Voyage from the Moon

I’ve always loved watching films, especially ones done with good special effects. If I had the privilege to watch the opening screening of of Melies’s Voyage dans la Lune, I think I’d fixate on the effects they used and try to figure out how they make it happen. These days it’s easy to dismiss all special effects as CGI, but before CGI people had to improvise. However, that’s not true for all special effects. For example, in filming Star Trek XI, during the scene when Kirk and Sulu were skydiving on to the Romulan drill, they just had the actors surrounded by reflective surfaces jumping around.

Based on the film, they made use of the fact that a film is fundamentally many pictures taken one after the other. The way they made things suddenly appear was by stopping filming and suddenly inserting the object or person into the frame then continuing filming. This technique is still utilized in amateur videos.

I’d also comment on the coloring of the film. This was made before color filming, meaning that this movie is colored because people took the time and effort to hand-paint each of the thousands of frames in this movie. That would explain the color inconsistencies, too.

The film would probably make me think about an actual voyage to the moon. Some movies are really there to propose ideas, and even if they might seem far-fetched during the period before the first World War, it makes you think. If people back then thought that a voyage to the moon is impossible, what concepts and ideas do we have now that are proposed in films but that we think are impossible? For example, this movie called Sunshine directed by Danny Boyle is pretty interesting. It’s about a group of astronauts on a spaceship towards the sun. They even make it past Mercury! Like right now, it might seem insane, but you never know.

Cadiz, M.T.M.