Category: Best Visual Effects

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 – 2011

Here we are with the final installment of a franchise that began ten years previous, one of the biggest money-making properties of all time.  The task of creating the visual effects for the crowning installment of the series of eight films was to be bigger, better, and more visually stunning than all the rest of the films.  And I honestly believe they succeeded.  They showed us a lot of visuals that we had never seen before, giving the effects-heavy Harry Potter films a proper send-off.

There was a completely photo-realistic dragon, fire demons, a sentient python, magical shields, animated stone statues, giants, giant spiders, those swirling, inky flashbacks, major explosions, the destruction of an entire castle, amazing magical deaths, wand battles, a magic sword, and a fantastic afterlife depiction!  This movie was heavy on the action and stunts, while, at the same time, maintaining an atmosphere of subtlety and finesse.

One spectacular kind of visual effect was the lengthy destruction of Hogwarts, a place that, over the course of six of the previous seven films, fans of the movies have grown to love.  And it wasn’t just one or two set pieces that were demolished.  Every part of the citadel seemed to sustain major damage.  The chaotic battle sequences were phenomenal, giving the real impression that no character was safe, except for maybe our three leads.  The climactic wand battle between Harry and Voldemort was exciting to watch, and they were smart to leave the destruction of the final horcrux until that battle was already underway.

I have to mention a few things that I really liked about this movie, even when comparing it to the earlier films in the franchise.  The first thing that comes to mind is the giants.  In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, we were given a completely CGI giant in the character of Grawp.  He looked ridiculously terrible.  But here, they redesigned the giants, using actors with makeup and prosthetics, who were then enhanced by CGI.  They looked so much better!  I also really liked how whenever a horcrux was destroyed, the image of Voldemort’s snake-like face appeared in the detritus surrounding the destruction.  We saw it in smoke, fire, and water, and it looked cool every time. The magical shield and its destruction was also really incredible.  And I really liked the variety of different battle-worthy spells.  They were creative and visually unique like the death of Bellatrix LeStrange, or when Voldemort’s robes came alive and tried to strangle Harry.

But I think my favorite effect in the movie was the fiendfyre spell that destroyed the trove of hidden things in the Room of Requirement.  The images of live animals in the flames was spectacular, and the way the sentient flames poured over the room like liquid destruction was incredibly intense!  They seemed to have pulled out all the stops for this movie, just like we all wanted them to, and they didn’t seem to drop the ball on any of it.  It all looked amazing, realistic, and totally believable.  It was an incredibly fitting send off to such a wonderful fantasy franchise.  Well done!

Iron Man 2 – 2010

One of the problems that many sequels have, especially when it comes to action films, is that the filmmakers have to try to be bigger and more exciting than the first film.  Unfortunately, this often means that reality, believability, and sometimes, even common get sense thrown out the window, and replaced with what looks good, what looks cool.  But darn it, this movie does look cool!  Incredibly cool!  Just don’t pay too much attention to the physics involved.

The only problem I have with the movie’s effects has more to do with the script than the visual effects themselves.  Unfortunately, the visuals are what display this problem.  In the first Iron Man film, we see Tony Stark constructing his super suit.  We see it assembled as he puts it on, and while we don’t currently have the technology for such an armored suit, they did a pretty good job of grounding it in a kind of reality, and it went a long way to making it believable.

But here, that all gets left behind, and the suitcase Iron Man armor makes me roll my eyes.  Stark has made a transformer with the ability to actually increase its total mass.  In order for the metal in the suitcase to cover his body, it would have to be spread out so thinly as to offer very little protection, not to mention all the technology needed to make the suit perform its feats of strength and firepower.   Also, one would have to assume that the armor, while in suitcase form, would weigh just as much as the fully assembled Iron Man suit.  Using that logic, how was Pepper Potts able to lift and toss around the compacted suit with such ease?

But ok, I need to remember that superhero movies are pure fantasies.  It’s ok to throw reality out the window, as long as the movie plays by the rules it establishes.  And that being said, the magically appearing suit of armor looked fantastic as it increased its mass and covered Stark from head to toe.  It looked incredible.

