What These Movies Really Look Like Before Special Effects Are Added

We're currently going though a period in movie history that will be remembered as the time when CGI started to seamlessly blend with live action. Hollywood blockbusters have become increasingly reliant on visual effects over the past few decades, but recent advances in technology have made it so feats in VFX work that were considered impossible just a few years ago are well within reach.

As the scope of what can be achieved with computer-generated imagery widens, the more studios are tempted to use it—not just out of necessity, but simply because it's often cheaper than the alternative. In fact, many modern blockbusters are covered in so many digital layers that the original footage looks unrecognizable—and more often than not, completely ridiculous. Here's what these movies really looked like before special effects were added.

Neill Blomkamp's follow-up to his acclaimed debut District 9 didn't exactly go as planned, despite the star power of Matt Damon. The blockbuster sci-fi cost a whopping $110 million to make, but only returned $93 million at the domestic box office. Blomkamp took full responsibility for the film's failings, telling Uproxx that he "f***ed up" the script. "I feel like, ultimately, the story is not the right story," he said. "I almost want to go back and do it correctly... I just didn't make a good enough film is ultimately what it is."

The South African director didn't have any complaints about the special effects team, however, who were expertly led by his trusted collaborator Peter Muyzers. "Having worked with Neill before, we were able to prepare well in advance for Elysium and really get things into place," Muyzers told Collider. "So the real challenges on that film were just the variety of character work ... There were about three times as many shots in Elysium as there were in District 9 from a visual effects point of view."

When George Miller returned to the world of Mad Max with his critically acclaimed tour de force Fury Road in 2015, audiences were blown away by the sequel's frenetic pace and visceral action—much of which was achieved through the hard work of inventive mechanics who built the weird and wonderful vehicles used in the movie from scratch. "Mad Max was always about cars," production designer Colin Gibson said. "The cars were a metaphor for power, and the one thing that George was very keen on and understood, I think, was that in a world where there's next to nothing, what little there is left needs to be loved."

The chase scenes were all shot for real, but the final product wouldn't have looked anywhere near as eye-popping if it weren't for the VFX team. Led by supervisor Andrew Jackson, hundreds of CGI artists enhanced over 2000 shots in Fury Road, from adding characters to creating an epic toxic storm. "We sourced a huge amount of real twister footage to find visceral effects we liked and thought would work well for this sequence," CGI artist Tom Wood told IndieWire about creating the movie's biggest VFX scene. "Lightning strikes were added as light sources, casting shadows onto and lighting through the dust layers."

To create the illusion of flight, Richard Donner's Superman (1978) employed wire rigs to hang leading man Christopher Reeve in front of different projected backgrounds. The film is a classic, and the effects looked great in the '70s, but watching it today it feels as though you're flying with Superman as opposed to him flying past you—something Man of Steel director Zack Snyder wanted to avoid when he enlisted the help of John "DJ" DesJardin, known for his work on the Matrix sequels as well as Watchmen (2009) and Sucker Punch (2011).

"I think a lot of the direction for the flying came from Zack's style for the movie," DesJardin told The Verge. "He said to us, 'I want this to be really cinéma vérité, documentary-style. I think it needs to be handheld. It's going to be 24 frames, no slow motion. It's going to be anamorphic, so if you look up at the sun there's going to be a big flare going across the screen.' And once we got into that mindset, a lot of camera-style questions got answered really quickly about how the flying should be done." Wire rigs and gimbals were used to suspend Henry Cavill in front of green screens, and DesJardin's team did the rest.

Effects studio Weta Digital changed the game when they helped reboot Planet of the Apes with a new trilogy of prequels, beginning with 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. "Weta brought their technology to another level for this movie to make our apes look real," said producer Dylan Clark, who had an equal amount of praise for Andy Serkis. The industry's top performance capture artist shone as protagonist Caesar, redefining screen acting in the digital age. "His facial expressions and body language are so evocatively and precisely rendered that it is impossible to say where his art ends and the exquisite artifice of Weta Digital begins," The New York Times enthused in their review of 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Fox campaigned for Serkis to get an Oscar nomination, but the call from the Academy never came, much to the actor's frustration. "The awarding bodies should not discriminate about this being different," he told Independent after the release of 2017's War of the Planet of the Apes. "The visual effects render the character, just like putting on makeup, except here it happens after the fact. It's digital makeup, if you will."

