Visual Effects Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The Visual Effects Society was founded to give a professional home to one of cinema's most invisible workforces. When you watch a great white shark lunge at a boat, or a T-Rex thunder across a paddock, or a thousand orcs charge across a battlefield, the people who built those images belong to no single studio, no single craft union, no single country. The VES exists for them. With roughly 5,000 members spread across 50 countries, it draws together artists, animators, technologists, model makers, educators, studio leaders, supervisors, producers, and even the publicists who promote this work. It spans film, television, commercials, music videos, and video games. Since 2002, it has honored the best of that work through its annual Visual Effects Society Awards. And in 2007, it did something that stirred debate in every corner of the industry: it ranked the 50 most influential visual effects films ever made.

• 2. The Awards

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  Starting in 2002, the Visual Effects Society began presenting annual awards that recognize the finest work of the preceding year across a range of categories. The ceremony gave practitioners a dedicated moment of professional recognition that had not previously existed in its own right. While other major awards ceremonies occasionally honored visual effects, the VES Awards were built specifically around the craft, covering the full breadth of the society's membership from feature films to commercials to video games.

• 3. The 50 Most Influential Films

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  In 2007, the Visual Effects Society unveiled a ranked list of the 50 most influential films in visual effects history. Because of ties, the list actually contained 51 titles. Star Wars, released in 1977, claimed the top position. Blade Runner from 1982 came second. Third place went to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film, which tied with The Matrix from 1999. Jurassic Park, from 1993, landed at fifth.

  The list reached back remarkably far into film history. A Trip to the Moon from 1902 appeared at number thirteen, and Metropolis from 1927 sat at number twelve. King Kong, the 1933 version, ranked seventh. The Wizard of Oz from 1939 placed fifteenth, and Citizen Kane from 1941 earned a tie at position twenty-seven alongside Forrest Gump, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

  Some placements carried a quiet surprise. Darby O'Gill and the Little People from 1958 appeared in a tie at fiftieth alongside The Fifth Element from 1997. Babe, the 1995 film about a talking pig, earned a spot at thirty-five. Mary Poppins from 1964 landed at thirty-two. The list acknowledged that visual effects innovation was never solely the domain of science fiction or fantasy blockbusters.

  The final ranked slot before the tie at fifty went to What Dreams May Come from 1998, placed forty-eighth. An American Werewolf in London from 1981 occupied forty-ninth. Toy Story from 1995, widely regarded as a landmark in computer-generated imagery, appeared at twenty-two, one position below E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, also from 1982, which tied for twentieth with Jason and the Argonauts from 1963.

• 4. The 2017 Additions

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  A decade after the original list appeared, the Visual Effects Society expanded it in 2017 by adding twenty-one films. Avatar from 2009, which at the time of its release had become a landmark in stereoscopic 3D production, joined the list. So did Gravity from 2013 and Inception from 2010. The additions also reached back to pull in Gertie the Dinosaur from 1914, an animated short that predates much of what most audiences would recognize as visual effects at all.

  The 2017 group included films from across the spectrum of what effects-driven cinema had become by the mid-2010s. Ex Machina from 2015 and District 9 from 2009 represented a strand of effects work focused on photorealistic creatures and prosthetics integrated with live action. Mad Max: Fury Road, also from 2015, stood for practical and in-camera techniques pushed to an extreme. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from 2008 brought the digital aging and de-aging of a human face. Godzilla from 1954, the Japanese tokusatsu original, joined a list that already included the 1933 King Kong, placing two foundational monster films among the most influential works in the field's history.