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Special Effects Milestones

Stop-motion apes, jammed cameras, talking pigs and seawater that copies your face. Step behind the green screen and see how much of the movie magic you can explain.

🎬 Movies hard 20 questions ~8 min

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What this quiz asks

This giant ape climbed the Empire State Building in 1933. Who brought him to life with stop-motion animation?
Which effects company did George Lucas set up in 1975 to make the effects for Star Wars?
How does the 'stop trick' of the French pioneer Georges Méliès make things vanish or change on screen?
Which actor performed Gollum through motion capture in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films?
Mary Poppins (1964) put its actors among cartoon characters by filming them in front of a blue screen.
Which 1982 Disney film sent Jeff Bridges inside a computer, using some of the first extensive computer-generated imagery?
Select ALL of these films whose stop-motion creatures were animated by Ray Harryhausen.
Which James Cameron film features a computer-generated tentacle of seawater that copies the faces of the actors?
Did Stanley Kubrick personally receive the Oscar for the visual effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)?
Pixar began in 1979 as the computer graphics group of which company?
The weightless scenes of Apollo 13 (1995) were filmed inside a real NASA aircraft making steep dives.
Which New Zealand company created most of the visual effects for James Cameron's Avatar (2009)?
Order these effects-driven films by release year, earliest first.
Select ALL of these films that won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
Which 1988 fantasy introduced ILM's digital 'morphing', as a sorceress changes smoothly through several animal forms?
How were the African landscapes of the 'Dawn of Man' opening in 2001: A Space Odyssey put on screen?
To film Sandra Bullock floating in space in Gravity (2013), the crew surrounded her with what?
In what year did Willis O'Brien's stop-motion dinosaurs first rampage across cinema screens in The Lost World?
Before computer tests won Spielberg over, Jurassic Park's dinosaurs were to be animated with the 'go-motion' of which artist?
Which film beat Apollo 13 to the Oscar for Best Visual Effects at the 1996 ceremony?