As movies become more and more reliant on computer effects, the entire landscape of
filmmaking is changing. And sometimes there aren't any landscapes at all, because it's
all done in front of a green screen.
The end result? Movie sets look completely ridiculous. Here's a behind-the-scenes look
at what some of your favorite movies looked like before the special effects team went
to work.
The Planet of the Apes
Effects studio Weta Digital changed the game when they helped reboot Planet of the Apes
with a new trilogy of prequels, beginning with 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Producer Dylan Clark had a special amount of praise for Andy Serkis. The industry's
top performance capture artist shone as protagonist Caesar, redefining screen acting in the digital
age.
"Andy Serkis is unlike any other actor. He can inhabit characters that don't speak and
emote in ways that you don't really see often."
Fox campaigned for Serkis to get an Oscar nomination, but the call from the Academy
never came, much to the actor's frustration. After the release of 2017's War of the Planet
of the Apes, Serkis told Independent:
"The awarding bodies should not discriminate about this being different. The visual effects
render the character, just like putting on makeup, except here it happens after the fact.
It's digital makeup, if you will."
Harry Potter
Bringing J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World to life was only ever going to be possible with
the help of CGI, and the films made increasingly good use of visual effects with each installment.
While early CGI hasn't aged well, the quality of digital imagery from Goblet of Fire onward
still holds up. The VFX team had to up their game for the fourth film in the series, as
it marked the return of Lord Voldemort. Paul Franklin, the VFX supervisor for Order of
the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince, revealed that creating Voldemort's nose was a mammoth
task. Franklin told Radio Times:
"There's this idea that we put the shots through the computer and it just vanished off [his]
face. [...] [His nose] had to be painstakingly edited out, frame by frame, over the whole
film. And then the snake slits had to be added and tracked very carefully using dots put
on his face for reference."
That's a lot of work for a couple nose slits, but Voldemort just wouldn't have been the
same without them.
"Thanks for the new wand Mr. Olive Vander!"
"Nothing's too good for James Potter."
Life of Pi
Filming this tale of a boy stranded at sea with a Bengal tiger came with a number of
obstacles—but the biggest one wasn't the tiger, it was the water. Director Ang Lee
explained:
"I knew that to make it work with 3D, water had to become a character itself. I've never
seen realistic water scenes in movies because water hits one side of a tank wall and bounces
back like it would in a bathtub, but we needed to make it work."
That's not to say that the tiger was easy to create, either. Scenes in which Pi interacts
with the deadly animal were done using a crude puppet. The rest of it had to come from CGI.
Game of Thrones
The season finales on Game of Thrones always have a cinematic quality, thanks in part to
the digital wizardry of Pixomondo. Green screen use is kept to a minimum where possible, but
bringing the creatures of George R. R. Martin's world into the mix requires some top-notch
CGI.
Pixomondo's VFX supervisor Sven Martin told The Washington Post that one of their biggest
achievements has been making Daenerys' dragons blend seamlessly with the world around them.
But all that magic doesn't happen until the dragon scenes have been shot, so how does
Emilia Clarke connect with her fire-breathing babies? Green puppets. The actress told Huffington
Post.
"They have these amazing life-scale models that we used for camera rehearsals for the
sake of the CGI people, and I got very attached to them. [...] Fundamentally [they're] dolls,
I suppose. But it was nice to have something physical that I could really picture in my
mind."
Alice In Wonderland
Tim Burton was creating stunning visual effects long before relying heavily on CGI, using
a combination of practical techniques to bring his vision to the screen. The former Disney
artist used stop-motion animation, miniatures and puppetry to great effect in his earlier
works, though when the opportunity to direct his own version of Alice In Wonderland came
along, he soon realized that he couldn't do it without leaning heavily on digital wizardry.
This means that all the stars of the movie had to do the bulk of their acting in front
of green screens. According to visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston, it was a challenge
for the whole team.
"The green screen color, after long periods of time, seems to create a certain aggravation
and irritation after staring at it for a long period. It is effective for compositing, but
visually and psychologically exhausting to be surrounded by it for extended periods of
time."
Beauty and the Beast
When Disney first announced their intention to remake a number of their beloved animated
classics in live action format, the title that raised the most eyebrows was Beauty and
the Beast. A film in which the majority of the supporting characters are animated household
objects was always going to rely on CGI, though director Bill Condon has never liked digital
effects and actively avoided using them wherever possible. He told IndieWire:
"It was important to make everything that could be real, real. I'm not a big fan of
CG movies. The idea is to feel grounded in a world and not be distracted by things that
felt like additions."
Unfortunately for the actor portraying the Beast, Dan Stevens, it was motion capture
all the way, plus some stilts to get him to the right height.
"It wasn't easy on stilts, heh heh."
