Someone once described the secret to making magic as putting in far more effort than any reasonable person would, such that no reasonable person would think you'd done it the hard way.
It's also (approximately) Lawrence of Arabia; at least the same principle.
Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers as a showy trick. Someone else tries it, and cries out that it hurts, then asks what the trick is. He replies, "the _trick_, William Potter, is not _minding_ that it hurts."
And then in Prometheus that scene is used to emphasize the behavior of an android becoming mis-aligned with the crew and not minding the consequences of subsequent actions.
That theme certainly appears in The Prestige, but those words don't to the best of my recollection. I guess I'll leave it to you whether that merits a finger cut.
Wow! There's a look of the Noddy at the end of this video: https://youtu.be/agKiATDgdBs (as well as what the broadcasted video looks like before it).
Funny how there are other frames like "Temporary Fault", that the camera can point to to inform the audience if there's a problem.
The Wikipedia page also mentions how they added "Colour" to promote the fact that colour service is available, and how people were choosing to remain in B&W because the licence fee for colour TV is higher. Meanwhile in 2025 I'm still using 1080p instead of 4K monitors because theye're good enough.
I went from a 32" 720p TV to a 43" 4K TV. I don't really notice the difference for TV watching. I don't watch a lot of TV anyway.
Now a 1080p monitor up to a 4K monitor? That was a huge improvement to my experience. It's like having 4 1080p monitors without a seam if you get one big enough.
That’s because a lot of broadcasters are either not transmitting 4k or encoding their streams in such horribly low bitrates that you might as well be watching through glasses made from empty beer bottles.
Contrast Apple TV with YouTube; or Crunchyroll vs Youtube. Then step it up to BD. There is such a huge difference between 4K “fast”, 4K “main”, and the 4K “high” used on BDs.
I have suspicions it may be a "passive" vs "active" experience difference. My argument as below:
Watching TV when I was younger with PAL/NTSC stuff I suspended disbelief as I could, let imagination fill the missing details, and enjoyed the stories. More resolution doesn't change that process. See shaky-and/or-quickcut cam fighting scenes for example.
Playing games, reading/typing words onscreen etc as might be done on a monitor rather than a TV. You are expressly paying attention to the finer details. Resolution helps with finer details.
Think about the logistics of suddenly having to put up a fault slide during an emergency, especially when the best you can ask for is a camera and possibly a chroma-keyer! A camera on a swivel must've been a luxury.
Doctor Who's original 1960's intro is in a similar vein of "wait a minute, how'd they do that in that year?". This predated any commercial synthesisers and was mind blowing for its time.
The theme is much more subtle and complex than my mental model.
I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)
Considering the breakdown of all the elements that went into it and the meticulous attention to detail, it’s not surprising that the creation of this logo took around half a year to complete. Golitzen really embraced the Art Deco movement and was also a storyboard artist for NANA in 1934, but its hard to find any illustrations online, what i can find is a mention of his name in a MOMA art/cinema expo from the late 70s https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327139.pdf
The original HBO "Feature Presentation" intro was shot with minatures and similar sorts of effects, all before digital/CGI existed or was feasible. There's a documentary about it on YouTube
There used to be real craft, based on the physical world, in creating that movie magic. It took a lot of knowledge about different stuff - materials, photography - to create this.
It's quite a hybrid would count this a in-camera, not pure practical.
not to this discount this but to encourage mixing media.
Lots of projection mapping going on which is pretty much capturing a digital screen on other surfaces.
I've read that the original Fraggle Rock was the last major puppet TV production that didn't use computers to supplement the puppetry by hiding the strings.
I'm sure the newer Fraggle rock and other newer Muppet shows have impressive puppetry but the viewer is further removed from the actual craft since the image is computer enhanced.
Sure, now a lot is teleoperated with servomotors instead of with linkages and string. (Letting the people underneath the floor focus more on the hands and other things that the servos don't run). But practical effects and puppetry have always used new technology as it became available.
Fair enough, "used to" is probably not the right qualifier. Still, those guys back in the 30's had to be pretty inventive to make some of the stuff they did with very limited technology. Not to disparage people working with practical effects today.
There is also a misconception that digital vfx are necessarily easier, faster and don't take as much skill etc.
My wife and I moonlight as performing magicians. We both love horror movies and when I was a child in the 80s / early 90s I wanted to do sfx makeup and practical fx for a living.
