I don't like being one of those guys who insists that things were better in the old days, about anything really, but about filmmaking in particular. We don't live in the old days. We can no more turn back the clock than we can grow our fingernails backwards. Maybe movies really were better in the '40s, but it's irrelevant; not only can we not make movies like that now, but if we did, no one would watch them.

And obviously, I've spent most of the last ten years as a fairly hefty digital booster. I'm a filmmaker and an artist and I like playing with toys, and the multifaceted pixel paintbox that digital filmmaking offers really does give me the ability to make the kinds of movies I want to make, in ways that simply were not possible even a decade ago. Every film I've made since (and including) Bone Daddy has literally been completely unrealizeable using traditional means. They have all been fully, unapologetically, intrinsically digital. Bully for the modern age.

Nevertheless, I was watching some making-of features on the Batman Returns DVD tonight, and I got a little twinge-y. BR, having been released in the summer before Jurassic Park, was really the last stop before computer-generated special effects exploded. It has a few CG elements near the end, but it's one of the last big-budget summer extravaganzas to be made largely the old way, before everyone started doing things the new way.

Anyways, I was watching them set up a matte painting shot with a live foreground element, and then later they were describing jerry-rigging a Batmobile model to jettison its outer fairings, and it just sort of hit me as to just how gall-darned neat that sort of thing is. It's just so endlessly compelling to watch an entire craft industry built around, essentially, gadgets and tricks. And even if CGI has given us the ability to pop our eyes completely out of our skulls at the purely photorealistic wonders we are now capable of smacking onto a screen, it's the "neatness" that we've lost.

In the optical age, special effects on film were like a magic trick. It's nothing short of amazing that they worked at all, and maybe that's why we were able to see past the inherently poor image quality and the abstract, "representational" nature of those effects. You'd never believe that Christopher Reeve was actually being photographed flying, but the fact that it kinda looked like he was, could trigger something in your brain that earned your respect even if you knew that what you were looking at was far from photorealistic. King Kong strobes and pops like crazy, but when he flips the T-Rex clean over himself (with the help of some clearly-visible support rods, no less), you cheer because it's just so unlikely that such a visual has been achieved at all.

The de facto tag line for Tederick Films has long been "seeing is disbelieving," and I suppose that it's this very effect that I was trying to get at: the best film magic makes you shake your head with amazement. "I can't believe they did that." Using every single loophole of a flawed and gullible - and oh so unbelievably analog - medium to extend the illusion past the frame and into the mind.

It's inaccurate to believe (as many do) that computer-generated images can do anything with little difficulty, but in general terms, there are probably not a great quantity of image concepts that cannot be somehow realized in the modern visual effects medium. Now, it's not a question of coming up with a clever trick to fool the eye; it's just a process of throwing enough man-hours at a data stream to generate an image output that obeys the directorial vision. And as a director myself, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The Lord of the Rings could not have been possible before the 21st century. The next generation of film art will, itself, be entirely based upon what these new tools have done to the medium which, until they came along, was technologically largely unchanged over the course of its first century on Earth.

But I've been following a certain magician-turned-filmmaker for a very long time now, and tonight reminded me that as much as I go happily forward into the new playground, the bones of what built this thing are turning to dust behind me. The Willis O'Briens and Stan Winstons, the Harrison Ellenshaws and Douglas Trumbulls, may continue to jealously guard their dwindling niche in modern filmmaking, but someday their brand of trickery may be disregarded altogether. There's a shame in that, if only because filmmaking once amazed us for what it was capable of doing as film, rather than merely as data. The moon used to seem a lot farther away, and when we got there, we believed in the dancing martians, because the lantern light had already gotten inside us, and told us that it was okay to believe.