Stuff You Should Know - SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: Special Effects: A Short History

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Special effects have been around since the first movies. In fact, the techniques the earliest filmmakers created are still around today, we just use computers to do them faster and cheaper. Put on your beret and get ready for SYSK film class.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's me, Josh, and this episode is all about special effects. We tried to cram as much as we possibly could into this episode and there's a lot to talk about with special effects. And there's all sorts of different kinds of special effects. Most of the stuff we think of today is all CGI, but that's built on things that people used to have to build with their own hands to make amazing movies look believable. I hope you enjoy this episode and I hope you've enjoyed this playlist. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant wearing his Stone Tumble pilot's hat and there I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant wearing his Stone Temple Pilots hat.

And there's Jerry over there. She's not wearing any hat. She's got really cool hair. It's not Stone Temple Pilots. It is too. I've seen the Stone Temple Pilots hats before and that's one. It is STP because I bought two hats at AutoZone yesterday. Oh. I have a Champion Sparkplug hat. Yeah, they have good hats. They really do.

I was getting a battery and I was like, I want these two hats. It was a Goodyear, Akron, Ohio Goodyear hat. Nice. Which is where Emily's from. Sure. So I wanted that and then I saw this STP hat. Stone Temple Pilots. But I would get a Champion Sparkplug hat too.

Those are, that's great. Okay, I'll let you borrow mine any time you want. Just got to give it back. I don't know if I've ever seen you in a baseball cap. It's a weird jam. Is it? Not what you want to see. I've seen you in shorts like twice in 12 years. I keep the legs covered.

I think one of them was when you came over to borrow my lawnmower. I remember that, yeah. Like nine years ago. Sure, I've got to mow the lawn sometimes. Now things have changed. You can buy a lawnmower. Yeah. That's where we're at now.

We can afford lawnmowers. I can wear shorts too. I actually have one of those plug-in lawnmowers. I have a battery-powered lawnmower. Do you? Look at us, stupid liberal hippies. Well, mine's battery-powered too, but you have to plug it in and charge it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. What kind do you have? I have the green one. Yeah, I think they're all green. No, there's to charge it. Oh, yeah, yeah. What kind do you have? I have the green one. Yeah, I think they're all green. No, there's a blue one. Oh, I've got the green one too. The Sun Joe? No, but I have a Sun Joe pressure washer.

Do you really? Is it battery operated? No, you plug that in. I was going to say, I'll bet it just goes like tinkles out water. But they do make plug-in lawnmowers. Like it's not a battery. You just like have a cord that you walk around with. And run over with your lawnmower.

I guess they're called electric. Sure. But yeah, I got the battery one because I have so little grass now and we may be done, period, with grass. Oh yeah, that's right. You're zero-scaping. Well, we're definitely doing the front,

but the back, it just got smaller and smaller. And my last lawnmower broke so I was paying a guy to come cut it. I was like, why am I paying this guy to cut to do a seven-minute mow? There's just that one blade of grass that sees the lawnmower coming like, mother. But then I went and got the battery on because lawnmowers are terrible for the environment. Yeah, that's why I got it. They're one of the worst polluters.

Yeah, we're both also aware that we are charging our battery powered lawn mowers with coal fired power. Yes, we understand that. We know. I'm just talking about exhaust fumes. I don't even need one. I live in a condo, but I'm so dissatisfied with the landscapers that take care of the condo that I bought.

No. Yes. I bought a lawn mower just to do the little patch out in front of our building. Wow. Poor Momo doesn't get lawn grass against her junk when she's pottying. This is a great way to start this episode. So we're talking special effects, obviously. This has been lawn talk. We're talking special effects, Chuck.

Yes, movie special effects, which, boy, I mean, we could do ten parts on this. This is kind of a big summation, because movie special effects can be everything from the movie that you walk out of saying, oh, that movie had no special effects, when in fact it did. Yeah, wrong. Yeah, just tiny little things that you may not even notice, to things that are almost whole cloth special effects, like Sky Captain and the world of tomorrow. Yeah, or sin city Yeah, I like both of those. Yes. Did you know sin city every single bit of the set was CGI?

Yeah, and that sky captain did it first Yeah, a year before huh? Yep every bit of that was it was a green screen movie I never saw it was it good It was interesting like the look of it was amazing and very much ahead of its time. Like real art deco, right? Yeah, for sure. I call it black and white, but it wasn't. It was just this really washed out color. But it looked awesome and was not bad. Nice. I'll have to check it out.

And I think the dudes that made that kind of quit making movies after that. It's a very unique story. Have you ever seen, this has nothing to do with anything, but have you seen the Changeling? George C. Scott? Yeah, sure. Oh my God. Did you just see that? Yes, and I have to tell you, I don't think I've ever gotten chills more frequently from a movie than I did with that one.

Changeling's great. It is genuinely, it's a genuinely scary ghost story. Yeah. Like it is wonderful. Yeah, I miss George C. Scott too. Yeah, he's a good actor. And I don't remember who the female lead was in there, but she was great, too.

It's been a while. I haven't seen it in many, many years. So anyway, special effects. Let's try this again. Yes. We're going to get derailed like every five seconds. That's OK. Effects are divided.

And this is by the grabster. He helped us out with this. Ed's a big movie guy and horror movie sci-fi guy. So he probably enjoyed writing this one up. They're divided into three general categories, and this all has to do with where the effect is happening. Right. It can be practical, which is in front of the camera, and that means it's a physical

thing that's happening. I think that's what most people think of when they think special effects. You think? Sure. Okay. By most people I mean me. In-camera effects that happen inside the camera, and then post-production effects. And many times you're using one or all three of these. Right. Right. So with like practical effects, it's things like, like makeup and prosthetics.

