Narrator: Here is a shot from "Clifford the Big Red Dog"
before the beloved pup was added with CG.
[Clifford sniffing]
[girl screams]
To get the proper reference footage
and give the cast something to react to,
a 10-foot-high practical version of Clifford was used,
and two puppeteers had to carry the massive puppy
through New York City.
That's just one of many movies that came out in 2021
that involved risky car stunts, innovative camerawork,
and a few creature performers.
After many previous out-of-this-world stunts,
the latest "Fast & Furious" installment
took it to another level with magnetized cars.
The team had to create a magnetization effect
with very little CGI.
Stunt coordinator Andy Gill used customized cars
with hidden ramps, locking mechanisms,
and cables to give the appearance of magnets
pulling and releasing other vehicles.
And for this scene, when the cars speed by
store-lined city streets,
appliances actually flew through the store windows.
Each appliance had an attached tube
filled with compressed air.
When carefully cued,
they were launched at the cars one by one
while whizzing by strategically placed extras.
Whether it was dancing on the wall,
a huge pool musical number,
or making these heads bob practically in the hair salon,
filmmakers found innovative ways
to bring the award-winning musical
"In the Heights" to the big screen.
For the song "When the Sun Goes Down,"
Nina and Benny sing and dance on the side of a building
in Washington Heights,
but neither of the actors wore safety harnesses.
That's because the crew built a giant replica
of a brick wall, fire escapes included,
and rotated it 90 degrees
to give the illusion of the gravity-defying romance.
The scene was filmed in front of a green screen,
and the George Washington Bridge and NYC sky
were added afterward.
In Disney's live-action "Cruella,"
costume designer Jenny Beavan was tasked
with creating 47 different, yet dramatic, looks
for Emma Stone's lead character.
Like this dress, worn when Cruella makes a surprise entrance
from dumped rubbish.
As she hops on the back of the garbage truck,
the dress reveals a 40-foot train
made from the baroness' discarded collection of gowns.
The train was so long and difficult to move in,
it couldn't actually be worn onto set.
So production had to attach it
when the cameras cut away from Cruella,
but right before the final exit and reveal.
This dress that accompanied this military jacket
had to be enormous enough to trap the baroness' car
but light enough for Stone to wear.
Chief pattern cutter Kirsten Fletcher and her team
had to cut out 5,060 petals,
which were later stitched on by hand.
And what about this climactic moment
when the baroness pushes Cruella off the balcony,
but her skirt transforms into a life-saving parachute?
They tried their hand practically,
but ultimately the parachute dress
had to be designed using CGI.
Ready?
Yeah!
Narrator: Almost 30 years after the original "Space Jam,"
the long-awaited sequel finally arrived.
Hundreds of artists collaborated to put a new stamp
on the live-action/animated classic
and bring the 2D Looney Tune squad into a 3D world.
Real-life basketball stars
were also converted to 2D and 3D characters.
With the many ambitious layers and textures,
plus a hand-drawn approach,
creating just one of those hybrid scenes took nearly a year.
They also used motion capture
to get the animated characters to play basketball.
For the virtual basketball court showdown,
a massive mo-cap stage was built
measuring 120,000 cubic feet,
utilizing a setup with over 100 cameras.
The beloved pup from the children's book and cartoon
Clifford the Big Red Dog
came to life in the 2021 live-action adaptation.
This required a big red puppet.
Puppeteers Rowan Magee and Jon Riddleberger
took on the physically demanding task
of carrying Clifford for eight- to 14-hour days,
taking a break every 70 minutes.
Woman: Is that enough of the dog?
Crew: Yeah.
Woman: And dog exit frame.
Narrator: So in some scenes,
the puppeteers used gimbals instead.
Like in this scene,
when Clifford's young owner gets on for a ride.
She was really climbing a ladder
to sit on a gimbal with springs and wheels.
Hidden crew members pulled the gimbal
to move as the dog would,
and a hidden cable attached to the actor kept her safe.
All right, here we go, guys. Be careful!
And action!
Narrator: M. Night Shyamalan needed the beach
to be the villain in the movie "Old,"
so the team had to make Playa El Valle
in the Dominican Republic intense and ominous.
That's where these fake mountains come in.
Production designer Naaman Marshall and crew
actually built these mountains
to create a sinister presence.
After taking photographs and measurements
of the site in El Valle,
Marshall returned to California
to build their model of the design.
Since the beach already had a rock wall,
Marshall blended theirs to it by using plaster,
scaffolding, foam, paint, and sand.
At one point, a hurricane even destroyed the unfinished set.
But in the end, they managed to complete
the 32-foot-tall, 900-foot-wide wall.
To blend it even more seamlessly,
the visual effects team used photographs of the natural rock
to recreate various textures on the surface.
Actor Bob Odenkirk reinvented himself physically
for his role in the action film "Nobody."
Odenkirk is known for playing
one of TV's most famous lawyers
in "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul,"
very much a non-action role.
Typically, actors train for four to six weeks
for action films.
But the 59-year-old comedian
trained in martial arts for two years
with "John Wick" and "Atomic Blonde" stunt performer
Daniel Bernhardt.
You can see Bernhardt in this scene
playing one of his attackers.
Even while filming "Better Call Saul,"
Odenkirk continued to perfect his skills
in an Albuquerque mixed martial arts gym.
And the first glimpse of this payoff
happens in this fight scene, which happens on a real bus.
The bus was made stunt-friendly
with hidden padding on the floor and in the seats.
And Odenkirk did most of the all-out brawl
without a stunt double.
In the end, this bloody six-minute scene
took three nights to film.
In "Reminiscence,"
Hugh Jackman plays a private investigator
who uses a machine to navigate his client's memories.
But this water tank
and these memory projections in the machine
were actually created without a green screen.
