3D before 3D

We're so used to seeing computer graphics everywhere that we no longer notice them, except when they're really awful. But lots of visuals that are now made with CG used to be done the hard way with bits of wood, metal and plastic. The video below is a Behind the scenes 10-minute featurette from 1983 that shows how the HBO Introduction was created. While the use of miniatures isn't surprising (it's still widely used today in special effects), I really liked the fact that a flying, shiny metallic logo at that time was actually built in chrome-plated brass that "flew" over a black table. Also notable are the star blast effect (two sheets of semi-transparent plastic moving on top of each other) and the meteor shower effects (a bunch of rotating, colored optic fibers).

Today, a trained 3D artist could do all that, and possibly faster, on a comparatively cheap desktop machine, but the practical ingenuity displayed by the HBO effects crew is still amazing.