Hacker Cinema
Movie Magic
1994 · TV series · documentary · 30 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Gary R. Benz, Stephen Rocha, Lise Romanoff
Documentary series dealing with every aspect of special effects in movies, from low-budget make-up to multi-million-dollar computer-generated graphics. The clear presentation includes descriptions of the creation and technical problems of the effects, and interviews with effects technicians, directors, stars and other crew. Each episode deals with one topic, effect or technician (eg theme park rides, CGI, Stan Winston), concentrating on one or more current or recent films.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
2 comments on Hacker News
This was on the TV show Movie Magic ages and ages ago, but they certainly never went into this much depth and backstory. This is a great writeup.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing. It's amazing how many novel techniques went into the film. I haven't seen it yet, but looking forward to it.
One of my favorite TV shows as a kid was Movie Magic. Back in the 90s, most effects were practical, rather than CG, and it was interesting to learn about the various techniques used to achieve the results. From matte paintings, foley sounds and miniature sets, to animatronics and pyrotechnics. There were entire industries dedicated to this, which were replaced—practically overnight—by computers.
While there was a rough patch of awful CGI in the 90s and 00s, and the tech has certainly come a long way since then, even today, a discerning viewer can still tell CGI apart from live action.
I feel like we lost some of that "magic" in the process.
Consider the animatronics used in Jurassic Park[1] and Free Willy 2[2]. They might be crude, stiff and surely very laborious and expensive to build, but the result on screen was much more impressive than today's state of the art CGI. Maybe we've been saturated and take VFX for granted today, but it's a shame that some of these practical effects didn't continue to improve, and are rarely used in modern films.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Fv3tQm_Os
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdzksxe4rio