Magical History Tour: Special and Visual Effects

Special or visual effects have long since ceased to be a marginal element of film, with an illusion generator of increasing perfection having emerged from the many early experiments, discoveries and techniques. The numerous innovations made in the SFX field during the analogue age were followed by a digital revolution around 90 years after Méliès' first "magic" films, opening up cinema to a seemingly limitless domain of computer generated images (CGIs for short). Computers or their "analogue" forebears are not merely capable of generating past or future realms and their inhabitants in the process, but can also create complex visualizations of whole worlds of feeling, perception and thought. The Magical History Tour throws light on the multi-faceted world of special and visual effects.