![]() O’Brien’s effects were complicated on an unprecedented scale, and the movie pioneered the use of the optical printer for compositing shots, so that foreground imagery, live-action footage, stop-motion animation, and backgrounds could be shot on separate strips of film and later combined into a single image. If fakes, they were masterpieces.”Īll Hollywood blockbusters of today owe something to King Kong (1933). After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle showed a test reel, the New York Times ran a front-page story that said, “(Conan Doyle’s) monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. Watching it today, the jerky movements are part of the charm, but audiences of the 1920s had never seen anything like this and many were convinced the filmmakers had discovered actual dinosaurs. The earliest feature film to make extensive use of animated special effects was The Lost World (1925), which boasts stop-motion dinosaurs created by the great Willis O’Brien. In these deliciously surreal shorts, star Ko-Ko the Clown would routinely hop off the drawing board and wreak havoc on his hapless creator Max, as in this wild scene from Trip to Mars (1924). ![]() The mixture of live action and hand-drawn animation was popularized by Max Fleischer’s silent-era Out of the Inkwell cartoons. “Trick films” from the early 1900s incorporated moments of stop motion as a kind of magic trick, with a good example being the hair-brushing scene in Hôtel électrique (1906) by Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón. Blending animation and live action creates such a spellbinding look that it always feels like a state-of-the-art special effect, but such combinations stretch back to the beginnings of the art form.
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