Computer-generated effects are ubiquitous in Hollywood, so when something amazing happens
on screen, audiences usually assume they're seeing a digital fantasy.
But despite the surge in CGI, some directors are still committed to doing special effects
the old-fashioned way, before today's digital wizardry existed.
From puppets to prosthetics to old-school camera tricks, we've rounded up some of the
most insane scenes you'll never believe were created without computers.
Flipping out
Fact: director Christopher Nolan actively dislikes CGI, and believes that audiences
prefer the real thing as much as he does, so he uses practical effects in his films
whenever possible.
Remember that epic car chase in The Dark Knight that ended with a giant 18-wheeler going butt-over-teakettle,
right in the middle of an actual city block?
"He missed!"
Special effects genies used computers to edit out some of the equipment involved in the
stunt, but everything else was completely real, aided by a remote-controlled piston
that was installed in the truck to propel its rear off the ground.
The scene was filmed from seven different angles, because when you're making an 18-wheeler
do a somersault in the middle of the night in downtown Chicago, there is no such thing
as "take two."
Anti-gravity fisticuffs
The Dark Knight director didn't limit his commitment to practical effects only to his
Batman franchise... which, don’t forget, also included blasting a plane in half, mid-air.
"Now what's the next step of your master plan?"
"Crashing this plane!"
In Inception, Nolan and his team created the gravity-defying dream-within-a-dream fight
scene by channeling none other than talented singer and hat-enthusiast Jamiroquai and built
a 100 foot-long hotel hallway on a rotating set.
According to actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the filming process required as much mental flexibility
as it did acrobatic balance, telling E! Online,
"I had to think of it like, 'This is the ground.
OK, now this is the ground.
And now this is the ground.'
It was just that the 'ground' was always moving under me.
That was the mind game I had to play to make it work."
With a camera mounted on a track that ran the length of the set, Nolan was able to create
seamless, stable shots even as the hallway itself spun 360 degrees.
But Nolan wasn’t the one who invented the ol’ rotating room...
The blood-barfing bed
CGI wasn't much of an option back in 1984, especially for a low-budget horror flick like
Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street.
So when Craven's horror franchise introduced audiences to the original fedora-wearing monster,
it had to pull off its nightmarish special effects the old-fashioned way.
These days, the soul-sucking blood geyser that consumed Johnny Depp would probably be
done with computers, but for the original Nightmare, the effects team came up with an
inventive way to pull it off.
The bedroom set was built on a rotating axis which could be turned a full 360 degrees.
What you see is actually an upside-down set.
Once the bedroom was flipped, all they had to do was pour 500 gallons of fake blood through
the bed, and let gravity do the rest.
Uh, simple, right?
Men becoming wolves
An American Werewolf in London featured animatronic heads, prosthetic body parts, and the most
elaborate assortment of merkins in the history of film.
Werewolf’s iconic transformation scene was achieved with nothing but good old-fashioned
practical effects and the magic of Rick Baker.
The effects guru created prosthetic versions of actor David Naughton's limbs, then fitted
them with air bladders to make them deform as Naughton's character turned from man to
wolf.
For the facial transformation, two animatronic heads created the illusion of the actor's
head reshaping itself into something more wolflike.
And the furry overcoat?
That effect used latex "skin" threaded with thousands and thousands of wiry hairs.
Baker filmed the hair being pulled backwards through the skin, then reversed the shot to
simulate rapid growth.
The final result was so realistic and terrifying that it earned its creator the 1982 Academy
Award for Best Makeup.
And when the movie got its inevitable 21st century reboot in the form of An American
Werewolf in Paris, the terrible CGI effects couldn't hold a candle to this practical wizardry.
The killer T-Rex
Hold onto your butts!
There's a reason the lizard king of Jurassic Park was such an imposing presence: he was
a real-life, full-sized animatronic that nearly killed someone on set.
The T-Rex weighed 9,000 pounds and was built on a skeleton made of hydraulic motors and
moving metal parts.
He was also decidedly dangerous: during the production, a crew member was unlucky enough
to be stuck inside the belly of the beast during a power outage, sending thousands of
pounds of hydraulics crushing down on him.
Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale.
Even the digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were often a combination of CGI and puppetry.
For instance, the brachiosaurus that sneezed all over Lex was only a digi-saur from the
neck down.
The head was all real for most of its time on screen…as was the copious spray of dino
snot, much to the dismay of actress Ariana Richards.
Little Hobbits, big world
Rather than rely completely on post-production CGI to shrink Elijah Wood, or embiggen Ian
McKellen, Peter Jackson often used old-school optical illusions to make his Hobbits teeny-tiny
in comparison to all the wizards, orcs, and elves of Middle-earth.
Using camera angles, cropping, and the actors' relative positioning, the effect known as
"forced perspective" makes them appear to be differently sized than they actually are.
In theory, it's simple.
In practice, it meant that many shots had to be staged down to the millimeter throughout
the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as The Hobbit trilogy a decade later.
Liquid metal evil
In 1991, Terminator 2 was a groundbreaking example of the power of digital effects, boasting
CGI that went miles beyond anything else that had been done.
However, what made the movie so spectacular wasn't the CGI alone, but the way James Cameron
seamlessly integrated the computer-animated cuts with practical effects.
For every purely digital shot of T-1000 slithering around in liquid metal form, there was a scene
rendered the old-fashioned way, with puppets and expert camerawork, giving the film a sense
of real-world weight.
Most incredibly, every time the T-1000 was blasted apart, Stan Winston's special effects
team would bring in a mangled, metallic puppet, complete with a cast of actor Robert Patrick's
head, to thrash around.
In the T-1000's last moments, the blown-up puppet is so seamlessly intercut with motion-capture
effects that you can't even tell where one ends and the other begins.
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