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This chapter studies the history of the special effects branch of the independent Hollywood service industry. The independent optical and effects business has existed since at least the early 1920s when Frank Williams and Carroll Dunning founded the Williams Composite Laboratories and the Dunning Process Company, respectively, and worked as independent contractors with the studios. In addition to studio and independent feature films, effects houses also worked on commercials, so-called motion graphics logos, and industrial or educational films. Lucas film's special effects wing, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), has been the industry leader in special effects production since about 1980, extensively shaping and defining photorealism. Beginning with Star Wars in 1977, ILM has continued to dominate the special effects industry up to this day with films such as Transformers and Iron Man.

This introduction lays out the case for approaching special effects from a transmedia standpoint, focusing on the unexpected roles they play in building and maintaining the storyworlds of fantastic media franchises and redefining traditional notions of media authorship, performance, and genre. Relevant scholarship on spectacle, film technology and narrative, and transmedia storytelling is reviewed, with an emphasis on the gap between studies of special effects and convergence culture, which this book seeks to fill. An extended discussion of preproduction practices in early cinema and Classical Hollywood provides an alternative framework for understanding special effects as designed imagery. Previews of the book’s chapters conclude the introduction.

This chapter discusses studio-era special effects from the 1930s to the 1960s, and 1970s special effects. The studio era had mostly been concerned with maintaining the more naturalistic “classical” style. Most importantly, special effects in the studio era were achieved as simply, economically, and efficiently as possible. By the 1970s, special effects became conspicuous and a more visible form of special effects emerged. Filmmaking in the 1970s tends to be divided into two periods—the naturalistic “New Wave” period and the spectacular “blockbuster” era. However, filmmakers like Lucas, Coppola, and Spielberg suggest that they saw the turn toward intensified, visible special effects as enabling an alternative style of realism. The technological prominence of special effects in the 1970s eventually transformed almost all the areas of cinematic production.

This book provides a history of the development of special effects, and its significance in cinema and media studies. The book studies 1970s special effects aesthetics, and mid- to late 1970s science fiction and fantasy blockbusters, arguing that “New Hollywood” auteurist filmmaking allowed the filmmakers to fully express their own personal vision through the effects work. Films such as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind led to the development of special effects technology and aesthetic, allowing greater control over the image to better express the filmmaker's “vision,” and the presentation of a highly personalized manifestation of that style. The book also deals with the topic of realism because special effects material is generally designed to match or complement live-action footage.

This chapter examines special effects in the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, industry professionals became increasingly concerned with the audience's experience and the role of cinema in the overall entertainment landscape, as well as the kinds of experiences the movie industry was expected to provide. The popularity of Hollywood blockbusters suggested a demand for more special effects films. The transformation of the film industry following the rise of technology-heavy mode of filmmaking marks a shift in cinematic aesthetics toward greater reliance on postproduction and a composite mise-en-scène. This led to innovations such as Industrial Light & Magic's (ILM) Go-Motion—an updated photorealistic “improvement” of stop motion; the emergence of rival effects companies; and the increase in competition for feature work.

This conclusion considers the larger set of changes confronting cinema and its siblings at this juncture between the analog and digital eras. Restating the book’s central argument that special effects play a central role in negotiating this transition, the conclusion argues in addition that many of these behaviors pass beneath conscious observation, in an ideological effect unique to engineered spectacle. In addition to noting areas the book wasn’t able to touch on for reasons of length, the conclusion discusses questions for further study, sketching a foundation for special-effects scholarship that attends both to their industrial and discursive dimensions as they forge a transmedia landscape.

This chapter examines auteurism and special effects-driven blockbuster filmmaking. Auteurism, an approach to mid-century filmmaking in which a film reflects the director's personal creative vision, was initiated by French critics and filmmakers such as André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, François Truffault and Jean-Luc Godard. George Lucas's and Steven Spielberg's investment in visual filmmaking and graphic dynamics places them among the critically embraced auteurs of the New Hollywood generation, including Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Terrence Malick, and Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas's and Spielberg's 1977 films, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, transformed the parameters of cinematic diegesis in portraying intricately realized fantasy environments rather than fictional settings that simply stage a fantasy narrative. The success of these films initiated a shift toward more special effects-driven filmmaking and had economic outgrowth well beyond the effects business.

With the return of the historical epic to our screens, advances in CGI and digital effects have allowed for even greater (and sometimes cheaper) special effects to return along with them. Matte paintings have given way to blue- and green-screen, models cede to CGI in post-production and casts of thousands yield to crowd-building software which emphasizes “the emergence of the multitude as a collective force in history.” Yet, they can also play an even greater role beyond simple spectacle: they can in some ways be seen as a prime motivation for the epic’s return. Comparing the role of digital effects in Kingdom of Heaven, The Eagle and the remake of Clash of the Titans (2010), this chapter argues that CGI effects of the new epics often serve two functions. Not only do they announce the film’s epic credentials but they also heighten the reality of these epic worlds by a greater degree of spectatorial immersion.

This chapter considers the special effects technology in Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In both films, the postproduction units had to match the principal photography to make all motion look “natural” to the eye, thus exhibiting a photorealist aesthetic. By using motion control, which has been considered as one of the historical breakthroughs of special effects technology, both films' effects were able to provide the sense of acceleration and kineticism. Motion control furthered the notion of what is now called “virtual” camera movement and virtual mise-en-scène by detaching the camera motion from live action. Star Wars, which had the historical advantage of being released a few months earlier than Close Encounters, is usually credited as being the first to use a computer-assisted system to control the camera motion on a feature film.

