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In the science-fiction thriller Alien (1979), the actor John Hurt has a sudden fit of violent coughing – and a hideous ‘baby’ alien bursts bloodily from his chest.

The illusion was created by the special-effects man Roger Dickens thrusting a puppet through a hole in a dummy torso.

Puppets have became popular with film makers to create terrifying creatures. Many are sophisticated pieces of engineering.

For Jaws (1975), three 25ft (7.6m) long sharks were built. One was pulled through the water on a type of sled, with scuba divers guiding it and working the fins and tail. The other two models were merely the left and right sides of a shark, to be filmed from only one side. They ran on an underwater rail and a hidden pivot arm enabled them to dive and surface.

The most endearing alien of all, ET (1982), was in fact several different ETs- three full-scale working models, a separate head and torso for close-ups and a midget actor in a costume.

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In the 1957 science fiction film The Incredible Shrinking Man, the actor Grant Williams had to appear to shrink in size daily. Part of the film were made by building giant-sized sets, complete with outsized armchairs and tables. But in some scenes, as when Williams is chased by his cat – gigantic in comparison to him – a process called travelling matte was used.

In a similar way to a stationary matte painting, travelling matte involves creating a ‘hole’ in a film background, so that separately filmed action can be superimposed. But the travelling matte ‘hole’ has to shift position or change in size from frame to frame, to match the area wherever the actors or vehicles are required to move.

The system was used extensively in the Superman films, especially when Superman was required to fly long distances o to recede to a very small size.

The most commonly used method is the ‘blue screen’ process. actors, miniatures or other objects are filmed before a blue screen and the colour negative is then printed onto a black-and-white master, which captures only the blue area. The result is a film in which the background is clear, while the foreground action appears in silhouette.

This is the travelling matte. It is then run through an optical camera to mask the unwanted foreground, while the background film is exposed.

Thin blue line

This process is next reversed to mask the background when the foreground action is added to the negative. The film then contains both foreground and background footage combined on each frame.

Sometimes, a thin blue line or fringe is visible around the outline of the actor or model. But modern optical-effects technicians can now eliminate the line, which was caused by reflected light from the blue background screen.

Another – yet more laborious – method of creating a travelling matte was used by Stanley Kubrick for his spectacular film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

To superimpose film of space vehicles on that of backgrounds of stars would have resulted in the stars also showing up the images of the spaceships. To solve the problem, Kubrick needed to have spaceship-shaped holes that would move backgrounds – holes that would move around to match the movements of the various craft.

The oldest, most time consuming and costly method of creating travelling mattes was resorted to: painting spaceship silhouettes onto hundreds upon hundreds of frames of film.

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Any scenery, from the skyline of ancient Rome to an alien landscape, can be added to a film background by a matte painting – a technique used to mask part of a scene which will be added later. The technique evolved from glass painting, invented in the 1930s.

A scene was painted on a sheet of glass, placed in front of the camera so that it merged with the action being filmed. Later silent-film makers developed ‘in-the-camera’ matte. It involved shooting live action with part of the scene ‘matted out’ by black paint on a glass sheet in front of the camera.

The partially exposed film was rewound and transferred to another camera.

A frame of the film was projected onto an easel and an artist added what was required to the matted-out area, leaving the live action area black.

The two segments – painted scenery and live action – were then combined, using a special ‘optical printer’, invented by a Hollywood technician, Limewood Dunn, around 1930. A type of film copying machine capable of superimposing and blending different portions of film, it can create a variety of effects. They include dissolves (in which one scene seems to ‘melt’ or fade into another), wipes (a shot which sweeps off the screen to be simultaneously replaced by another), freeze frames (a pause in the action on one shot) and the combining of several, separately shot sequences.

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In 1922, the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – creator of Sherlock Holmes – showed a film of model dinosaur animation to the Society of American Magicians. It made headlines in The New York Times. DINOSAURS CAVORT IN FILM FOR DOYLE.

Conan Doyle did not explain to its astounded audience that the film had been shot using a technique which had already been used somewhat unconvincingly in other silent pictures – but greatly improved upon by the American effects technician Willis O’Brien. It was a sequence fro the movie of Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World, which was released in 1925.

Models are made to move by exposing a single frame of film at a time and adjusting the model to a new position between each shot. When the film is projected at the normal speed, the model – a brontosaurus, giant ape or some other creature – seems to move naturally.

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The action sequences in Star Wars (1977), with speeding spaceships in dramatic dogfights, were achieved with models and never moved. In a technique called motion control, the camera does all the flying.

The effects supervisor John Dykstra wanted to avoid the time-consuming and costly method used in 2001: A space Odyssey. For that film, the camera remained fixed when models were moved past it. For a scene in which the spaceship Discovery travels through space, it was necessary to film the model many times.

This was so that other elements, such as crew members visible in portholes, and star backgrounds, could be incorporated. The model was 54ft (16.4m) long and each camera pass on its 150ft (45.7m) long track took four and a half hours.

Dykstra’s solution was to mount his model spaceships on rigid pylons coloured blue so that they would not show up against a blue screen background. The camera, mounted on a crane, travelled along a track. The crane man arm moved up and down and rotated, and the camera could tilt, take sweeping panoramic shots (a pan), and track (follow any object) in all directions. It was computer-controlled so that each movement could be duplicated precisely to film different images on each pas, using the same film each time. So laser flashes, exhaust glow, explosions and starry backgrounds all ended up on the film in their right positions.

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When mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent became the Man of Steel in Superman (1978), he was made to fly through the sky over Metropolis – through a technique called front projection.

It is the reverse of back projection. The background scene is projected onto a screen behind the actor. But it is beamed from the front. So how do they avoid the background scene showing on the actor?

A projector bounces a low-intensity background image, too dull to show on the actor, off a mirror, angled between projector and camera. The image is reflected back at the camera from a screen, the surface of which is composed of glass beads,. Which intensity the image. Because the light from the screen travels in straight lines, the actor’s shadow is masked by his body.

In the Superman flying sequences, the actor Christopher Reeve was supported by a hydraulic arm protruding fro the screen. Like his shadow, the arm was concealed from the camera by his body.

Zoom lenses on both camera and projector provided the illusion of movement and perspective.

One of the first film makers to use front projection effectively was Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A space Odyssey (1968). It provided the background scenery in the opening sequence of ape men.

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