Special Effects - Vintage 1984 documentary on SFX

[@Emmuzka]

I saw this as a little kid and have searched it many times since. And now I want to see that Android movie!

[@unbrokenandalive1089]

The astounding craftsmanship displayed in this really cool documentary will soon be nothing more than a tragically lost art. How sad...

[@TruculentSheep]

Unless we find a way to keep them alive.

[@savantartists5273]

I loved this doc as a kid. THANKS for posting.

[@johnnyhawkins43]

This does teach you a lot about the old FX!!!

[@lewismassie]

As I've learned more about VFX over the last year, I've become more and more obsessed over miniature filming

[@metafuel]

There's a really great short on KZbin by the guys who created the mini sci-fi movie "Slice of Life". They show how they went about creating their mini Cyberworld. Well worth a watch. Just search "Slice of Life miniatures" in KZbin it should pop up. Great, fun and interesting video.

[@Skynet_the_AI]

I'm light weight obsessed with sound design and sound effects.

[@SpacemanOutbound]

This motivated me to make my first movie.

[@niktaronikov]

Thanks for the film. It was very interesting.

[@egamez1]

I love the sound of old computer keyboards....49:57

[@romainthirion503]

42:18 - And Daft Punk was born.

[@genesanford9412]

I love shows like this ! :D

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

22:53 Back in the early days of the Steadicam, there were a lot of horror movies in particular where the camera was chasing after some victim (perhaps from the viewpoint of the killer) until they met their untimely end.

[@theenchiladakid1866]

1984: In the future Video games will look real 2021: 2077

[@TruculentSheep]

CGI only works if you don't know it's CGI. Hence why 'The Wolf of Wall Street' was the best CGI film in recent years. (I'm not joking - watch documentaries about how they made it.) Everything else is just Who Framed Roger Rabbit without the soul or artistry. Only Stan Winston and his crew could make CGI look wondrous, and he's gone now.

[@davidranlet5019]

Well that was awesome....53 minutes about how amazing the computer is going to be one day.

[@moeskido]

Not everyone could accept that at the time. It wasn't universally obvious.

[@WPQ190D]

Ah, the delicious computers! Because of them, in forty years, we'll all be remembering movies like "Aquaman" and "The Last Jedi."

[@Vesalempinen]

And they hit the right spot.

[@donovandelaney3171]

Wizard of Oz had the first CGI.

[@kristianTV1974]

@42.40 "This is digital sound!" - *reverses it* - "MY ASSHOLE!"

[@EDcase1]

Ah the good'ol days

[@sushantswamy]

Who’s here because of a self quarantine to avoid a corona virus infection?

[@davyjones2994]

Sushant Swamy everybody?

[@christopherwilson9979]

THAT GUY REALLY LIKES FLYING HIS PRETEND HELI

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

20:38 Unfortunately, those dark fringes around the spaceship give the game away ...

[@webbox100]

19:28 Is it just me, or are the notes of the Star Trek theme playing here? :P

[@bonbonpony]

44:53 Hahah is this MOS 6502 assembly? :D

[@andreasdanek3433]

Does anyone have the source to this documentary? Would be greatly appreciated

[@noahwalling2928]

Is it possible to hear the French over the dialogue?

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

18:37 A “travelling matte”.

[@ticiusarakan]

in childhood I would given my soul to the devil for this movie)

[@Clay3613]

The Right Stuff is still the best movie about the US Space Race. The effects are so basic, yet better than Apollo 13.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Funny that _Apollo 13_ filmed the weightless scenes in actual weightlessness ...

[@Clay3613]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Talking about the spacecraft shots. Some are painfully obvious CGI despite some great modelwork on the ground.

[@kirksealls1912]

I love both movies, but yes, some of the effects in “Apollo 13” are quite dated now. I would argue “Apollo 13” isn’t really a space race film, as by that time the race had been well and truly won

[@warmecanic]

This is NOT digital sound :V

[@chumcool]

43:45 Motorcycle?

[@boogiestreet594]

10:55 my GOD how cheaply made is that haha. Compare that to the Corridor's in Alien.. Aliens... Even Episode 4...

[@SagaofaCrew]

A 1980's Science Fiction Cult Film Movie Prop is taken out of cold storage to begin a restoration ======= kzbin.info/www/bejne/mJbGoIqij8Z8ndU

[@Lumibear.]

