Special Effects: In Film and Television

While the special effects in the movies keep us astounded, learning how they were performed can be just as enthralling. In this book, you are given a brief introduction to how some of the groundbreaking special effects were made. Scenes from the classic science fiction movies such as the Star Wars sequence, "2001 A Space Odyssey", "Terminator 2" and "Alien" are described and explained. Other standard special effects such as fire scenes, battle scenes, underwater scenes, combinations of live actors and animations and explosions are all demonstrated. While none of the explanations is completely thorough, they all are lengthy enough to give you the general idea as to how the action was accomplished. In my opinion, knowing how something was done never detracts from the thrill of seeing it, therefore I enjoyed this book immensely.

Ok, so I'm not 9-12 years old (the book's target audience), I'm almost 30 and I still enjoyed this book tremendously. It has awesome illustrations to show the techniques used in various effects like robotics, miniature models, etc. The explainations are easy to understand too. This book took the mystery out of the state-of-art special fx with recent blockbuster movies as examples. For an introduction to special effects, it's excellent.