Around the late 90s / early 00s, the movie industry went through this phase where digital vfx / cgi was extremely trendy and hype-driven. Kind of like the LLM hype train in tech today. Movie studios embraced digital vfx to the exclusion of practical for a variety of reasons and with mixed results as far as public reception went. Just like with LLMs, there was this attitude amongst studios and fx shops that digital was "the future." It was driven partly by cost but also by the impression that you can do things digitally that you can't do practically, or can't do as safely or for the same budget.
So during this period we saw a hell of a lot more digital CGI and a hell of a lot less practical.
The state of vfx has matured quite a bit since then, and there has been a modern embrace of practical fx but not for the reasons that people think.
The idea that practical is better than digital is horse shit. But so is the idea that digital is better than practical. Just like with anything, it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.
Digital vfx artists are magicians. What they do is not easy. Neither are practical fx artists. Both are highly skilled crafts and disciplines and most movies today use hybrid approaches because it's all about finding the right tool for the job at hand.
What gives a lot of us vfx enthusiasts a laugh, is when studios boast about doing everything practically because of just how much of a bad image the general public has gotten about digital fx.
First, they're almost always lying to you. They undoubtedly do a lot with practical, but there is still a lot of digital vfx going on. But they play fast and loose with what they mean by "digital vfx." Is compositing the same thing as CGI? Not in a strict sense, but it's still an example of a digital effect unless you're filming on film and doing it the old fashioned way.
People have it in their mind that digital is always going to look artificial, and practical is going to "feel" real. Go look at some budget practical fx from the 80s. Some of it is brilliant and has aged well, while others looks absolutely garbage. That's true for digital as well.
The techniques needed to mature, the computers needed to mature and the industry needed to mature. Now a days most people would be surprised how much is done with digital vfx that they wouldn't have realized, because good CGI is invisible CGI. You believe it and don't question it. And amazing results are had when practical and digital are combined. Which, if I can play loose with the term "digital" has actually always been the case since Georges Méliès, a 19th century magician and early film and vfx pioneer, who accomplished a lot of his sfx using a combination of "on camera" practical methods and film compositing (what, pre-CGI, people would call "camera tricks"). A lot of what is done digitally today, takes tricks and concepts that were done by hand with film and lets people do it faster and easier with software.
It strikes me as funny, because I've been around movie magic for so long, that the wizbang grafix abilities of today have nearly erased from memory the knowledge of practical FX. I do miss the extra features of a nice DVD release with a bunch of BTS clips that showed the various movie magic to make the final version. I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.
The Columbia logo is another one that has been updated over the years. I've seen writes up about refreshing it back when it was an edit bay ruled by tape based playback. Each layer of clouds was on a separate tape all played back in sync to generate the final comp. Further back, it would have been separate film strips.
> I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.
Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film, so they just let various media produce free content about it and put stuff on YouTube?
You're saying there's YouTube channels that produce making of/BTS content as the same caliber we'd get as bonus materials on shiny round discs? I just don't see a YouTuber doing something for free over the course of principle photography just on the hopes they'd get enough ad revenue when they could be churning out other content on a more frequent cycle.
It is interesting to see a post like this at the top of HN considering the vibe here lately.
The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.
And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.
Posts like this are the only reason I come here. I've never been employed as a programmer or software engineer, have never been to California and don't care much about startups.
It’s also interesting that it’s commercial art/design, which many tech industry denizens view as some disgusting malevolent force in the world. I’d argue the tech end of advertising, which props up a pretty huge part of tech, generally, has been a whole lot more concerning than the visual end of it for a couple of decades.
> There is something incredibly human about creating art like this.
There's also something a little sad in that it's just one more artistic work created as an ad. Advertising has been one of the few ways artists have been able to actually make money in this world. So much of the artistic creativity and ingenuity of humanity has been funneled into outputting lies, manipulation, and corporate promotion. I have to wonder what artistic works we'd be able to talk about if these artists were able to make a living creating something other than marketing/propaganda.
I suspect that AI means fewer artists working on ads and it'll probably be a while before companies get sick of just regurgitating the history of artistic talent fed into their models and start employing artists again to make something new.
While I agree that it would be great if artists had more freedom to create whatever they wanted, I think it is overly cynical to dismiss commercial art as somehow lesser. I think this specifically is a great example of that. It isn't really an ad for anything else beyond other art. It doesn't need to be as intricate, involved, and for a lack of a better word, artistic as it is. The only reason it ended up that way is because artists had personal pride in making it. This is true for countless pieces of art. Nearly all the music or movies people listen to and watch today are commercial art. That doesn't make them any less noble than art created by someone who has no financial incentive to create art.
