Research in Visual Effects Practice & Technology

I am writing a monograph based on a course I taught in the previous century at NYU.  Maybe it will never get done (likely) or maybe it will be self-published on the internet (also likely) or maybe it will even become a book.  Who knows.  But since things will be written down, it makes sense to try and research it and see if I know what I am talking about.

The course/book is a study guide to visual effects, talking about the use of the different technologies as they evolved and in context.  Its about other things as well related to animation and visual effects.  I have lots of eccentric opinions and colorful anecdotes, some of which may even be true.  It turns out a lot of what I have picked up over the years is highly debatable or at least there are other stories out there.  

What kind of things am I talking about?  Here are two examples.  One of the great scenes in film from 1949 is the Ferris wheel meeting between Harry Lime and Holly Martins in The Third Man.  Another is a big chunk of the start of Lost Horizon that takes place in what is supposed to be a DC-2 over the Himalayas.  In both cases, I am pretty sure they built a set of the interior that would make it easier to shoot, sent a photographer out to shoot some plates, and then shot the hero sequences using (probably) rear screen projection of the exterior footage. In the latter case, shooting in a real DC-2 high over the mountains would be cramped, noisy, cold and difficult to light. Your actors would hate you and besides you would have to do the sound again later. So I am pretty comfortable that something like I describe here happened.  But it would be nice to know.

The Third Man and Lost Horizon are famous films and I may be able to find a book or article about production and it may have what I need. There may also still exist an actual shooting script from the production which is a very different thing from what purports to be scripts on the Internet.  My hope was that there would be Am. Cinematographer articles is not working out because it was only in the mid-late 70s that Am Cine started doing articles on things like this.  There may be old Cinefex's that go over classic films.  The Academy Library has a great collection of "oral histories" which are available.  They have interviewed a lot of interesting people over the years.  That is lucky because most of the people who worked on these films are no longer with us.

My guess is that there is no general solution, but just a lot of research to do in different places for the different films.  5 Million Years to Earth (the Hammer version) will not have the same sort of sources as Fantastic Voyage.  So I think I just have to tough it out, baby.  In some cases, I am just going to have to rely on surmise and deduction and document it as that.

I think this is going to take years.