Visual Effects - Star Wars

Personally I think it would be wrong to talk about visual effects without talking about Star Wars. Whilst the earlier films didn't use a lot of it, this was probably only because at the time it wasn't available  The modern Star Wars films have made use of it in vast battle scenes and in their spacecraft.

Star Wars is reknowned for it's high fantasy, futuristic setting - even if it is supposed to be set a long long time ago, it still certainly is in a galaxy far far away. It would have to be, as many scenes in Star Wars would be impossible if not for the advances in visual effects.

'The secret to film is that it is an illusion, and that illusion is created by 24 frames per second, you have the illusion of movement, you have the illusion of space and time, and ILM is concerned with creating an illusion.'

'On Episode 1 we basically have more freedom than George ever had on the original Star Wars film and that's really due to digital technology as we were constrained by the technology we had, we couldn't previously build an epic landscape'.

In the true Star Wars original film fashion though, there were still many props, replicas and models - miniatures  as that would still often provide to be cheaper, easier, or simply provide the look that Lucas wanted.

CG characters who interacted seamlessly with live action characters was also one of the notable features of Star Wars Episode 1. The most notable example being Jar Jar Binks, but I think it's also worth pointing out the death of Darth Maul in which the character is split in two and falls. This was done with CGI rather than modelling as it provided a more realistic look. I think this scene in particular was well done because even now I still remember it.