I think the reflection of the letters must also have been a separate shot with no gap in-between the letters and the globe. Otherwise you would have seen the backs of letters on the left and right through the globe in the final sequence.
Someone once described the secret to making magic as putting in far more effort than any reasonable person would, such that no reasonable person would think you'd done it the hard way.
It's also (approximately) Lawrence of Arabia; at least the same principle.
Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers as a showy trick. Someone else tries it, and cries out that it hurts, then asks what the trick is. He replies, "the _trick_, William Potter, is not _minding_ that it hurts."
And then in Prometheus that scene is used to emphasize the behavior of an android becoming mis-aligned with the crew and not minding the consequences of subsequent actions.
Never actually thought about it that way - so the Android feels pain overriding its own programming. Teaches itself to manage that pain
The trick is that he has thick callouses and/or has burned the nerves in his fingers.
Teller, from Penn and Teller, I think https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller
See #2 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-h...
That reminds me of the Ricky Jay article in the New Yorker. What an amazing guy! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/ricky-jay-magi... It so worth the read and there's no paywall.
Do New Yorker articles older than a certain amount of time have no paywall? I never noticed.
I would cut my own finger if it's not from prestige.
:)
That theme certainly appears in The Prestige, but those words don't to the best of my recollection. I guess I'll leave it to you whether that merits a finger cut.
Penn & Teller, although someone else might've said that before them.
The Prestige says that (in as many words) in 2006. Someone probably said it before then.
The Lawrence of Arabia line is from the 1962 film. Perhaps there's an HN'r who knows an earlier variant.
https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1ja9kdy/why_is_the_...
Reminds me a bit of the BBC 1 ident from the 1960s-1980s, which was a physical model that was broadcast live (not even recorded!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)
It was replaced with a custom-built electronic system which was itself pretty crazy. One of the COWs came up for sale a few years back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Originated_World
Wow! There's a look of the Noddy at the end of this video: https://youtu.be/agKiATDgdBs (as well as what the broadcasted video looks like before it).
Funny how there are other frames like "Temporary Fault", that the camera can point to to inform the audience if there's a problem.
The Wikipedia page also mentions how they added "Colour" to promote the fact that colour service is available, and how people were choosing to remain in B&W because the licence fee for colour TV is higher. Meanwhile in 2025 I'm still using 1080p instead of 4K monitors because theye're good enough.
I had to get a new TV and did upgrade to 4K because it seemed to make sense. But hadn't had an urge to do so previously.
I do think a lot of people get obsessed with incremental resolution/sound/network improvements that, in practice, don't really affect the experience.
I went from a 32" 720p TV to a 43" 4K TV. I don't really notice the difference for TV watching. I don't watch a lot of TV anyway.
Now a 1080p monitor up to a 4K monitor? That was a huge improvement to my experience. It's like having 4 1080p monitors without a seam if you get one big enough.
That’s because a lot of broadcasters are either not transmitting 4k or encoding their streams in such horribly low bitrates that you might as well be watching through glasses made from empty beer bottles.
Watching hockey this winter I noticed a big quality difference between broadcasters. Nothing that would really affect the experience though.
Contrast Apple TV with YouTube; or Crunchyroll vs Youtube. Then step it up to BD. There is such a huge difference between 4K “fast”, 4K “main”, and the 4K “high” used on BDs.
I have suspicions it may be a "passive" vs "active" experience difference. My argument as below:
Watching TV when I was younger with PAL/NTSC stuff I suspended disbelief as I could, let imagination fill the missing details, and enjoyed the stories. More resolution doesn't change that process. See shaky-and/or-quickcut cam fighting scenes for example.
Playing games, reading/typing words onscreen etc as might be done on a monitor rather than a TV. You are expressly paying attention to the finer details. Resolution helps with finer details.
Think about the logistics of suddenly having to put up a fault slide during an emergency, especially when the best you can ask for is a camera and possibly a chroma-keyer! A camera on a swivel must've been a luxury.
Thank you for posting that video. The wikipedia description doesn't quite capture the visual interestingness of the globe with concave mirror.
How does this article not include a video or photo of what the logo actually looked like?
