When Superman CINEMA received the following statement earlier in June of 2002, it was hard to accept that the world had now lost one of the men who made you believe a man can fly, and a professional who helped the British special effects industry fly forever:

"Yes, sadly it is true that Roy Field has died. He passed away on Thursday 23rd May. He had been diagnosed with cancer just a couple of months ago, so it was all a bit of a shock. The funeral took place on Wednesday 5th June. "

EVERYONE here at Superman CINEMA grew up with Roy Field's groundbreaking visual effects work, it not just part of the website, but part of our childhood and the top drawer of cinema itself.

In the Twenty-First century, cinema audiences globally are bombarded by a level of visual effects content never before seen in film history. Post production visual effects houses internationally are bustling with work as there is hardly a frame of film in sight that isn't somehow manipulated through digital tinkering. It is an age where illusion is taken for granted.

The visual effects revolution of Star Wars has pushed celluloid magicians into realms of new creation and fantasy. With the technology as well as research and development invested since the late 1970s, traditional visual effects methods and new computerisation have encouraged the production of visual effects as spectacle, often used to sell a movie to the public.

Film studios have since been giving as much visual effects creation to the mediums artists and technicians, which has lead to the extensive domination of visual effects in films, the term 'special effects blockbuster' and as of late visual effects departments have become full filmmakers in their own right, turning to successful all Computer Generated movies such as Pacific Data Images production of Antz, Blue Sky effect's Ice Age and Sony Imageworks Astroby.

Roy Field existed in a different universe from this visual effects philosophy, as he was part of the generation that existed before veteran Douglas (2001: A Space Odyssey) Trumbull in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the following baby-boom generation of John (Star Wars) Dykstra, Dennis (E.T.) Muren and Richard (Ghostbusters) Edlund in the late 1970s who have since laid down the rules for contemporary visual effects production.
The genius of Roy Field was his persistence to keep his involvement in filmmaking to a minimum. Field came from a background of training where visual effects artists went almost entirely uncredited, where team work was of upmost important. Due to the tiny budgets and break-neck schedules of the many Rank produced British dramas and comedies made in the 1950s and 1960s, time and money were the focal points of all operations. Visual effects, opticals and mattes were seen as the last exit for productions challenged by time and money. If a production had neither the time or money to film on location with principal actors, then the blue and rear screens of Pinewood would be the answer, with composited or matted backgrounds proving an answer to the filmmakers, and these effects had to keep costs down with minimum filming time.

This policy was something Field and his co-working 'backroom boys' followed throughout this era, where they worked five to six weeks per film project, at a time when British film studios were churning out film after film, meaing continuous, endless weeks of long hour working days with projects shot back to back (often overlapping).

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