movies. Even things like the new "Battlestar Galactica" and "Firefly" haven't really carried forward that sense of space being distinctly different to atmospheric flight and that sense of freedom from a bounded plane).

Karl

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I hear what John and Zudo are saying about Jurassic Park, but the movie just annoyed me too much by how few minutes of screen time it gave to the dinosaurs that I must fault those SFX for their costliness.

I find more magical and rewarding to watch the duel between T-rex and dragon beginning about 1:30 into Part 2 of the spoof dragon documentary, which may be slightly less polished but at least doesn't cut short due to costing a million pounds a second:



I'm afraid Star Trek II and the opening shots of Star Wars: A New Hope don't do much for me at all. It's all too frustratingly slow - the ships do seem to carry mass, but they don't have life to them. The ships in B5 seem like creatures swimming or in flight, and so have much more energy in their movements.

I love Shadow ships to bits.

Martin

[legios]

Sept 29, 2008 20:35:34 GMT Grand Moff Muffin said:

I find more magical and rewarding to watch the duel between T-rex and dragon beginning about 1:30 into Part 2 of the spoof dragon documentary, which may be slightly less polished but at least doesn't cut short due to costing a million pounds a second:

I'm not a big fan of "Jurassic Park" myself - the whole film just feels like an exercise in pointlessness. It was all folk running away from dinosaurs just because. Also the Dinosaurs lack any real sense of personality to me. (Mind you, it isn't as bad as the JP rip-off that was Fakezilla).

I hadn't seen any of that pseudo-documentary before, but I have to say I do like that. The effects are a little rough around the edges - the fire especially makes me cringe - what makes up for it in my eyes however is the degree of character to the animation. All of the creatures have different body language, and move in distinctive ways - it gives them a sense of aliveness and a bit of character to them.

I'm afraid Star Trek II and the opening shots of Star Wars: A New Hope don't do much for me at all. It's all too frustratingly slow - the ships do seem to carry mass, but they don't have life to them. The ships in B5 seem like creatures swimming or in flight, and so have much more energy in their movements.

No need to apologise, this one really is a horses for courses. The sources in question are coming from such different paradigms that they are pretty much at the edge of being comparable.

I have a soft spot for the stodgy battlewagons and the world war two naval feel. I quite like my capital ships to be massive and unhurried. I'd disagree that the slower ships don't have life to them. Like an only slightly annoyed Rhinocerous they may not charge around swiftly and agilely but they present a nice sense of solidity and power. That said, Babylon 5 really shines at the lower end of the scale - fighters, gunboats and corvettes. (The White Star is one of the better realised and most photogenic TV picket ship-sized vessel). I don't have a preference either way to be honest. Both are valid approaches given their underlying assumptions about how spacecraft should feel for a given story and do a good job of realising it on screen.

I love Shadow ships to bits.

The Shadow ships are really nice. The first time that anyone really tried to get biotech spacecraft to work on screen and they pretty much nailed it there.

Karl

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Sept 29, 2008 21:03:23 GMT legios said:

I hadn't seen any of that pseudo-documentary before, but I have to say I do like that. The effects are a little rough around the edges - the fire especially makes me cringe -

Very true. But at least it's scientifically explained.

How do people feel about special effects in the LOTR trilogy? I rate them pretty highly, from nice little touches like the sword of the Black Rider that disintegrates in Strider's hand and blows away in the wind, and the smallness of the Hobbits, to Gollum, the great architecture and the massed cavalry charges. I even liked the Ents. What do others think?

Martin

[Deleted]

Best special effect of all time

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I think you're right.

Martin