Stevens spoke to both Andy Serkis and Mark Ruffalo about their experiences in motion
capture roles, and their feedback left him sweating. He added:
"I think I was mildly terrified. But that's really, generally what drives a lot of my
decisions these days, is calibrating the right amount of terror."
Nothing like a Disney movie to get that fear meter up, right?
The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan is notorious for using real-life effects as much as possible, and most of the
big effects in The Dark Knight were done on-camera.
"The only visual effect involved in that scene was to remove the ram that they had built
inside the truck."
But The Dark Knight still offered some unique CG challenges, especially since it was the
first film to shoot scenes with IMAX cameras as opposed to using 35 millimeter and converting
in post. Visual effects supervisor Nick Davis spoke to StudioDaily about his experience
on the Batman flick, saying:
"It was important for the visual effects to look as though they were shot on set. [Nolan]
didn't want the film to take on a gimmicky visual-effects look."
Taking this route meant that Nolan's first sequel to 2005's Batman Begins was "a difficult
movie to finish" as the visual effects had to be rendered in a higher resolution than
ever before.
When it came to creating the look for Harvey "Two-Face" Dent, Nolan wanted to remove layers,
not add them. The VFX team had to digitally remove the skin. Two-Face's exposed eyeball
had to be painstakingly animated by hand, as were the subtle changes in muscle tension.
Gravity
The biggest challenge Alfonso Cuarón faced making his space epic Gravity was achieving
a realistic lack of gravity on screen. Pulling it off involved an intricate mixture of practical
and digital effects.
"Now there are flares, and there are mistakes, as it were, but...no mistakes. It's all created."
The director talked to Space about the challenges in getting the effects to look realistic,
saying:
"It took a lot of education for the animators to fully grasp that the usual laws of cause
and effect don't apply. In outer space, there is no up, there is no down."
Co-stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney were advised on their movements by real astronauts
before being hooked up to a series of rigs created by Academy Award-winning visual effects
artist Neil Corbould.
It turns out that Bullock not only had to put up with being suspended from wires most
of the day, there were electric shocks to contend with, too. Corbould explained:
"There was a charge in there like the static you feel underneath an electricity substation.
If you walked out then touched someone, you'd get this massive shock."
It may not have been easy work for the actors, but it worked out pretty well for Corbould,
who won his second Oscar for Gravity.
The Matrix
Arguably one of the most influential films of all time, The Matrix truly changed the
landscape of action movies, with its memorable fight sequences becoming a benchmark for stunt
coordinators and VFX artists alike.
The term "bullet time" was coined for the epic slow motion shots that the movie employed
on the regular, which were created by visual effects guru John Gaeta. Gaeta old The New
York Times:
"The directors wanted to emulate the stylization found in Japanese animation. When we created
weather, fire and smoke, we wanted it to move not realistically but impressionistically."
Raw footage released as an extra on the DVD showed how bullet time was achieved using
an intricate setup of perfectly positioned cameras and masses of green screen.
The Lord of the Rings
Whenever Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy comes up, the first thing most people
mention is Andy Serkis' brilliant motion capture performance, though creating Gollum was just
one of many challenges Weta faced during the movies.
Practical solutions like miniature models and forced perspective were used in places,
but the bulk of the visual effects were achieved digitally. Even the interior of Bilbo Baggins'
hobbit hole was computer generated for some shots.
Speaking to AWN, visual effects supervisor Jim Rygiel revealed that Return of the King
was his favorite of the three movies, because of the monumental amount of work he and his
team put into the picture. He explained:
"Return of the King has more shots than one and two combined, it's like 1,450. It was
mind-boggling to figure out logistically how to do them all. It's something you never think
you could have done and you did it, like climbing Mt. Everest."
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Bill Nighy's character Davy Jones made his first appearance in 2006's Dead Man's Chest,
although you may not have recognized the actor under all those digital tentacles.
"Well I was once required to be a squid man in a movie. I was an octopus guy."
"And I was perfectly happy watching that. Because what are you going to say? You don't
like my squid? Well then, you know...live with it."
Visual effects supervisor John Knoll was able to develop a method that allowed Nighy to
be on set with his fellow actors instead of filming separately in front of a green screen,
which in turn allowed him to interact more believably and deliver a far more genuine
performance. Knoll described the process to EW, saying:
"On a soundstage with 25 technicians staring at Bill and nobody to play off of, that quirkiness
would all have gotten ironed out. Somebody would say, that gesture is 'too off' or 'too
odd.' It could have become a real sort of committee effort."
"My squid was world class. My squid was an award-winning squid because of the hundred
men and women who created my squid."
The post-credits scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales opened the door for
the return of supernatural sealord Davy Jones, although Nighy had no part in it. In fact,
he had no idea his award-winning squid was even in the movie until a taxi driver told
him about it.
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