As hard as it may be for many of the below-twenty crowd to believe, there indeed was a time, long gone by, when computers as we know them didn’t even exist. Yes.  There was such a time.  And during those times, effects for movies were done the old fashioned way, through extensive use of miniatures and camera tricks.

Citizen Kane is probably one of the most celebrated movies of all time, and rightfully so, as it was a groundbreaking achievement, not only cinematically, but also technically as well.  A device called the Optical Printer was used on the film, to achieve several shots that director Orson Wells wanted for the movie.

You might call it the forerunner of the compositing programs used today, It was used back then mostly to enlarge or transfer film, but it could also allow a user to combine film images, and as Citizen Kane proved,  combine them to great effect.

When Star Wars was released in 1977 (The year yours truly was born as well) it met with instant box office success.  Back then motion control was still in its infancy, and all of the effects shots involving space battles were done with scale models. 

In fact there was no other way to go back then, if you needed to shoot a space fight you shot models hanging on strings against a black background painted with stars.  Some models would be rigged to explode and the laser fire would be added later on.

Now, what exactly is the point of this little history lesson?  Why go through three paragraphs on how good Citizen Kane was as a movie, or how low-tech by today’s standards the technology used in Star Wars was?  The point is simply this: Even today not everything has to be done in CG.

But, some may ask, why not?

In contrast to the first Star Wars, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace featured dozens of digital space fighters shooting each other down and armies of computer generated battle droids marching along, happily exterminating equally computer generated Gungan warriors who, well, were not really very happy about it at the time.

Exciting, stuff?  Of course.  But consider the fact that Return of he Jedi had dozens of cute Ewoks live on set, actual marching Storm Troopers and miniature ships, ships and speeders, and till today I still find that more of a fun movie than Episode I.  

Actually, a lot of Star Wars fans I know would say so.

True, being able to build things and make things happen in a computer is a great thing, no argument here.  I wouldn’t be in this industry if I didn’t think so.       If you look at the big effects movies of the past five to ten years, I seriously doubt that there was one that didn’t have something computer generated in them.  Even  a movie like Forest Gump, which wasn’t all a fantasy or sci-fi, had a CG ping-pong ball going back and forth between Forest and an opposing ping pong player.

While computer graphics are great, hands down on that fact, there are still things to be said about doing things the “old fashioned” way, using miniatures, camera tricks, guys in rubber suits, puppets and such.

The question now is: To CG or not to CG? That’s right, In a twist on Hamlet’s age-old question to himslef, “To CG, or not to CG?”

It may surprise some people that there are still a LOT of effects out there that aren’t computer generated.  There are a lot of ways to get an effect without using computer graphics.

One would be with the use of puppets.  I mean really, puppets and muppets have their appeal, and their advantages.  I remember there was a large group of people who were against the idea of Yoda being all digital.

While some scenes from Spiderman 2 were completely CG, with digital buildings, a digital Spidey and a Digital Doc Oc, there were also plenty of shots where Doctor Octopus’ tentacles were actual and being controlled by puppeteers.  The Aliens in Alien Vs. Predator as well, were predominantly puppets being controlled from off-screen.

Then there are always camera tricks.  Anyone remember the Knight bus careening pell-mell through London in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaben?  It was a great, sequence, one where I thought the bus itself was CG. 

In the shot where the bus has to squeeze between two double-deckers, it is CG, obviously. 

But for the rest they crew actually constructed a triple-decker Knight Bus.  It was said to be so tall that it wouldn’t fit under the bridges in London and they had to take it a part and put it back together again when they had to move shooting locations.

To make it look like it was speeding around London, it was driven at normal speed, and stunt drivers around it were driving at about a third or normal, in other words at a snail’s pace.  And when the film was sped up, all the surrounding traffic appeared to be moving normally and the bus appears to be travelling at hyperspeed.

And then there are miniatures.  In an interesting trend in a time when digital effects are running rampant on the big as well as the small screens, the old-school technique of model-building in Hollywood has never been stronger.

Take for instance the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  All three parts were awarded accolades for best visual effects, and yet not everything in the movie wasdigital.  In fact, a large portion of the shots were not. 

Oh sure, the hundred thousand charging orcs and uruk-hai warriors and the noble elves standing their ground were created in MAYA and animated using Massive, WETA’s self-developed crowd-control software. But for some bird’s eye view shots, Helm’s Deep, the fortress city of Rohan in the second movie was one massive (I just couldn’t resist the pun, hehehe...) miniature.

And when I say massive, I mean huge, as far as miniatures go. 

Actually, so were the towers of Baradur in Mordor and Orthanc in Isengard.  Sometimes, for practical purposes and even for aesthetic purposes, digital may not be the way to go.

Which brings me to another reason to why models are still popular for visual effects nowadays.  They’re needed.  Miniatures are needed, not only to be on-screen, but also to be scanned and used to generate digital versions.  It’s a lot quicker to scan a castle than it is to build one from scratch in a computer.

You can email the author at Broadbandbm@yahoo.com