Like Ed uses the example of David Lynch's The Elephant Man. Like the prosthetic makeup that was used to turn John Hurt or John Hurt. Which one? Hurt. Into Joseph Merrick. Yes. That's a special effect. An explosion on Yes. That's a special effect. An explosion on set. That's a special effect.

A blood packet to make it look like somebody just got shot in the chest. A squib. That's a special effect. All three of those are practical effects. They're actually happening in the physical world in front of you on set, being captured on film. That's a practical special effect. Yeah, and the other one I wanted to mention there that you might not think of is stuff like if there is a fire,

like a fireplace in a scene, and then you flip the camera around to show the people, and you see that fire shimmering on the wall. That's a practical effect too, little things like that. But it's lighting. It's a lighting effect. Yeah, or it's a fire. Like, you know, those aren't real fires. I mean, it's real fire. Somebody should put that out. But it's not like someone lights a bunch of wood. They put fake wood and they have these fire bars that it's like what you have under your grill, basically.

Right. And they hide those and then that's your fire. Sure. Because it has to look perfect. You can't just chance somebody not being able to start a fire or it looking wonky. That's why movie fires look perfect. Yeah.

Because they're fake. They are kind of dreamy. They're so good. So in-camera effects is just basically messing with the way the film is being produced inside the camera. Not what's going on in reality that the film is capturing, but how the film is actually capturing this stuff. Yeah, slow motion is a special effect

in camera special effect. Yeah, or fast motion too, which is 10 times more hilarious than fast motion, if you ask me. Like, where would the Munsters be without fast motion? Yeah, or Benny Hill, for God's sakes. Sure. That lived and breathed on fast motion.

Yeah, it did. What else can you do there? You can, and we'll see this in some of the early special effects, like stopping the film, changing something, starting it again. Right, like bewitched, appearing out of nowhere. Yeah, that's a special, in-camera special effect. Yeah, one thing that struck me about all this from researching this is how the basis, the foundation for special effects was laid immediately

upon like motion pictures being like created. Like the whole industry, not even the industry, before the industry existed, but basically after the invention of motion pictures. And that it stayed virtually the same until the 90s. Yeah. People refined it and got better at it and techniques got more... The same general crafts were used.

Very much so. Which is why craft service is called craft service. Oh, yeah. Because each department is their own craft. Oh, I didn't know that. And they're there to serve them pizza rolls. Yeah. Man. Or whatever. You can put on some weight filming something. I'll tell know that. And they're there to serve them pizza rolls. Yeah. Man.

Or whatever. You can put on some weight filming something. I'll tell you that firsthand. Yeah, you can. Oh my God. So, stop motion animation, that is an in-camera effect. You're moving a little clay figure or whatever, a doll or a King Kong. A raisin?

One, a California raisin, one frame at a time, 24 frames per second. Can you imagine? Didn't you do that with your brother, with G.I. Joe? I did. And then years later I did a little Star Wars thing when I got a high-8 video camera and spent like three days working on something that ended up being nine seconds long. And I said, I'm done. What's funny is you're going to get a cease and desist letter from Lucasfilm after talking about this in the podcast. I might. And then we have post-production effects and that is, I think that's what a

lot of people think of as special effects these days. Really? Because that's all the CGI stuff that you will see is all happens in post-production. Okay, all right. Yes, these days. I gotcha. Like almost all special effects happens in post these days, right? Well, no. They still combine some of the old crafts as well, but yeah, surely a lot of it is CGI. I mean, computers can do some amazing stuff.

They can. I mean, stuff that used to take months to do, a computer can do in hours now and do it a million times better. Yeah. So, depending on your taste, I should say. That's right. So, those are the big three. Practical, in-camera, and post-production.

And like I was saying, the basis of special effects was founded in the 19th century. There were just some people who had kind of followed in a tradition of still photography. Still photographers by that time had already figured out some cool stuff that you could do messing around with cameras. Something like double exposure, where you take a picture of one thing and then take a picture of another thing with the previously exposed film,

and all of a sudden it looks like there's a ghost looming behind you. That's right. Stuff like that. So out of the gate, when motion pictures were, started to become a little widespread and people could afford them and try messing around with them, they had a basis of trickery to begin with.

But there's a lot of stuff you can do with motion picture cameras that you can't do with still photo cameras. And they figured this out right away. Yeah, that first guy who's credited as the first special effect is Alfred Clark. And they don't have the year exactly right. It's either 93, that's 1893, or 1895. He made a short film called The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. And he did that little stop trick, like I was saying. You shoot something, you stop the camera, you replace it or you remove something, and then you start the camera, and in real time when you go to play it back, it's seamless.

Right. And in his case, did you look at it? Did you watch that one? No, I didn't see that one. He uses a stop trick with Mary getting beheaded, and right when the axe is going to fall, he switches her out for a dummy, then starts the camera back up and he chops the dummy's head off. And it looks pretty good, like you can't, there's no big weird jump. He did, for 1893, he did a really good job. Yeah, and the key to that is just making sure that no one touches the camera or even breathes on it. Don't move.

And then getting the dummy in the same position as the actor. Yeah, and in fact, as we'll talk about later with matte paintings, it's so crucial that the camera not move that one technique was they used to bury the camera tripod like a couple of feet into the earth just to make sure like no dumb dumb PA bumps into it. Like me. So Alfred Clarke is credited with the first special effect, but a guy named Georges Méliès, did I get it, Méliès? We should go ask Casey Pegram. Oh yeah, he would know.