It does, third picture on the right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BBC_One_colour_1969.jpg
Doctor Who's original 1960's intro is in a similar vein of "wait a minute, how'd they do that in that year?". This predated any commercial synthesisers and was mind blowing for its time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4
https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/making-of-the-doct...
The theme is much more subtle and complex than my mental model.
I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was just incredibly innovative. I spent a long time learning about them and their techniques as a music student.
Considering the breakdown of all the elements that went into it and the meticulous attention to detail, it’s not surprising that the creation of this logo took around half a year to complete. Golitzen really embraced the Art Deco movement and was also a storyboard artist for NANA in 1934, but its hard to find any illustrations online, what i can find is a mention of his name in a MOMA art/cinema expo from the late 70s https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327139.pdf
The original HBO "Feature Presentation" intro was shot with minatures and similar sorts of effects, all before digital/CGI existed or was feasible. There's a documentary about it on YouTube
https://youtu.be/agS6ZXBrcng
There used to be real craft, based on the physical world, in creating that movie magic. It took a lot of knowledge about different stuff - materials, photography - to create this.
And still today - most people probably don't realized that the Windows 10 desktop background was made using practical effects:
https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
It's quite a hybrid would count this a in-camera, not pure practical. not to this discount this but to encourage mixing media. Lots of projection mapping going on which is pretty much capturing a digital screen on other surfaces.
What's the difference? The Universal logo discussed also required compositing.
Still my overall favorite Windows desktop background.
What do you mean, used to be? There still is, more than ever.
You might be surprised at just how many modern effects are still practical, not digital.
Here's an anecdote:
I've read that the original Fraggle Rock was the last major puppet TV production that didn't use computers to supplement the puppetry by hiding the strings.
I'm sure the newer Fraggle rock and other newer Muppet shows have impressive puppetry but the viewer is further removed from the actual craft since the image is computer enhanced.
IMO the new Fraggle Rock is outstanding. Lots of practical craft.
https://youtu.be/1dkNlkom7MU?si=y4Cm1T3SnXZTbMI-&t=196
Sure, now a lot is teleoperated with servomotors instead of with linkages and string. (Letting the people underneath the floor focus more on the hands and other things that the servos don't run). But practical effects and puppetry have always used new technology as it became available.
This may not be ‘major TV’ but - The Creatures Of Yes might tickle your fancy, if you’re into practical effects and puppetry (and weird vibes)
https://youtube.com/@thecreaturesofyes
Fair enough, "used to" is probably not the right qualifier. Still, those guys back in the 30's had to be pretty inventive to make some of the stuff they did with very limited technology. Not to disparage people working with practical effects today.
There is also a misconception that digital vfx are necessarily easier, faster and don't take as much skill etc.
My wife and I moonlight as performing magicians. We both love horror movies and when I was a child in the 80s / early 90s I wanted to do sfx makeup and practical fx for a living.
Around the late 90s / early 00s, the movie industry went through this phase where digital vfx / cgi was extremely trendy and hype-driven. Kind of like the LLM hype train in tech today. Movie studios embraced digital vfx to the exclusion of practical for a variety of reasons and with mixed results as far as public reception went. Just like with LLMs, there was this attitude amongst studios and fx shops that digital was "the future." It was driven partly by cost but also by the impression that you can do things digitally that you can't do practically, or can't do as safely or for the same budget.
So during this period we saw a hell of a lot more digital CGI and a hell of a lot less practical.
The state of vfx has matured quite a bit since then, and there has been a modern embrace of practical fx but not for the reasons that people think.
The idea that practical is better than digital is horse shit. But so is the idea that digital is better than practical. Just like with anything, it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.
Digital vfx artists are magicians. What they do is not easy. Neither are practical fx artists. Both are highly skilled crafts and disciplines and most movies today use hybrid approaches because it's all about finding the right tool for the job at hand.
What gives a lot of us vfx enthusiasts a laugh, is when studios boast about doing everything practically because of just how much of a bad image the general public has gotten about digital fx.
First, they're almost always lying to you. They undoubtedly do a lot with practical, but there is still a lot of digital vfx going on. But they play fast and loose with what they mean by "digital vfx." Is compositing the same thing as CGI? Not in a strict sense, but it's still an example of a digital effect unless you're filming on film and doing it the old fashioned way.
People have it in their mind that digital is always going to look artificial, and practical is going to "feel" real. Go look at some budget practical fx from the 80s. Some of it is brilliant and has aged well, while others looks absolutely garbage. That's true for digital as well.