Sub Red Dwarf level and that’s saying something.

[@bcbudrecords]

Nice doc about VISUAL Effects ... super shitty doc on SPECIAL effects !

[@antelopefreeway214]

Many of those old, hand-made effects (especially using miniatures) have a more satisfying feel than the ultra-slick CG effects I see today. CG effects often appear cartoony and weightless. The art of "in-camera" effects is almost lost.

[@matteagle6914]

i don't agree. yes, cgi is a tool often overused because it's cheep, but when i look at stuff like the mandalorian and their use of the virtual sets, puppets and miniatures combined with cgi, i see the art of "in-camera" effects. also they talked about how the fx got better because they had the filmed miniatures as a reference. it's all about using the right tools for the task they fit. i can understand why compositing is no longer done on film for example. we are in a time where cgi is still new and exciting for some, but already looked down upon by others. thats why i don't think anything worth saving will get lost.

[@RavenFly1232]

@@matteagle6914 Also, for some effects, miniatures are actually cheaper than CGI. And the miniatures can be later agumented with CGI.

[@nottiification]

Yeah im sick to death of CGI puppet shows. All the action films are the same now, whenever theres a fight everybody turns weightless and starts doing double backflips for no good reason.

[@cgrant26]

My issue with CGI is it usually feels too sterile. It lacks the grit and realism you find in nature. While this effect works pretty good in futuristic, sci-fi type settings (like inside a spacecraft) it doesn't do so well in more typical settings. You'll see this get better over time though as computers get more powerful and able to simulate "grit"

[@JayLangly]

I agree. But I think BladeRunner 2049 and Mad Max Fury Road are acceptable.

[@donovandelaney3171]

That's how movies now a days should be made. Practical Effects.

[@twstf8905]

NONE of them looked nearly as good, or as believable, as the Star Wars movie effects. Most of the effects from that original trilogy still hold up to this day. While the effects from seemingly everything else stands out as OBVIOUS, despite the tricks or "methods," of the particular tools used. The quality control is MILES ahead of all the rest, even now. It's clearly why John Dykstra was immortalized within, (and beyond,) the industry as the inventor of the motion-control "Dykstra-Flex" computer system, hardware and its associated software. And necessary components of the process have gone on to create ancillary industries of their own in the Motion Picture special effects arena, from the first Renderman software eventually becoming Pixar, until its inevitable evolution into the Pixar animation studio, all started for the singular purpose of realizing George Lucas' demands of putting his imagination to film in Star Wars. We literally wouldn't have much, if any, of the technology necessary to even make most of the movies that have dominated the entertainment industry over the last 40+ years had it not been for Lucas' requirements necessitating the creation of the technology in the first place. Other visionary filmmakers, like Stephen Spielberg and James Cameron, in particular, have each further pushed the technology beyond what was imagined possible, up to the point in which their demands needed fulfilling, but it all started with those initial bold technological breakthroughs made by realizing the Star Wars dream. Which is why ANY documentary or equivalent program worth watching on the subject will ALWAYS include clips of those three original films. Whether or not the spexific methods used tools used to pull them off are mentioned at all, in that context. (Some programs omit those details aware of the existing abundance of such documentaries elsewhere.) That being said, the original 1933 version of King Kong was also WAY ahead of its time. And The Right Stuff still appears especially realistic. Both properties textbook examples of special effects done correctly. That's impressive. Most impressive. Edit; fortunately visual effects and sound editors are no longer inhibited by the comparatively rudimentary technology of the late 70's, early 80's anymore lol it's no longer necessary to store or retrieve saved data files from, "thousands of magnetic disks." 🤣 The vast libraries of sound effects that used to fill shelves upon shelves in the studio can now be saved on to a hard drive the size and capacity of an average cell phone. And that's just the files saved for that one project. Nowadays, our computing capabilities have been the technology that has grown exponentially the most. (As computing power tends to do.) All of the computing power necessary to control the Apollo 11 Moon Lander can fit on a modern SD card, the storage and retrieval systems have developed and matured so much. It makes this, compared to any previous, the most exciting time to be alive. When we're finally realizing our potential and are within reach of answering some of humanity's oldest, most fundamental questions, once and for all. But, that's a little off-topic lol it's a pretty exciting time to be a filmmaker too, I'll bet. 👍

[@Scott.Sandifer]

I'm still fond of all the 'mistakes' in the original trilogy VFX. This is partly the reason I found the remastered versions upsetting. They should have remained unmolested as a testament to ingenuity of the time period.