I think it's Méliès. Oh nice, I think he just nailed it. Georges Méliès, at any rate, this guy is known as the father of special effects. He was very early on doing stuff that no one else was doing. You know, granted, there were very few people working in this field at the time. None of the five people did. But he was an illusionist and he said, oh man, I can really do some amazing tricks with this camera.

And he really put it to good use from a very early Like I mean turn to the last century. Yeah, he actually stumbled upon that little stop trick by accident when he was shooting a Street traffic scene in Paris in 1896 the camera jams while I think a bus was coming across frame. He's like Mad fixes the camera. Can we say that? Sure. All right. We don't have any French people listening. frame, he's like, mad, fixes the camera. Can we say that? Sure. All right.

We don't have any French people listening to that. Yeah, that's true. Starts the camera back up, and of course there's different things happening. And then when he went back to look at it, it's, he kind of just stumbled upon this weird little substitution splice that became part of filmmaking.

Yeah, because by the time the camera had started up again, the bus was replaced by a hearse. So it looked like when he went back and watched it, the bus suddenly transformed into a hearse. And he said, wait till they get a load of Bewitched. Yeah. Seventy-something years from now. Yeah. So...

Or no, I guess, what was that, in the 50s? Uh, 60s. 60s, all right. So you may not recognize Georges Méliès's, oh, I got it, that time. I think so. Name. But you probably have heard of his work, like A Trip to the Moon. Yeah.

What's very widely cited is like one of the first actual movies. I think it was in the 20-something minute range. But it was about some explorers in the Victorian era getting in a rocket and traveling to the moon and the rocket lands and the man in the moon's eye. Everybody's seen that. I don't care who you are if you say you haven't, you have. Yeah. This was the guy who made that.

And this is a very early movie. It was from 1902, but he was doing all sorts of amazing stuff. He was using extensive costuming, masks, all sorts of in-camera techniques. He was painting on film frames? Yeah, and this is 1902. And like I was saying, this stuff was refined, but it was the basis of special effects for the next century to come. Should we take a quick break? I think so.

All right, let's take a quick break, and we will talk a little bit about the MAT technique right after this. I'm actually pretty psyched about this. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech

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Find resources for breaking through barriers at tearthepapersceiling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. Alright, Chuck, as I said, I'm very psyched about the mat. Yeah, so this isn't, this is a little confusing the way it's laid out here. Because what Ed's talking about here with Norman Dawn is called original negative matte painting. If you hear of a matte painting, that is a piece of glass where you have, and I'm going to talk about the most common way you might see it employed, is you take a big piece of

glass and you paint like a cityscape on it. Like really realistic. And then you put that in a scene and shoot it. So it's instead of having someone in front of a city, and this was pre-blue screen and green screen technology, you would just put Kurt Russell in a sca Escape from New York in a field and there's a matte painting of New York City behind him. Right.

And it looks great. And James Cameron painted that in Escape from New York. He was a matte painter. Oh, I didn't know that. That was like his first job. It's neat. Like if you, even if you do know what Chuck's talking about, go to the internet and just look up like great matte paintings.

It's amazing. There's a lot of really wonderful ones. One you've seen before, one you haven't. But basically, any time you've seen a movie pre-1993, maybe 1990, where somebody walks into this enormous place or this amazingly elaborate future city or something like that,

what you're actually looking at is an expertly painted painting that has been messed with in post-production or using an in-camera technique to make it look like it's alive or actually, you know, bustling or energetic or there. But it's really a it's a painting. It's a painting that some amazing human being painted by hand. Yeah, and we should point out they still do this today. They just do it digitally. And digital matte painters are super talented as well. But it's kind of neat to think about that old craft and James Cameron painting a piece of glass

and sticking that behind Kurt Russell. And I mean, it was used in everything. Like, for my money, matte painting is the single most important and widespread special effect ever. Maybe hard to argue that. Thank you. Like it was in Mary Poppins when Mary Poppins is coming into the city of London. Floating down. That's a matte painting.

When Superman walks into the, where's the, what's the name of the place where he's from, like the crystal cave where... Fortress of Solitude? Yeah, is that where he talks with Marlon Brando, his dad? Yeah, I think so. Okay, that's a matte painting. And I think the Fortress of Solitude are the remnants of Krypton. And boy, Superman people are so mad at me right now.

Are there Superman people still? I thought everybody was on the Marvel train. No, people love Superman. The comics. Oh, okay. Because I was going to say, I mean, you've seen what they've done with Superman lately, right? In Batman? Yeah.

So that's the matte painting. And what that is, it's called set extension. So that basically means you're just sort of extending the real life set to make something bigger and more opulent. Gotcha. Or maybe not more opulent, just bigger and more. But here's the thing, relying on that matte painter and having the glass there and glass can break and it can, you know, on set with lighting can be weird.

So that's all, can get a little hinky. So that's why this technique called Original Negative matte painting was developed by Norman Dawn. And that is when nowadays they'll use what's called a matte box, which is literally a black, I don't think it's cardboard these days, but whatever they make out of, a cardboard thing that you put over the lens to block out whatever you want to block out. Back in the day they would paint cardboard and hold it in front of the lens or they would actually paint the lens and what you're essentially doing is painting away, it was early green screen, you're painting away what you don't want in the frame or what you want in the future and

then adding that later on. Right and because it's black or because it's covered, there's light is not hitting that part of the film. That part of the film, the actual film strip itself that you're recording onto or filming onto, that's unexposed. All that gets exposed is the part of the lens or the camera that is not covered,

that has, say, your actor doing the herky jerky dance. Right? And then so what you do after that is you take that film that has your actor doing the herky jerky dance, project it onto a screen so you see where the actor is, and on this screen you literally paint the background that you want. Then you film the whole thing a second time, and now you have your actor in the set that you originally wanted.

