10 Special Effects Movie Milestones That Came After Star Wars

4. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)

Directed by: Peter Jackson The scale of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy arguably exceeds any epic film franchise before or since. Sure, there were war movies before and sure, massive battle sequences have shown up in plenty of post-LOTR films... but not like this. Prior to The Two Towers, armies of a large scale were created in a fairly straightforward way. Step 1: animate a group of soldiers. It can be a group of ten or ten thousand, but the more you animate the better it will look. Step 2: copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste until you have a nice big bloodthirsty army. The Two Towers - which featured the now-classic battle sequence at Helm's Deep - didn't exactly stray from these two steps. But advances in animation allowed an army made up not of copied and pasted sections that would repeat the movements of earlier sections, but made up of the same thing that real armies are made of: individuals. As it's more likely that readers have been to a sporting event than have been to the thick of battle, I'll use that as my example: the waves you see in a crowd of people, the way a bunching of heads seems to swarm as one big beast with each person's movement contingent on the one in front or behind - that's an effect that the copy-paste-copy-paste method could never achieve. Influenced: Hopefully, a major influence in 2014 will be The Hobbit: There and Back Again. While the expected battle in the shadow of the Lonely Mountain shouldn't be quite as epic of those in LOTR, it should still be quite a sight.