VFX is a trade with a rich history of innovation and spectacle. In this miniseries, we’ll expose some of the core practices of a bygone age in bite-size pieces.
Rear Projection
How did they put actors in crazy locations before green screens came along? Rear projection was the answer that early filmmakers came up with. As the name suggests, rear projection involves projecting images or video footage behind a subject. This subject could be a person, animal, or vehicle. One common use of rear projection was for shots that involved a moving vehicle. Filming people in a moving vehicle can be very difficult. Particularly as many cars in that time did have a roof. This meant that filming in one of these vehicles would be dusty, loud, and dangerous. Wouldn’t it be great to just be able to film these scenes indoors. You could get a car inside, but what about the road and other surroundings?
Using rear projection, they could project videos recorded on the road onto a screen behind the car. Because these films were often black and white, no color matching was necessary and this trick worked really well. Next time you watch an old movie, look out for this illusion.
Miniatures.
How do you explode a block of buildings safely and without going bankrupt? Some early pioneers in filmmaking had a genius answer to that question; build a miniature city. Have you ever seen a kit for a small model car, boat, or plane. These can be found in many stores and often have a huge amount of detail. Filmmakers can use models like these and other types of models to create entire cities. Once you have a tiny town, you can do almost anything you want with it. Floods, fire, explosions, earthquakes, and more can be created. If you capture these mini sets with the right camera lens, they look like they’re full-scale.