Right. The only difference there, which is something that wasn't quite right here, is they don't like project it. They just develop a few frames of it and project it like a slide. So it's not like the camera, the film is moving through on the wall. Right, right. Because in the article here it says, and then you just stop it, and what happens if you do that is the bulb burns the film. Okay. So you can't just stop a movie projector.

You produce like a slide of and project that. Yeah, and then you paint in the castle or the mountain or the whatever you want, and then you go back and expose it again. Pretty neat. You just open your trench coat, there you go back and expose it again. Pretty neat. You just open your trench coat. There you go. And the big innovator with the original negative matte painting was Norman Dawn. And he really like, really led the way.

But I mean, again, most of the stuff that does this now is done by computers in post. But this is like the lengths people were going to to make movies at the time. And you watch them today and you're like, God, it looks terrible. But if you stop and think about the effort that they were going to create this. They were inventing techniques.

Yeah, it's just mind boggling that they managed to get it to this point. Yeah, Norman Dawn tried to patent that technique as well, but they said, no, you did not invent this. You popularized it, and you can't patent something that you made super popular. Yeah. There's some other stuff too.

There's like rear projection and front projection, which is basically like projecting the background, the moving background onto a screen behind the actors. Yeah. Basically, you know, all those hokey driving scenes where the person's like, the car's being rocked or whatever, the road behind them, that's front or rear projection. Yeah, and people still will use that as homage,

like in pulp fiction, very famously Bruce Willis, or I guess not, yeah, when Bruce Willis gets in the cab after the fight, and if it looks old fashioned, that's because QT used rear screen projection for that. Yeah. And there's also a technique that's not in here that I just remembered. So I'm actually having to look up what it's called. When you're in a car scene, but you're not doing your rear screen projection.

So what happens here is you're sitting in a car, in a still car on the set, but they're not projecting anything behind you. Okay. What you've got is two people shaking the car out of frame. What are they, grips? Yeah, usually a grip, but I've shaken cars and trains before. Okay. Because I'm just a body on the set.

Oh, I gotcha. Like, get in there and shake that thing. In fact, one job I was on, there was a fake subway train and the hydraulics broke early on, and they were like, bring out the PAs, you're going to shake this train for 12 hours. So like you got rhythm? Get in there. Yeah. Oh we couldn't have too much rhythm because we got yell that for that because

it looked too rhythmic. Gotcha. So we're like I don't know what I don't know how to do this. Who are you working for? Oh it was just a commercial director that said that our movement of the train looked too rhythmic and not believable. So anyway. This Fruit of the Looms commercial is totally unbelievable.

You sit in the car, you're acting like you're driving, there's someone else shaking the car, there might be someone else off camera, like flashing a light through the car, like you're going by a street light or a headlight goes across their face, and there may be fake rain in the background. And this is sometimes like six, seven, eight people working in concert to make it look like you're driving at night in the rain or something like that. Right, so there's not like an obvious background, trees or road or whatever, but maybe there's headlights coming up behind you, it's just dark. Yeah, but they're people with a spotlight. Yeah.

It's really, really cool. Old fashioned, but people still use that stuff. Yeah. And I wish I could remember the full name of that technique. The, uh, the, the Shaken Shimme. It's, I'm going to be so mad later on. We'll just call it the Shaken Shimme, okay? That's right. So you talked about green screen and that's actually super old too.

There's a really convoluted explanation about how originally green screen employed sodium vapor lights, which would actually mess with the yellow exposure on panchromatic film. And my brain, I started bleeding out of my ear. I cannot tell you how many times I read descriptions about this and I can't quite get it. So suffice to say that that was one technique for green screen. What really kind of changed the industry

is when they figured out that again, if you film in black, the film is not going to be exposed. So anything you go and re-expose it to, it will cover over that stuff so it's transparent. So for example in The Invisible Man from I think 1933, 1933 yeah. Claude Rains wore a black bodysuit. And the background was black, it was a black screen like a black green screen

And but he wore clothes and everything in bandages and sunglasses I think he smoked a cigarette or whatever, but when he took the bandages off we took his sunglasses and clothes off There was nothing there. It was a black bodysuit and a black background So when they filmed the background later on, all you could see was the background and the clothes and the bandages. It looked like there was nothing there because as far as the film was concerned when they were filming it, there wasn't anything there so the film wasn't exposed in those sections on each frame. That's right. And that's called the Williams Process. And a key part of the Williams Process

is the optical printer. and that is a projector that actually prints an image directly onto the film that runs through the camera while that printer and camera are synced up. Yes, so this is to me the optical printer is the second most widespread and useful special effect technique in the history of film. You just waved your hand. I did. So I suddenly had an ascot and a beret on.

Yeah, hard to argue that too. But all this stuff was just precursor to what was blue screen early on, chroma key blue, and then later became chroma key green. I'm not sure why they made the switch actually. Other than maybe the green. Less prevalent or less used? I think so, probably. Maybe the blue was... Because you know what, you don't want anything close to that color will disappear against the green screen.

Anyone who's ever done the weather on the newscast can tell you that. Yeah, there have been, there are blooper reels of weather people disappearing when they wear like a green jacket or something. Right. It looks like the weather's going on through their body. Same thing. So, I want to say one more thing about optical printers, or another little bit about it.