The main villain was Whiplash, whose weapon was an awesome pair of electrified chain whips!  Their first iteration was more low budget looking, and the second seemed more sophisticated.  The design team really did a great job of making that distinction.  Sadly, the climactic battle of the film was just a little anticlimactic.  What I mean is that the fight with Whiplash’s army of drone robots was more exciting than when he came down in person to fight Iron Man and War Machine.  The three armored combatants scuffled for a short moment, but the bad guy’s electric whips didn’t seem to cause much damage, and he was quickly put down by a kind of mega-explosion that we’d witnessed earlier in the film.

Still, the battle at the car race was pretty exciting.  The racing cars, themselves, were all CGI, and they looked fantastic!  Whenever one of Whiplash’s whips cut one in half, it looked amazing.  I also really liked how Whiplash’s power harness burned away the top half of his jumpsuit.  It made him look really dangerous!  Funny though, how it burned his clothes completely off, but didn’t burn him at all.  Hmm…  And lest I forget, all the Black widow stunt effects were amazing!  So cool!

Hereafter – 2010

I have no idea why this movie was nominated for best visual effects.  There, I said it.  There were just so few of them, and while they were good enough, they were nowhere near the caliber of their competitors.  The movie was an average film, that had a supernatural theme, so there was the potential for a more robust profile of visual effects, but they were just such a tiny aspect of this emotional drama.

Wikipedia had a single short paragraph devoted to the film’s visual effects, saying, “Visual effects work was carried out by Los Angeles-based Scanline VFX. 169 effects were created, the key sequence of which was the tsunami, which features ‘full CG water shots and CG water extensions to water plates, digital doubles, CG set extensions, matte paintings, digital make-up fx, and full CG environments with extensive destruction, from toppling digital palm trees to colliding digital cars’. An effect described as the ‘hereafter effect’ also appears, giving the viewer glimpses into the afterlife.”

I’d guess that 95% of those 169 effects took place in the first 9 minutes and 20 seconds of the movie, the entirety of which, was just over 2 hours long.  The tsunami sequence was impressive but brief.  We saw the moment when the water receded from the shore, formed a massive wave, assaulted a giant cruise ship, and crash onto the Hawaiian beach resort.  We saw it flood a street, topple palm trees and telephone poles, pick up cars like toys, throw them into people and buildings, and drown the fleeing people.  We saw one of the lead characters drown and have a vision of the afterlife.  When she is revived, we see CGI abrasions on her face.  Then we saw the devastated remnants of the destroyed city.

And that was it.  The rest of the entire movie was virtually visual effects free.  I found a short video on Youtube that broke down all the effects in the film, and I’ll list all the other effects shots in the film, according to that video.  I went back to the movie and counted a combined total of 15 seconds of the “hereafter effect.”  There was a shot where an airplane was digitally inserted in a twilight sky.  We see a burst of flame and a few sparks come out of a London Underground train tunnel.  Then we saw a few seconds of digital smoke coming out of Charring Cross Station.  And finally, we get to see a few CGI tears roll down Marcus’ cheeks.

There was nothing else.  All told, I’d estimate that after that first 9 minutes and 20 seconds of the movie, there was a grand total of 40 seconds of visual effects shots.  I am trying to remain objective in my assessment, and I know that it isn’t about the quantity of the visual effects, but rather, the quality.  But even there, the quality seemed no better or worse than the effects in any other average movie.  So I’ll say it again.  I have no idea why this movie was nominated for Best Visual Effects.

I suppose it might be worth noting that this was the first year that the number of nominees in the category was raised from three to five.  But I can’t imagine that they were hard up for more worthy candidates to nominate.  I just don’t get it.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 – 2010

First of all, I’d like to mention that I think this entire movie is underrated.  But I must also confess that I believe I understand why.  The reason I mention the merits of the film, as a whole, is that it has a direct bearing on the film’s visual effects.  Were they good?  They most certainly were.  But when compared with most of the rest of the Harry Potter movies, there just didn’t seem to be very many extraordinary effects sequences.

