What Great Movies Look Like Without Special Effects
Hollywood blockbusters have become increasingly
reliant on visual effects over the past few decades, and recent advances in technology
have made it so feats in VFX work that were considered impossible just a few years ago
are now well within reach. More and more studios are using CGI in films,
mostly 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. 300: Rise of an Empire
Zack Snyder’s 300 made heavy use of CGI, and the technology used to create it had advanced
immensely by the time its sequel, Rise of an Empire, came around. Which, of course, meant squeezing every ounce
of that tech into the movie. Director Noam Murro told Forbes:
“It’s amazing how the tools available eight years later continue to develop. A major difference is CGI and the ability
to create things in post that are convincing and complex and three-dimensional. The idea of creating a water movie without
a drop of water on the set is remarkable.” The filmmaker also revealed they relied on
some of the same techniques used in the Oscar-winning CGI blockbuster Gravity. Elysium 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 film cost a whopping
$115 million to make, but only returned $93 million at the domestic box office. But while Blomkamp took full responsibility
for the film’s failings, the South African director didn’t have any complaints about
the special effects team, which had to put together over three times as many VFX shots
as they had for District 9. Jurassic World When Steven Spielberg decided to adapt Michael
Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park, CGI as we know it today didn’t really exist. Spielberg brought on Industrial Light and
Magic and tasked them with creating living, breathing dinosaurs using computer-generated
graphics, and their efforts proved revolutionary. Of course, it wasn’t just CGI that brought
the inhabitants of Jurassic Park to life. There were a number of practical effects used
too, and ILM mixed it up in the same way for Jurassic World. The fourth film in the franchise used detailed
white casts of dinosaur heads that would later be layered with CGI for close-up shots, and
they used actors in motion capture suits to make sure their movement seemed real. VFX supervisor Tim Alexander told Below the
Line: “It gave us a new natural look for the animation. We ended up casting a person to give us a
consistency in the performance. There were individual people being that raptor. We had suits that they would put on with a
tail.” Mad Max: Fury Road When George Miller returned to the world of
Mad Max with his critically acclaimed 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 vehicles used in the movie from scratch. 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. The Avengers When Earth’s Mightiest Heroes teamed up on
the big screen in 2012, the stakes were high for Marvel Studios and their team of visual
effects artists. Jeff White, the film’s VFX supervisor, told
MTV: “With Avengers, there were so many things
to get right. We created a lot of New York City for the
film and needed to build flying shots of Iron Man all from photography. We had to build a new Iron Man suit—the
Mark VII—and Stark Tower. We had to build the alien race. When you add all of those things up, there
are quite a few challenges there.” Green screens were used during most of the
film’s action sequences, so the cast spent a good chunk of time reacting to invisible
threats and taking cover from fake explosions. The biggest hurdle they faced was inserting
the Hulk into group situations. White explained:
“We wanted it to feel very natural when he’s sitting in that circle of Avengers. We spent a lot of time working on his skin
and his hair and his teeth, just to make sure that all of that was believable.” Man of Steel To create the illusion of flight, Richard
Donner’s Superman 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 set out to make Superman soar. Snyder decided to use a handheld approach
to filming Clark’s flying scenes, which meant adding in most of the effects in post. Wire rigs and gimbals were used to suspend
Henry Cavill in front of green screens, and the CGI team did the rest. Iron Man 3 When the first Iron Man movie dropped in 2008,
director Jon Favreau wasn’t known for CGI-heavy features, but advances in technology had convinced
him to change his stance. “I’ve always steered away from using visual
effects whenever possible… That being said, in the last few years there
have been a lot of wonderful visual effects movies where it’s beginning to become seamless
even to me.” Favreau returned for the sequel, but Shane
Black took the reins for Iron Man 3, which contained some of the most challenging visual
effects yet. Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige explained:
“We wanted the ability to be able to suit up anywhere, anyhow, without a giant gantry.” The answer was having Tony Stark design outlets
he injects just below the skin, not unlike the comics, allowing him to call the Iron
Man suit from anywhere. To pull off the effect, each individual piece
had to be digitally added to Robert Downey Jr.’s body after the fact. Spider-Man: Homecoming Years of gymnastics training really paid off
for Tom Holland on the set of Spider-Man: Homecoming, the character’s eagerly anticipated
introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even with the advances in CGI in recent years,
it helps to have an actor who feels comfortable jumping around in tights and doesn’t mind
hanging around on wires all day long. This was the case with the film’s Washington
Monument scene—but while that was indeed Holland under the Spidey mask, the monument
itself was a fake, erected on a studio sound stage. “We couldn’t film at the real Washington Monument,
but we built very impressive, very large chunks of the monument for filming.” Holland got up the structure with the aid
of a wire rig, though even with his background it was far from a walk in the park. “We did two weeks and every single shot was
upside down. And my head just took a pounding, man, from
all the blood that was rushing to it.” The Jungle Book The CGI Jon Favreau used for Iron Man was
nothing compared to what he did for his 2016 live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book. To create an entire jungle around a human
