Today with computerization putting something other worldly on the big screen is easy,but some decades ago it was a chore,such as the famous[Parting Of The Red Sea]scene in The Ten Commandments,legend has it that it took all the technology in Hollywood to make it work,and it still looks good today as does Alfred Hitchcock's[The Birds] or the famous train crash from[The Greatest Show On Earth]...what cha got?
Some of the physical stunts ( I know it is not the same as a SFX) from Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies of the 1920's to this day make wonder how on earth did they do that.
The destruction of San Francisco in the 1906 earthquake shown in the 1936 Clark Gable/Jeanette MacDonald movie of the same name, San Francisco, has always seemed remarkably realistic to me.
Easy, the "Twister" from "THE WIZARD OF OZ." J. A. G.'s idea of using a nylon stocking was so perfect.
John Carpenter's THE THING looked very good on the Blu-ray I watched. Presumably this film was the limit of what could be done with pneumatic [sic?] makeup and puppetry. I'll argue that with the exception of a few snippets, the stunt work in THE ROAD WARRIOR looks far better and more realistic than MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.
2001... Not only the model shots, but specifically the flight instrumentation on the lunar shuttle. It's the landing scene with Ed Bishop as the captain. They didn't use CRT's - the displays look like something that could be in use now.
A technically modest but emotionally very effective scene in an otherwise rather stagey film. The arrival of the Heavenly Train in the Hollywood version of Liliom (1930) FF to 1:07:26
Toward the beginning of "Citizen Kane," the camera that moves down onto a model of the "El Rancho" nightclub where Susan Alexander is singing -- and actually breaks the sign, which was rigged to split apart! -- only then for the film to dissolve into an interior shot of the nightclub. I learned about that from Roger Ebert in his class on "Kane" at the Virginia Film Festival.
Not really a special effect, but this may be the greatest camera shot I have ever seen. Tracking the funeral in I Am Cuba (1964)
I was surprised watching that Spielberg documentary, when they showed his childhood film-making; how smart he was, even back then, to show the light reflecting off his actors who were watching the UFO go by!
Virtually everything about both "Forbidden Planet" and "War Of The Worlds" hold up, visually, incredibly well to this day, especially considering both are from the fifties. No CGI, just FX done remarkably.
I Am Cuba - Wikipedia In another scene, the camera follows a flag over a body, held high on a stretcher, along a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four storeys until it is filming the flagged body from above a building. Without stopping, it then starts tracking sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a rear window where the cigar workers are watching the procession. The camera finally passes through the window and appears to float along over the middle of the street between the buildings. These shots were accomplished by the camera operator having the camera attached to his vest—like an early, crude version of a Steadicam—and the camera operator also wearing a vest with hooks on the back. An assembly line of technicians would hook and unhook the operator's vest to various pulleys and cables that spanned floors and building roof tops.
A bunch of stuff in Wizard of Oz is absolutely iconic and beautiful to look at: the Wicked Witch's "Surrender Dorothy," the glowing crystal balls, Almira Gulch on the bicycle, and don't forget the "All-Powerful Wizard of Oz's" throne room. That scared the crap out of me -- well, maybe a little bit -- as a tiny tot. Yes, even the "ID Monster" looks terrific. My poor Krell! I can remember getting creeped out by the monster's footprints "appearing" on the ground, and it took me several years before I figured it out. I read every single book on special effects in the library (and then some) by the time I was 12, and bought a few more. I just about memorized Raymond Fielding's Techniques of Special Effects, which was a classic book on the VFX techniques of the 1960s and early 1970s. I'm in the process of going through every single classic 1930s/1940s/1950s Universal Horror film in the Blu-ray boxed set, and I was floored by how good the effects were in Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein. They still hold up surprisingly well, though Lon Chaney Jr.'s werewolf transformations are terrible (though I concede the degree of difficulty they were attempting was incredible). The work John Fulton did on the Invisible Man was astonishing, too, given how primitive the resources were at that time.
Forbidden Planet War Of The Worlds Wizard of Oz The Time Machine Probably a dozen titles from the late 60's up to start of film making with Méliès theatrical tricks on film, some inside the camera with double exposure.
Stone-cold classics, every one. Beyond criticism. They also work very well just as films: the stories and characters hold up surprisingly well. I would add a personal favorite of mine that often gets left out, which was Universal's big-budget This Island Earth (which preceded Forbidden Planet by a year). I really like that film, and it's one of the rare 1950s sci-fi films that I swear feels about 20 minutes too short. But the effects are really good. And I still want an Interocitor... One day, all films will be released in a triangular aspect ratio!
The Back to the future trilogy invented some breathtaking VFX tech and gave us incredibly impressive scenes like this
Yes, I got to talk to an ILM technician around 1990, and I said, "hey, this article explained that you guys had digitally removed wires from this flying skateboard scene. How the hell did you do that and then get it back to film?" And he grinned and said, "ah, you noticed that. Well, if I told you, I would have to kill you." But he said they had a process -- a very slow one -- to take short film segments, scan them to digital, change them, then render them back to film. I was floored, because nobody had ever done this before. This was miraculous stuff in 1990, a thousand times better than kinescopes had been in the decades before. All three Back to the Future movies still hold up, and they wrung every bit they could out of every time-travel element possible. Now, we look back and you can see the difference in picture quality if you look for it. But it was still a breakthrough technique. The "water tentacle" in The Abyss (1989) was a massive breakthrough effect since it was the first time a living creature had been composited in 3-dimensional space in a scene with real-life humans. This eventually led to the CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in 1993, and the impact of that movie on the visual effects business was extremely destructive: traditional miniature effects and optical effects were rendered (no pun intended) obsolete overnight, and thousands of people and hundreds of companies went out of business over the next 4-5 years. But the smart companies were able to transition to digital effects and stayed alive. Still a very tough business, even today. One thing I'm really impressed with are background effects you're not supposed to notice, like the massive amount of composites and rear-projection in Citizen Kane. The glass paintings and transitions and stuff going on in that film are astonishing. I see something new every time I watch it, and to me, that film still holds up very well today.