That’s not to say that there weren’t a few pretty remarkable effects.  There were, of course, but they were largely understated.  And that ties back to the fact that the film is underrated.  You see, the movie is the first part of the final edition in author J.K. Rowling’s series of books.  The complete story had a flashy and spectacular climax, which this movie seemed to lack.  The plot of this first part, and the visual effects needed to show it on the screen, just didn’t require many impressive special effects.  This film was more about setting up the climax that would come in the next movie, and to be sure, part 2 was nominated for Best Visual Effects in 2011.

It is also important to keep in mind that this was the 7^th Harry Potter movie.  We’ve seen all the relevant effects before in parts 1–6.   We’ve seen the smoke projectiles that are the Death Eaters flying.  We’ve seen the fantastic image warping effect that shows characters disapparating.  We’ve seen the CGI snake, Nagini.  We’ve seen curses being fired out of wands.  We’ve seen characters morphing into other characters when they drink pollyjuice potion.  And we’ve seen dememtors, house elves and patronus charms.  This movie was about story and set-up, not effects.  It was all familiar territory, and there wasn’t much that was new.

Sure, the scene with seven Harry Potters was amusing, and the scene where Harry is attacked by Nagini was scary, but those scenes didn’t really stand out to me as special.  Even the scene where Ron Weasley destroys a horcrux was very intense and creepy, but it didn’t really blow me out of the water.  After doing some reading, I found that the Death Eater flying effect was slightly enhanced for this movie, but only slightly, something I wouldn’t have known just by watching the film.

But the sequence that really stood out to me was the animated sequence that told the Tale of the Three Brothers.  Now this portion of the film remarkable!  It was completely animated, but I’ve never seen any animation that even approached this kind of style or sophistication.  It was clearly CGI, but it almost looked like they filmed live puppets and enhanced them with digital effects.  It was gorgeously masterfully done!  The little story within the film’s narrative was artistic in a way that nearly transcended the film, itself.  It sparkled like glitter, if glowed like magic, if flowed like ink in water.  It was beautiful and memorable.  Amazing!

Don’t get me wrong.  I really enjoyed the film, but there was very little that was new, that put it above the preceding Harry Potter movies.  Was that short, animated sequence enough to earn it its nomination?  I’m not so sure.

Alice in Wonderland – 2010

A live action adaptation of the well-loved fantasy story of Alice in Wonderland seems like a shoe-in for a visual effect extravaganza.  And to be clear, this was exactly that… however, while they were incredibly well-done, I felt the visuals were too cartoonish to achieve the photo-realism that I think the filmmakers were going for.  It was clearly a step above computer generated cartoon animation like the Toy Story movies, and yet a step below believable live-action/CGI blends like Avatar.

There were characters in the film that were completely real, like Alice.  Then there were partially real characters like the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.  And finally, there were the completely CGI characters like the March Hare and the Cheshire Cat.  The same could be said about the fantasy environments and many of the props.  The problem is that I’m not sure if this inconsistency was intentional.  At times, it was as if the director, Tim Burton, didn’t wanted his audience to forget that most of what they were seeing on the screen was animated.  He didn’t seem to want true photo-realism all the time.  As a result, there was a bit of a disconnect in my brain when I watched it.  And yet, I must admit that a certain unbelievable mix of reality and imagination was a theme in the film’s plot.

I think that the worst offender of this was the Jabberwocky.  Sometimes he looked very life-like, at others, he looked like a miniature scale puppet, the kind that was once used in stop-motion animation, and at other times, he looked and moved like a very obviously CGI creature.  And he was supposed to be the climax of the movie.

That’s not to say the effects weren’t interesting and innovative.  They were.  One of the most interesting effects in the movie was how they were able to digitally stretch, augment, and enhance the faces and bodies of their live actors, giving them, for example, the ability to keep the actors’ actual facial performances, while giving them CGI bodies, or, in the Queen’s case, just making her head to big for her body.  It was a great effect, and it was rather ingenious how they were able to digitally taper down her enlarged neck to blend with the normal-sized shoulders and torso.  They used a similar technique to make the Mad Hatter’s eyes larger, giving him a look that was just a little more insane.