So what you have is a projector projecting a film on to a screen, and you have a camera recording what's being projected, right? That's right. That's the optical printer. And you could do all sorts of stuff with that. So let's say you have a shot where you have one mat in the foreground and live actor and then another mat in the background that has a bunch of different people in it or something like that.

Yeah, or storm troopers. Okay, so you got three different elements to that shot. What you would do is using the same film, film each thing. So you go film that like the actor, the live action actor, you got that on the film, and you project that, and you take film where you're filming the mat, and you project that and film that. I just totally have screwed this up.

Oh my God, this is just like, um... The sun? No, it's worse than that. Was it, um it false positives? Do you remember that time where I was like, I took a pretty simple thing and just completely walked the dog with it? Yeah. Okay, well, I'll just do that again.

Everyone, I want you to go look up optical printers, read a little bit about them, and then you'll say, oh, Josh is right. Yeah. This is tough stuff. It is. Essentially, you're filming a projection, and you can do that multiple times with the same film, and it adds up to where you have the shot you wanted,

where it makes it look like all these things that you filmed three separate times are all happening together in one space. Yes, you are marrying separate images together onto a single piece of film. Right. You couldn't do that with before optical printers, which is a projector and a camera working together. That's right. Okay. I think. I needed that.

We should mention briefly motion-controlled cameras. This is a system that allows, it's basically taking the person out of the equation. There is not a person pushing a dolly, there is not a person moving the camera. It is a machine that is programmed to move a camera through space very, very precisely and exactly the same every single time. Yeah, so you can do the exact same motion over and over again. Over and over. And a lot of times, if you're on a TV commercial, as boring as that is, you will see stuff like this for like a food shoot.

Because food shoots are notoriously tricky because everything's super close up and has to be perfect. And you can't be off a little bit with a camera because a lot of times you'll sub in stuff later in post. And that's the whole reason for motion control is to replicate moves with exact precision. So I was reading about industrial light and magic using this to really great effect with the first Star Wars, which is episode four, right? The New Hope? That's the first one, right? Right? I'm not confirming or denying anything. I'm just going to let that stand.

Episode four is the first Star Wars movie that ever came out, correct? The Star Wars a new hope is the first episode Okay, that I ever saw in a movie theater because it's the first one that ever came out Anyway, when they were making this, you know, is it a Star Destroyer? The big the big daddy ships. Okay, we're gonna get murdered The big daddy ships? Okay. Oh man, we're going to get murdered. Everything, all of the ships in Star Wars were models.

Yes. Fairly small models actually. You got that part right. They weren't the biggest. Okay. I think it was episode four. I'm almost positive. Okay.

So those models were not moving in these shots and these enormous like huge panoramic shots where like there's TIE fighters flying around shooting everything and X-wing fighters shooting the Thai fighters. None of those models were moving What happened was they figured out how to use motion-controlled cameras so that the the camera would go through the shot And around the model and make it look like the model was moving and plus it was moving the shot through space, right? Right. The thing is, is let's say you have five different ships. You film those five ships separately,

but those five ships are all going to be in the same shot. So you have to film that same shot the exact same way, five different times, and then run it through an optical printer so that you can get all of them, all five shots, onto the same strip of film. But that's one of the ways that motion-controlled cameras were really put to good use, and it was extremely groundbreaking, because not one of those ships were moving in reality when they were filming Star Wars.

Can you name five Star Wars ships? TIE Fighter, X-Wing Fighter. You already said one. The TIE Fighter II. The Deuce is what the people in the know call it. Sure. You already said Star Destroyer. So Star Destroyer was right?

Yeah, there's a Star Destroyer. Oh, okay. You made a face like I was just totally off. You could make the case that Endor was a ship, even though it was a planet. There was the Forest Speeder, the Podracer, and Dr. Zeyas. That's right. He's the final ship. Yeah. Do you know how many people, their calf muscles just popped right out of the back to their

legs. Holly Fry is like hyperventilating somewhere in the office and she doesn't know why. So as I said earlier, it's usually a combination of these different techniques to create one overall special effect using these different crafts. And a great example is Jurassic Park and the scene with the velociraptors in the kitchen, that great, great sequence when it was playing cat and mouse with those children. There were puppets, there were actors in costumes, there were animatronic raptor heads,

and there were full CGI raptors. And you throw this all in a hat, mix it all up, and it comes out to be like a really believable looking scene. Yeah, it comes out as an Oscar. Yeah, I'm sure they won Oscars, right? They had to have. I don't know, but there's just no way. It was groundbreaking.

I remember being just gobsmacked in the movie theater when I first saw those dinosaurs walking across the screen. And that was 1993, I believe, for the first Jurassic Park, right? Jurassic Park, A New Hope, the first one that came out? So, but that was five years after the first Oscar had been awarded for special effects, as far as I know. Oh, really? I believe that The Abyss was the first one to win an Oscar for special effects, maybe?

Or there... No, no, I'm sorry. I'm way off, way off. The Abyss was the first movie to win a special effect for a CGI effect. Okay, remember the water sure Still looks pretty good. It looks amazing. Yeah, this is 1987. We're talking about Wow was that when that came out? Yeah, I was surprised to see that too because I thought it was yeah. It's a good movie. I really like that movie How do you know like Ed Harris? You don't like it here. What did you not like Ed Harris?

No, I like him as an actor. I think a lot of people might have problems with Ed Harris as a person. He's notoriously cantankerous. I've never heard that. I believe it. Sure. He looks like he could yell somebody down, doesn't he? Sure. But he also keeps a cool head when he's an actor as a 70s or 60s NASA guy. Hey, I love it, Harris.

