Technology..who needs it?

TECHNOLOGY? WHO NEEDS IT.

Remember when?

Growing up watching films from the 60’s and70’s as a kid I remember first seeing such blockbusters as Jaws and Star Wars like a million other kids of the era I was awestruck. I stayed up late and watched UHF transmissions of Toho films, watching with eyed enthusiasm as Godzilla, the brown and green Garguantuas, Rodan, Mothra and their kin stomp the hell out of Osaka and Tokyo (or their miniature equivalent).

Realism wasn’t necessary to draw you into the fantasy. Computers and digital high tech didn’t exist when Spielberg and Lucas first started making names for themselves as filmmakers but the success of their work became the harbinger of the technology which has ushered i

Ray Harryhausen created most of his amazing illusions single handedly with a rear projector screen, footage of the day’s dailies and one or two of his stop motions models. And whiz!.. bam! In a few months, an action sequence!!!. Harryhausen’s films were created at a time when fantasy wasn’t really the king of the roost. Science fiction and fantasy were considered aberrations and B-movie drivel by critics and audiences alike. Occasionally big studio productions would emerge that would receive positive notice from the America’s top critic’s. George Pal’s War of The Worlds and Forbidden Planet were just two examples of A list fantasy from an era when such things were often laughed at and ignored. Technology changed all that. Now the top grossing films of all times are primarily in the fantasy or science fiction realm.

The pre-digital age films had a charm to them. These films had a handmade kind of feel to them and the effects and matte paintings had a wonderful aesthetic quality to them that you cant really describe to someone born pre 1980’s. I think it’s easy to look back at some of these older films and laugh at their crudeness. But when you consider the budget and technology limitations of the pre-digital age, you begin to appreciate the art and creativity behind them. Back then artists were really artists.

So many of these illusions required the skills of engineers, photographers and even scientists to bring them to life. Off the shelf solutions that are common in the digital age didn’t exist. Problem solving was always a competent of the methodology in the pre-digital age.

When you watch David Naughton transform himself into the devil dog from hell in John Landis’ cult classic American Werewolf in London, you feel every bone-crunching bit of his metamorphosis. Rick Baker and his crew were unable to show the wolf creature full frame as a quadruped due to restrictions of the technology at the time so the director showed the creature running from the head to mid section only. The effects team used a “wheel barrel set up to move the actor in the suit so he appeared to move as a four legged creature. Using clever editing and quick cutting solved thhe issue. Problem solving was a director’s prerogative. It kept them on their toes. Now it seems like digital tools have made filmmakers lazy.

Sometimes the most effective effects are always the ones that you never see. When Spielberg had difficulty with the mechanical shark built by Robert Mattey, he decided to shoot around it until

Editing together with Verna Fields he discovered that not showing the shark in the first hour of the film was far more effective and suspenseful. The now opening of the film is a classic example of letting the viewer fill in the blanks for maximum effect.

Digital effects have opened the door wide open for filmmakers and producers to create anything they can image. That can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on your point of view. From a strictly economic perspective, digital tools can save time and money, create imagery that can be change with relative ease, create armies of digital actors to fill in crowds without having to pay for extras.  However, digital effects often look mechanical and soulless. Directors often over do effects sequences making action sequences extremely overlong and redundant simply to show off the technology or to create time filler. Either way, the sheen comes off fairly quickly.

Illusions are no longer eye openers. They don’t make your jaw drop open like I remember so vividly when I first viewed the “Stargate” sequence when I saw 2001: a space odyssey at the Cinerama dome in Hollywood.  I recall seeing Terminator 2 in a movie theatre in Boston. In the scene when Arnold’s robotic protector blasts huge holes in the liquid metal T-1000. A quick shot showed the holes liquefying and sealing up, a remember a loud gasp from the woman sitting behind me. That was a sounding horn of the new age. Digital was here to stay. Since then we have had dinosaurs, dragons, trolls, great apes, goblins and every manner of magical creature that would never been possible before the implementation of computers.

But nothing since the dawn of the digital age has made me gasp in awe since I first saw the fighting skeleton army of Jason and Argonauts, the universe opening up in a barrage of mystical colors in 2001: a space odyssey, the monster from the ID breaking through the invisible force field in Forbidden Planet, the alien war ships destroying Los Angeles in War of the Worlds. This was my eye candy. These are the images that will stay with me forever. I can’t really remember much of what I saw last week at the theatre.