Another issue that the filmmakers had to deal with was that of size, as Alice continually grew and shrunk as part of the plot.  For the most part, this was done pretty well.  And the completely digital environments were done very well.  As I have come to expect from Tim Burton, they were a fantastic mix of the beautiful and the horrific.  I especially liked the interior of the Queen of Heart’s throne room, and the large exterior shots of both her castle and the White Queen’s castle.  The throne room had stained glass windows that were masterfully created, casting light and shadows in all the right ways.  For all the inconsistencies, whether they were intentional or not, the film has a very unique look.  I believe it deserved its Best Visual Effects nomination, but I’m also glad that it didn’t win.

Inception – 2010 (WINNER)

Inception is one of the most intellectual movies I know.  It was a movie that really makes you think as you are watching it, and the visuals are a pretty huge part of that, and I do love movies that make me think.  They made use of perfectly crafted optical illusions that distort what is physically possible, which, at times, can make you second guess what you are seeing on the screen. 

The perfect example of this is a plot point that made use of the Penrose stairs, stairs that ascended in an impossible eternal loop.  Even after taking a screenshot of this visual trick, giving me a chance to study the image, my brain still struggles to make sense of it.  But in the film, it wasn’t just a still image.  The illusion was live and in motion, making it all the more amazing.

And to make it even more impressive, I learned that according to the movie trivia on the film’s IMDB page, “In spite of this movie’s extensive surreal effects sequences, the majority of the visual effects throughout the movie, such as the Penrose stairs, rotating hallway, mountain avalanche, and zero-gravity sequences, were created through the use of practical methods, not through the use of computer graphics imagery.  This movie only has around five hundred visual effects shots, as opposed to most other visual effects epics, which can have upwards of two thousand visual effects shots.”

One of the things about the effects in this film that really requires you to pay close attention is the timing.  The visuals had to be timed to serve the complicated plot.  This is the third time I have watched this incredible film, and I feel like I find something new and interesting every time I watch it.  I call that bold, innovative, and wonderfully creative story-telling.  The concept of the movie is based on having dreams within dreams, within dreams.  When something happened in one level of a dream, it had an effect on the deeper levels of the dreams, and it was important to keep track of who was dreaming which dream levels.

One of the most visually fantastic effects in the movie occurred when, in one man’s dream, a second dreamer is in a van that rolls down a hill.  In his new dream, the hallway in which he is standing begins to turn over and over.  They filmed this using a technique that Stanly Kubrick pioneered to create the illusion of people walking up walls until they are standing on the ceiling in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  They built the hallway on a rotating gimble and fixed the camera to rotate with the hallway.  Obviously it is an old trick, but it worked beautifully.

Even the sequence in which a mountain fortress is blown up was achieved with the construction of a miniature model, something that is rarely done any more in favor of completely digital environments.  I think the scene that contained the most CGI was the one where Paris is folded over on top of itself.  But even then, audiences had never seen anything so surrealistic, though all the practical effects gave the movie a wonderfully organic feel of reality.  This was such a pleasure to watch!

Star Trek – 2009

So here we are with the J.J. Abrams directed movie that revitalized the Star Trek franchise and gave it a new look.  Not only were all the iconic characters brilliantly recast, but the costumes and sets were redesigned with flare, or should I say… lens-flare! But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Although this hasn’t been the first Star Trek movie to be nominated for Best Visual Effects, it has been 30 years since the only other one was recognized for those achievements.  Since then, filmmaking technology has obviously had many significant advances.  Photo-realistic CGI alone allowed this film to far surpass 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  But that being said, this movie was created to be more of an action film than a science fiction/drama.  It had a much faster pace, which is a severe understatement.

There were three really awesome space ships in the film.  The design of the Enterprise was much more modern, though familiar enough to be recognizable as the ship we all know and love.  The Narada, the monstrous and imposing Romulan mining ship was like some dark and demonic creature in space. And Spock Prime’s little ship containing the red matter, which was named the Jellyfish, was fast and very futuristic.

The redesigned bridge of the Enterprise looked all white and sterile, like a brightly lit surgical room in a hospital.  One of the problems with so many lights on the set was that there were constant lens-flares surrounding the action.  But rather than fixing these, Abrams liked how they looked and embraced them.  In fact, he liked them so much that he went out of his way to incorporate them into other parts of the film.  This was the first Star Trek film to create all their ship exterior shots in space digitally with no miniature models.  In shots where the Enterprise was being displayed dramatically, digital lens-flares were actually added, to match the ones being filmed inside the vessel.