actor, they needed to pull out all the stops. The lighting was particularly difficult. The director explained:
“It’s very hard to fake light and shadow. 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 via puppets and actors in blue suits. RoboCop Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop got the most out
of the special effects available in the ’80s, using a combination of stop-motion and prosthetic
builds to create a movie that was disturbingly realistic at times. In the 2014 reboot, Murphy gets his injuries
in an explosion that was created digitally, but the suit he dons afterward was actually
real. “And there was a philosophy from the start
that we were going to have a head-to-toe suit.” The challenge was building a suit that was
mobile and easy for the digital department to add onto. The Martian 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, a
huge amount of digital work was required to give The Martian Scott’s desired look. VFX supervisor Anders Langlands told Gizmodo:
“[Ridley Scott] is famous for doing his little sketches which are sort of really cool Ridley-grams. 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 time was 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: the helmet visors. “But of course glass visors would reflect
the crew, and the lights, and the sound stage, so all the helmet visors you see in the film
are actually added in digitally.” Suicide Squad David Ayer’s anti-hero ensemble Suicide Squad
definitely had its flaws, but few of those were the fault of the many visual effects
houses—18 companies in total—that worked tirelessly on it. Imageworks were the ones who handled the Squad’s
final battle with Enchantress, and the movie’s villain proved to be a huge challenge, according
to VFX supervisor Mark Breakspear. He told ARTofVFX:
“Enchantress was a unique challenge as the actress had been shot without a costume as
we had to add it in later to allow it to behave in a way that normal cloth or materials couldn’t.” Breakspear later told AWN that of the 300
shots they enhanced for the film’s third act, dealing with the Enchantress’ tattoos proved
the most difficult. “That was amazingly tricky to make sure it
looked like skin, but also had the translucency that we needed to see the sub-surface tattoos.” The Wolf of Wall Street
Watching Martin Scorsese’s ode to excess The Wolf of Wall Street, the only scenes that
stick out as being possibly computer-generated are the one during which Jordan Belfort’s
yacht sinks and the one when a lion wanders freely through his office. But a visual effects reel released by Brainstorm
Digital revealed that some of the most basic shots in the movie were rendered with CGI. From sun loungers to tennis courts, Brainstorm
made plenty of subtle touches to bring the film in line with the director’s vision. VFX producer Mark Russell told Digital Arts:
“Working with Martin Scorsese, everything is about propelling a story forward and contributing
to the film. I feel that with his movies, there’s a kind
of stylized realism to them that we have to integrate with.” San Andreas
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. According to Variety, the production budget
was only $114 million—roughly half the amount needed to bring Roland Emmerich’s 2012 to
the big screen. 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. As he explained it:
“You can make a $100 million movie look like a $200 million movie. You can make movies way smarter. CG for the sake of CG is always a mistake.” They still had their work cut out for them,
though. Seven different companies worked together
to render 1,300 VFX shots for the movie. Thanks for watching! Click the Looper icon to subscribe to our
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What other movies would you want to see prior to their special effects being added?
In today's world a movie without CGI n special effects.. Wud be like a documentary movie on African Lion or sea water Crocs. But no.. U want Black Widow or Wonder Woman with oozing curves.. Or Cap America meaty body..So stop complaining..
I wouldn’t call suicide squad great
The only "great" film mentioned here is "Wolve of Wall Street". Some of the others are okay, most of the others won't stand the test of time. Great CGI doesn't help if the film itself is of no value at all.
"What great movies look like without special effects". Then 90% of the video is movie clips WITH the special effects, and some guy talking non-stop. TERRIBLE TITLE!
7:18 I cant get over how stupid that animal looks
I liked elysium
"Great movies" and then there's Suicide Squad…come on.
Black widow is just a chick and a gun
And my question remains, how do movies look without special effects? Only Special Effect material in there
What yiu show in the video is visual effects and not special effects.
Too much talking, not enough footage
Wait wait wait, "Suicide Squad" was NOT a great movie, it was HORRIBLE.
2:22 Everyone thought running from a T-Rex with high heels was stupid. Turns out they shot BDH without heels and added them in post. That's even worse!
suicide squad?
Everyone is robots
CGI can be beautiful when done right and I understand that for some scenes it's necessary to use but sometimes practical effects are just unbeatable and so much more appreciated for the effort that goes into making them. I just hate when movies get CGI so wrong to the point where it actually takes effort to fuck it up that bad. While I'm not completely against the use of CGI, I do think they should use a bit more practical effects instead. But again, like I said, when it's done right, CGI can turn a movie into something that's beautiful and attention grabbing and again, I know for some of the scenes, it is necessary to use CGI and I really don't mind I mean when it's done right, I actually really enjoy it cuz I know how much effort went into it and I know it's a lot of work to pull off. Great video by the way, thanks for uploading it, I really enjoyed watching it.
Great movies?
Suicide squad?
Great movie?
Thanks to CGI the practical effects are gone and amazing movies like the original Chucky or Original Jurassic park. Sadly it’s all garbage cgi now.
since the old times a movie called waterloo they did the impossible
Godzilla King of the Monsters
You said "great movie" and have the trash pile suicide squad in here. lol
This would have been a great video if you’d done it right!