All right, let's take another break. Okay. And we're going to come back and talk a little bit about Star Wars episode whatever, right after this. OpenAI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration. A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about

all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google, I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes.

So in this one case, two of their search results that I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, a picture of Michael Jordan. But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting this software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. This is not a minority report. This is happening right now.

People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family.

They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit adoptUSkids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Okay, we're back and we should talk, we should mention the garbage mat real quick. Okay.

Because that is a big deal. A lot of times you have wire work or you have things hanging from wires. It doesn't have to be a person. It can be like a model plane or a tie fighter or whatever. Sure. You got to get rid of those wires. Unless you're Ed Wood. You can't have fish in line.

No, you're supposed to not, but yes. Or if you're Charlize Theron in Mad Max Fury Road, you gotta get rid of that arm. Or if you're in Forrest Gump, you gotta get rid of Lieutenant Dan's legs. Man, that was amazing. That was the first time anybody's ever done really something like that throughout.

Yeah, I had my problems with that movie for sure. And one of them is, I think he way over, he was like a kid in a candy store and way overdid the, like, and now Forrest is in the White House and using archival footage and sticking Forrest in it. Yeah, that whole like half-hour dialogue he has with Peter Cushing's ghost. It was uncanny. But I get it. I get why these filmmakers get excited. These really technical wizards. They get a new technique and they just hammer it. The guy from Industrial Light and Magic when they made the first Star Wars, call it what you will,

his name was I think John Dykstra, and this motion-controlled camera assembly that they created was called Dystraflex. It was super groundbreaking, and they really did amazing stuff with it. Well, he's like a legend in this industry now. And I saw an interview with him recently, and he was like, I'm so tired of seeing just whole cities leveled and like,

just the most amazing stuff you can possibly think of being done just because we can do it. Right. He put it really, really well, I think. It's an embarrassment of riches. Yeah. You know?

Totally. Like it can be done, so it's being done. Everybody's doing it. It's just, you know, like, and it makes it less amazing. Not necessarily because it looks bad. It just keeps looking better and better every time. Like if you look at Charlie Theron's prosthetic arm or missing arm, compared with Lieutenant Dan's missing legs, it does. So it's getting better.

There's just too much of it, I think, is the point. Just to be all Ed Heresy on this. No, I have long predicted a return to practical effects. And it's starting to happen a little bit more and more. Yeah, I could see it starting with indie filmmakers. Yeah, for sure. Which is funny because finally, computer-generated effects have trickled down enough.

Like, you or I could just walk out of the studio and probably get on any one of those Macs out there and use stuff that 10, 15 years ago would have cost $500,000 to set up a rig like that. Yeah, and that's how some young filmmakers have gotten noticed is by making these short films with like zero money on their computer that get a lot of action on YouTube because it looks so amazing. Right. And the studio will be like, sign that person up. Yeah. on their computer that get a lot of action on YouTube because it looks so amazing.

And the studio will be like, sign that person up. I can't remember the guy's name, but that's happened a couple of times in recent years. To Ed Harris. We should talk about a few of the groundbreaking people over the years. Oh, yes. We'll go through these a little quicker than what we have in front of us, I think. But we should mention Lon Chaney, one of the original superstars of film in the silent era, the man of a thousand faces.

He was very talented doing his own makeup and changing his face. That's why he's called the man of a thousand faces. Right. He's like, here's 997. What about Willis O'Brien? He was one of the pioneers of stop-motion photography. Again, if you're a California Racers fan, you have a lot to thank Willis O'Brien for. He also, the stuff he did, I mean, if you look back, he did King Kong, the 1933 King Kong.

And if you look back at this, you're like, this is cool, but if you research what was done to create this, you're just blown away by it. Yeah, again, many processes coming together to create that 1933 version of King Kong, and that fight looks good still. I mean, it doesn't look realistic, but consider the year, it looks awesome. It does It does and it's about three three and a half minutes long King Kong fighting the Tyrannosaurus Rex But it took seven weeks to film. Yeah, because there's 24 frames Shot per second in a film. That's right. And For every frame they moved the models a little bit here or there. So that's why it took seven weeks just for that fight scene.

I think it was 55 weeks for all of the stop-motion photography that was done in that movie. Yeah, that's impressive. It really is impressive, especially when you realize the trouble they went to, when you go back and watch it, like this is pretty nuts. Yeah, Ray Harryhausen continued the work of Willis O'Brien and very famously in the 50s and 60s with movies like Jason and the Argonauts. And Clash of the Titans. Remember Medusa? Sure.

Scary Lady. Yeah, that had to be toward the end of his career, I guess, because that was in the 80s. Yeah, I think like 81 maybe. Remember the Minotaur 2, man? That was a cool movie. That was a big movie for me as a kid. Yeah, and I was like, when L. when LA Law came along, I was like, I know that guy. That's right.

There's the Titans guy. We should shout out Millicent Patrick. This is a very interesting story. She was one of the only, well, first and only women working in special effects back in the day. And she created the very famous mask of the Gill Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon in the mid-1950s and was unceremoniously fired. Not just fired, stricken from the credits.

Yeah, this guy named Bud Westmore, he assisted her and then basically had her fired rather than give her the credit for the mask, which he would take credit for. Because I think he was the supervisor in charge of effects or costume or something. Oh, I thought I guess he assisted her, but he was her boss? Yeah. Okay. But like she very clearly on her own came up with the Gill man for the creature from the Black Lady.

