Someone once described the secret to making magic as putting in far more effort than any reasonable person would, such that no reasonable person would think you'd done it the hard way.
Wow! There's a look of the Noddy at the end of this video: https://youtu.be/agKiATDgdBs (as well as what the broadcasted video looks like before it).
Funny how there are other frames like "Temporary Fault", that the camera can point to to inform the audience if there's a problem.
The Wikipedia page also mentions how they added "Colour" to promote the fact that colour service is available, and how people were choosing to remain in B&W because the licence fee for colour TV is higher. Meanwhile in 2025 I'm still using 1080p instead of 4K monitors because theye're good enough.
ghaff · 2h ago
I had to get a new TV and did upgrade to 4K because it seemed to make sense. But hadn't had an urge to do so previously.
I do think a lot of people get obsessed with incremental resolution/sound/network improvements that, in practice, don't really affect the experience.
doubled112 · 2h ago
I went from a 32" 720p TV to a 43" 4K TV. I don't really notice the difference for TV watching. I don't watch a lot of TV anyway.
Now a 1080p monitor up to a 4K monitor? That was a huge improvement to my experience. It's like having 4 1080p monitors without a seam if you get one big enough.
stavros · 3h ago
How does this article not include a video or photo of what the logo actually looked like?
No comments yet
SoftTalker · 3h ago
The original HBO "Feature Presentation" intro was shot with minatures and similar sorts of effects, all before digital/CGI existed or was feasible. There's a documentary about it on YouTube
Considering the breakdown of all the elements that went into it and the meticulous attention to detail, it’s not surprising that the creation of this logo took around half a year to complete. Golitzen really embraced the Art Deco movement and was also a storyboard artist for NANA in 1934, but its hard to find any illustrations online, what i can find is a mention of his name in a MOMA art/cinema expo from the late 70s https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327139.pdf
LargeWu · 5h ago
There used to be real craft, based on the physical world, in creating that movie magic. It took a lot of knowledge about different stuff - materials, photography - to create this.
pimlottc · 4h ago
And still today - most people probably don't realized that the Windows 10 desktop background was made using practical effects:
It's quite a hybrid would count this a in-camera, not pure practical.
not to this discount this but to encourage mixing media.
Lots of projection mapping going on which is pretty much capturing a digital screen on other surfaces.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Still my overall favorite Windows desktop background.
crazygringo · 4h ago
What do you mean, used to be? There still is, more than ever.
You might be surprised at just how many modern effects are still practical, not digital.
staticman2 · 3h ago
Here's an anecdote:
I've read that the original Fraggle Rock was the last major puppet TV production that didn't use computers to supplement the puppetry by hiding the strings.
I'm sure the newer Fraggle rock and other newer Muppet shows have impressive puppetry but the viewer is further removed from the actual craft since the image is computer enhanced.
mlyle · 2h ago
IMO the new Fraggle Rock is outstanding. Lots of practical craft.
Sure, now a lot is teleoperated with servomotors instead of with linkages and string. (Letting the people underneath the floor focus more on the hands and other things that the servos don't run). But practical effects and puppetry have always used new technology as it became available.
mock-possum · 2h ago
This may not be ‘major TV’ but - The Creatures Of Yes might tickle your fancy, if you’re into practical effects and puppetry (and weird vibes)
Fair enough, "used to" is probably not the right qualifier. Still, those guys back in the 30's had to be pretty inventive to make some of the stuff they did with very limited technology. Not to disparage people working with practical effects today.
Octo-Shark · 53m ago
There's a studio here in Brussels that is similar to the one I work in. Very clever and genuinely nice guys I like to chat with from time to time.
Doctor Who's original 1960's intro is in a similar vein of "wait a minute, how'd they do that in that year?". This predated any commercial synthesisers and was mind blowing for its time.
The theme is much more subtle and complex than my mental model.
I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)
dylan604 · 3h ago
It strikes me as funny, because I've been around movie magic for so long, that the wizbang grafix abilities of today have nearly erased from memory the knowledge of practical FX. I do miss the extra features of a nice DVD release with a bunch of BTS clips that showed the various movie magic to make the final version. I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.
The Columbia logo is another one that has been updated over the years. I've seen writes up about refreshing it back when it was an edit bay ruled by tape based playback. Each layer of clouds was on a separate tape all played back in sync to generate the final comp. Further back, it would have been separate film strips.
mistercow · 3h ago
> I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.
Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film, so they just let various media produce free content about it and put stuff on YouTube?
dylan604 · 2h ago
You're saying there's YouTube channels that produce making of/BTS content as the same caliber we'd get as bonus materials on shiny round discs? I just don't see a YouTuber doing something for free over the course of principle photography just on the hopes they'd get enough ad revenue when they could be churning out other content on a more frequent cycle.
