The Academy Award for Best Visual Effects

by Kyle Kull

With the Oscars approaching, I thought it would be appropriate for me to overview an award category, giving you some history as well as some information on previous winners and the current nominees. One of the special characteristics of cinema that has helped cultures fantasize for over a century now is the ability for a filmmaker to create an image for the audience that is nonexistent in the real world. The Academy Award for Best Visual Effects (VFX) tries to find the film during that year in which the filmmaker was able to most effectively create illusions for his story. When looking at this award historically, it typically was able to highlight films which were especially influential to the direction in which film ended up heading.

Numerous popular classics have received Best VFX, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) to name a few. More recently, films like King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005), Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), and Hugo (Martin Scorcese, 2011) have won the award, mainly for there ability to use digital filmmaking to its fullest potential.

Let's take a look at two films which won the award in the past.

The classic "Dawn of Man" scene from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2001: A Space Odyssey is still to this day renowned for its groundbreaking use of special effects. From start to finish, there were techniques that the great Stanley Kubrick engineered and created, laying out the visual effect techniques for filmmakers until the digital revolution in the early 90's. In the scene above, where the average monkey discovers a bone which he can use as a tool, Kubrick used front projection, which until this film never existed. Instead of doing the typical process in which the background was projected behind the subjects in the shot, the environment was overlaid on top of the monkey, giving a more realistic shot to the audience. He used this not only in his historic "Dawn of Man" scene, but throughout the entire film. This brilliant new technique was one of many reasons why this film in the end won the award for Best Visual Effects.

Hugo (Martin Scorcese, 2011)

Let's look at a more recent film, Hugo, which won the award in 2011.

The scene from Hugo which made tribute to the iconic Lumiere Brothers.

While Martin Scorcese is not a director who is known particularly for his visual effects, his film that features a boy living in a train station during the 1930's used visual effects to enhance his tribute to the origins of film. As a result, Hugo received the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. One scene from the film that juxtaposed the currently emerging visual techniques as well as a comically classic anecdote from the early era of film is when Hugo dreams that a train at the station runs off the track, terrorizing the people crowding the station. The Lumiere Brothers, considered the first group of filmmakers ever, were showing one of their many short films, which was simply a train arriving at a station. As the train approached the edge of the frame, travelling "towards" the audience, the film entitled The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (The Lumiere Brothers, 1895) frightened the audience so suddenly, that most of the audience panicked and ran out of the room. Similarly, Hugo showed a train running off the tracks towards the people in the station, frightening them. Scorcese, being the brilliant filmmaker that he is, by using 3D, was able to replicate the feeling of panic that the Lumiere Brothers were able to achieve when they invented cinema. It was this level of brilliance that gave Hugo the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

Both of these films were prime examples of how intelligent filmmakers were able to receive this award, however other films such as Jurassic Park, Star Wars, or Alien were simply breathtaking in their visual effects as well. Let's take a quick look at the films that have been nominated for this category at the 86th Academy Awards:

• Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron, 2013)
• Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013)
• Star Trek: Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)
• The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug (Peter Jackson, 2013)
• The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013)

Keep a lookout on this year's Oscars to see which film will win the award this year.

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