10 Movies That Pushed The Boundaries Of Visual Effects
6. Star Wars: A New Hope
Star Wars is perhaps the most revolutionary movie in terms of visual effects. Groundbreaking applications of technology created some of the most iconic and exciting effects in history. The effects were created by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic team. After finding out 20th Century Fox's effects department had been shut down, Lucas was forced to create his own effects team and handed control to John Dykstra, the initial developer of the Dykstraflex motion control system. Motion control had been used successfully in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Star Wars took the technology to a new level. This system allowed for filming of the various special effects scenes on a larger scale than ever before. Not only did it give greater control of filming, but it could be used to record the same shot over and over again with little error. Some of the most memorable shots of the movie, such as Princess Leia's Tantive IV being pursued by the seemingly-infinite star destroyer Devastator, were created using the Dykstraflex. Miniatures were another key part of the process: they'd been used before, but the Dykstraflex allowed for such accurate filming that a huge number of scenes wouldn't have been possible to make. The dogfight and trench run scenes on the Death Star could not have been created if not for the Dykstraflex system. There were, of course, plenty of other effects in the film such as the creation of lightsabers, blasters and floating landspeeders, but it's scenes like this one that first wowed audiences and spawned the biggest movie franchise of all time. Such was Industrial Light and Magic's success, they continues work on the sequels and eventually became industry leaders, creating effects for Jurassic Park, Harry Potter and Indiana Jones, to name but a few. A branch of ILM would later become Pixar another company to revolutionise the visual effects industry.