While Jon Favreau embraced CGI for Iron Man, the experience he had making that film was nothing compared to what he did for his 2016 live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book. Technology had advanced to the point that photo-realistic digital animals were possible, though to create an entire jungle around a human actor, they needed to pull out all the stops. "It's very hard to fake light and shadow," the director said. "So everything became about using panels of LEDs to project light so if we had the kid bowing before the elephants, you have panels where we actually would pre-animate the elephants and they would cast the shadows on the kid in the exact right way."

This meant that 12-year-old star Neel Sethi had to imagine the animals he was interacting with, though Favreau was on hand to make the experience as real as possible for the young actor. "There were puppets that helped me, so it wasn't just a tennis ball that I was trying to have emotion with," Sethi told Independent. "Jon got into the puppet at times, I got to interact with him, which made it a lot easier."

Ridley Scott is no stranger to special effects, but creating the red planet onscreen for The Martian may have been his biggest challenge as a director. While some practical effects were used—the dust storm that Matt Damon gets lost in, for example, was created using fans—a huge amount of digital work was required to give The Martian Scott's desired look. "He's famous for doing his little sketches which are sort of really cool Ridley-grams," VFX supervisor Anders Langlands told Gizmodo. "We'd ask 'What do you want the background mountains to look like in this shot?' And he'd sketch out a little diagram of what they wanted. So you just literally match that and he'd be happy."

A lot of hours were spent finding the right hue for the skies and arid landscapes of Mars, though in the end it was a simple thing that caused the VFX team the most problems. "I think the trickiest thing we came across was actually the reflections in people's visors," Langlands revealed. "Sometimes we'd just take the visor out completely and replace it with a CG one. And then we'd use the environment to generate new reflections that matched what would actually be there."

Bringing J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World to life was only ever going to be possible with the help of CGI, and the films made increasingly good use of visual effects with each installment. While early CGI (like the troll in Sorcerer's Stone) hasn't aged well, the quality of digital imagery from Goblet of Fire onward still holds up. The VFX team had to up their game for the fourth film in the series, as it marked the return of Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). Paul Franklin, the VFX supervisor for Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince, revealed that creating Voldemort's nose was a mammoth task.

"There's this idea that we put the shots through the computer and it just vanished off [Fiennes'] face," he told RadioTimes. "[His nose] had to be painstakingly edited out, frame by frame, over the whole film. And then the snake slits had to be added and tracked very carefully using dots put on his face for reference." Franklin likened the process to creating a renaissance painting. "The digital brushwork has to be very, very fine to get it to work. The art and time that goes into those nostrils should never be underestimated."

Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy wouldn't have worked if the VFX team didn't nail Gollum, as the CGI character was hugely important to the plot. Weta worked their typical magic on him, but it was the motion-capture performance of Andy Serkis that really brought the devious little creature to life. Serkis reprised the role in Jackson's The Hobbit films, but he wasn't the only actor slipping into a spotted grey suit this time out: Benedict Cumberbatch was brought in to play the trilogy's antagonist Smaug, solely because of his voice.

"It wasn't about what he looked like, it was about what he sounded like and what he was able to produce in the character simply by his voice," Jackson said. "And he knew Smaug, I mean he understood Smaug as well as we did." Cumberbatch revealed that the gravelly tones he gave the psychotic dragon were an imitation of the ones his father used when he read The Hobbit to him as a child. "My dad's an extraordinary actor," the Doctor Strange star said. "He brought this already very rich, magical, visionary world of hobbits and giants and trolls to life."

Game of Thrones season finales always have a cinematic quality, thanks in part to the digital wizardry of Pixomondo. A lot of shooting is done on location and green screen use is kept to a minimum where possible, but bringing the creatures of George R. R. Martin's world into the mix requires some top-notch CGI. Pixomondo's VFX supervisor Sven Martin told The Washington Post that one of their biggest achievements has been making Daenerys' dragons blend seamlessly with the world around them, explaining, "This was always our main approach, to not make the dragons too fantastical and too design-driven."

But all that magic doesn't happen until the dragon scenes have been shot, so how does Emilia Clarke connect with her fire-breathing babies? "Well, they have these amazing life-scale models that we used for camera rehearsals for the sake of the CGI people, and I got very attached to them," the actress told Huffington Post. "They genuinely helped me and I kind of got very maternal towards these—fundamentally [they're] dolls, I suppose. But it was nice to have something physical that I could really picture in my mind."

When Disney first announced their intention to remake a number of their beloved animated classics in live action format, the title that raised the most questions was Beauty and the Beast. Their rebooted version of The Jungle Book required them to render photo-realistic animals, though at least the protagonist was human. A film in which one of the two leads is a big hairy creature and the majority of the supporting characters are animated household objects was always going to rely on CGI, though director Bill Condon has never liked digital effects and actively avoided using them wherever possible.

"It was important to make everything that could be real, real," he told IndieWire. "I'm not a big fan of CG movies. The idea is to feel grounded in a world and not be distracted by things that felt like additions." Unfortunately for the man portraying the titular Beast, it was motion capture all the way. Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) spoke to both Andy Serkis and Mark Ruffalo about their experiences in motion capture roles, and their feedback left him sweating. "I think I was mildly terrified," he said. "But that's really, generally what drives a lot of my decisions these days, is calibrating the right amount of terror."

As the titular beasts in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter prequel are all fictional, it was difficult for leading man Eddie Redmayne to get acquainted with the creatures he was supposed to adore, so he spent time with animal handlers in the Muggle world to learn how they interacted. "It was really about working out the relationship Newt had with each of the animals and it's not a human relationship," he told Pottermore. "For example, I'd hear some of the sounds these handlers would make. They are not necessarily the same noise as their animal makes but it would be something that the animal reacts to."

Redmayne was able to give a realistic performance because he did his homework, but all of his grunting and squawking would have looked ridiculous if it weren't for the work of Framestore. The London-based visual effects house oversaw the growth of the beasts from flat images into real characters, and they were given a huge amount of creative freedom by director David Yates. "It was an open brief, essentially," VFX supervisor Pablo Grillo told The Independent. "David saw the value in bringing the animation team in from the start, to shape how these creatures were going to come together."

Whenever Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy comes up during conversations about special effects, the first thing most people mention is Andy Serkis' brilliant motion capture performance, though creating Gollum was just one of many challenges Weta faced during this epic undertaking. Practical solutions were used in places—the forced perspective technique was employed to compensate for the height difference between hobbits and most of the other races in Middle Earth—but the bulk of the visual effects were achieved digitally. Even the interior of Bilbo Baggins' hobbit hole (with the exception of the chandelier that Gandalf bumps into) was computer generated.

Speaking to AWN, visual effects supervisor Jim Rygiel revealed that the Best Picture-winning finale Return of the King was his favorite of the three movies, because of the monumental amount of work he and his team put into the picture. "Return of the King has more shots than one and two combined, it's like 1,450," he said. "It was mind-boggling to figure out logistically how to do them all. It's something you never think you could have done and you did it, like climbing Mt. Everest."

The amount of destruction on show in this Dwayne Johnson-led blockbuster definitely doesn't come cheap, but San Andreas actually cost a lot less to make than many of the big natural disaster flicks that came before it. The production budget was $114 million, according to Variety—roughly half the amount needed to bring Roland Emmerich's 2012 to the big screen in 2009. The film's visual effects supervisor, Colin Strause, was able to keep costs down by employing practical solutions to problems that most visual effects companies would solve with only computers today.

"You can make a $100 million movie look like a $200 million movie," Strause said. "You can make movies way smarter. You don't have to gold plate everything... CG for the sake of CG is always a mistake." Miniatures of numerous landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge were swilled with buckets of water to save animators some time when it came to engulfing them with tidal waves, though they still had their work cut out for them. Seven different companies worked together to render 1300 VFX shots for the movie, which looks utterly ridiculous before their work is added.

James Cameron had been planning his sci-fi epic Avatar for a number of years when he finally decided the time was right to get the ball rolling, a decision he made after seeing Weta turn Andy Serkis into Gollum for The Lord of the Rings. The Terminator director flew to New Zealand to meet Peter Jackson, who convinced Cameron to entrust Weta with Avatar. He still had reservations about the job ahead, however, as he explained to The Telegraph: "We were going significantly beyond anything [Jackson] had done because we had all sorts of different characters based on different actors."

Leading those actors were Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, who had to film her scenes as Neytiri in a camera-rigged motion capture suit. Green screen shooting presents all kinds of obstacles for actors, but it's also extra challenging for the person directing them. "My challenge as director is to make it as real as possible for them, and their challenge as an actor is to imbue it with a sense of emotional veracity," Cameron told NPR. "If it's a big dramatic confrontation, the best thing to do is just let them go at it and act off each other." The movie went on to win Oscars for cinematography, visual effects, and art direction.

Arguably one of the most influential films of all time, The Matrix truly changed the landscape of action movies when it dropped at the turn of the millennium, with its memorable fight sequences becoming a benchmark for stunt coordinators and VFX artists alike. Director duo the Wachowskis have openly admitted that they were heavily influenced by classic manga turned cult anime Ghost in the Shell, so much so that they actually took a copy of the film with them when they were pitching to producers. "We want to do that for real," they'd tell them—and to do that, they needed to embrace new techniques.

The term "bullet time" was coined for the epic slow motion shots that the movie employed on the regular, which were created by visual effects guru John Gaeta. The goal was to "create a ballet that could never be staged in real life," the film's experienced special effects supervisor told The New York Times. "The directors wanted to emulate the stylization found in Japanese animation. When we created weather, fire and smoke, we wanted it to move not realistically but impressionistically." Raw footage released as an extra on the DVD showed how bullet time was achieved using an intricate setup of perfectly positioned cameras and masses of green screen.

Fox's adaptation of James Dashner's The Maze Runner wasn't the best dystopian teen movie to come out over the past decade, but it was far from the worst. The film scored a respectable 65 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with the majority of their critics praising the premise, acting and visual effects. Method Studios' Sue Rowe was the visual effects supervisor on the project, which proved fun but challenging for her team. The walls of the maze itself apparently kept them very busy—it was created in a huge open field with some strategically placed blue screens.

"The walls needed to be 100ft tall with ivy growing at the tops," she told Art of VFX. "On location we had a section of wall 20 by 40 where we shot a lot of the dialogue shots, however the rest of this 900m square field need to have imposing concrete walls." Rowe also had to dedicate a large chunk of time to the final battle with the Grievers, in which everything but the floor that Dylan Thomas and his castmates stood on was blue screen. As Rowe later admitted, "That was a hell of a thing to pull off."

The combined star power of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt helped Passengers turn a profit at the worldwide box office, but back home in the States, Morten Tyldum's sci-fi romance failed to recoup its $110 million budget. The film had more plot holes than black holes, and the majority of critics were quick to pick up on them, though despite the movie's many failings nobody could deny that it looked great. Passengers was Tyldum's first big VFX feature, and the Norwegian director wanted to keep things as subtle as possible throughout, as MPC visual effects supervisor Pete Dionne explained.

"For every sequence, every shot, every detail in the frame, Morten was always clear on what the purpose and impact would be to the story," Dionne told Art of VFX. "His aesthetic is definitely biased towards invisible effects, and where they couldn't be invisible by nature, to keep them restrained and to never distract from the drama." MPC were behind many of the big visual effects shots in the movie, including the zero gravity water sequence and the impressive Starship Avalon, but bringing those scenes to life was no walk in the park. "MPC took on around 1150 shots," Dionne added, "which was a significant number considering how lean the budget was for what Morten required us to achieve."

