Special effects in movies: 10 films that changed VFX

Special Effects in Movies: 10 Films That Changed VFX

Some films use visual effects. A few force the industry to build new tools. We went back through VFX history and picked ten films where something actually changed. A technique, a pipeline, or a business rule.

They’re listed oldest first. Every number below comes from published production records. The sources are at the end.

1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

ILM built the liquid-metal T-1000. The shot count is smaller than you’d guess. CG appears in about 42 or 43 shots. Another 50 to 60 shots used practical effects, mostly from Stan Winston Studio. Up to 35 ILM artists worked on roughly five minutes of T-1000 screen time.

The lesson still holds. Use CG only where nothing else works. Blend it with real effects everywhere else. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

2. Jurassic Park (1993)

About 15 minutes of dinosaurs appear on screen. Roughly 9 minutes are Stan Winston’s animatronics. About 6 minutes are ILM’s CG.

The plan started as stop-motion. Phil Tippett’s team was set up to animate the dinosaurs. ILM’s computer tests changed the decision, and fewer than 12 months remained before release. Tippett’s team built a tool that turned puppet movements into data for CG models. The stop-motion animators became computer animators. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

3. The Matrix (1999)

Bullet time uses a ring of still cameras fired one after another. Software fills the gaps between the photographs. The camera seems to orbit a frozen moment.

John Gaeta supervised the effects. Manex Visual Effects built the bullet-time shots. Animal Logic did the code hallway and the exploding agents. DFilm handled the heavy compositing, including the skyscraper jump. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

4. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

Gollum was the first CG character that carried a performance. Andy Serkis acted on set and in a motion-capture setup. Many scenes were shot twice, once with Serkis and once without him. Weta Digital redesigned Gollum after Serkis was cast. The body came from motion capture. The face was animated by hand.

Weta delivered around 800 effects shots on this film. It won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

5. Avatar (2009)

About 60 percent of the film is computer-generated. The rest is live action. Weta Digital peaked at around 900 people.

Actors wore a skull cap with a tiny camera pointed at the face. That captured every expression. James Cameron used a virtual camera to see the actors inside the digital set while they performed. The production needed over a petabyte of storage. A single frame often took hours to render. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

6. Life of Pi (2012)

Rhythm & Hues built the tiger, Richard Parker. The team spent a year on research and development before the shoot started in January 2011. A custom wave tank was built at a former airport in Taiwan. It held about 1.7 million imperial gallons of water.

Here’s the part nobody talks about. Rhythm & Hues filed for bankruptcy on 11 February 2013. The Oscar for Best Visual Effects went to the film about two weeks later. The studio that made the winning effects was already in trouble. For anyone running a VFX business, that’s a lesson in margins.

7. Gravity (2013)

About 80 percent of the film is CG. Framestore, supervised by Tim Webber, built almost everything you see. Sandra Bullock’s face was real. Most of the rest was digital.

To light her face, the team built a box of LED panels. It played back the lighting of space around her. The opening shot runs about 13 minutes. The whole production took around four and a half years. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

8. Interstellar (2014)

DNEG, supervised by Paul Franklin, worked with physicist Kip Thorne to render a black hole. Single frames took up to 100 hours. The data came to around 800 terabytes. Thorne’s work led to three published scientific papers.

The film has about 850 effects shots. Around 150 of them were done in camera, using projected backgrounds. The remaining 700 were done in post-production. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

9. The Irishman (2019)

ILM, supervised by Pablo Helman, de-aged three lead actors across decades. Robert De Niro plays characters as young as 24 and as old as 80.

The team built a three-camera rig and shot without tracking markers on the faces. ILM spent two years studying old films to decide how each actor should look at each age. The film has about 1,750 effects shots. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Visual Effects but didn’t win.

10. Dune (2021)

DNEG, supervised by Paul Lambert, did about 1,200 of the film’s roughly 1,700 effects shots. The desert scenes used sand-coloured screens instead of green ones, to match the real desert shots around them.

Much of the filming took place in Wadi Rum in Jordan and in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

What this means for a project

Most of these films spent years and tens of millions of dollars. A short film or an ad with 20 to 50 VFX shots can’t copy that. The habits still apply:

  1. Shoot as much as you can for real.
  2. Plan every VFX shot before the shoot, not after.
  3. Decide which shots truly need CG. T2 had only about 43.
  4. Pick one studio or one supervisor to own the whole look.

If you’re planning a VFX shot and want a second opinion, have a look at our work or get in touch. Happy to talk through it.

Which film would you add to this list? Let us know.

Sources and references

  1. Wikipedia: Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park (film), The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Avatar (2009 film), Life of Pi (film), Gravity (2013 film), Interstellar (film), The Irishman, Dune (2021 film).
  2. Industrial Light & Magic: “Creating the Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park” (ilm.com).
  3. The Conversation: “Jurassic Park at 30: how its CGI revolutionised the film industry”.