[@NewMediaFormat]

John Buechler is a Hack (as you can see) artist .. I Know because I'm one (along with many others) who worked at NEW WORLD PICTURES... We in the Makeup Effects could Hardly tolerate him.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

1:11 Ah, those quaint old optical printers. Every time you layered another piece of film on top of the stack, you lost a little bit more in quality. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that digital compositing was introduced, which let you do unlimited layering without loss of quality. This was used heavily in _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ , just for example.

[@yaburnt9754]

wow i had this on vhs, lost it, thank you for the memories!

[@amaxamon]

One of many mostly stock-footage tv specials about FX made in the 1980's. I remember watching this one when it aired! I eventually got a 8mm camera and made all sorts of stop-motion and "trick" movies (I still have them!). It's funny to think how critics were saying that special fx were taking over movies back than LOL if they only knew!

[@flippert0]

It's funny for me (and partially melancholic) how this documentary talks about "vintage effects". Everything the year 1984 could come up with with regards to special effects is vintage now itself (doesn't mean it's bad, see "Terminator" or "Blade Runner" from two years earlier).

[@SkemeKOS]

Terminator was out this same year - 1984

[@cliffsinclair4900]

try 2001

[@kirksealls1912]

That’s how time works

[@mgabbard]

They spelled Syd's name wrong. 30:54 It's amazing how many of these effects shots still hold up when viewing today 30+ years later. The creativity and imagination of these special effects masters was really something.

[@MG-ty7hp]

To the governments of this world... stops CGI....now!! .....Oh I miss the times when I left the effects cinema and was enthusiastic about all the created creatures, spaceships, robots, "real" sets ...... today, with theoretically endless possibilities, hardly any film can do that. I can't think of a CGI film that made a lasting impression on me except Avatar (although it was mostly the very good 3D in the cinema) .... RiP Handmade Effects

[@kirksealls1912]

I’m no fan of the excessive use of CGI, and much prefer practical effects, but God forbid government gets involved!

[@SkemeKOS]

46:25 "What I've always hoped and dreamed for is that the individual person in their home will eventually create their own television experience" His dream has became reality. We now how have Dreams on PS4 that does exactly that.

[@dignes3446]

Wonder if he is still in the industry, or at least playing games; he must be in his 70s by now.

[@Gambit771]

Dreams is just a game like any other. We've been creating our own television experience long before that existed.

[@SagaofaCrew]

Submitted for an ironic twist, here's a 2020 Documentary about a little known 1984 vintage Science Fiction Film! kzbin.info/www/bejne/oWioi3Vme7Vgn8k

[@ParkerPPipe]

9:49 watch the guy talking about the set. Count how many times he touches his nose. 80s baby. Always snowing

[@bradhouston4734]

I’m so pumped by this intro that I had to STOP then come here to tell you!! As I know that you all want to know!! 😉 (Back to it) 😀🕺🏻🎥🏖🇦🇺

[@fearlessjoebanzai]

What's the strange audio track that seems to be playing quietly in the background when people are talking? It sometimes sounds like other languages, almost as if there is a German or French dub playing simultaneously? I'm guessing this is from a laserdisc, so I wonder if that is the case and it's a strange artifact of the technology? Does anybody have any thoughts/answers?

[@yuibot5998]

Maybe its added to fool copyright police?

[@fearlessjoebanzai]

@@yuibot5998, no, it's not that (besides anything I doubt even Disney would copyright this!), thanks for the suggestion though!

[@seagrey75]

Maybe is a dubbing

[@marcomacias3960]

i notice that there is an extra voiceover when the narrator spoke. was there a dub version of this video in another language?

[@donovandelaney3171]

They're called Practical Effects or Practical Special Effects.

[@macdaddy1149]

I’m a SPFX artist myself. I do practical, prosthetics, creature, gore/wound and many other things for Film, TV, print,locations, collectors or what ever else comes my way.I love watching these. You can never stop learning nor see how far things have came in this profession. It also can teach you how to do things on a tight budget and still get great results.

[@thedeepcutpodcast]

This is digital sound

[@Lumibear.]

