Motion picture special effects have been used since the beginning of the medium, with the early experiments of Georges MTliFs in France showing ways in which the new medium could be utilized to create images of things that seem to be happening but that in fact never happened at all. Special effects in recent years have taken a quantum leap forward with the advent of computer techniques to improve the use of established techniques of image processing and the use of traveling mattes and to initiate entirely new possibilities for such new effects as morphing and computer animation. Digital processing is clearly the wave of the future, and the wonders it has wrought already in films like Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and True Lies are only the beginning. Computer animation techniques are being improved all the time, and the goal for many seems to be creating a film without actors or sets, a film made up entirely of computer-generated images. This is probably a distant dream but its fruition seems to be coming closer every day.
The rapidity of change in this field is remarkable. An effects house called MetroLight won a special visual effects Academy Award four years ago for work done for Total Recall, where the effects house created an animated X-ray version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The senior technical director for the house says now that today they would not even consider doing this in the same way. He points to work done for the NBC television show Viper, which required that a red Dodge Viper make a smooth transformation into a gray high-tech armored vehicle and to do so in a way that looked mechanical and thus more real. Another example of MetroLight's work is seen in the feature film Blink where it was necessary to recreate the view of a woman only slowly regaining her eyesight after an operation. Company president Jim Kristoff explains what had to be accomplished:
We had to take life-action shots and distort the imag...