Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from
digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies,
yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated
imagery to ...enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of
digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism
invented by Hollywood-by one company specifically: Industrial Light
& Magic.
The Empire of Effects shows how the effects company
known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star
Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital
realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique
from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares,
wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that
called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of
digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the
opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on
tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were
accustomed. ILM's style, on display in the most successful films of
the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were
forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own
success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but
one player among many.
Plastic reality Turnock, Julie A
2015., 20150203, 2015, 2014-08-01
eBook
Julie A. Turnock tracks the use and evolution of special effects in 1970s filmmaking, a development as revolutionary to film as the form's transition to sound in the 1920s. Beginning with the ...classical studio era's early approaches to special effects, she follows the industry's slow build toward the significant advances of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which set the stage for the groundbreaking achievements of 1977. Turnock analyzes the far-reaching impact of the convincing, absorbing, and seemingly unlimited fantasy environments of that year's iconic films, dedicating a major section of her book to the unparalleled innovations of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She then traces these films' technological, cultural, and aesthetic influence into the 1980s in the deployment of optical special effects as well as the "not-too-realistic" and hyper-realistic techniques of traditional stop motion and Showscan. She concludes with a critique of special effects practices in the 2000s and their implications for the future of filmmaking and the production and experience of other visual media.
In special effects scholarship, the transformation of the "trick man" to "special effects artist" is a commonplace cliché. However, examining professional and journalistic discourse of the 1910s and ...1920s reveals that these terms and several others were actively debated in effects circles, in order to raise their professional standing and attract more specialized work.
This article describes the participation of West Coast experimental filmmakers in the special effects industry of the 1970s and 1980s. I argue that although individuals working on films such asStar ...Warshad limited influence over the production, experimental filmmaking approaches to kineticism, the illusion of movement, and allover design of the film frame helped special effects practice remake fictional screen space in mainstream feature filmmaking.
This article describes the participation of West Coast experimental filmmakers in the special effects industry of the 1970s and 1980s. I argue that although individuals working on films such as Star ...Wars had limited influence over the production, experimental filmmaking approaches to kineticism, the illusion of movement, and allover design of the film frame helped special effects practice remake fictional screen space in mainstream feature filmmaking.
Rather than duplicating a transhistorical notion of "“perceptual realism"” based on the phenomenal world, contemporary digital imaging imitates the look of photography -– specifically, the look of ...1970s cinematography. This is largely due to the historical dominance of one special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which developed a photorealistic special effects aesthetic to match the live action photography of the originaol Star Wars trilogy. Over time, that particular aesthetic hardened into a powerfully convincing house style. Given the prominence of ILM in the film industry, denaturalizing the ILM aesthetic is crucial to understanding how digital images evoke "“authenticity"” or "“veracity"”.
This paper provides a rejoinder to Industrial Light and Magic's (ILM) rather triumphalist story of its 'rebel' origins. First of all, the paper describes the independent Hollywood optical, title, and ...effects houses in the late 1960s and early 1970s - an industrial history that does not exist in either academic or popular accounts. The independents provided the training ground for much of the future ILM team on Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) and other special effects-heavy blockbusters of the late 1970s and through the 1980s such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977) and Blade Runner (Scott, 1982). By paying proper attention to the industrial context of special effects in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, a surprising stylistic history emerges that reveals that today's special effect aesthetic (which is primarily the ILM aesthetic), typically called 'photorealism', is as much of a style as any other, with stylistic components that can be identified, analyzed, and most importantly, denaturalized. Further, I argue that the style of photorealism as practiced by ILM includes surprising components-based counterintuitively in 'anti-realistic' styles, such as commercial graphics, experimental animation, and stop-motion animation. (Author abstract)
CONCLUSION Turnock, Julie A
The Empire of Effects,
06/2022
Book Chapter
Delineating the contours of the ILM aesthetic is important to denaturalizing it so that it does not go by unnoticed. However, one must also recognize the ideological implications of a style of ...realism in popular cinema that clings so tightly to a 1970s New Hollywood model. What does it mean that for most effects practitioners and filmmakers their unthinking notion of perceptual realism is (a version of) 1970s New Hollywood realism? And how does this connect to the future of ILM in the context of the Disney conglomeration?
The ILM house aesthetic was originally conceived as a way to photorealistically