Visual effects supervisor Bruce Jones
worked with director Lisa Joy
to devise a way for the actors to interact with the memory,
seamlessly walking around
the moving pieces of footage on the set.
The memories were filmed ahead of time,
then projected onto a very thinly meshed Halo Gauze screen
stretched into a cylinder.
Three 20K projectors were needed
to map the moving images onto the circular screen.
And the mo-cap cameras moved in sync with the actors
around the screens, keeping the illusion of a hologram.
"No Time to Die" had one of the longest
pre-credit James Bond openings,
clocking in at over 20 minutes.
And with lots of in-camera effects, it was no easy feat.
The action sequence was shot on location in Matera
and used 10 Aston Martins.
For this scene, the crew planted squibs
to replicate bullet impacts
timed perfectly with the car's movements.
Approximately 200 pellets were fired at the car windows,
which were layered with a special polycarbonate plastic
so they wouldn't shatter.
And this jump ...
was no green screen.
A stunt driver went exactly 60 miles per hour
up a 25-foot ramp and jumped 12 feet in the air
to make the impressive landing.
It took four takes to get the shot they needed.
For "The French Dispatch,"
Wes Anderson and the production team
created the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé
by adding their own touch to the real city of Angoulême,
located in the southwest of France.
As Anderson frequently does in his films,
the crew relied on handcrafted sets
and practical elements shot in-camera.
They constructed foreground buildings
and scaffolding that could twist and turn for the camera,
added original banners and signs to store walls,
and built café fronts and trees.
Even freeze-frames were recreated
by having actors keep still while objects hung in midair.
But not all the imaginative moments
were captured completely in-camera.
In the film's prison riot sequence,
Benicio Del Toro's wheelchair shatters midair.
To achieve this effect,
green-suit performers held each part separately in the air
to precisely manipulate the wheels.
Mirror shots are notoriously difficult to film
without the camera being seen.
"Last Night in Soho" had the added challenge
of having one character, Eloise, on one side
and a different character, Sandie, on the other.
The production design team built a double lobby set
so Sandie and Eloise could follow each other in the mirror.
It got more complicated when other actors were in frame,
like in this shot, when Jack joins Eloise
in front of the mirror.
That is actor Matt Smith's actual reflection
in a real mirror, but it's been cut in half.
On the other side is Sandie in front of a green screen;
VFX later adjusted her background to match.
Perhaps the most physically taxing trick
comes during this elaborate mirrored dance sequence.
The two actors had to prep for weeks
and work with a movement coach
to make sure not a single eyeline was off,
nor body movement unmatched.
Then, to capture it all, a Steadicam operator
referred to on set as "the human motion control"
had to shoot every mirrored shot the exact same way.
In "Army of the Dead,"
the zombie tiger Valentine may have stolen the show.
The VFX team based Valentine on a white tiger in Florida,
which they later found out was owned by Carole Baskin
of Netflix's "Tiger King" documentary.
The team recorded and studied the animal
to nail down the proportions, movement, and light
for the zombie version.
Later, they created the emaciated look
with old dried bloodstains and a missing eye
to blend it in with the postapocalyptic environment.
A stuntperson in a green suit stood in for eyelines
and in the interactive scenes.
And for the scene of the tiger mauling Martin,
cables were used to throw him around
as if the tiger was swinging him with his jaws.
Director: Three,
two,
one,
action!
Narrator: The MCU blockbuster "Black Widow"
was filmed in multiple cities across the globe.
But the most visually stunning chase scene
was captured in Budapest.
Production filmed for two weeks in the city,
with motorcycles and armored vehicles
speeding wildly through city streets.
Special effects teams built
some of the large Taskmaster tanks you see here.
And a total of four BMWs were destroyed in the process,
with one exploding in the air on a real Budapest street.
The opening scene of "A Quiet Place Part II"
raised the stakes of its predecessor by showing
the characters' first encounter with the monsters.
The chaotic sequence was done with very few cuts.
This was especially tricky for the moment
when Emily Blunt's character, Evelyn,
has to quickly reverse her car
as a mangled bus heads towards them
at over 40 miles per hour.
A series of cameras were mounted
inside and out of Evelyn's car with a custom Biscuit rig.
At the top of the car,
a stunt driver operated the vehicle
as Blunt pretended to be in control.
Director: Action!
Katy: Hold on, everybody!
Narrator: The bus sequence in "Shang-Chi"
raised the stakes higher than many Marvel fights before it
by setting the action on a moving surface.
It took a month to film this nearly seven-minute sequence.
The actors all went through intense training
for the film's hand-to-hand combat,
and Simu Liu did a good portion of the stunts by himself.
For the scenes that show the outside of the bus,
several real buses were filmed
driving through San Francisco.
Two separate buses were shipped
from California to Sydney, Australia,
to be deconstructed and used in a blue-screen studio.
Both were suspended: one on a 15-foot-high,
six-axis gimbal for the leaps, twisting, and turning,
and the other slightly off the ground
to simulate the bus shaking and general driving shots.
"Ghostbusters: Afterlife" stayed true to the original
by bringing back the terror dog
and the original's cutting-edge creature effects work.
"Afterlife"'s crew decided to use as little CGI as possible,
building their monsters from scratch.
The practical terror dog ultimately weighed 450 pounds,
thanks to its mechanized motors called servos,
which allowed specific movements.
The monster's face alone had 21 servos
controlled by puppeteers
to create detailed movements like blinking and sniffing.
These servos were crucial to making the character
look as real as possible.
But traditional cables also helped
create convincing movements.
The dog's leg in this scene
used just an isolated leg controlled by cables.
The puppeteer could wear the leg on his arm,
manipulating its movement.
And because the leg was so big,
cables helped move its ankles and toes
where the puppeteer's real arm couldn't reach.