Personal Research Project: Visual Special Effects in Film and Television
For my personal research project I have decided to do an investigation into the art of visual special effects in film. I shall be researching and learning as much as I can about the history and techniques used to create the various illusions and creatures in a variety of films, in particular the horror genre. However the main purpose of this investigation will be to observe,learn and finally compare between using more traditional special effects such as prosthetic make up,actors,animatronic robots and models, to the increasingly common CGI effects of today. Although CGI is now used in the majority of horror/sci-fi and adventure films and these advances in technology are generally seen as a blessing for the film industry, I'm not entirely convinced; for instance compare the mechanical shark from Jaws made back in 1975 to the ones created digitally for Deep Blue Sea in 1999...and then to a low budget straight-to-video film, Shark Attack 3:Megalodon made in 2002.

Jaws (1975)

Deep Blue Sea (1999)

Shark Attack 3:Megalodon (2002)

I shall be researching into various films to find out as much as I can about visual effects and analysing the techniques used and final effects among other things before coming to a decisive conclusion.

In terms of research I have been using a variety of books that I have bought and borrowed from the library however none have proved that useful as yet, although today I purchased Special Effects:The History and Technique by Richard Rickett off Amazon for a hefty 30 quid second hand which according to reviews is the best book you can buy on this subject so looking forward to that arriving so can get started on writing the 4000 word essay.
Another useful source of information I discovered today is the e-journals accessible through the VLP, I have only looked at the Art Full Text journal database recommended by Jools and already found numerous interesting and relevant articles.
Another important source of research will be Making of documentaries found on the special features menu of various DVDs. I have already found an extremely interesting one for The Hills Have Eyes remake and have learnt a lot from it, so I therefore plan to purchase more DVDs for this purpose.