The Life of Pi is a
story of friendship and perseverance, following the footsteps of a young Indian male by the
name of Pi Patel, who is cast adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat after surviving
a shipwreck. However, he is not alone and he learns to survive with several other animals,
who also find refuge on the lifeboat including a fearsome Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.
As you likely figured, the Bengal tiger was not real as using a real tiger probably wouldn’t
have ended well for the actor. As the visual effects supervisor of the film put it, “We
didn’t want our actor to get eaten.” In scenes where Pi had to interact with the tiger,
a stuffed blue animal of some sort with rather questionable eyes drawn on was used. As for
the ocean, well, there was no ocean, just a massive self-generating wave tank with a
blue screen.
“Don’t Let Go” was the tagline to the 2013 Sci-Fi Thriller, Gravity. After the mid-orbit
destruction of their space shuttle, two American astronauts find themselves stranded in space,
tethered only to each other and must work together to survive. Many of the scenes in
the film are comprised of stunning visual effects from the whole environment of space
to the space suits and even the props themselves. In fact, of the film’s 91-minute running
time, 80 of which entirely consists of visual effects. And if that wasn’t impressive enough,
a manually controlled lighting system consisting of 1.8 million individually controlled LED
lights was built to simulate the extreme light in outer space.
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes certainly raised the bar when it came to visual effects
and WETA digital did an exceptional job bringing the apes to life through motion capture technology
and CGI as opposed to using actors in ape suits. The film revolves around Caeser, a
chimpanzee who gains human-like intelligence and emotions from an experimental drug. Later
in the film, Caeser gets locked up in a primate sanctuary and during his time there, he assembles
a simian army and leads an ape uprising. Not only were the visual effects impressive but
also Andy Serkis’ performance as Caeser. The facial expressions, movement and emotion
Serkis brought to his performance is truly phenomenal. Someone just give the man an Oscar
already, he deserves it.
In the third instalment of the Captain America movies: Civil War, the government passes an
act that restricts the freedom of The Avengers following widespread fears of the actions
of the heroes. This leaves The Avengers divided in opinion, particularly Captain America and
Iron Man and an all-out war eventually escalates between Captain America’s team and Iron
Man’s team. As you can imagine, a lot of VFX and green-screen work goes into making
Marvel movies and Captain America: Civil War was no different. Green-screens were key in
a lot of the scenes including the massive fight that took place between Team Iron Man
and Team Captain America at the airport. Get it, “green-screens were ‘key’ in a lot
of the scenes” as you “key” out green-screens… ahh, forget it. You’d think they would film
at an actual airport but no, it’s astoundingly all computer-generated. Just look at the size
of the green-screens used, that’s some pretty big green-screens.
22-years after the events of Jurassic Park, a new theme park, called “Jurassic World”
is opened to the public, located on the same fictional island of Isla Nublar, off the west
coast of Costa Rica. Scientists create a genetically modified, hybrid mutant dinosaur, however,
the dinosaur ends up breaking loose and chaos ensues. This may be very surprising to some
but the dinosaurs were created using CGI and in some scenes actors had to imagine interacting
with them. But, for other scenes with dinosaurs like Velociraptors, human actors wearing motion
capture suits and raptor headgear because why not, were used to replicate raptors’
movements. Everything from the scenery to even grass and foliage were created using
visual effects and it makes you wonder what is even real anymore? It goes to show how
fundamental and how much of an impact CGI has on films nowadays.