And this has only come out in the last like few years. They've kind of dug up the original stuff. And yeah, sexism just basically pushed her out of the industry altogether. Yeah. Very sad. She's starting to get her due now, though, which is good. Yeah, that is very good. There's Dick Smith is amazing. He created the Squib.

Oh, really? Yeah. He's a very famous makeup artist. He's really good at making people look aged. Yeah, he made 47-year-old Marlon Brando look much older. 45. And the Godfather. Oh, yeah?

Yeah, he was a year younger than me. That's crazy. I never thought about that. Isn't that nuts? Wow, he really is good. He also did Death Becomes Her, which is one of the all-time great movies. Oh, yeah. For sure.

And The Exorcist and Scanners. And have you ever seen Ghost Story from 1981? Oh yeah, yeah. Very scary movie. The Old Dudes? He did that. What else? Very famously aged Dustin Hoffman and Little Big Man by many, many years.

Sure. And then in the last like 25, 30 years, Rick Baker and Stan Winston. Stan Winston's, he's got my vote. Yeah, I mean these two guys were both just creative leaders in the industry and trailblazers in the industry. And as Ed says in here, like mentored a generation of special effects employees. Employees, creators, artists. Sure. All three of those work.

Lord. Gig workers. Rick Baker, American Werewolf in London in 1981, which still holds up. The Thriller video in 1983. Star Wars, Mos Eisley Cantina, he made all those. Yeah, did you know that about the Maus Isley Cantina? Sure. I didn't know that.

He was almost single-handedly responsible for all of them. And then Stan Winston, you got to talk about movies like The Thing and Predator and Terminator. And they both have set up foundations and schools and things like that. Stan Winston also did the makeup for what I think is maybe the best slasher film of all time, Friday the 13th Part 2. Yeah, 2 is when Jason comes along, right? Yes, it's Jason. Before he got his mask, he gets his mask in 3. I think the Friday the 13th franchise is as good as it gets for horror movies. I dropped off at a certain point. Did you see all those?

No, no, I still haven't seen all of them, but even just putting like the first five or six up, I think it's like watching them again as an adult, I'm like, these are really good slasher films. Like even better than I remember from being a kid. And the reason Stan Winston filled in for Friday the 13th part two is because the guy who did Friday the 13th, the first one, Tom Savini, was unavailable. He was off doing Creepshow, I believe.

But Tom Savini's another legend. I think they're redoing Creepshow. Are they? Oh, okay, I'd watch that. Different stories. Oh, even better. I think, if I'm not mistaken. But yeah, Savini is well known for being sort of the godfather of gore.

Yeah. He did Maniac. Did you ever see that? Yeah. That was an off-the-rocker movie. And then these days there are companies, ILM and WETA, ILM Industrial Light and Magic is Lucas's company, and they're cool because they invented this stuff because Lucas needed stuff to be done that couldn't be done. Right. And he was like, go figure out how to do it. And they did. They really did. this stuff because Lucas needed stuff to be done that couldn't be done. Right.

And he was like, go figure out how to do it. And they did. They really did. And then Weta is Peter Jackson's company. Oh, okay. And he's the one that has really pioneered the mocap, the motion capture techniques. Mm-hmm. Where a person's wearing like a suit and the suit has a bunch of different, kind of like

almost ping pong balls all over it. Like joints and crucial places where the body moves and the actor, stunt person, or dancer, whoever wearing the suit goes through the motions. And then... They're just going through the motions. Sure. And those motions, what's captured is fed into a computer

and the computer generates a character doing all those same motions, creating the performance, but it's a computer generated character. Yeah, I don't think he was the first, but the Gollum character in those Lord of the Rings movies was really one of the first really terrific looking, fully CGI character. Yeah, I found, from what I could tell, the first full CGI character ever in a movie. You want to guess? You'll never guess. Well, I mean, it's touted as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Wrong.

Really? What is it going to be? It's another Spielberg movie. Okay. It's young Sherlock Holmes. Do you remember the stained glass knight that comes to life and tries to slash one of them with his sword? First full CGI character in a movie. Well, why?

I don't know. But that's what I could find, and that one's from 1985. Well, it says maybe it's in the nitpicky language, because in The Last Crusade, when Walter Donovan's face melts and turns to dust when he drinks from the chalice. That's in Raiders of the Lost Ark, isn't it? Oh no, you're right, you're right.

I'm sorry. Last Crusade. It says here, it was the first ever digital composite of a full screen live action image. There's something in the language there. Yeah, like maybe it wasn't full screen or something. This was the first CGI. But it wasn't the first CGI image. This was the first moving CGI image.

The first CGI image was in Looker. Remember that movie? I totally saw Looker. Yeah. That was a big HBO movie for me. For sure, same here. It was Looker, Runaway, Kroll. Runaway, it's Tom Selleck.

Yeah, and Gene Simmons is the bad guy. That's right. I saw Kroll a lot too. Looker had Albert Finney, right, if I remember correctly. Albert Finney and Susan Day. Yeah, Susan Day. And it was written by Michael Crichton, I think. That was the first full-body 3D human, but it did not move.

It was static. And the very first computer-generated effects period, funny enough, were used to replicate computer screens. So whenever you would see a computer screen in like Westworld or Aliens or Star Wars, and they were like, what is a computer going to look like, you know, not now? That was the first time they used computer-gener generated imaging was to make a fake computer screen. And the first full CGI scene ever done was in the Wrath of Khan, which I believe came out in 1982.

But there's a Genesis like Earth being, like cooling and turning into the Earth and there's this amazing shots around it. That's all CGI and that was the first one. And Tron, I thought for sure Tron would have been among the first. Apparently most of that was animated by humans, not computers. That's right. The, like all the glowing lines, all that stuff, animated.

