Though they may seem a recent phenomenon, special-effects driven movies have been with us since the dawn of cinema. From the moment filmmakers realized that the camera and the editing room offered the ...

The year is 2023 and this summer saw the release of many massive tent poles with insanely high budgets and an army of visual effects artists working on countless shots. So why do almost all of them ...

When people talk about the magic of cinema, they’re usually not referring to monologues. More often than not, it’s the awe-inspiring visuals and imaginary worlds brought to life that give the phrase ...

It’s true, on the most elemental level, that all one really needs to “make a movie” is a camera and a subject to point it at. Since the advent of the motion picture camera, people have been capturing ...

George Lucas looks at the Death Star. (Sunset Boulevard / Getty) Ever since I read media scholar Julie Turnock’s The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism, I haven’t ...

It was a typical day on the set of Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and a dead mime was screaming. The most unsettling problem? The actor‘s tongue still had a visible and decidedly not-ghostly ...

F0r almost as long as there have been movies in theaters, there’s been a need for special visual effects to bring them to life. However, it wasn’t until 1938 that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts ...