10. The Adjustment Bureau: Door-to-Door
Say what you will about the decision to turn one of Philip K. Dick's bleakest, most nihilistic stories into a metaphysical romance, but The Adjustment Bureau is filled with VFX shots so classy, you never realize that whole streets, crowds and environments were fake. The most dizzying sequence comes at the end, when Matt Damon and Emily Blunt's characters sprint through various magical doors, seamlessly teleporting from one New York location to another. They travel from a courthouse to Yankee stadium to a Manhattan street, and then to Liberty Island. Without the VFX house?s before-and-after highlight reel, the reality-warping illusion is impossible to see through.
9. Immortals: Clashing with Titans
Gods move in mysterious ways in Immortals. Or, rather, their victims do, hanging and twisting in midair after being killed?a way the filmmakers demonstrated the superhuman speed of the gods making war with Titans.
This effect shows up multiple times during the movie, but the brawl that follows the Titans' prison break is most stunning, as the gods' targets and their spattered blood instantly downshift to a new, slower speed, drifting through space while combat proceeds at a regular pace around them. Though copious CGI completed the effect, the VFX wizards smoothly integrated the different movement rates by filming different actors at different speeds. One shot combined motion-capture footage filmed at 48 frames per second (fps), and separate footage at 500 fps.
8. Hugo: Paris Overflight
Scorsese's surprise contribution to 3D and family-friendly cinema, Hugo, begins with an extended overflight of a snowy Paris in 1931. The entirely digital cityscape is convincing, but it's when the camera nosedives into the rail terminal, through the crowds and past the walls to follow the eponymous hero's hidden route among the station's pipework and clockwork gears that we realize what CG can do in the hands of a master director and cinematographer. The interior shots are mix of live and digital elements, but none of it comes across as a polished-up videogame cutscene. It's a fitting beginning to a movie-length tribute to cinema in general, and the father of visual effects, Georges M?li?s, in particular.
For more, read PM?s story, Five Things to Know about Martin Scorcese?s Hugo
7. Battle: Los Angeles: Command Center
This one features its fair share of the decidedly unspectacular kind of VFX that dominates many alien invasion flicks. We?re thinking particularly of the weightless, gummy movement of the extraterrestrial foot soldiers. But give VFX creators Hydraulx credit for the sheer spectacle of Battle: Los Angeles? climax, in which an alien command center rises from the depths of Los Angeles (you can see it at the end of this trailer).
The command center tears through the elevated freeway with a convincing mass and bulk. It sheds rubble and wreckage throughout the ensuing fight, turning what should have been a cut-and-paste, gung-ho showdown into a visually convincing snapshot of what a modern infantry squad might actually look like while repelling a vanguard of metal-encrusted aliens.
6. Super 8: Train Crash
The most effects-heavy shots come late in Super 8, when the mysterious alien's eerie, work-in-progress spaceship continues to draw everything metallic through the air, and into its shifting, roiling hull. That's perfectly cool, but floating particles are par for the course in computer animation. It's the train crash early on, which releases the rampaging alien and sets the plot in motion, that feels the most dangerous and is the most technically complex. Director J.J. Abrams combined early CG-only shots created for a teaser trailer with live-action footage of the child actors charging past on-set explosions. Filmmakers added falling train cars to sync up with the kids' flinching, as well as the real-world pyrotechnics of a moving, bomb-laden sled.
5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2: Trouble with Treasure
The last movie in the series is packed with thunderous spells and swooping aerial sequences, the sort of swashbuckling visuals a franchise is supposed to end with. It's the scene in Gringott's Bank, though, where Harry and company are searching a vault for an item that could help kill off his archnemesis, that stands out. Treasure scattered around the enchanted storage space starts multiplying at an exponential rate, threatening to drown the characters in its gilded undertow. The fact that the propagating treasure is 100 percent CG is hard to believe, given the way to rattles, tumbles, and reflects against the actors.
4. Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Battle on the Bridge
Nearly every scene that features the hyper-intelligent, wildly compelling CG chimpanzee Caesar deserves a debriefing. Those eyes. That fur! Then again, much of what makes Caesar work is the motion-capture performance of Andy Serkis, who became famous (in his way) as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies.
In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it's the battle on the Golden Gate Bridge that had the highest degree of difficulty, as dozens of digital primates charge a roadblock of mounted police. Actors in motion capture suits?most wearing prosthetics to give them longer, more chimp-appropriate arms?would run and leap across the 300-foot-long outdoor replica set, and animators turned their movements into superhuman feats in post-production.
3. Transfomers: Dark of the Moon: Bumblebee Ditches Sam, Reconsiders
By the third Transformers movie, we've seen it all. Even the city-block-length skyscraper-constricting apocalyptic robo-worm seems like more of the same (if slightly bigger). What we haven't seen, it?turns out, is just how terrifying it is to be a Transformer's passenger.
During a high-speed chase Bumblebee is forced to dodge a rolling truck. Instead of going right or left, he goes over, turning into a robot in midair, while his hapless passenger, Shia LeBeouf, is left clawing at empty air. After slapping aside a few chunks of giant shrapnel?debris from that pesky truck?the Autobot lands as a Camaro, transforming around a screaming LeBeouf, who winds up back in the driver's seat. It's a flawless slow-motion shot that uses a real stretch of highway, a real LeBeouf swinging on a wire harness, and a very unreal Bumblebee to create a visual that's pure Michael Bay: utterly pointless but totally thrilling.
2. Real Steel: Atom vs. Zeus
Two fully-CG creations engage in fisticuffs, in a largely CG boxing ring and venue, with an almost entirely CG crowd cheering them on. It should be an unmoored, dislocated mess. But Real Steel's bot-on-bot fight scenes?and the final, championship match in particular?have all the crunching impact of a demolition derby.
Despite the towering size of the robots, the filmmakers emphasized motion-capture wherever possible, by putting performers on stilts and fitting them with hulking shoulderpads. And while many of the less action-oriented scenes used actual, practical robots, the fight between the contender Atom and titleholder Zeus was a motion-capture standoff, choreographed by boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard. The VFX team was able to show the director and cinematographer live, composite footage of the robots in action, overlaid on top of the performers, during filming. They also created a new crowd-replication and management program that turned 85 extras into a crowd of 20,000.
1. Tree of Life: In the Beginning
In the run-up to the release of Tree of Life, as well as in head-scratching reviews once the movie hit theaters, much was made of a brief and somewhat inscrutable scene between two dinosaurs. Prehistoric creatures are rare in arthouse flicks, but here's what's rare in any film, of any kind: a 20-minute, near-wordless sequence showing the birth of the universe, the stars, and planet Earth, and finally those two dinos. Nebulae flow though the void, the Milky Way rolls on its mighty axis, the surface of the Sun churns and roars. It's patient and immaculate, and the only thing more astonishing than this cosmic meditation is how it was created.
Some of those shots are animated versions of the static images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Others feature lower-tech photographic effects, such as the use of dry ice and miniatures for celestial bodies, and shooting without a lens to encourage light leaks. Our favorite trick by far: creating an ominous, on-screen nebula by filming the languid billow of half-and-half poured into a tank of water. Light cream has never been so heavy.
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