People didn’t look at effects the same way. As long as they weren’t obviously bad (like, say, “Plan 9 from Outer Space”), people were too busy looking at the film to notice that the effects.
If you notice the effects of the film (as effects) at all, then the film has failed. Indeed, some of the best special effects are those few notice (like Welles moving his camera through a glass window in “Citizen Kane”). Nowadays, effects are for effects sake, often to the detriment to everything else.
And there are many examples of better effects in earlier films. Look at the two versions of “The Time Machine,” for instance.
What makes you so certain there were so few special effects in those movies? I think notice needs to be paid to the difference between special effects in a science fiction/fantasy/adventure/otherwise “fantastic” movie, and special effects in other types of films.
There were plenty of special effects in the movies you name: stunt driving, matte paintings, squibs, explosions, makeup effects, and so forth. In a non-“fantastic” movie, the job of the effects artists are to make them unnoticeable.
As many have said, the best special effects are often the ones that aren’t noticed as such. Here’s a beautiful example from Citizen Kane.
At one point, a reporter goes to visit the Thatcher Memorial Library. The scene starts with a shot of a marble statue of Thatcher seated atop a large plinth. Camera pans down the seated Thatcher, down the front of the plinth, pauses on the plaque that informs us this is a statue of ‘Thatcher’, and then moves to the librarian.
Show this scene to anyone and ask them to spot anything unusual. No-one ever does, or could. There’s nothing to see.
Fact is, the statue itself didn’t exist on set. Originally, the shot started with the plaque on the plinth. Later, Welles decided he wanted to start with the statue. So an effects guy modelled a miniature ‘maquette’ of the seated Thatcher figure, shot this, and then composited the two shots fairly seamlessly. When you know what to look for, you can see the black ‘shadow’ that separates the seated Thatcher ‘statue’ from the base plinth.
As for the OP, at any given time, special FX technology is going to look better than what went before, and not as good as what follows (better in terms of seamless photo realism). At any time, average audiences are going to appreciate that whatever constitutes state-of-the-art FX technology (same definition as above) offers some advantages over what went before, but at the same time needs t obe handled more intelligently, because of the greater range of options on offer. So, no, they didn’t think “the effects stink”. But later on, when something better comes along, they can see the difference.
Exceptions are rare. 2001 does hold up incredibly well. Another god example is ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’. Nearly all the FX work holds up very well, and the man .v. spider fight is damn near flawless.
I said ‘most’, so some of the time they were CGI, especially the ships like the silvery Naboo ones. But the Jedi Starfighter that Obi Wan flies and the Naboo fighters, and Slave I were often if not entirely motion control models. (Actually - now that I think about it, though most of the time in Episode I they were usually real models, in Episode II perhaps there were less instances…)
Well, both Obi Wan’s ship and Count Dooku’s ship were built full scale on the set.
There was only one set that was entirely CGI, which was the room where Obi Wan meets the Kamino President Lama Su. When they’re walking around, the corridors are real sets or models composited in.
A lot of the sets were extended with CGI, like adding stuf outside windows, or making the walls five hundred feet high or something. But the arena at the end is all a model composited in, the floors and walls of various locations were all almost always complete sets, and it’s only the final battle that the gunships, the clonetroopers, and the landscape were all CGI.
Cites: www.starwars.com - The Art of Star Wars - my friend Justin who worked on the movie - and various Effects websites that conducted interviews. I expect the latest issue of Cinefex magazine will clarify where I went wrong.
Like most people, I was enthralled by the fantasy world depicted in the Wizard of Oz- The colors, creatures, witches etc. all added up to a surreal world that just sucked you in and held you there. But a few years ago, when they released the ‘digitally remastered’ version in the theaters, they cleaned it up a bit too good- You can see every wrinkle in the backdrop, and when they started down the yellow brick road, it looked more like what they were really doing- walking straight into the matte. They should have left it all alone; it really dispelled some of the fantasy.
1.) A lot of old special effects still stand up. 2001 has already been mentioned, but look at The Day the Earth Stood Still – most of it still looks excellent. A lot of the stuff in Forbidden Planet was far ahead of its time. For that matter, go and watch a good print of Metropolis. That robot, especially in her initial scene, is still impressive as hell.
2.) As I’ve remarked before, we get jaded as time goes by. When movies first came out, people were ducking to avoid the train as it passed by. When the cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur was first shown, people thought there was some sort of mechanical contraption on stage. When Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed footage from the 1925 The Lost World and showed it to newsmen in NY, they thought that they were seeing the result of some new discovery (live dinosaurs, or some back-in-Time-TV). Women reportedly fainted in the aisles when King Kong first showed in 1933. And so on. Only a few years later, in each case, the audience would never have reacted that way. The effect looks good and impressive the first time we see it. Later on, we get used to it and can see the flaws. Dig out a copy of Jurassic Park and look at it again. The CGI velociraptors don’t really look right – they’ve got some kind of internal “glow” that doesn’t match the indoor lighting. At the time, though, they were perfect, right?
The real test of special effects is when they aren’t used for something impossible, but for something real, and you don’t notice them. Like the train in Out of Africa, or a lot of recent crowd duplication shots. People complain about the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (which I still love), but nobody talks about dust storms in, say Bound for Glory.
“When movies first came out, people were ducking to avoid the train as it passed by.”
—Urban legend, I’m afraid (and I wouldn’t call anyone but you on this, as I know what an expert you are!). People were familiar wenough with magic lantern slides and such by the late 1890s to know it wasn’t a real train or real waves—the myth comes from comedies like Uncle Josh at the Picture Show, which depicted rubes and jays ducking as the train came in, to show how comically gullible they were.