This chapter studies the production and aesthetic of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Weary of the effects problems from Jaws, Steven Spielberg approached Douglas Trumbull to give him full control of the effects unit of Close Encounters. Spielberg had illustrations and storyboards already drawn up when he met with Trumbull for the first time, so Trumbull's job was to work out how to present them in the mise-en-scène. Trumbull's special effects realize the rather generalized thematic motif of light as enlightenment and insight in the script, which lends the light materialized substance and significance in the overall film. The strong graphic and kinetic properties of Close Encounters' effects were meant to add value to the overall impact of the film, not just invisibly supplement it.

This concluding chapter discusses the legacy of the 1970s special effects. Special effects technology enabled filmmakers to provide alternate world possibilities, prompting moviegoers to think about the world's transformation or alteration. Recent critics' dislike for excessive use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in “over-animated” action films suggests the extent to which the original context, in which optical animation was conceived, has been largely forgotten. Many filmmakers quickly used technology to convey the negative potential for over-technologization to express pessimism and dystopia. However, films such as Zodiac and There Will Be Blood followed the style of 1970s filmmaking. Critic Mark Harris suggests that many still prefer 1970s photorealism, and that the novelty of physics-defying CGI has begun to wear out. Recent films like Avatar and Gravity show that 1970s filmmakers' goal to have complete aesthetic control over all aspects of the composite mise-en-scène have been realized.

The conclusion makes a case that, generally speaking, the 1970s films are, in effect, more “disturbing,” both politically and aesthetically, than the 2000s remakes. The remakes tend out to be more “incoherent” politically than the films of the 1970s, while forming a more coherent body of films in terms of aesthetics. The chapter then takes up the often made suggestion of critics and filmmakers alike that the technical and financial limitations of the independent horror movies of the 1970s make them all the more effective by looking at several pragmatic aspects: cinematography, special effects and acting. In short, the added contingencies that went into the actual filmmaking process seem to have added to their “disturbing” quality.

Chapter 4 discusses the musical underscore in The Wizard of Oz. Contemporary discourse on the musical soundtrack has emphasized its role in underscoring—literally and figuratively—the film’s extraordinary content, often stressing its “special” and “effect”-like qualities. Studio publicists plugged the score’s idiosyncratic length and complexity, and Herbert Stothart also drew connections between music and elaborate illusions: “music and sound must be highly imaginative, unreal while super-realistic. Here sounds must stir the fantasy. . . . The difficulty is to blend music and the special sound effects.” Elsewhere Stothart averred that the striking hues of Technicolor warranted special musical treatment. From studio records, contemporary newspaper accounts, the conductor’s score, and the film itself, musical gestures are identified in the underscore that work as and in tandem with special effects.

Informed with how modelling practices take place, positions in model theory have revised too simplistic syntactic or semantic views. Analogously, it is now necessary to recognize that also the relationship between the data from the computational models and their sensualization is non-trivial either. ‘Visualization’ is often praised, but naturalized and thus overlooked in its structuring or creative potential. The present approach reveals the complex situation in ‘visualized’ simulations; there is no such thing as a simple equivalent between the calculated data and its depiction. Especially for the scenic rendering of the process it is necessary to develop relationships between the dynamics and the form in the first instance. The reason why the form is needed lies in the simple fact that dynamics have to be embodied in order to be perceivable. On a very basic level we can say that time and space enter into negotiations.

In this chapter, Paul Wells argues that the literal and metaphorical developments of animation in the twenty-first century allow ‘virtual histories’ to be constructed from the subjective and relative contexts of the contemporary period. He examines special effects in animations and controversial works such as Edouard Salieri’s short film Flesh (2006), which juxtaposes images of the 9/11 terrorist attacks with images drawn from the booming pornography industry, as well as more mainstream animations such as the two Ice Age films (2002, 2005) and Happy Feet (2006), which struck a more conventional liberal-ecological note. He looks beyond the shift from Disney’s classical 2D aesthetic to Pixar’s 3D computer imagery, and argues that 21st-century animation has become a richly nuanced language, incorporating metamorphosis, fabrication, symbol and metaphor, and interweaving memory, history and fabrication to challenge the dominant ideological myths of the day.

Garner Simmons’s essay meticulously details the preparations that Peckinpah and his crew went through, from the rewriting of the script to the work of The Wild Bunch’s wardrobe supervisor, coscriptwriter, and various other personnel, making it clear how Peckinpah remolded and reshaped the material, sometimes on the fly, to realize his dramatic vision.

This concluding chapter cites Michael Gondry's film, Mood Indigo (2013), in presenting the pitched battle raging constantly in matters concerning cinema and between attraction and narration. Being a driving force in the genealogy of the medium, this tension has been revived, in this day and age, in several critics' discussion of the film. The attractional effect produced by special effects, undermining the narrative economy parallels the tension between the homochrone and the heterochrone. In cinema, the homochrone reinforces the overloading of the special effect, in which viewers have no control. The digital world and its boundless possibilities are fascinating, but such a fascination must not compromise the rigor of one's research. However, digital technology makes it possible to fuse the two systems of artistic interpretation and total representation. This spirit of convergence gives birth to the concept of animage.