The art of visual effects involves nothing less than making words
into pictures, technology into art, and magic into reality. Artists
and technicians who create this magic have labored throughout
the history of moving imagery, always working in service of the
story, the director’s vision, and the cinematographer’s art. This
book, and its accompanying online version, is meant to be an
exhaustive source that clearly describes and explains the techniques
we use in the incredibly creative process of visual effects.
It is important to keep in mind that film may have been the
first moving image medium that employed visual effects, but
as new technologies developed—
animation, video, games, the
Internet—visual effects were there. From the early video tricks
of Ernie Kovacs, to YouTube, to your local cineplex, visual effects
have been employed to help the creators of all moving media
tell their stories.
So to the reader, we stress that when you read
the word “film,” we mean by implication all moving media. As
technology
improves—and video games start to look like film,
and film’s visual effects are created like video games, and all are
done at the same resolution, and they look photoreal in animated
films as well as live-action films—visual effects will merge into a
shared technology.