h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

are there 2 david lynch films because the film i saw a few years ago definately did not have great special effects. The worms resembled an earthworm filmed very close. And the interior of the ornithopters was particularly disapointing, looking disturbingly like the Simpsons front room.

It probably all depends on your point of view. I think the effects in "Metropolis" are excellent, yet others feel they are 80 years out of date. There are aspects of most films which look tacky - the computer screens in "Star Wars" and "Alien" look tacky today. Yet at the time they were good.

I think the effects in Dune were good - but it's all a degree of view.

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yeah i suppose i didn't realise how old a film it was, so was expecting better from the quotes put on the case. Also i imagine it must be very hard to make effects better than people imagination, and that's something which the book really ignites.

That's true - afterall, you cannot have any special effects without imagination to cerate them - so no effect can ever be as good as that imagination in the first place.
But for the early 80s, it's impressive.

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Definitely. The special effects were way better than, say, Tron, and that was billed as THE special fx film of the early 80s.

Absolutely. We're now so immersed in multi-million pound special-effects that in comparison, all other films look pathetic - even ones made only 10 years ago.

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I think it's true to say that the best effects (and the ones that are least prone to looking dated) are the ones that you don't actually realise *are* effects.

LotR had a few examples of this, like the excellent scale effects in Bag End, among others.

obviously special fx that integrate seemlessly into the film are much better than when you realise that it's computer graphics. You also have to careful of only putting in SFX because you can. But new technologies are providing more chances for films that previously would've been impossible (for instance Star Wars ep 1-3 weren't made earlier because there wasn't the technology available at the time to make em).

I always thought it was because it takes George Lucas that long to come up with such rubbish-sounding names.

good one

Good special effects did exist before "Star Wars" - take "2001: A Space Odyssey" as an example - when I saw it in the cinema last year it was still breath-takingly beautiful.

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lindsay ofcourse that's the real reason

2001 is the daddy of groundbreaking special effects. If only people knew the half of it, the work that went into producing such beautiful shots - it really was a labour of love I could go on all day about this, so I'm not gonna bore you all, but it really did set the ball rolling for a lot of directors....

I've no objection to going into detail about the effects work on 2001, about how many films were included inside the film for different sections, how the computer graphic screens were all done by animation, or the corset factory...

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corset factory..?