Another effect that was updated for this film was the transporter.  According to Wikipedia, “Unlike other Star Trek films and series, the transporter beam effects swirl rather than speckle.  Abrams conceived the redesign to emphasize the notion of transporters as beams that can pick up and move people, rather than a signal composed of scrambled atoms.”

There were also a few creature effects that were pretty impressive, like the giant red monster on Delta Vega.  On the DVD documentary, Abrams described this creature as being covered with hundreds of eyes, which may have been true, but since we never got that close a look at him, they just looked like natural skin colorations, kind-of like leopard spots.  And lest I forget to mention one of my favorite effects in the film, the lightning storm in space that showed up, when the Narada arrived and was finally destroyed, was very cool.  I could say that Abrams really has a… FLARE for making things look impressive on the big screen!

2009 – District 9

There were a lot of visual effects in this film, but the good thing about them was that a lot of them didn’t look like visual effects. They looked very photo-realistic, and there is a specific reason why.  About half the movie was filmed as if it was a low-budget documentary, or found-footage.  There was a lot of hand-held camerawork, and low-grade images that made to look like they belonged in a television news program.  You’d think that using such techniques, they would be able to get away with a little less detail on the CGI, but I assure you, that wasn’t the case at all.

For example, one of the first effects we see in the film is the image of a gigantic spaceship hovering over Johannesburg in South Africa.  But the ship is only seen as news footage.  On top of that, the city has a haze of smog over it, making the distant alien ship look almost fuzzy.  However, later on in the film, we get to see the ship from a much closer vantage point and the detail is increased to what you might expect in a modern film.

The aliens, themselves, were pretty remarkable.  They were insectoid in nature, and though they had distinctly humanoid shapes with arms, legs, and heads in all the familiarly human places, though they were otherwise completely alien.  The had antenna on their heads, mouths with finger-like tentacles, flexible claws instead of hands, segmented bodies with what appeared to be exoskeletons, and little vestigial appendages that could retract into their abdomens.  In a few of the deleted scenes included on the DVD, the visual effects had not been rendered, and you could see the actor in a gray motion-capture suit, standing on stilts to give him the proper height for the other actors to perform against.

But there were two really great effects that stood out to me as very well done.  The first of these was the alien weaponry.  Their guns fired jagged blue lightning bolts that, when they hit their organic targets, would make them vaporize with a disturbing spray of blood, and disgusting bits of meat and bone.  It was a very cool effect.  The other was the alien battle-armor.  You’d think that such a large robotic body-tank would move in a clunky way, but they made it very quick, mobile, and incredibly realistic.  And to the script’s credit, they made it incredibly durable, but not unstoppable.

And finally, probably one of the most disturbing effects in the movie was how the main character, Wikus, is slowly transformed into an insectoid alien.  And being as realistic as they could be, it happened slowly, a little bit at a time.  You could see the different stages of his pitiful transformation.  That really creeped me out, but it was really effective story-telling.  And honestly, the low-resolution documentary-style footage really made everything look very realistic.  And in contrast to so many special effects-heavy films, most of the action took place in bright daytime locales, allowing us to see and appreciate all the cool visual effects.  Thank you!

2009 – Avatar (WINNER)

The visual effects for this film was, hands-down, incredible.  It really deserved its Oscar win.  Not only was the photo-realistic CGI creature animation unlike anything the world had ever seen, the fantasy landscapes and digital environments were also utterly unique and amazingly rendered.  This movie pulled out all the stops and truly gave the world something phenomenal.

So, where to start?  Well, I’d say that more than half the movie was completely CGI, though through the use of new motion capture technologies and improved methods of capturing facial expressions, it is sometimes easy to forget that you are watching a completely computer-generated image on the screen… but not always.  Every now and then, the CGI animation loses a bit of its realism, and it looks a little false.  But it helped that the faces of the CGI characters, the Na’vi, and the Avatars, were created using the live performances of the actors.  The real emotion of the actors came through in the animation perfectly.