The techniques needed to mature, the computers needed to mature and the industry needed to mature. Now a days most people would be surprised how much is done with digital vfx that they wouldn't have realized, because good CGI is invisible CGI. You believe it and don't question it. And amazing results are had when practical and digital are combined. Which, if I can play loose with the term "digital" has actually always been the case since Georges Méliès, a 19th century magician and early film and vfx pioneer, who accomplished a lot of his sfx using a combination of "on camera" practical methods and film compositing (what, pre-CGI, people would call "camera tricks"). A lot of what is done digitally today, takes tricks and concepts that were done by hand with film and lets people do it faster and easier with software.
There's a studio here in Brussels that is similar to the one I work in. Very clever and genuinely nice guys I like to chat with from time to time.
I was surprised how they did the Logo for Arte a few years ago. https://youtu.be/gEWWo5VCQ6A
Link to the Twitter thread of 24-may-2020
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264630771316404224.html
It strikes me as funny, because I've been around movie magic for so long, that the wizbang grafix abilities of today have nearly erased from memory the knowledge of practical FX. I do miss the extra features of a nice DVD release with a bunch of BTS clips that showed the various movie magic to make the final version. I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.
The Columbia logo is another one that has been updated over the years. I've seen writes up about refreshing it back when it was an edit bay ruled by tape based playback. Each layer of clouds was on a separate tape all played back in sync to generate the final comp. Further back, it would have been separate film strips.
> I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.
Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film, so they just let various media produce free content about it and put stuff on YouTube?
You're saying there's YouTube channels that produce making of/BTS content as the same caliber we'd get as bonus materials on shiny round discs? I just don't see a YouTuber doing something for free over the course of principle photography just on the hopes they'd get enough ad revenue when they could be churning out other content on a more frequent cycle.
Didn’t realize plexiglass existed in the 1930s!
Wikipedia says it was first marketed only 3 years earlier so it was pretty new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(methyl_methacrylate)
related aside : the 'This Island Earth' MST3K is a great episode, which apparently features a part of the effect.
'This Island Earth' is great all by itself if you're into campy early-ish scifi.
"This Island Earth" was featured on MST3K: The Movie!
When "Universal International" appears on screen, Mike Nelson quips "Doesn't the fact that it's universal make it international?"
It is interesting to see a post like this at the top of HN considering the vibe here lately.
The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.
And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.
Posts like this are the only reason I come here. I've never been employed as a programmer or software engineer, have never been to California and don't care much about startups.
The "other" category here is pretty wide though.
It’s also interesting that it’s commercial art/design, which many tech industry denizens view as some disgusting malevolent force in the world. I’d argue the tech end of advertising, which props up a pretty huge part of tech, generally, has been a whole lot more concerning than the visual end of it for a couple of decades.
> There is something incredibly human about creating art like this.
There's also something a little sad in that it's just one more artistic work created as an ad. Advertising has been one of the few ways artists have been able to actually make money in this world. So much of the artistic creativity and ingenuity of humanity has been funneled into outputting lies, manipulation, and corporate promotion. I have to wonder what artistic works we'd be able to talk about if these artists were able to make a living creating something other than marketing/propaganda.
I suspect that AI means fewer artists working on ads and it'll probably be a while before companies get sick of just regurgitating the history of artistic talent fed into their models and start employing artists again to make something new.
While I agree that it would be great if artists had more freedom to create whatever they wanted, I think it is overly cynical to dismiss commercial art as somehow lesser. I think this specifically is a great example of that. It isn't really an ad for anything else beyond other art. It doesn't need to be as intricate, involved, and for a lack of a better word, artistic as it is. The only reason it ended up that way is because artists had personal pride in making it. This is true for countless pieces of art. Nearly all the music or movies people listen to and watch today are commercial art. That doesn't make them any less noble than art created by someone who has no financial incentive to create art.
I think the reflection of the letters must also have been a separate shot with no gap in-between the letters and the globe. Otherwise you would have seen the backs of letters on the left and right through the globe in the final sequence.
Side note: highly recommend MST3K The Movie, which features the classic movie “This Island Earth”.
Scott Manley made a video talking about what would happen if the modern logo was real: https://youtu.be/cBxb6LRFG08
I love practical effects in cinema
The stackexchange post is a copy of the information in a blog which is a copy of the information the this X thread: https://x.com/That_Chair_Guy/status/1264632757856198658