We all have some idea about how movies are produced and what steps have to be followed in order to get a film into the theaters, because this process hasn't really changed for almost a century now. On the other hand, the things that went through a lot of changes include the size, influence and power of the film industry, the material of the recordings, the capacity of recording devices, and, among many other things, the various special effects that were mainly developed in the last 20 years. It would take at least as many as three books to follow through and explain these changes step by step. Right now, I would like to focus on the special effects side with this 3D phenomenon breathing on our neck and taking over the theaters nowadays.

In the following paragraphs I'm going to mention the effects that I find the most important. Note that there are may more besides these main ones.

Chroma key compositing, commonly referred to as green screen or blue screen, is the process of combining two or more recordings in one scene. This type of effect is used when a locational shoot would be expensive, or when the story takes place in a faraway place or between imaginary surroundings. The background of a set is a single-colored wall. Actors walk before this wall and the background image is projected in the place of the wall when the two recordings become one. Cameras recognize that particular color and where they perceive it, they project the other bit of film in its place. It is a bit tricky because, if a color in the scene falls into the range of color that the background is in, the object with that color will be projected onto as well, so clothes and props have to be chosen accordingly. Nevertheless, this also enables the creation of further effects like the invisibility cloak in the Harry Potter series.
The background can have any kind of color, but green and blue are the most often used. Green is used because it requires less light than blue, the green channel of digital cameras holds the most detail, and the blue color of the sky is inevitable during an outdoor shoot. Whereas, blue is complementary to human skin tone, and when several plants are included in a scene, green wouldn't work. Blue background is commonly used for weather forecasts. Red is rarely used, since it prevails in human skin pigments.
Below, thanks to Stargate Studios, you can see a compilation of how series are created using chroma key compositing:



CGI (computer generated imagery) represents the group of effects created by the use of computer graphics. It is widely used in the production of computer games and animation movies. The first animation movie to be fully created by the use of such technology was Toy Story. CGI can either be pre-rendered graphics (mostly cutscenes in computer games), or performances of actors and movement of objects that have been animated onto, such as Gollum or A Scanner Darkly. As a matter of fact, both of the previous examples are outcomes of a CGI-type visual effect called rotoscoping, which means that they were animated frame by frame.

Bullet Time is an especially important effect for me, as I was a fan of The Matrix and Max Payne as a kid as well. This technique helps overcome the limits of time and space on screen, by letting the audience observe the scene from different perspectives at various speed. Although this effect can be achieved manually with multiple cameras, most of the time it is done by the use of virtual cameras. It first appeared in Blade in 1998.

Stop motion is my personal favorite of all, because its results are usually mind-blowing and extremely abstract. The idea is to make physically manipulated objects look like they are moving on their own. This is done by taking lots of pictures of moving objects under a fairly small amount of time, or altering inert subjects between shots. A popular branch of this technique is clay-mation, an example for which is Wallace and Gromit.
Now take a look at a music video, which was compiled from 5.000 photographs with stop motion in mind. Then watch the making of the video. Kaki King - Pull Me Out Alive:





Last, but not least, we have 3D on the uprise among effects. This technique is more than a hundred years old actually. It originates from stereoscopy, which includes any kind of technique that is capable of recording 3D or creating the illusion of depth in an image. When you are watching a movie in 3D, you are looking at the screen from two different perspectives at the same time. This 3D illusion is created either by recording from two perspectives at the same time during shooting, or generating two perspectives with a computer. There are several different techniques for recording in 3D and watching 3D: various types of cameras, various types of 3D glasses, etc. I don't want to go into details about them now, but I might do another post on them.
What I will mention though is that soon we might not have to put on glasses at the movies. Autostereoscopy means being able to observe 3D with only the help of your eyes, and Hitachi has recently released the 1st 3D mobile phone that meets those requirements. However, this technology cannot be integrated into theaters yet.

Even though it is amazing how advanced we are technologically and how eye-popping 3D can be, I'm not sure whether I'd like to see it gaining attention and popularity. Nevertheless, I'll surely miss the 35mm films if that will be the case.

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