I'm wondering this because after watching once upon a time in china and lots of the john woo movies, there seems to be lots of wire removals in those movies as well. (Cameron mentioned that in the t2 extreme dvd commentary.)

Does Superman count?

T2 probably has the first CG wire removal in movie history.

how did they remove the wires in superman then? Or is it where the wires are so thin that only really good vision could see them.

For superman they just made Sup's lay on his stomach on a blue sheet.. for the shots of him slowly landing they just threw him off a cherry picker and had all the other actors actor faster so they could use slow motion.

Well if you are going to slow down one actor the others have to move faster in order to make it look like they are in normal speed.. yup. the insides of hollyweird.

I believe it was a certain kind of wire that wouldn't show up on film.

I know "Death becomes her" was pimping this technique when it came out.

I dunno why I threw that in but that was the first movie that came to mind.

I know for certain that Predator has one wire removal.

I'm certain that Back to the Future 2 also used wire removal (Zemeckis admitted that it was the only "digital" shot in the movie).

CGI merely allows moviemakers to do things more efficiently (read less expensively) and with more precision. The techniques themselves have been done optically for decades. Have a look at the "making of" stuff on the TRON DVD. The computer animation aspects of it were minimal compared to the things we see today, much of it was traditional animation techniques applied to live action footage composited (optically) with computer-generated stills.


I guess what I'm saying is that you don't need a computer to do wire removal roto-work, but it helps!

and also according to the doc on tron, the movie couldn't win an oscar for special effects because it used computers!

Sean Connery
Shocking!
/Sean Connery