Last year, not long after it's release, I watched Bong Joon-Ho's masterpiece "Parasite" for the first time. Not only did it blow me away the first time then it's blown me away every other probably four to five times I've seen it since then. So yeah I think it's great, so how does this relate to the title of this post I hear you ask? Well recently I stumbled upon the VFX breakdown video created by Dexter Studios and was shocked, in all my times of watching this movie it never once occurred to me that there was any sort of VFX at all. This sucked me down a vortex of discovering some truly amazing things people have been doing in modern films with VFX. Within a very small time frame effects in movies have become amazingly complex and has lead to some of the most creative and ground breaking films ever made.
Now artists have been working with special effects ever since the dawn of cinema such as with George Méliès's "A Trip To The Moon" (1902) where he pioneered the use of techniques such as the "substitution splice" in order to make characters appear as if they were vanishing into puffs of smoke. However the more modern digital effects such as CGI have been around for a far shorter period of time, I have a hard time finding anyone definitively saying when digital effects began to be used but i can roughly guess within only the last fifty years. Yet in the last 10 years or so they have become so important in film making that it's hard to find a film without some sort of digital alteration.
So the question then becomes, does all this use of VFX actually make for better films? In a way there is no true black and white answer to this question. Movies like Céline Sciamma's "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" are highly acclaimed and use no visual effects whereas Ari Aster's "Midsommar" Uses loads and is equally highly acclaimed. The answer in my eyes is that VFX, like any other piece of technology used in film making is just another tool for the expression of the story. sure "Parasite" could probably have been made without ever needing to have put up a blue screen, but would it have won 4 Oscars including best picture? Who knows.
We are now in an era where any story no matter how far fetched and crazy the idea can be, has the chance to be told, and VFX has a vitally important role in this era. Whether your using effects to make minor adjustments to your world like in "Parasite" or your building completely new ones such as in the "Star Wars" franchise, any story has the means of being told in a compelling and convincing way. I am still always just as excited if a film was all done practically as not every film will require it but having the freedom to tell any story imaginable is a luxury older generations must have dreamed about, and their here now
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