The 1930’sThe ‘talkie’

1927 “The Jazz Singer” was released with rave reviews from audiences. Up to this point, Hollywood ignored the idea of adding sound to films, but the paying audiences wanted more films with sound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wxSMA9GTAo&feature=related

Eventually snippets of sound were added to silent films, and by the mid 1930’s all major studios were adding sound to their films.

Influential films of the 1930’s

• Journey’s End – 1930-Tracked the horrors of war.• Frankenstein – 1931 This film included electrical properties, model work

and now famous monster design

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H3dFh6GA-A• The Bride of Frankenstein – 1935 –Contained more technically superior

effects than it’s forerunner.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUWTXt0TRkQ

• The Invisible Man-1933- Film Modelmaker John P Fulton used the “Williams Process” to ensure that when Claude Rains shed his bandages, he revealed nothing.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa3zKy5l1oo&feature=PlayList&p=528676F159017CEB&index=0&playnext=1

The Williams Process

• Patented in 1918 by one time Keystone Kops cameraman Frank Williams, the Williams process (also called the black-backing travelling matte process) was the first practical and widely used travelling matte technique.

• The foreground element (such as the actor), was photographed in front of an evenly lit, plain black (or occasionally white) backdrop. The background element with which this this foreground action was to be combined was usually shot first, so that directors and performers could refer to it in order to choreograph movement.

• Example of a travelling matte

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtJ7JRU8Cko

Indoor studios

• Early microphones were weak, so from around 1933, sound recording restricted filming on location.

• Fore the next twenty years, the great Hollywood outdoors would be filmed almost entirely within studio walls.

• Sound was thought to be responsible for the wholesale move into studios.

• In truth, the move had as much to do with having increasing control by studio bosses, after location nightmares such as those on Ben Hur (1925), preferred to keep wayward productions and problematic directors well within view.

Special Effects Matures

• By the middle of the decade, special effects had advanced so much that it was necessary to create several departments within this area.

• These included rear projection, miniatures, physical and mechanical effects and matte paintings

• Special effects became an integral part of movie making for their time and money saving power and also their ability to create the fantastic or seemingly impossible

Rear Projection

• Rear projection is an in-camera special effects technique in film production for combining foreground performances with pre-filmed backgrounds. It was widely used for many years in driving scenes, or to show other forms of "distant" background motion. The presence of a movie screen between the background image and foreground objects leads to a distinctive washed-out look that makes these "process shots" recognizable.

Citations

• You Tube

• “Special Effects” – The History and Technique – Richard Rickett