My very first quasi professional job was working for Brick Price Movie Miniatures during my summer break visiting my dad who lived in LA when I was just 15 years old. I started out sweeping floors of the model shop and when I was done I was taught how to sculpt and make molds some of the projects going on in the shop. This was during the late 1970s and mind you everything was done practical. There was no CG and no digital post compositing. Everything was created to shoot in front of a film camera and then re-composited with on camera techniques. I was able to learn a lot of the tricks of the trade for that time period. Believe it or not some of those tricks still are effective today working with our nice HD video cameras and they are not that difficult to do. No digital compositing with After effects needed.
Miniature models and locked down cameras with matte paintings. Forced perspective shots and rubber latex prosthetic makeup. Puppets and black powder squibs. Lets not forget stop motion animation and Ray Harryhausen the king of visual effects. All of this was what I was raised in as a young artist in the film industry.
I just want to touch on the point,s but I will go into detail about these methods of film making later on in the blog.
