Looking for resources to learn about the history of vfx and other aspects

General Discussion
#1

Hi, I’m César, I’ve posted some topics about my final university project, and this one is no different.
This time, as I’m working on the written essay that I must write for the project , and I’ve come to ask for any books, documentaries, pages, etc that could tell me about the history of vfx, as I need to write a section about that. Apart from that, I’ll also need to write another one about the current market and also the state of the art for vfx.

Now I’m focusing on the history, so yeah, any help and resources you can point me to are greatly appreciated. Same goes for the other sections I’ve mentioned. Thank you for your attention and your help!

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#2

You can find some VFX history in a couple chapters from Elemental Magic. Could be helpful! :sparkles:

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#3

Also, are you talking strictly game VFX, or film too?

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#4

My first idea was to focus on just games, but I think I’ll have to talk about movies too. I’ll ask my professor about it, but for the time being resources about movies could be useful too ^^

The idea is to have it as an introduction, I don’t need to do a full breakdown of the history of vfx, just enough to understand how we got here. Hope that makes sense.

#5

That can be quite a rabbit hole to go down as visual effects have been going long before the digital age (and even before color film!).

Examples like the work of Georges Méliès with his famous films like “A Trip to the Moon” in 1902 and the matte painters who augumented early filmmaking with paintings on glass plates shot in camera documented in the book “The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting” are good examples.

Sites like this one have somewhat exhaustive overviews of landmark advances in VFX over the last century, but I’m sure if you dig around in some search results you’ll find more concise summaries as this is a topic many people are interested in.

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#6

Even if I don’t go in that deep it’s still useful information, and the website you’ve shared is awesome, didn’t know that such complete compendium existed.

Also, even if I just talk briefly of cinema, Méliês is a good starting point, he was the first to dare and try to bring fantasy into cinema.

Thanks for all the info ^^