Which makes it nuts that they were able to create that. Yeah. Now the big thing is this de-aging technique that they're getting better and better. Yeah, they really are. Yeah. So the new Scorsese pick, the Irishman, I think de-ages and it has taken a long time to get out because the de-aging didn't look good enough for Scorsese. So they have de-aged De Niro.

And then I saw this new Ang Lee movie, Gemini Man, where Will Smith of Now, he plays an assassin and he has to go kill his younger self. Looper. Yeah, sort of like Looper, I guess. But this Gemini Man script has been in development for like 25 years with various people attached, but they could never do it. Because the technology was new. Yeah. It's finally here. But here's the thing I didn't know.

Like I've seen this trailer, and I'm like, man, that de-aging looks great. They didn't de-age him. It is a fully CGI Will Smith. Oh, and it looks that realistic? The younger version is, yeah. Wow. Because I was like, man, they're getting so good at the de-aging.

Wow, that's amazing. So he mo-capped his whole performance, motion captured, and they just used Fresh Prince photos. Man, they just basically deep faked them. Sort of. Fresh Prince photos. Have you seen the Bill Hader deep fake that's going around now? Yes.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. Because he goes from Hader to Tom Cruise to Seth Rogen, back to Tom Cruise, it's like kind of all over the place. Yeah. It's really creepy. It's really well done. And then, you know, like we said, they use CGI for so many movies.

Little mistakes that can be corrected, little things that it's just much cheaper to add digitally later on. It could be a movie that, like I said, looks like it has no CGI whatsoever, and it's cheaper to put a plate of food in the background digitally than cook the food and put it on set. That's a bad example. Or you can color grade a movie. You completely change, like the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Has that yellow hue for everything. All that stuff is green. They're in the deep south in the summertime. Right. They used to have to film it at some weird exposure and then project it at another exposure with some filter and then

Record the whole thing on an optical negative. Yeah now they can just do it all with the computer easy peasy. It's great You anything else I'm kind of looking around but this is like one eighth This topic. Yeah, hopefully it made you appreciate movies more. Yeah you specifically me I know you love the movies sure if you want to know more about movies go listen to Chuck's podcast movie crush You'll love it. Hey, thanks and since I said movie crush. It's time for listener mail And actually since you said movie crush we're about to release an episode on the Matrix. Oh yeah. Hadn't seen that movie. It's been 20 years since it came out.

You've never seen the Matrix? No, I hadn't seen it in a long time. Oh, I gotcha. But I didn't realize this is the 20 year anniversary. Watched it last night. Still totally holds up. Really? Looks great.

Fun. Yeah. Well acted by most of the cast members. Who didn't act well? Oh, you know, Keanu always gets picked on. I love that guy. I know Kung Fu He's perfect in that role though. Yeah, he's great. I can't imagine anybody else in it'd be too Just too serious. I think like imagine Tom Cruise in that in the matrix. Yeah, you're right He adds a little like something light doesn't he? Yeah

It makes it a little more every man almost a little more believable in a weird way. I think so. Do you see those John Wick movies? I've seen some of it. It's just like a little too video gamey for me. Yeah, but I mean it's fine I respect that people like it. Sure Here we go, okay, this is about 3d 3d it's about solar panels. I got movies on the brain. Hey guys, being a roofer my entire life, I never thought I'd have much input until now.

It's my time to shine! One thing that wasn't mentioned in the solar panel episode is that people really need to consider the age of their existing roof before installing solar panels. Oh, that's a good point. A new residential single roof should last about 30 years, but if the roof isn't nearly new, I would not suggest installing solar panels. And definitely don't install it if the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. Once the panels are installed, roof repairs or replacement is very difficult and much more expensive.

If the life of the roof ends before the solar panels die, you can easily add 50 to 75 percent is very difficult and much more expensive. If the life of the roof ends before the solar panels die, you can easily add 50 to 75% or more to the cost of the re-roofing due to the added labor cost to remove and reinstall the panels. So you should align it ideally with your new roof. Sure. I do mostly commercial roofing. Can't tell you the number of customers who I talked to had solar panels on an old roof and are now paying through the nose for repairs or replacement. Reputable solar panel specialists should have this roof conversation with a potential customer before installing the panels. I'm afraid it doesn't always happen or customers

underestimate the added re-roofing cost once they're installed. Man, this is a great PSA. It is. Thanks again for what you guys do. I'm in my truck a lot driving to different job sites and it's always easier on Tuesday through Thursday when I have a new stuff you should know. And that is from Owen Sincenig. Great name.

First and last. Yep. Love the name Owen Stephen King's kids name Yeah, okay. Thanks a lot Owen. We appreciate that big time. That was a great email I would have never thought about that and he didn't even send his business in to be plugged So just Google his name and roofing and if he happens to live near you use him. That's how dedicated this guy is. He sounds honest. Well, if you want to be a cool person like Owen, you can get in touch with us.

You can go onto stuffyousshouldknow.com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech Are there any pictures of you online? on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. about how living in the future is affecting us right now. Police, they are trusting the software

with this magical ability to lead them to the right suspect. In this episode, we dive into how cops are using AI and facial recognition, and sometimes getting it wrong and putting innocent people behind bars. So if your accuser is this algorithm, but you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. Listen to Killswitch on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I always had to be so good, no one could ignore me. Carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling, the limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree.

It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through barriers at tearthepaperceiling.org, brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. This is an iHeart Podcast.