How did Chaplin do it?
Call them the CSI team of vintage movies.
Today’s film buffs know just about every trick of the trade when it comes to special effects. But that wasn’t the case during Hollywood’s Golden Age. “The techniques were trade secrets,” says Craig Barron, an Oscar-nominated matte painting innovator who heads his own visual effects company, Matte World Digital.
So Barron and other special effects enthusiasts have investigated how those vintage effects were accomplished, watching classic films over and over in the process.
“We’re using computer graphics as a way to simulate and help an audience appreciate [the effects],” Barron says.
On Thursday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Linwood Dunn Theater, Barron will discuss the methods that Charlie Chaplin used on 1936’s “Modern Times.”
He will be joined on the “Techno Chaplin” program by John Bengston, author of “Silent Traces: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Charlie Chaplin.” The evening includes a screening of the digitally restored film.
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