How Movies Created Their Special Effects Before CGI: Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

The youngest moviegoers today do not, of course, remember a time before visual effects could be created digitally. What may give us more pause is that, at this point in cinema history, most of their parents don’t remember it either. Consider the fact that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, with its once impossibly realistic (and still wholly passable) CGI dinosaurs, came out 32 years ago. That may put it, we must acknowledge, into the realm of the “classic,” the kind of picture whose entertainment value holds up despite — or because of — the qualities that fix it in its time. Equally spectacular but longer-canonized classics pose a greater challenge to the imaginations of young viewers, who can hardly guess how they could have been made “before computers.”

After seeing the notable examples provided in the new Primal Space video above, they’ll certainly understand one thing: it wasn’t easy. Even a seemingly simple effect like the pen floating loose through the zero-gravity cabin in 2001: A Space Odyssey required no small degree of ingenuity. We might naturally assume that filmmakers in 1968 would have accomplished it with a couple of pieces of Scotch tape and fishing line, but that would have resulted in unacceptable tangling problems, to say nothing of the trickiness of ensuring, quite literally, that the strings didn’t show. Instead, Kubrick’s team ended up attaching the pen to a sheet of glass — meticulously cleaned, no doubt, to eliminate the possibility of streaks — large enough to occupy the entire frame and thus go unnoticed by the viewer. It was then slowly rotated by a crank-turning assistant.

A few different effects from 2001 come in for explanation throughout the course of the video, including the multiple-exposure photography that made possible shots of spacecraft passing planets as well as the psychedelic “Star Gate” sequence toward the end. Though some of the devices used in these processes were put together just for the production, the underlying techniques had already been evolving for more than 60 years. Indeed, many were pioneered by Georges Méliès, previously featured here on Open Culture for A Trip to the Moon from 1902, the very first science-fiction film. This video goes behind the scenes of a work from the year before: L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc, or The Man with the Rubber Head, in which Méliès managed a shot in which his own cranium inflates to huge proportions without the use of so much as a zoom lens.

Other examples, drawn from a range of beloved films from Metropolis to Mary Poppins, illustrate the inventiveness born of sheer technical limitation in the days when filmmaking was a wholly analog affair. In some cases, the effects these productions pulled off with miniatures, prisms, and mirrors 60, 80, 100 years ago look as good as anything Hollywood puts on the screen today — or rather better, since the innate physicality behind them makes them feel more “real.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this video’s artificial-intelligence course sponsor makes reference to the endless range of visual possibilities available to those who master that technology. And it’s not impossible that we now stand on the cusp of a revolution in visual effects for that reason, with at least as much of an upside and downside as CGI. If so, we should prepare ourselves to hear the question, from children born today, of how anyone ever made movies before AI.

Related content:

How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cinema Forever (1902)

The Art of Creating Special Effects in Silent Movies: Ingenuity Before the Age of CGI

The 1927 Film Metropolis Created a Dystopian Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026–and It Hits Close to Home

How Stanley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Seven-Part Video Essay

How 2001: A Space Odyssey Became “the Hardest Film Kubrick Ever Made”

Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Anymore: A Close Look at Changing Filmmaking Techniques

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.