To do this, individual skull caps were made for each of the actors.  The caps had cameras attached to them that were suspended in front of the actors’ faces, capturing every facial expression and eye movement.  Other cameras recording the same performance gave the animators different angles to use as references, as well.  And as is the case with all CGI animated images, the lighting was key. 

And speaking of lighting, according to Wikipedia, a new system for lighting massive areas like Pandora’s jungle was created.  And let me just say that I think that the environment of Pandora was one of the best things about the film.  They created an incredible alien landscape that required so much imagination, that I can’t help but be impressed each and every time I watch the film.  Their use of color and lighting, especially in night-time scenes, was a huge part of that.  The vegetation glowed with an eerily beautiful phosphorescence.  The water sparkled, the grass moved, and the air was alive.  It was a magical environment that was completely computer generated.  And it was all done with that same extreme photo-realism that was so captivating in the other aspects of the film’s visuals.

But there were also the human aspects of the film as they interacted with the CGI characters.  The climax of the film was a perfect example as the Na’vi Neytiri rescues the human whose avatar she has come to love.  She cradles Jake in her arms and weeps for joy when he revives from near suffocation.  It was an incredibly emotional scene, which, from what I’ve read, was a very difficult effects shot.  But it was beautifully done, and the emotion of the scene came through wonderfully.  And less mesmerizing, but equally important to the story, was all the futuristic human technology like the air ships, the armored walkers, and all the battle sequences, were really well-done.  The destruction of the Home-tree was great.  Completely CGI, and yet, incredibly photo-realistic.  Very exciting to watch!  I guess that’s why, after the success of the film, four sequels were quickly announced.

2008 – Iron Man

This was a really good movie.  It was one of the first films to really put the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the map, and we all know how big that franchise is.  The visual effects are really first rate, and I think they went a very long way to making this film as successful as it was.  The photo-realism was beyond amazing, giving audiences something they had never seen before.

Now, all that being said, this was a superhero movie, which has become its own sub-genre of action films, and being an action film, it had its fair share of great explosions.  Explosions seem to be standard for action flicks, and these were pretty spectacular.  In fact, in a small way, explosions were inherent to the plot, seeing as how Tony Stark was a weapons manufacturer.  We get explosions when he is demonstrating his weapons, and when he is destroying them. And more explosions when Stark escapes from the terrorists in his first iron suit.

But that isn’t why people came to see this movie.  They came to see the red and gold super-powered armor in action. Well, they knocked this effect out of the park, and though most of it was CGI, there were a few live rubber costume pieces and a few metal ones, but you’d never know it by what is shown on the screen.  It all looked amazing!  It occurs to me that something this movie did that one of the previous year’s Best Visual Effects nominees, Transformers, didn’t do, was to show the mechanics of the moving metal in an engaging way.  They allowed us to kind-of see the inner workings of the robot-like armor, like they were showing off how photo-realistic their CGI animation was, and it was really cool!

And when Iron Man was in action, he was exciting to watch.  He moved just like he should have, like the pieces of an armored suit would actually move.  When he was in flight, he moved at super-sonic speeds.  When he was firing his repulsor beams, there was a realistic kick-back.  When he was hit with a missile, he was thrown off balance.  When he was pummeled to the ground, his armor had visible scrapes and gouges. I mean we all know that the technology for a real Iron Man suit doesn’t actually exist, but they seemed to really think about what it would be like if it did.

But we can’t forget the amazing villain of the film, Obadiah Stane, when he puts on his own armored suit and becomes Iron Monger.  He was huge and hulking, looking like it could easily crush the sleek little Iron Man without any effort.  Iron Monger, again paying attention to the details that made the fantasy more realistic, moved differently than Iron Man, functioned differently.  The visual effects team really thought about what they were doing and it showed.  And when they pay attention to those little things, all of it is just more believable, and makes for a better movie.

And finally, all the futuristic computer-generated holographics we got to see in Tony’s lab, and the digital displays shown over his face when he was wearing the Iron Man helmet were fantastic.  And I loved the sequence in the film where Tony is testing his flight capabilities in his lab.  Very cool, and funny, to boot!