Great practical effects in film

With Avengers:IW about to release I’m sure we’re going to get some incredible CGI. But I miss practical special effects, stop motion creatures, animatronics, and other old school so
special effects.

This thread is for calling them out.

Watching Superman:The Movie now, and I have to say the diamond shaped thing that captures Zod and crew at the beginning is so cool.

If I explained it simply it would sound dumb. A flat screen TV comes and captures them and flies off. But the way they filmed it was brilliant. Black starless sky, white glowing planet. Thing swooping in, tumbling as it turns and showing its two dimensional and shiny. It lands on them and then they are projected in it, a medium close shot of the three of them yelling. It takes off, flipping and spinning into space. Their proportions makes no sense but it’s striking and memorable. Something just beautiful about that sequence and it works visually and as a metaphor. Imprisoned in a spinning 2D space jail.

Phantom Zone!

I mean, Ray Harryhausen’s work–especially in Clash of the Titans in 1981–has to be mentioned, right?

Yeah, the Medusa sequence is brilliant. So well-paced, so tense.

The Thing (1982) had legendary practical effects work.

Also, for pre-CGI awesomeness, it’s tough to beat Stan Winston’s massive Alien Queen puppet.

The behind-the-scenes stuff on Blade Runner is pretty cool, too. Here’s the Tyrell Building model under construction:

And anyone who loves old school VFX should check out the Alien making-of doc in the Quadrilogy set. It’s basically a film school unto itself. Loads of cool tricks, like the fact that the little flutter of movement visible in the translucent egg is Ridley Scott’s hands wearing white gloves!

The magician’s best tricks are inexplicable ones.

The porgs were puppets?

The best thing about the Medusa fight as a kid was the blood that ooooozes out of her limp snake body when Perseus cuts her head off. That was the grossest special effect I had ever seen at Bart’s age when us kids saw a bootleg VHS copy of clash of the Titans.

As an adult, I have to say that it’s way more impressive than y’all think. That sequence is beyond mere mortal men. It’s Harryhausen’s absolute peak.

It’s the lighting that makes it so good. It’s all set to fucking flickering fucking firelight. It must have been a nightmare to stop motion that. I would have loved to have been on set watching him play with lights and armatures and whatnot.

Yes, Clash of the Titans! That’s the movie that started my fascination with movie effects.

I wish I had a photo of my bedroom in high school. One wall was covered in a collage of cutouts I made from Fangoria magazine featuring gruesome monsters and gore effects. Sickles through necks, Pumpkinhead, a whole section for H.R. Giger. And a Hellraiser videostore cardboard standee featuring a life-size Pinhead standing in the corner of my room. My mom loved it.

Some of my favorites:

Re-Animator - the decapitated head on the post-it spike, the undead cat corpse, and the bonesaw through the torso (copious fake blood and raw ground beef shoved through the hole)
Prince of Darkness - rising out of bed with the burned skin and blonde ponytail
The Serpent and the Rainbow - skeleton bride with distended jaw and snake writhing out
American Werewolf in London - the gold standard in werewolf transformations
Poltergeist - lots of memorable effects but the bathroom ‘tearing off his face’ scene changed my life
Halloween III - Season of the Witch - the face-eating masks
The Fly - I’d refer you to the titular fly
Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (co-written by Frank Darabont dontchya know!) the vein marionette or the tv that sprouts arms
Total Recall - tiered face mask
Robocop - windshield goo

OHMYGOD, WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO THOSE POOR THINGS???

-Tom

Everything done by Stan Winston and his study. He brought dinosaurs to life.

SciFi best in class: The Fountain

I think my favorite example of stop-motion is Phil Tippett’s go-motion work in Dragonslayer

He was 29 when he made that. He’d go on to do the AT-AT/AT-ST animations in ESB and RotJ as well as the ED-209 in Robocop. He also did this quick and dirty stop motion animatic for Jurassic Park.

Yeah, I wanted to say just that after my girlfriend and I watched Gremlins and Gremlins 2 fairly recently. I heard that the puppets were so valuable (five digit figures each) that all cast and crew and their vehicles had to be checked before leaving the sites. We couldn’t believe just how articulate they were and en masse it was mightily impressive.

The film that really caught me off guard was Fright Night which I only watched for the first time in the last few years. Wow, the practical effects in that were amazing and still look fantastic today.

…Yep.

I mean, you’re the FXpert here, but according to the puff press piece that porg picture came from, at some points the puppets were articulated and performed. Aside from the CGI replacement for the puffins. The Star Wars sequels have had a lot of practical creature effects, in addition to the CGI.

I just this last weekend watched Alien with my daughter, she loved it. It holds up super well, a fact she noted and was floored when I pointed out the movie is nearly 40 years old. We had a small conversation about practical effects and she walked away having a good respect for them, I think. She’s super excited for Aliens now, too!

Well, I haven’t seen the movie yet, but a buddy of mine has a Porg on his reel (the trailer shot in the Falcon), and he’s a digital animator, not a puppeteer. Maybe they used a bit of both, but if the CGI Porgs are in back-to-back shots the consistency would be difficult to maintain; but then again, there are scores of films where you go from a live action plodding dude to suddenly defying gravity and doing crazy stuff , some of it terribly jarring, so who knows.

All that said it is fairly standard now to make an elaborate puppetted model that ‘acts’ on set that will be completely replaced later in CGI. They’re useful for getting actor’s eyeline correct, give an accurate idea of the space it fills in frame, lighting reference, sometimes it even helps inform the actor and create a back and forth performance that would be wooden without it. Other times where money is to be saved or shooting is furious they might just print out life size images on cardboard and cut it out.

The Power-Loader fight from Aliens.

Or really the entirety of the visual design of Ridley Scott’s original ALien.

It’s not a great film, but I’ve always found it fascinating that almost all of the effects work in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula were captured in camera. Such an insane amount of work to do that, but it looks great and surreal.

More recently, Nolan of course does wonderful practical work in his films, with both stunts and effects. The truck flip in Dark Knight, the hotel hallway fight in Inception - great stuff. And Miller’s usage of real vehicles as often as possible for much of Fury Road makes that film look far more amazing than an alternate universe version where they just CGI’d everything like most other directors would have done.

I’m super excited for her! Let us know how she gets on with it. Alien used to be my favourite but these days it’s Aliens. It blows me away on so many levels.