The 1940s — An overview of special effects

by FX

At the beginning of the 40s, most of Hollywood’s leading effects people had over a decade of experience in studio production behind them and were masters of the various techniques available to them. Rear projection, optical printing, matte painting, etc, played a key role in the majority of studio productions, and were considered as a part of the normal film production process.

The rise of color photography as a viable option production in the 1940s, brought significant changes to the industry. For effects technicians, color was a challenge. Rear projection in color was at first a vivid but unattainable dream. The background images projected on to a screen behind actors in the studio were not bright enough to be re-filmed in color. Nonetheless a powerful new projection system devised at Paramount helped to overcome this problem in the early 1940s.

Travelling matte techniques (techniques which convincingly combine images that have been filmed at different times or locations) also needed modification to accommodate colour. The first new method was pioneered and used in the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad.

The Caliph enjoys an airborne horse ride over his city in one of the first-ever Technicolor blue-screen travelling mattes for The Thief of Bagdad. The film won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects in 1940.

Blue-screen separation process, employed for the first time in The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

The technique that was most affected by the arrival of color was matte painting. In black-and-white the painter and the photographer only had to worry about matching the greyscale tones of painting and filmed action. In Technicolor, however every color and shade of painting had to match exactly those of the original footage after both had been combined under different lighting conditions. The first major display of Technicolor matte painting was Gone with the Wind (1939).

A screenshot from the epic Gone with the Wind, a successful blend of painting and live action.

Despite the success of Technicolor, however, it was both an intensive and expensive system, and so was generally reserved for prestige productions. Thus the majority of films in the 1940s continued to be shot in black-and-white.

After the United States entered the war in 1941, Hollywood began to mass-produce war films. Many of the American war films in the early 1940s were designed to celebrate American unity and demonize the enemy. Thus the re-creation of battlefields, destroyer-prowled oceans and fighter-filled skies fell to the effects technicians ; and so war films relied heavily on models and miniature photography.

Films such as Ships with Wings (1942) relied on model ships, planes and miniature pyrotechnics for their portrayal of war.