This probably feels more recent than it was. Phantom Menace came out 25 years ago.
Before my current job I was working in the special effects business at an interesting time, about 18 years ago. The effects house that I worked for specialized in practical effects and, although it was certainly possible to use CGI to create fairly realistic car crashes, for example, it was still faster and cheaper to do it for real, which is obviously a lot more fun. Unfortunately the type of effects where that’s still the case is getting more limited all the time.
