Explore Optical Technology Through These Featured Films

The team at Pulsar offers us a visual look at a unique niche within the film industry through the lens of optical technology. Infrared optics are used to elevate fictional settings, highlight characters, and improve camera technology and special effects. The study sheds light on a previously overlooked aspect of filmmaking and storytelling, providing a fresh perspective on films we all know and love.

How Optical Tech Enhances Filmmaking

In the film Predator, infrared optics are a prominent feature of the storyline. An advanced race of aliens used infrared to better hunt for sport in terrifying twists and turns. But the filmmakers used infrared to their own benefit, too. They portrayed the aliens’ infrared vision by using an Inframetrics thermal video scanner to bring the vision to life. The film is full of optical challenges that director Joel Hynek overcame in fascinating ways, including the aliens’ unique camouflaging effect.

The team’s chart includes a recent and powerful sci-fi film example, Dune 2. In the film, the planet Giedi Prime is portrayed in a haunting grayscale that enhances its brutal, joyless atmosphere. The film’s director, Denis Villeneuve, used a groundbreaking technique to achieve the effect. He filmed in infrared and then removed saturation in post-production to create a unique, almost ghostly, ethereal appearance for the actors, along with a stark, sharp grading for the architecture and scenery. The technique is now known as “The Harkonnen Effect.”

Infrared technology is especially powerful when filming military movies. For example, in the Oscar-winning Zero Dark Thirty, filmmakers blended infrared light with night vision optics to create a tense atmosphere that reflected the gritty world of Navy SEAL warfare for the film’s dramatic climax. Filmmakers used infrared for a similar effect in the A24 film Zone of Interest. In the infrared scene, a woman sneaks through the cover of night to leave food for Auschwitz prisoners during the Holocaust. The director chose infrared lighting to show the act as a small, hopeful point of light during a period of intense darkness.

Optical Technology as a Plot Point

From the silly to the scary, the chart also thoroughly covers examples of optical technology used to enhance the plot or define a character. The team highlights superheroes like Daredevil and Superman. Superman uses infrared vision to store solar energy in his eyes and blast lasers at his foes, while Daredevil uses his superior senses to create a mental heat map that helps him overcome blindness. Nick Fury sports a pair of infrared glasses in Marvel’s Secret War series. The beloved cartoon alien Stitch from Disney’s Lilo & Stitch boasts a long list of special abilities, including heat vision that causes his eyes to glow red.

Plenty more military films are featured here, too, starring characters from the armed services who use real technology to overcome tremendous odds. Some of the weapons featured include a Barrett M82A1, PVS-7 goggles, and Accufire Incendis.

Pulsar’s roundup of optical technology used in film does a perfect job of demonstrating both realistic and imaginative uses of the tech, as well as demonstrating the ways filmmakers have applied new optical technology to cameras to push the limits of special effects and filmmaking.

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