Nylon, actually.
King Kong (the original) obviously. It’s still better than many current films.
There’s also the opening scene in Buster Keaton’s The Playhouse, where Keaton plays all acts, the orchestra, and the audience in a vaudeville theater. It’s well done, especially when you realize the cameras were hand cranked. The cameraman had to shoot the film multiple times while turning a crank at the exact same speed each time. That’s more amazing than anything nowadays.
I love the melting power lines in the original Godzilla. I believe they’re made of wax.
An obscure one: Sh! The Octopus (1937). There’s a scene at the end where a character undergoes a facial transformation that rivals any modern day version of the same effect (i.e. the Théoden transformation in LOTR.) I saw it in a theater full of hardened sci-fi fans and many gasped during the scene with lots of “…how the heck did they do that back then…” muttering afterwards, it was that well done. Amazing what they could do pre-CGI. Don’t waste $$$ renting the film, besides that scene it’s pretty dreadful.
I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the original special effects extravaganza. The scene where the robot is transformed to look like Maria is absolutely stunning.
I haven’t seen that one, and I’ll have to look it up. But here are two GREAT types of on-camera transformation:
1.) Larry Talbot as The Wolfman in several Universal movies, including the original The Wolfman. They did this in stages, applying makeup bit by bit to the face and hands of Lon Chanry Jr (who had to lie still for this for extended periods, poor guy) and soft-dissolving between stages. They used tricks like using a plaster pillow for his head to rest on (so the wrinkles don’t change over the long period of filming and inevcitable motion)
2.) This one was used on The Twilight Zone, and in black and white movies. You take advantage of the fact that the black and white film doesn’t pick up differences in color. You light the scene with one color (green, say), and have makeup old age lines, or veins, or monster features, or whatever) painted on in green. At the time of transformation the green lighting is brought down and a contrasting color – red, say, is brought up at the same time. The result is that the overall light level appears to be unchanged, but the features painted on in green slowly fade in and become visible – but there are no sudden “jumps” in the figure or quaking of lines (as seen with superimposition). It’s a flawless, seamless special effect. (This was in the Twilight Zone episode “Long Live Walter Jameson”, with Kevin McCarthy apparently aging very rapidly.)
I was going to say King Kong as well. The original Kong has about ten thousand times the personality of the most recent one. I’ve watched the movie hundreds of times, and I never find myself thinking of Kong as a big clay puppet or whatever.
The fight at the top of the Empire State Building is still as thrilling as I imagine it must have been to audiences when the movie premired.
It’s hardly “old”, but this last weekend I was watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit? for the first time in a very long time, and was just amazed by how good the effects still look. Consider that that movie was made before Jurassic Park, before the big explosion of CGI, before Cool World, (which was just atrocious compared to how good WFRR looked) and it boggles. You still believe for every minute of the movie that “toons” and humans are walking around interacting together.
And I also think that Clash of the Titans (and all the Sinbad movies) still looks gorgeous. So you can tell they’re stop-motion clay monsters or whatever. Who cares, they look amazing!
Sorry for the bad link. Here it is again: Little Lord Fauntleroy, starring Mary Pickford.
Well, he wasn’t a big clay puppet. He was a jointed mechanical armature, covered with sponge rubber musculature, a latex rubber face, and dyed rabbit fur.
Buster Keaton, as mentioned, was a master at this. In Sherlock, Jr. he climbs into a movie screen and is repeatedly disconcerted by shifts in the scenery - diving from a rock in the ocean and landing in a snowbank, for instance. He had to stand absolutely still while the cinematographer used surveyor’s equipment to exactly measure distances to keep the illusion working.
Two great making of featurettes that have portions germane to this thread are The Thing and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I think both are from special edition DVDs.
The one on “The Thing” DVD has amazing insights from Rob Bottini, who did most of the makeup effects. Really interesting, informative, and funny. There is also an interview with the guy who did the matte paintings (sorry, can’t be sure of his name) who sounds like he is speaking a foreign language while discussing his work. Well worth seeing.