That was excellent, thanks for making it available.

[@ogmoustachemalefacialcompa3907]

Those computermajiggy thingumies will probably be useful some day.

[@mackjsm7105]

14:30 aaaand it looks NOTHING like him lol

[@yank3656]

thanks for sharing Cinema Garmonbozia

[@fybsi2081]

What in the hell are all the secondary voices in the background of the audio on this video?? So unbelievably annoying.

[@klisher]

That is exactly what i was just going to post. .. really annoying.

[@paulmoadibe9321]

50:28 those are hard disks ! golden age of computers...

[@Clay3613]

Adam Savage used to deliver them to businesses.

[@aussiecoastie72]

Excellent documentary, thank you for uploading this .

[@metafuel]

This was excellent thank you. And Syd Mead is a legend R.I.P. Mr. Mead.

[@lylejohnson7591]

This is what the sound effects people did in the old radio shows.

[@kevinsupreme_ph36yearsago59]

Imagine how advance practical effects were today if cgi wasn't invented.

[@kirksealls1912]

I had a similar thought when watching the film “Ferrari.” If they had done the shunts practically, rather just using CGI, they could have used robotic puppets that would act very realistically under the forces being exerted, just like a person trying in vein to control the car, and separate robotics directly controlling the throttle and brakes, likewise simulating a driver’s inputs. I’m not actually convinced it would have been more expensive than the really poor CGI they ended up with. As it is, the best shunts in a racing movie are probably in the movie “Le Mans” (1971), but in that case you can clearly tell the throttle was fully open during the entire sequence, we could do so much better today. In fact, I’d go so far as to say if Christopher Nolan had made the movie “Ferrari,” he’d have done it properly (with all due respect to Michael Mann)

[@Papallazarou]

This is digital sOUnd!

[@areamusicale]

42:41 "my asshole asshole asshole asshole ..." "this is digital sound" reversed

[@nigelcarren]

Amazing upload thank you! 🏆🇬🇧

[@vizionthing]

Would love to zap back and give a few of these guys a 20 second go with a smartphone

[@geoffok]

Yep, video games are more entertaining and engaging than movies or tv, but they're only for kids. 🙄

[@Gardner1701]

16:56...What movie is that? The one with the blue glowing spheres?

[@macdaddy1149]

Ok did anyone else hear “This is digital sound “ backwards sounds like “My A$$hole has zits” or was it just me?

[@Thoracius]

44:14 anyone know the name of this song?

[@kangawroon]

42:39 when he reverses the sample and it says "my asshole"

[@crapstermcduck6593]

Wtf is this title?!? I can't find it on IMDb and it's driving me mad.

[@nicksmyth8531]

This is digital sound.

[@The_RetroManiac]

42:30 Human.exe has stopped working

[@ipiob]

Chemical Brothers in 42:50

[@yank3656]

thanks for sharing Cinema Garmonbozia

[@1zymn1]

Crazy how much terminology has changed from then to now. Stop-motion and animatronic weren't even terms yet.

[@homersimpson2159]

What the hell you smoking? Those were old terms when this was made smh

[@felipeaquino3782]

I was thinking the same thing.

[@serious_salt22]

27:09 putting this here for my own use 😊

[@DavidSmith-wr6vj]

.......and then there were computers

[@birvanawab7214]

it was superb

[@nameinvalid69]

46:00 he's right you know. 🤣 We are *almost* there. Unreal Engine 5 The Matrix showcase is possibly the most photorealistic real time game as of right now. MS Flight Simulator is also absolute insane nowadays. I don't know if these folks are still here today, they would be absolutely stunned with what we have achieved in visual realism today.

[@wildone106]

14:30 GEEZUZKRIST

[@ianrotten4453]

I lived through this age and these early pioneers really were prophetic! Just look at FS 2020. Just think about 20 years from now... And most of it began with my all-time favorite film, Tron.

[@h0ll0wm9n]

I saw a "Side 1" logo. Was this on LaserDisc?

[@KnightOnBaldMountain]

I love how the sci-fi films of this time ignored the reality of physics. The spacecrafts were luxuriously spacious and their design ignored the reality of mass and propulsion considerations.

[@cadror26]

Aside from King Kong and Star Wars, what other films (starting from 9:10) are shown in this video?