Because that's where the eyeballs were. It's really not hard once you get over your own hatred for something everyone else enjoys. I don't use Twitt...er, X, but I understand why others do. Your unwillingness to see the same point is just going to continue to be a source of frustration for you.
bigbuppo · 2h ago
Specifically, it's where the technical-creative eyeballs were, which is why twitter was such a weird and magical place. That and the algorithm that amplified anger at outrage, but mostly, well at least partly, it was the people.
stronglikedan · 3h ago
Because a great many people do just that to great success on that platform. Why wouldn't they want to reach the most people possible, regardless of niche? Crazy how people would cut off their nose just to spite their face.
jeffhuys · 5h ago
Twitter is just another blogging platform, but with more than half a billion users. So, why not?
related aside : the 'This Island Earth' MST3K is a great episode, which apparently features a part of the effect.
'This Island Earth' is great all by itself if you're into campy early-ish scifi.
evan_ · 1h ago
"This Island Earth" was featured on MST3K: The Movie!
When "Universal International" appears on screen, Mike Nelson quips "Doesn't the fact that it's universal make it international?"
linotype · 1h ago
Side note: highly recommend MST3K The Movie, which features the classic movie “This Island Earth”.
Findecanor · 4h ago
I think the reflection of the letters must also have been a separate shot with no gap in-between the letters and the globe. Otherwise you would have seen the backs of letters on the left and right through the globe in the final sequence.
slg · 1h ago
It is interesting to see a post like this at the top of HN considering the vibe here lately.
The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.
And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.
autoexec · 41m ago
> There is something incredibly human about creating art like this.
There's also something a little sad in that it's just one more artistic work created as an ad. Advertising has been one of the few ways artists have been able to actually make money in this world. So much of the artistic creativity and ingenuity of humanity has been funneled into outputting lies, manipulation, and corporate promotion. I have to wonder what artistic works we'd be able to talk about if these artists were able to make a living creating something other than marketing/propaganda.
I suspect that AI means fewer artists working on ads and it'll probably be a while before companies get sick of just regurgitating the history of artistic talent fed into their models and start employing artists again to make something new.
nancyminusone · 56m ago
Posts like this are the only reason I come here. I've never been employed as a programmer or software engineer, have never been to California and don't care much about startups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)
It was replaced with a custom-built electronic system which was itself pretty crazy. One of the COWs came up for sale a few years back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Originated_World
Funny how there are other frames like "Temporary Fault", that the camera can point to to inform the audience if there's a problem.
The Wikipedia page also mentions how they added "Colour" to promote the fact that colour service is available, and how people were choosing to remain in B&W because the licence fee for colour TV is higher. Meanwhile in 2025 I'm still using 1080p instead of 4K monitors because theye're good enough.
I do think a lot of people get obsessed with incremental resolution/sound/network improvements that, in practice, don't really affect the experience.
Now a 1080p monitor up to a 4K monitor? That was a huge improvement to my experience. It's like having 4 1080p monitors without a seam if you get one big enough.
No comments yet
https://youtu.be/agS6ZXBrcng
https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
You might be surprised at just how many modern effects are still practical, not digital.
I've read that the original Fraggle Rock was the last major puppet TV production that didn't use computers to supplement the puppetry by hiding the strings.
I'm sure the newer Fraggle rock and other newer Muppet shows have impressive puppetry but the viewer is further removed from the actual craft since the image is computer enhanced.
https://youtu.be/1dkNlkom7MU?si=y4Cm1T3SnXZTbMI-&t=196
Sure, now a lot is teleoperated with servomotors instead of with linkages and string. (Letting the people underneath the floor focus more on the hands and other things that the servos don't run). But practical effects and puppetry have always used new technology as it became available.
https://youtube.com/@thecreaturesofyes
I was surprised how they did the Logo for Arte a few years ago. https://youtu.be/gEWWo5VCQ6A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4
https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/making-of-the-doct...
I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)
The Columbia logo is another one that has been updated over the years. I've seen writes up about refreshing it back when it was an edit bay ruled by tape based playback. Each layer of clouds was on a separate tape all played back in sync to generate the final comp. Further back, it would have been separate film strips.
Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film, so they just let various media produce free content about it and put stuff on YouTube?
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264630771316404224.html
I don't get why nerds interested in a specific niche have to post their otherwise excellent stuff there (for clout).
The thread there mentions a blog[1], that mentions a book, which I was unable to find.
[1] https://brighams-blog.blogspot.com/2015/06/17-june-2015.html
Because that's where the eyeballs were. It's really not hard once you get over your own hatred for something everyone else enjoys. I don't use Twitt...er, X, but I understand why others do. Your unwillingness to see the same point is just going to continue to be a source of frustration for you.
'This Island Earth' is great all by itself if you're into campy early-ish scifi.
When "Universal International" appears on screen, Mike Nelson quips "Doesn't the fact that it's universal make it international?"
The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.
And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.
There's also something a little sad in that it's just one more artistic work created as an ad. Advertising has been one of the few ways artists have been able to actually make money in this world. So much of the artistic creativity and ingenuity of humanity has been funneled into outputting lies, manipulation, and corporate promotion. I have to wonder what artistic works we'd be able to talk about if these artists were able to make a living creating something other than marketing/propaganda.
I suspect that AI means fewer artists working on ads and it'll probably be a while before companies get sick of just regurgitating the history of artistic talent fed into their models and start employing artists again to make something new.
The "other" category here is pretty wide though.