Your Favorite Movie Effects

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Nostromo87's Avatar
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03-17-14
Originally Posted by The Gunslinger45
Will there be any practical blood effects on this list? One of my biggest pet peeves in horror flicks these days is CGI blood!
we'll see, as Mesmerized alluded to- chocolate syrup tends to translate to film well. think i heard that Hitchcock started that trend with the shower scene in Psycho



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Ghouls, vampires, werewolves... let's party.
03-17-14
Originally Posted by nostromo87
we'll see, as Mesmerized alluded to- chocolate syrup tends to translate to film well. think i heard that Hitchcock started that trend with the shower scene in Psycho




I think Hitchcock also perfected movie editing. Not a single nipple... or anything else appears in that shower scene. I went through that scene once frame by frame and nothing shows.



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03-18-14
Dream Attack
---
a Nightmare on Elm Street
(Wes Craven, 1984)

Twenty-six years before Chris Nolan was spinning hallways in Inception, Wes Craven's crew built a rotating room for his movie about dreams



i watched a behind-the-scenes featurette and the actors, Amanda Wyss & Jsu Garcia, who play Tina & Rod, talked about how bizarre and nauseous this scene was to film. an upside-down room completely threw off their state of equilibrium, bed & furniture tied down to the 'ceiling,' while the ceiling is really the floor. imagine yourself in a room like that, if you could flip your room upside down and walk on the ceiling. this is a movie that's filled with cool practical gags, sometimes simple, yet effective



speaking of the T-1000, covered in the first post of this thread, here's a shot from T2 that's pretty much identical in concept with one in a Nightmare on Elm Street - which was released 7 years before:




Fun with Movie History: this film goes to show that cool practical effects can be pulled off even on a low budget. it cost $1.8 million to make the original Nightmare on Elm Street. and it cleaned up at the box office, making $26,319,961, 14.6x's its budget






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03-18-14
not all movie effects have to be mechanical, sometimes they are artistic and help to create a cool visual atmosphere

hence, Fun with matte paintings:

this is sort of a lost art form in current moviemaking: the hand-drawn matte painting. i love these sort of things bc i love to draw. when these are done well, we don't even think of them as matte paintings, we think of them as part of the movie and part of the setting. that's the magic matte painters can help to create



↑ matte painting in Black Narcissus (1947) ↑




in the Ray Harryhausen universe, here's a matte painting for the Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), painted by Emilio Ruiz del Rio






no post about matte paintings would be complete without Ralph McQuarrie working on mattes for the Original Trilogy



↑ Planet of the Apes (1968) matte ↑




Ebert said Citizen Kane (1941), had more special effects shots than Star Wars



↑ the last shot in Raiders is a bada$$ matte painting ↓


Last edited by Nostromo87; 03-18-14 at 03:47 PM.



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I Am Rick Cottontree
03-18-14
I did a Top 20 a couple years back with my fave CGI. Here 'tis...



20: Troll Hunter

Ok, overall it's a bad film but the CGI is absolutely top notch when it's actually used. Especially for a movie that was shot on such a low budget too.



19: Cowboys And Aliens

A Marmite film for movie goers but the CGI involved, not just with the aliens, but all of the CGI throughout, is almost faultless.



18: Independence Day

Giving worldwide audiences 'On Screen CGI Destruction' that had never been seen before, and, exhilarating and faultless CGI dogfights too.



17: Terminator Salvation

Not the best of the Terminator Franchise but the CGI Machines seen throughout are undeniably realistic. Then there's that cameo from Arnie too.



16: I, Robot

Highly stylised looking CGI but certainly some of the best rendered in the movie business.



15: Sam Raimi's Spider Man (Original Movie)

Raimi's original outing for Spidey gave audiences a view of the comic book hero that they had only dreamt about.

Then he gave them more when his cameras decided to follow Spidey while swinging through the streets.



14: 2012

Awful, awful movie and the second one of Emmerich's to appear in this list, but the CGI used in 2012 is absolutely breath taking.



13: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith

From the aliens, to the space ships to the Clone Soldiers themselves. Lucas' movie may not be the best of the Saga, but is still a gem in the CGI world.



12: The Abyss

Never-before-seen images bring the movie almost into its own genre. Whenever there's CGI on screen, even after over 20 years, it never fails to impress with it's realism and imagination.



11: Evolution

One of Reitman's in this list (), this time round there's the originality of the creatures involved throughout, and the fact that the CGI is incredibly realistic, make this a must see.



10: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Cameron blew us away with The Abyss but T2 gave audiences a taste of things to come in the future of movies, and broke the mould of CGI forever.



9: Paul

Another Marmite movie, but this is about the CGI.