[@1zymn1]

21:39 Wow, that design has hardly changed. Better electronics and features now I'm sure, but they damn well got the design down right away.

[@DarthHater100]

OMG these old school effects are so hokey and fake looking. Millennials can do better effects on our phones than the best effects of previous generations. Were they just too lazy back then to create capable computers? Did people back in these days just have really low standards? I guess before the internet, people must have just been ignorant, and that's the reason they were light years behind the modern generation. If one of us were alive back then, we'd win every best effects Academy Award in like 2 seconds lmao

[@kirksealls1912]

I probably shouldn’t, but I’ll reply to this. I find that more often than not when you see a practical effect that doesn’t look right, it’s usually due to compositing. Compositing is the act of combining multiple different elements into a single video. Originally, this meant elements from multiple different film rolls into a new roll of film, and was accomplished by alternatively blocking off portions of the new film roll from light and exposing other portions of the film to light transmitted through one of the original film rolls. This was incredibly difficult to do well, for a few of reasons: 1) It only worked as well as the mats used, i.e. the physical barriers blocking the light from the film where necessary, and the perfect alignment of those successive mats. Multiple blue screen technologies were developed to produce mats, and Disney probably had the best technology using a yellow screen, but it was too expensive to produce more than one of those cameras, which Disney owned. At times, mats had to be painstakingly hand drawn 2) Film stocks are not 100% consistent, so combining elements without color shifts in the final image was a real challenge 3) The more traditional compositing you do, the more you lower the fidelity of the final film All this changed with digital compositing, which rendered nearly all of these issues moot

[@DarthHater100]

@@kirksealls1912 I don't need someone Boomersplaining things to me that everyone already knows. Your little explanation changes nothing. Yes, I know boomer artists did everything stupidly and it resulted in terrible effects. Explaining the details of how they failed at doing good effects actually illustrates my point. Instead of doing all of that, using rolls of film and mattes, they should have invented a computer to do it for them. If they were smart, like my generation, they would just use computers for compositing and CGI, and their effects wouldn't look so bad. But your generation never thought very far ahead. Always wanting the quick buck, rather than planning for the future and investing in technology that would actually make things easier. If I were alive back then, I'd invent the iPhone in like 2 seconds and rule the planet. Why didn't boomers have the ambition to think of and invent the iPhone? Laziness. Pure laziness.

[@kirksealls1912]

You have increased my vocabulary, @@DarthHater100! I’ve never heard the word “Boomersplaining” before, might have occasion to use it! I’m 35, by the way, I’m just not ignorant

[@xander9956]

15.03

[@jingleskhanaudioproductions]

to put it in the words of MR Spock: "fascinating" this is how it all started.

[@fuerzadataimagenes7810]

I own a CP16 just like that one 21:40

[@RedSiegfried]

People tend to complain a lot about entertainment that is heavy on special effects and light on story but I'd rather have too many special effects than too much woke politics in my entertainment.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

16:30 I think they already had a term for this: “kitbashing”.

[@CurtisAmusements]

Old School. :)

[@brenthaskins1712]

Wow, on a whim I had just a couple of days ago I wanted to find a special effects documentary that I remember watching as a rerun on The Discovery Channel as a kid in the early 90s but didn't know the exact name of. All I could remember was it had a CGI paper airplane sequence, some stop-motion dolls, and an animatronic ape monster & human head. I thought it would be a needle-in-a-haystack Google search, but lo & behold this popped within a few minutes of using various search terms. Not all heroes wear capes. Thank you for uploading this & greatly satisfying a nostalgia trip for me!

[@SagaofaCrew]

A 1980's Science Fiction Cult Film Movie Prop is taken out of cold storage to begin a restoration ======= kzbin.info/www/bejne/mJbGoIqij8Z8ndU

[@bayareaartist999]

1984 is vintage?

[@QuasarRedshift]

wow - very dated . . .

[@stevenholbrook3501]

5 layers for one shot

[@kentcampbell122]

19:25 ... as opposed to times when what the camera shoots isn't the audience's point of view??

[@theswissmiss69]

Kent Campbell 🤔

[@mattd1626]

2:46 Tommy Chong, man.

[@podboq2]

lol

[@topofthemornintoya]

This is the BEST

[@pr0newbie]

Underrated video.

[@erikshure360]

48:00 XD