Of particular importance in movie-making

So, a couple of weeks ago, I saw Inception on Friday, and then Resident Evil: Afterlife the day after.

For those of you who don't follow box office trends, Inception has been the most successful movie this Summer in terms of box office sales and reviews.  As for Resident Evil: Afterlife, it's topped the box office for the weekend it came out.  Both of these movies are wildly different in many regards, save for a few.  Among these few similarities is something that has been common in movie-making for many decades now.  What I refer to is special effects; a key part in the movie-making process.

Special effects aren't solely limited to computer animation (also known as Computer Graphic Imaging, or by its abbreviated form, CGI).  Among the varying effects you'll see in a movie are explosives and pyrotechnics (think of any Arnold Schwarzenegger film); wirework, which most have seen in movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Matrix trilogy; as well as sound, which entails more than you would think. Cleaning up an actor's voice, as well as any sounds of crashes, punches, gunshots, screaming, and more, in order for the sounds and voices to be heard in excellent quality.  You wouldn't want to watch a movie where the actor is interrogating someone, and his voice is muffled as if speaking into a pillow.

Since the beginning of the millennium, most movie-goers have become accustomed to more special effects in the movies they see. Even live-action comedies have incorporated computer animation into the finished product. However, this wasn't always the case. Going back as far as twenty years ago, computer animation was a technical breakthrough, and pyrotechnics, stunt doubles, explosives, puppeteering, and mechanical props all increased the amount of time and money put into making a movie, usually pushing the boundaries of creativity and that picture's budget. Such examples of big budget movies that followed this formula are Jaws, ET, Back to the Future, and Tron. It wasn't until 1993, when Jurassic Park was released in theaters, that audiences saw what computer animation could bring to a movie-going experience.

Interestingly enough, there's evidence that, if not for one man's vision, special effects and movie-making in general, would have turned out quite different. Back in 1976, a young film maker who just graduated from film school named George Lucas worked alongside a dedicated production crew, as well as noteworthy and young actors in an effort to make a sci-fi epic called Star Wars. Dealing with constraints from the British Screen Actors Guild, budgetary problems due to financing from 20^th Century Fox, as well as expenses for props, filming locations, and the normal issues of film-making, he created a movie that was expected to fail, due to competing in the Summer movie bracket of 1977 with “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

Yet, perhaps due to the subject matter of good versus evil and self-discovery, or the appeal to all ages, or because of technical and special effects work, or even due to being an upbeat movie after the end of the Vietnam War, it not only was a huge success, it spawned two sequels over the next six years, as well as a line of toys, commercial success, and gaining instant recognition for the actors playing the main characters.

During the making of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, George Lucas and his production crew refined techniques and utilized new ways of stage setup, sound and rigging, and special effects that ultimately became the effects studios Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. After 1983, these two effects studios were involved in virtually every film being made by major Hollywood studios, and their influence has been seen in such ground-breaking movies as Tron, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Toy Story, Independence Day, up to recent special effects powerhouses, such as Transformers, Cloverfield, Iron Man, and Avatar.