Below we have put together a list of our favorite film special effects quotes. If you find it helpful then don’t forget to check out our other filmmaking quote topics.
The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.
George Lucas
Digital technology is the same revolution as adding sound to pictures and the same revolution as adding color to pictures. Nothing more and nothing less.
George Lucas
Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.
Werner Herzog
My approach to 3-D is in a way quite conservative. We’re making a two-and-a-half-hour-plus film and I don’t want to assault the eye every five seconds. I want it to be comfortable. I want you to forget after a few minutes that you are really watching 3-D and just have it operate at a subliminal, subconscious level. That’s the key to great 3-D and it makes the audience feel like real participants in what’s going on.
James Cameron
I had a fascination with 3D that goes back to the View-Master. I’d always dreamed of making a film in 3D. It’s like a combination of theatre and film. There’s something 3D gives to a movie that takes you to another land.
Martin Scorsese
I was very intimidated by the visual effects world. But I began to realize that you don’t have to know everything. You have to be able to talk about story.
Ron Howard
I think it’s important that filmmakers look at the technology and figure out how to make the theatrical experience a little more exciting.
Peter Jackson
From the beginning, I kept saying it’s not the technology that’s going to entertain audiences, it’s the story. When you go and see a really great live-action film, you don’t walk out and say “That new Panavision camera was staggering, it made the film so good.” The computer is a tool, and it’s in the service of the story.
John Lasseter
Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
Walt Disney
[observation, 1940] ‘Fantasia’ merely makes our other pictures look immature and suggests for the first time what the future of this medium may well turn out to be. What I see way off there is too nebulous to describe. But it looks big and glittering. That’s what I like about this business, the certainty that there is something bigger and more exciting just around the bend – and the uncertainty of everything else.
Walt Disney
The good thing about animation is that you can affect it. If something is not working, then you just fix it.
Tim Burton
Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood – these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It’s disastrous. When I made The Lost World I limited the amount of special-effects shots because they were incredibly expensive. If a dinosaur walks around, it costs $80,000 for eight seconds. If four dinosaurs are in the background, it’s $150,000. More doesn’t always make things better.
Steven Spielberg
In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn’t work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They’re relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists. The fact that Disney closed down its cel animation division is frightening to me. Someday soon, somebody will come along and do a drawn-animated film, and it’ll be beautiful and connect with people, and they’ll all go, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do that!’ It’s ridiculous.
Tim Burton
I don’t use film cameras. I don’t do visual effects the same way. We don’t use miniature models; it’s all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It’s a completely different tool-set. But the rules of storytelling are the same.
James Cameron
[on CGI technology] How about another Dirty Harry movie where Clint Eastwood looks the way he looked in 1975? Or a James Bond movie where Sean Connery looks the way he did in Dr. No (1962)? How cool would that be? There’s no way to scan what’s underneath the surface to what the actor is feeling. If Tom Cruise left instructions for his estate that it was okay to use his likeness in Mission Impossible movies for the next 500 years, I would say that would be fine. You could put Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in a movie together, but it wouldn’t be them. You’d have to have somebody play them. And that’s where I think you cross an ethical boundary.
James Cameron
I think we’re going to enter a phase where there’s less interest in the CGI and there’s a demand for story again. I think we’ve dropped the ball a little bit on stories for the sake of the amazing toys that we’ve played with.
Peter Jackson
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