It’s not the most ingenious effect, but the transformation scene in Ladyhawke is IMO very well-executed, conveying the emotion and beauty of the transformation without drawing much attention to the effect itself.
At MAGI we did the best we could on Tron to get the animation done in a reasonable amount of time. Rendering time was often over a minute per frame. We had the fastest machines out of any of the 4 companies producing CGI for Tron and ended up doing close to 90% of all the CGI in the end because the other guys couldn’t keep up.
However, there are tons of effects that were hand painted on to film like all those glowing uniforms.
As noted by kenobi 65, they’re called practical effects.
I’d have to go with Willis O’Brien. You can cite everything in King Kong, but my favorite was the fight between Kong and the T. Rex/Snake (and I say this as someone who hates fight scenes). Especially impressive is the way the T. Rex jaw flops down after he’s dead.
Wasn’t that deliberate? I mean *Tron *is largely set in a world inside a computer, and *Last Starfighter *is about a video game that is really a battle training simulation. Looking computer generated is perfectly in keeping with the plot.
OP,
Do you really mean “pre-CGI” or “non-CGI”? If “pre-CGI”, could you give us a year? There’s quite a big of Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park special effects which were practical. CGI in T2 represents only 5 minutes and it’s not like T2 only has 5 minutes of good special effects.
The '80s and early '90s are probably the best time for special effects. That’s when the industry and technology had had the most time to evolve and there would have been the highest number of people who’d been doing it for a long time.
Plenty of special effects that are supposed to represent alien or futuristic tech have aged, very, very badly but the Predator cloak from 1987 still holds up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luZklMqLgDs
Jacob’s Ladder goes a simple, creative thing that works very well at establishing its atmosphere: https://youtu.be/FOD0DZRdQ9w?t=95 https://youtu.be/gQbQi77ibA4?t=76
On Space: 1999, Maya was an alien shapeshifter. This was back in the 1970’s, and they would do a closeup of one of her eyes, show what she was going to turn into, and then pull the camera back to show whatever she’d turned into. Surprisingly effective–and cheap, too.
Funny how much the idea of “a reasonable amount of time” has changed. The new *Jungle Book *was up to 40 hours per frame.
An American Werewolf in London does the transformation scene really well.
There is digital work for sure, but a lot of it was done in much more creative ways.
Sure, it’s a different world, they have thousands of processors working in parallel, and each one of them could outperform the one machine we used then.
Having only read the title, what first came in mind was the chestburster scene from “Alien”. Even the actors shat their pants when shooting this. A close second is the exploding head from Cronenberg’s “Scanners”. They are both iconic.
There is a scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets where Alec Guniness is filmed acting with 5 other instances of himself:
Oh, one more, the flight scene from Murnau’s “Faust”. It’s amazing.
The city of the future in Metropolis.
Sorry, too late to edit, but I noticed that the above link has an atrocious quality and doesn’t do the scene any justice. Here’s a much better link.
The crashed dropship scene in Aliens.
You seem to be under the impression that “CGI” and “special effects” are synonymous. CGI is “computer generated imagery”, but there are many other ways to achieve special effects. And CGI was in its infancy at the time, as can be seen in the few instances of it that we do see in the movies: The Death Star rendered as a green wireframe on a black background, and the trench rendered as expanding rectangles in Luke’s targeting computer. Absolutely everything in the movie that looked better than that, didn’t involve computers.
As for the forced perspective in the Lord of the Rings movies, it (mostly) wasn’t CGI, but it was still computerized. That is to say, what we’re seeing is a real record of real photons that really passed through real lenses onto a real sensor, after being reflected off of real objects… but the movements of those real objects, as well as the movements of the cameras, were all computer-controlled to keep the perspectives correct.
Another good one is Labyrinth. The film has lots of visual tricks, especially (for me) the scene where Jennifer Connelly wakes up in her bed in her room and it turns out to be in a trash heap still in the Labyrinth. You are convinced it’s her room, but they simply took the set of her room and punched a hole in it. I like the Escher room too, but it’s just too weird to be real.
Heck, Bowie doing the sphere twiddling is pretty good, too–done by wrapping a juggler around Bowie.