How It's Clipped brings to life the stories of how great animation was made. Behind every film there was a day when something on screen seemed impossible: fire with no edges, a crowd of thousands, a robot with no face. Someone found a way. We find that person and that idea, check every fact against the original papers and interviews, and rebuild the trick in front of you, so you can watch it work.

First up: how 750,000 glowing dots invented movie fire for Star Trek II in 1982, and how the team behind them went on to become Pixar.

What should we take apart next? Tell us the film and the scene in the comments, or at miu.fm/howitsclipped.

Sources: William T. Reeves, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 1983; Pixar, Our Story.