I genuinely don’t understand why (people say) suicide squad is so bad can someone pls explain
only jackie chan can do real things
Plottless dross
CGI is stupid
Job favreu or however you spell his name, is the director of iron man 3? I thought it was Shane black???
The HFC of movies… it's in everything now ;/
Hollywood is using waaay too much CGI in a lot of movies these days.
Wait….Tom Holland is British?! What what?!?
Hotel fight scene in Inception is an example where director did not yield to CGI effects. Instead, that scene was shot in actual rotating set that was the most incredible in making.
Episode 1 phantom menace looked like a cartoon 🤦♂️
1 word shit
Holy shit this channel sucks.
wats the background score? any link plz
suicide squad and a great movie
9:23
Nope, Star Wars A New Hope and Close Encounters of the Third Kind((both 1977) are best first special effects movies.
At the beginning I thought that it was a list of 300 movies, but then I realized it the name of the movie.
Thats way i love Jackie chan movies
jureassic world cgi was deplorable
– talks about great movies
– mentions suicide squad
I’m would not say that Man of Steel was a great movie.
"Elysium only made $93M…" Did you forget to look in the lower left corner of your own screen shot?
bitch, if you would shut the hell up for a second and show the actual comparison that would be great.
CG is "visual effects". Practical makeup effects are "special effects".
I think you mean the former.
Prediction: no actors/actresses needed in future because of the improvement of CGI
If this is supposed to be great movies why is Suicide Squad here?
Turns out playing against imaginary zombies as a kid can be the perfect training to be an action movie comedian
haha you put this out to show the kids what a movie looks like without the effects.. but when i watch a cgi fest of a movie all i see is the greenblue screen, the edges between whats real and whats cg… its so obvious… Like when watching endgame all i saw was actors i half costumes running in front of a blue screen, while the girl next to me was legit crying when the heroes came back like she didnt know it was gonna happen.
imagine you told someone that you're an actor and they're like "oh what movies are you in"
oh yep im a raptor in jurassic world
The title is/was misleading
Elysium didn’t make money? Wow that sucks great movie, too bad everyone is just into superhero’s these days
How am I gonna watch the scenes when theres just a lot of words in the way ?
If I was wal
Đ
Suicide Squad is a great movie?
I wonder if the whole bandrsnatch episode from black mirror will ever take off. You watch a movie and different possibilities or outcomes will take shape good or bad based off what the viewer chooses. Or there are subtle hints in scenes or the inter talking amongst characters that will help you move it along. What if the whole vr type technology takes off and you are quite literally in the movie watching. I know this would cost boatloads more then it already does and that’s being said it’s not like most of the movies that come out are actually any good. First thing first Hollywood needs better movies.
Don't you just the adverts!
With the Original Hulk , a real person (Lou Ferrigno) was used . Should have been that way with all other movies that used the Hulk, using a real person.
300 was a big lie and dishonarable insult to persia.
Suicide Squad is not a Great movie. shouldn't be on this list due to the "great" requirement
The use of the word “great” preceding a bunch of the movies in this vid is hilarious
This guy forgot an epic movie – interstellar
Real creator
nice tehnology
8:55 That is Eaten Center in Toronto! I never noticed that. That is Dundas Street and Yonge Street.
. H
I name these types of actors green screen actors because that is the type of work they are doing as oppose to normal acting with stunt doubles like the 80's.
Man of Steel, Jurassic World, Ironman 3, The Jungle Book, Robocop 2014, Suicide Squad, San Andreas? These are NOT great movies.
U missed avatar
This video just played 10 commercials in 8 minutes. gg wp!
If movies with CGI are cheaper then why is it that those movies always seem to have big budgets?
guys i need your knowledge about film. how can 1 movie can reach hunder million dollars?.. wht actually make the cost really expensive?
you forgot avatar film
u forgot madea goes to jail, best CGI ever by tyler perry, haters gona hate
Nooo…my worldview just crumpled :O
This was pointless
souper annoying bla blah blah shit. misleading title
Its success will be its demise, the actors can leave! they've become futile. Gaming will become better though.
Shut up and let us enjoy it.
It's not a coincidence that most of these movies are shitty ones.
The Rock swims like.. well.. a rock
This video is 11 minutes long and contains 185,000 words
Yea and made it in to a boring job for the actors…
Imagine assistant of iron Man in the movie is the director of iron man wtf.😂😂😂
Wait! So Happy Hogan is the director of the first Iron Man film??
cool
Since When is Suicide Squad a great movie
when you turn the quality to low for better frames in a video game
Superman is a lie.
Since when did 300 get a sequel? 🤯
Here's an unpopular opinion: Suicide Squad was the only interesting movie out of all of those imo
'natural look'
Unfortunately marvel doesn’t pay its visual effects artists enough, they generally live in really shitty homes
10:40 looks dangerous AF
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: Dead mans chest + At worlds end — DAVY JONES!!
Nice
like airplanes hitting towers in NYC, good con