The Hunger Games movie franchise came to an end at a time when releasing the final movie of a series in two separate parts was the fashion, and (much like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) the second installment was a lot more exciting than the first. "The two films are different in tone and execution," VFX supervisor Charles Gibson told 3Dtotal. "Mockingjay – Part 2 was more of an action/war film with big set pieces playing within The Capitol. We had to enhance battle action and create believable environments that would hold up for extended coverage."

Gibson worked closely with production designer Phil Messina, who joined the Hunger Games team in the early 2010s when the franchise was still in its infancy. "Phil and I had extensive discussions about locations versus building digital sets [and] we agreed that a mix of both would be best for the film," Gibson said. He went on to heap praise on his colleague throughout the interview, claiming that Messina's input on the project was invaluable. "Generally the success was due to Phil's taste—picking compatible locations and coming up with a unified design approach and providing a 'look book' of architectural styles for our vendors."

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) turned countless Netflix users vegan in 2017 with his touching action adventure Okja, the story of a little girl and her super pig. The Verge called it "the first great Netflix movie," and the majority of critics certainly approved of the film—itwent Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 86 percent. According to the project's VFX supervisor Erik-Jan de Boer, the success of the film hinged on whether the audience believed that Okja, a new kind of genetically engineered pig created to fight world food shortages, was real.

"I explained it to Bong: The only way that people are really going to believe Mija and Okja and their little pet friendship is if we have a lot of contact, and if that contact is truly believable," he told No Film School. "The movie has a lot of really intricate and tender caressing and stroking. Some of that stuff is really hard to do in CGI, and it took a lot of hard work from all departments in post-production to pull that off." The team created a range of foam props for young star Ahn Seo-hyun to interact with, including a full body suit for the most intimate interactions between the girl and her giant best friend.

Before Denis Villeneuve imagined the future of mankind in Blade Runner 2049, he directed a sci-fi outing that was a little more grounded in reality. 2016's Arrival follows a linguist and a physicist (Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner) as they attempt to communicate with an unannounced alien species, with large portions of the film taking place in and around one of their monolithic spacecrafts. The VFX style was the polar opposite of his Blade Runner sequel; at times it all seems a bit drab, though that was very much Villeneuve's intention, according to VFX supervisor and regular collaborator Louis Morin.

"He wanted nothing to do with any kind of sci-fi movie that we've been seeing recently from Hollywood," Morin told VFXblog, revealing that Scarlett Johansson-led indie sci-fi Under the Skin was a big inspiration on the project. "The way they shot with a camera with non-actors, [Villeneuve] said he just wanted this movie to feel so real and so boring in so many ways, like, ordinary looking. I remember we were cutting the movie, we spent a lot of time finessing the story in the edit, and we were in Montréal in February, minus 15 or 20 outside with a cloudy day, no color—he said, 'That's what I want.'"

Tim Burton's reputation was built on his inventive use of miniatures and stop-motion techniques, but in recent years, the onetime Disney animator has gravitated toward CGI. Burton first started dabbling with digital effects in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), and his love affair with computer-generated visual effects has grown in scale ever since. "He remembers when you couldn't even remove a wire from a shot, so he really appreciates what he's able to do now," pointed out Frazer Churchill, VFX supervisor on Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

Churchill admitted to being a little apprehensive when he visited Burton's house one morning to discuss the film ("A stone skull at the door threw me off my guard," he revealed while chatting to Art of VFX), but he was offered the job the same day. He set about dividing the work between various well-respected VFX vendors, including Double Negative, Rodeo FX and MPC, but it was Scanline who were tasked with creating the tricky underwater shots.

"I believe that Scanline has built a reputation for producing world class visual effects and in particular crafting state of the art water simulations of any sort," VFX supervisor Jelmer Boskma said. "I wasn't surprised that, when Tim Burton envisioned some rather complex underwater scenes for the movie, his VFX production team reached out to Scanline to help create some of the effects."