Official announcement from The Internet ™: these videos of lots of special effects from across the ages are A Thing now. We had one from the Academy themselves and one that was heavy on the recent releases. And now comes a very even-handed one that, while including the genre-obligatory Epic Music, takes us all the way back to 1878, before there even really were movies: it’s an Eadweard Muybridge zoopraxiscope shot you’re seeing.
From there the clip has something from almost every year between then and now, charting the initial reliance on “graphics” in the really very literal sense of things drawn onto film, through the rise of models, stop-motion, clever montage work, elaborate costuming and the like, until computers begin to rear their electronic head with early classics like “Tron” and through to the recent, CGI-rich (or entirely-CGI) work that we now all know so well. Nice work from Jim Casey. Maybe the Academy needs an award for these things? [Wired]
