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After honey-voiced computer HAL 9000 has killed his crewmates, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) continues alone with their mission to investigate a vast monolith in orbit around Jupiter. At which point, Stanley Kubrick's epic interpretation of Arthur C Clarke's science fiction story takes its most mind-boggling turn. Bowman's journey becomes a trip through the brightly coloured 'Stargate', beloved of hippies and then ravers since the film's release in 1968.
This standout sequence was achieved using slit-scan photography, developed into an animation technique by special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull. It involved moving an animation camera along a 4.6m track, at the end of which were two sheets of glass, one with backlit abstract artwork on it, the second masked except for a slit. The resulting lightshow was unlike anything seen before on screen. The technique was subsequently used for Superman, 'Doctor Who's' 1970s opening sequence and even warp jumps in 'Star Trek', prior to CGI.
It took three long, expensive years in the mid-1930s for 'Disney's folly' to take shape. Not content with the huge successes of Mickey Mouse and the musical Silly Symphonies shorts, the pioneering animation company took the unprecedented move of creating a feature length cartoon version of the Snow White fairy tale.
The finished film was a massive success, earning Disney an Honorary Award Oscar, which took the form of one full-sized and seven mini statuettes. Among the film's most memorable elements were the human characters, who boasted realistic movements: Snow White wields a broom while she and her animal chums clean the dwarfs' house to the tune of 'Whistle While You Work'. This effect was achieved using the rotoscope, a device patented by Disney's great rival, Max Fleischer in 1917. In the pre-computer era, rotoscoping involved re-drawing images projected from live action film footage, a frame at a time. Disney used it again for 1950's Cinderella.
The coming of CGI enabled filmmakers to more fully realise the exploits of superheroes in adaptations of comic books, but one film stands out as using digital technology to bring its source to the screen as loyally as possible: Sin City.
Directed by Robert Rodriguez, a long-time exponent of digital filmmaking, in tandem with Frank Miller, the legendary creator of the source comics, the film was shot almost entirely against green screen on soundstages, using HD digital cameras. This type of production, where very little in the way of sets or locations is real, has become known as the 'digital backlot'. Using HD digital cameras meant the 'footage' (basically just data) could then be seamlessly combined with digitally generated backdrops, closely styled on Miller's high-contrast black-and-white artwork in the comics. As such, the film was more a literal translation from one medium to another than a conventional adaptation.
Rummage around in the copious extra features on the Lord Of The Rings DVDs, and you'll come across the striking image of actor Andy Serkis trussed up in his 'gimp suit' performing Gollum. Of course, the decidedly human Serkis looks nothing like the scrawny, deformed creature. Although Serkis provides the voice and the physical aspects of Gollum's performance, the on-screen character is entirely computer-generated, in part the result of motion capture.
This technique involves digitally recording an actor's movements, then using the data to create the computer modelled counterpart. In the case of The Lord Of The Rings, animators drew on Serkis's performance as well as using 'keyframing', a more traditional animation process for defining specific frames of a sequence. Serkis would return to 'mocap' - or performance capture - for Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson's next film, King Kong, where the actor lent emotion and nuance to the digitally generated title character.
Among the technologies pioneered in 2001: A Space Odyssey was motion control, a process whereby a specific camera movement could be repeated exactly. This enabled filmmakers to make identical camera 'passes' (in the case of 2001, of a 16m model spacecraft) to smooth the integrations of various special effects elements. The process was entirely mechanical, however - reliant on precise gearing.
For Star Wars, George Lucas, like Kubrick, surrounded himself with a team of savvy technologists and engineers, founding the renowned special effects company Industrial Light & Magic in the process. ILM's head was John Dykstra who pushed motion control into the digital age, being the first to use microchips to store the exact details of a camera movement. The technique was fundamental to such scenes as the memorable opening, where the formidable star destroyer (realised with a 2.6m model) appears to slide by the camera in its pursuit of the Rebels' blockade runner.
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If Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is defined by one thing other than an OTT Jack Nicholson, it's the smooth, fluid camera shots that track through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel and its frosted maze. This imagery was the result of Kubrick's use of the Steadicam, a camera worn on a harness and stabilised by gimbals, gyros and counterweights. It had been invented in the early 1970s by cinematographer Garrett Brown and had been used in Rocky.
The story goes that Kubrick kept grabbing at the camera, which ruined the shot, so Brown and focus puller Douglas Milsome faked a conversation, within earshot of the director, about Brown, who Kubrick had hired, knocking down Stallone for trying the same thing on Rocky. It had the desired result. As some of the shots were so long and physically demanding, the team ended up using a wheelchair converted for three crewmembers. The whole rig was preposterously precarious but it did the job, creating some of horror cinema's most iconic imagery.
The first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan are about as intense as cinema gets. Tom Hanks' Captain Miller is among the thousands of soldiers landing on the notorious Omaha Beach. Steven Spielberg recreated the look and sound of the beach landing with unprecedented levels of veracity, eschewing the use of Steadicam or dolly shots in favour of handheld cameras. He even avoided storyboarding the sequence, so it wasn't formally structured. 'In that way I was able to hit the sets much like a newsreel cameraman following soldiers into war,' he said.
The finished sequence has a remarkable texture - Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski also used a technique that helped simulate the look of period footage, altering the shutter angle and reducing the exposure, giving the effect of stuttering, frozen images. In post-production, the effect was further exaggerated by the removal of certain frames.
After consolidating an international reputation with his work on Delicatessen and The City Of Lost Children, French-Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji worked on the seminal serial killer movie Se7en. He'd previously shot a Nike advert with its director David Fincher, but their partnership reached new levels of eloquence with Se7en's neo-noir vision of a grim, rain-drenched, unnamed city.
The drained-out colours and heavy blacks were the result of developing the celluloid using what is called the 'bleach bypass' process. Without bleaching the film, it retains its silver and the finished footage effectively consists of both a black-and-white image and a colour image, overlaying each other. The process had been used since the 1960s but the success of Se7en led to it becoming commonplace in the 1990s. Spielberg and his regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski frequently use the process, giving film a grainy or period look.
Citizen Kane is regularly voted the greatest film ever made. This greatness is generally attributed to its director, producer, co-writer and star Orson Welles, but it's never quite that simple on something as collaborative as a film. Foremost among Welles' team on the film was cinematographer Gregg Toland. Toland was 11 years Welles's senior and had been shooting films since 1926. Among the techniques Toland had been perfecting during his career was deep focus, in which the image had extensive depth-of-field - with objects both near and far in focus.
Citizen Kane is packed with precisely shot examples of the technique, which Toland achieved both in-camera through skilful utilisation of lenses and lighting, and in post-production, through the use of an optical printer. Toland's experiments with the technique are also clearly evident in the film he made with John Ford the previous year The Long Voyage Home, but Welles' faith in the veteran cinematographer inspired him to achieve his best work.
Ken Adam was born into a German-Jewish family who fled the Nazis in the 1930s. He trained as an architect, but fought as Britain's only German RAF pilot in the war. Afterwards, he got involved with the movies as a draughtsman but it was the 1960s and his involvement with the burgeoning Bond franchise that really made his name.
With 1962's Dr No, Adam established the distinctive Bond style, which would define the look of the series with its modernist edge and out-sized grandeur. Among the sets designed by Adam and built at Pinewood Studios was Dr No's base, with, among other things, the underwater apartment where Connery's Bond and Ursula Andress are held prisoner.
After working with Kubrick on Dr Strangelove, Adam made six more Bond films, including You Only Live Twice, with its undersea volcano SPECTRE base and The Spy Who Loved Me, which required the construction of the vast 007 Stage at Pinewood.
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