Paul absolutely blew me away with the sheer realism of the titular character. Simplistic in the look and rendered absolutely flawlessly.



8: The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy

It was hard to pick just one out of these three movies, so I had to put all three into 8th place. The CG effects were awesomely awesome in the first film, and actually got better as the movies progressed.



7: Cloverfield

Similar to Troll Hunter in that the CGI is used incredibly sparingly, but when it is, wow!

Stunningly realistic and highly imaginative.



6: Avatar

Yet another James Cameron flick in the list.

This time round no expense has been spared on the highly stylised CGI aliens, CGI forest and the realistic human machines involved too, are top drawer.



5: The Matrix (Original Film)

Forgetting the awful cartoony sequels, the original Matrix gave audiences top notch CGI effects mixed with computerised cameramen.

In the process, the filmmakers also gave us Bullet Time.



4: Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes

More highly stylised CGI, almost to the point of 'cartoonyness' but what makes it stand out is that the filmmakers have made it a style choice. Apes has by far the best CGI when it comes to real life creatures.



3: Pirates Of The Caribbean Original Trilogy

Again, it was tough to choose just one of the movies. The CGI throughout is like with LOTR: It starts out faultless and gets better as the movies progress.

What makes Pirates stand out though, is the traditional and legendary look of the CGI, in regard to the world that the movies are set in.



2: Jurassic Park

The CGI in Jurassic Park didn't just blow away audiences, but it blew away the competition. Over 20 years on and the CGI is still talked about as if it came out last year.

Even today, there are scenes in the movie that still throw me into disbelief.



1: Starship Troopers

A massive surprise for me when I first saw it. I expected the usual standard 'Verhoeven sci-fi', like Total Recall or Robocop.

What I saw though has lived with me for a long, long time.

Starship Troopers' CGI is flawless, faultless and extremely exciting in the action stakes.

It's one of only two movies, Jurassic Park being the other, that still fool my eye.



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there's a frog in my snake oil
03-18-14
Great post Nostromo!

I think purely because of its age, Metropolis's welter of techniques have always stood out for me. The black box risk of of the multiple exposures (eyes etc), the striking mix of mattes, models & lighting, the pre-bluescreen 'schufftan process' trickery etc etc.

[05:38 if timecode doesn't work]
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And of course the pure pre-cliche-chic of the transformation:

[1hr 24mins-ish if timecode doesn't work]
&start=5040
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Last edited by Golgot; 03-18-14 at 06:59 PM.



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03-18-14
Originally Posted by Golgot
Great post Nostromo!

I think purely because it's age, Metropolis's welter of techniques have always stood out for me. The black box risk of of the multiple exposures (eyes etc), the striking mix of mattes, models & lighting, the pre-bluescreen 'schufftan process' trickery etc etc.
definitely agree! Metropolis certainly deserves to be mentioned, considering it inspired some of the best modern-ish sci-fi hits







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Fly Eagles Fly
03-19-14
in my opinion The Thing and 2001 a space odyssey got the best special effects
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03-21-14
Baron_Gorc, thanks for including Royal Wedding (1951) in the special effects group. One of my favorite Fred Astaire movies, and of course, favorite scenes. Also thanks to Golgot and nostromo for the Metropolis scenes. I love it when the older movies get love, because, well, I'm a bit old.



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there's a frog in my snake oil
03-24-14
Just as an update on Metropolis, ended up reading this decent interview with Fritz Lang (scroll down). Some great innovation chatter in there ...

...he synchronized the camera with a projector that was to project the picture of a man on the videophone. That was done with linked rods connected by mobile joints going from the camera to the projector, which were, because of the shooting stage, rather far from each other.
Another camera effect concentrated on creating the robot Maria. The concentric rings of light that surround her and move from top to bottom were in fact a little ball of silver rapidly turning in a circle and filmed on a background of black velvet. We superimposed those shots, in the lab, over the shot of the robot in a sitting position that we had filmed previously.
The way we filmed the explosion of the heart machine was one of the first uses of the subjective camera, giving the audience the same impression that the actors feel of the shock. The camera was attached to a swinging pulley on a vertical board that advanced toward the machine on the platform then moved back to give the effect of the explosion.
This last bit reminds me of the window zoom he used in M. Not really a special effect, but occasional camera mobility probably helps make his films seem ahead of their time.

---

And on oldies dgb, I reckon expert use of the montage should count, and that this scene from The Roaring Twenties should be right up there




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03-24-14
Have to give a big second to the liquid metal in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. Since it was not mentioned, I also have to acknowledge the Oscar winning special effects in the 1992 comedy DEATH BECOMES HER...just amazing...especially the climactic fight between Streep and Hawn on the courtyard steps where they bodies literally fall apart.

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