The one for “BC&tSD” shows how the “cliff jump” scene was shot. A platform was set up in a lake, then a matte painting of a cliff was added. The DVD gives a really cool “insider’s” view of the process. I had no idea it was a matte painting until I saw this. In addition, there is a great description of the filming of the stunt where the train car blows up. That still has to one of the best stunts ever shot, and of course the explosion would have been rigged by the Special Effects department. A different Special Effects department than the one meant in this thread, but SFX nonetheless.
It occurs to me that to answer this question one must consider what it actually means for a special effect to hold up well. While I agree that 2001 stands out as a bench mark for its portrayal of realistic space ships the last time I watched that movie back in 2005 it looked like a bunch of models to me. So in that respect, no, it does not hold up very well.
Marc
Thanks, this is fascinating stuff. I’d bet this second technique is the one used in the film I mentioned. The effect was very seamless.
The use of colored make-up and shifting color lights was used to transform Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931).
Harold Lloyd hanging from the Clock. Still looks dangerous and thrilling to this day and yet… it was a camera trick.
Superman: the Movie is full of effects some bad some not too bad. But there is one subtle trick that holds up extremely well becuase unless you think about how impossible the shot is, you miss the effect.
After the cornball flight with Supes and Lois Superman says goodbye and flys away from the roof while pondering her flight with the man o Steel Lois hears the door knock and opens it and it is Clark.
Easy enough to do with editing…except it is all done as single shot from his exit to her opening the door for Clark.
Clever stuff.
Other neat tricks… Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde (1933) has a transformation on screen with no edits or cut aways. He begins to transform before our very eyes (How it is done was pondered for years and the solution is so clever and simple it would make you smack your head)
When was the last time you saw it in 70mm? Because the level of photo-realism at that scale still impresses, and the simplicity of the effects make it much better looking–now, in 2007–on the big screen than many SF films that were made over a decade later.
One other effect in the Rouben Manoulian/Fredric March 1931 Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde is the long opening sequence, done in an unbroken Point-of-View shot. You see Jeckyll lookking down at his hands, playing the organ, getting called by his manservant, getting up, going through the doorway, going over to the mirror and looking straight into it at himself as the manservant puts his cloak on him, themn turn away to see his manservant open the door, then going out through the door.
Of course, the mirror trick was worked by having a complete second room on the other side of the empty mirror frame, but it required setting it up and a bit of choreography to get the servant from one side of the frame to the other to put on the cloak, then back again to open the door (I’m pretty certain they didn’t use a double). It’s another flawless effect.
And they’ve used it over and over again through the years in many other films, most notably in Terminator II. The scene got cut from the release version, which is a pity, because I think it tells an essential part of the story and character developpment, besides being a wonderful bit of low-tech effects work in a movie laden with more up-to-date methods. IIRC, they recruited Linda Hamilton’s sister to double for her in the mirror.
Damn it was 1931… (I edited that out of doubt) yes I completely forgot that one! It was a very interesting opening. Especially when you consider it was a moving camera during the early days of Sound. (Hard to find many cases of those, unless the scene is silent)
Kind of an odd, slightly obscure one, but the movie Godspell has some interesting camera tricks in it. For those unfamiliar with this flower-power relic, the premise is that a hippie Jesus arrives in NYC (mostly Manhattan), circa 1973. Everyone in NYC vanishes, except Jesus & his small group of hippie disciples, who re-enact the gospel of St. Matthew.
Throughout the movie, the movie is shot in such a way, and with such cunning that it makes Manhattan look genuinely empty. But the best shot is the finale, as the disciples are carrying Christ’s body away (to the strains of “Day by Day”), they proceed through midtown Manhattan. In one single tracking shot, the small group rounds a corner, the camera then follows them around the corner, and the disciples are gone - to be replaced by the bustling crowds of normal day Manhattan. It’s quite an ingenius bit of staging.