I'm away from home this wknd and left my sleeping pills at home, so having lost the ability to sleep I've been watching goofy movies all night. This is easily the goofiest of them was "Goliath and the Dragon", but one interesting thing is does have is a practical centaur suit with moving legs. I've never seen that before, and it actually doesn't look half-bad considering the era (1960's). Now I'm sitting here watching a special on Harry Potter's visual effects and seeing how much was done with CGI, and it makes me wonder what the movies would have looked like in "the old days". I've always been fascinated by cinematic special effects, and

You can get an idea of what that would look like from watching the "premakes" by "WhpisEyevan" on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/whoisey.....nd=23&ob=5 He's cut together old movies to make trailers for modern films as they would have looked in that era. The Ghostbusters and Up ones are particularly nice. Kevin the bird from up is represented by the Diatryma animated by stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen in "The Mysterious Island", and likely that's how a lot of monster effects would have been achieved.

I've always been fascinated by cinematic special effects, and it's interesting seeing CGI be invented and sort of take over in my lifetime. I appreciate the work that goes into it - I took a course in computer animation and even doing the simplest stuff can be a hideous struggle. There's no button you can push and just add an effect. But I also think moviemakers have become too quick to say "this will need to be CG because we could never do it practicaly". Pre-CGI writers, directors and special effects artists had to work around the limitations of what they could do, and this forced them to be more creative in some ways.

Still, oddly, looking back there seem to be so many missed opportunities. For example, I'm really surprised no one ever used stop-motion to do a werewolf transformation effect. The Wolf Man did it with lap dissolves, and not only was the design slavishly copied for the next 40 years, the effect was too. I wonder if automatically defaulting to CGI now is stifling creators now in the same way.