Comic book fans you all know me my all time favourite comic book has always been and will always be the 1978 film Superman. Since i've talked about this film alot I thought that i'd come up with a new idea well it's kind of new since I was inspired to do this post from the Youtube channel Corridor Crew who I highly recommend checking out but they did a version of what i'm doing on the original Star Wars trilogy and since that was to big for me undertake right now i'm looking at a movie with less effects.
Now the film does make use of pretty much effect available at the time of filming a key example of such a scene if the scene where Superman helps a train across some broken tracks. The train footage is from what I what I can tell sped up stock footage but what is interesting is the tracks behind Superman were actually a matte painting so they built some of the tracks and then while filming was going on they would leave a gap in the set so that the paining could take over at the same time the person doing the painting would have to leave a gap for the film set.
During the sequence where Superman has to save Lois from a falling helicopter at the end of the sequence there's at least three effects all going on at the same time. With one half of the building being done using optical effects (don't ask me what that is I don't know) , the top half of the building again being a mette painting and the helicopter itself being a miniature and all three are blended together to make it look they are all in the same shot.
Now let's travel back to Clark's youth because if you recall in the movie there's a scene where he runs faster then a train. Well while the train might have been real (I have no idea if the train was an effect or not) the crew had the challenge of making Clark run faster so what they did is hook the actor up to a moving crane and like you would for some car chases these days they pulled him along and filmed him running.
Now for the shot where Superman saves a crashing Air Force One the wing of the plane was a giant miniature so it was still small but compared to the other effects used in the film it was large and it had to fit Christopher Reeve. This honestly does look like a mette painting because that's the effect that was used alot when Superman was flying so it only makes sense that it was used here and so to here it was a miniature was quite shocking to me.
What is even more shocking is that the Air Force One seen in the film was built to look like the real one and they even had the plans for the real Air Force One as well. So if you really think about it Superman saved the presidents life which is just something for you all to chew on since his actions nearly get the president killed just one film later but it's not that film were talking about it's the first one.
Now this might seem obvious to some and it is in retrospect but it's still an impressive effect and i'm going to talk about it. During the final when a bus gets caught up in the earth quake on the Gold Gate Bridge that entire part bus included is a miniature in fact the only real actors in that whole sequence are the insert shots of the children on the bus and Superman himself even the cars on the bridge were miniatures but less detailed ones.
The other major miniature in the film is the construction of The Fortress Of Solitude which again does seem like an obvious choice but I feel that the effect is so seamless that you don't realise your watching an effect. Speaking of the fortress Marlon Brando was superimposed into any of the scenes he was needed for and was filmed in a black room wearing a black turtle neck since only his face was going to be seen.
The scene with perhaps the most effects in it is the helicopter sequence with pretty much every effect in the film being used in this one sequence. There are matte paintings , live actors optical effects , rare projection , optical effects and wire work all in one sequence. So you have Margot Kidder acting in a set it switches to rare projection when she falls out and then when Clark gets changed into Superman that's an optical effect and to complete the effect of that sequence when he saves her that's a mixture of blue screen and wire work.
So there we go guys that is a breakdown of some of the effects featured in the very first Superman film. Naturally I couldn't cover every single effects scene because there's a lot of effects in every single scene and that would mean i'd be here all day writing the effects and just to get the ones featured in this post I had to to spend about thirty to forty minuets looking at various articles and watching videos on Youtube and so if you want more please don't let me know it takes alot of work for just one of these posts to get down.