What are your favorite special effects in movies?

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Marty Chinn said:
I came to post a pic of a Clone Trooper from Episode 2 cuz I was shocked to find out every single trooper was CG in every scene of the movie. I was amazed that not one suit was built for the movie. However, Davy Jones takes that a step further. Yoda when he's visiting Palpatine in the second movie also is a good runner up since I thought it was still a puppet on the close ups, especially the way they got his ears to bounce like rubber like the old puppet did. Anytime CG can fool me is top notch in my book. I love CG where I don't know it's CG.
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EVERY single trooper? Now I know where the budget went.
 
ChoklitReign said:
EVERY single trooper? Now I know where the budget went.
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Yep, every trooper. Crazy eh? Some of the closeups I just assumed were men in suits, but it was all CG. So it tricked you too. That says something about the quality of it =)
 
ChoklitReign said:
EVERY single trooper? Now I know where the budget went.
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The budget was actually pretty restrained. Lucas is a shitty director, but the man knows how to get his money's worth. Look at movies like Wolverine and Spider-Man 3 and tell me you think the effects in those movies justify the budget.
 
"Who Framed Roger Rabbit". It blows me away how good it looks even 20 years later. I also loved the special effects in the fight scenes of "The One".
 
Scullibundo said:
The budget was actually pretty restrained. Lucas is a shitty director, but the man knows how to get his money's worth. Look at movies like Wolverine and Spider-Man 3 and tell me you think the effects in those movies justify the budget.
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Granted, Lucas owns ILM, so he is able to get a pretty nice discount. Or at least pick the right people to do the work for cheap. He and Spielberg know how to wring every penny out of a budget on their films. Michael Bay did as well with Transformers. It cost less than some of his other stuff, but the effects were ten times better.
 
Marty Chinn said:
Yep, every trooper. Crazy eh? Some of the closeups I just assumed were men in suits, but it was all CG. So it tricked you too. That says something about the quality of it =)
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What Lies Beneath had a lot of tricky CG stuff in it that fooled me. Some stuff I never realized was special effects until watching the special features and I was blown away. But there was one shot where in the theater I said "that has to be fake, that camera move is impossible" and sure enough, it was. It bugged me that on the commentary they said "We arent telling how we did that." It kinda sucks that Zemeckis is stuck on CG now like Beowulf. While impressive, the man knew how to push effects in movies while making it mostly seamless. Just look at Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump.
 
PhoncipleBone said:
What Lies Beneath had a lot of tricky CG stuff in it that fooled me. Some stuff I never realized was special effects until watching the special features and I was blown away. But there was one shot where in the theater I said "that has to be fake, that camera move is impossible" and sure enough, it was. It bugged me that on the commentary they said "We arent telling how we did that." It kinda sucks that Zemeckis is stuck on CG now like Beowulf. While impressive, the man knew how to push effects in movies while making it mostly seamless. Just look at Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump.
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Here's an awesome effect from "What Lies Beneath" you may have missed:

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The final shot in the film. It slowly fades to black before the credits start, and leaves an afterimage of a face. It freaked the hell out of me and a friend of mine while watching it his uncles personal theater. We replayed it multiple times to make sure our eyes weren't playing tricks on us.
 
Since Jurassic Park and The Lost World, only Davy Jones in POTC2 has impressed me.

I thought Davy Jones was a clever animatronic mask throughout the entirety of POTC2

But nothing tops the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park
 
- Gollum, Gandalf's light powers, the Balrog (Lord of the Rings trilogy)
- lightsabers, Force lighting, star destroyers, the Death Star and its superlaser (Star Wars series)
- Bullet Time, the rippling window, the spectacular semi truck crash, the fucking awesome water sphere during the Smith vs Neo fight in Revolutions (The Matrix series)
- Davy Jones (Pirates of the Carribean sequels)
- the transformations (Transformers)
- Nightcrawler's teleportation smoke, Mystique's whole look (X-Men 2)
- all the liquid metal effects in Terminator 2
- Sin City's whole look
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow's whole look
- King Kong (Peter Jackson's King Kong)
 
Practical effects: The Thing. How in the fuck has this only been mentioned once? Still amazing today, 27 years later.

CGI: Davy Jones, POTC: DMC. Hes so well animated that you totally buy it - he doesnt look like an effect, and you believe such a guy exists. Even better, the whole thing is bolstered several notches by a great Bill Nighy performance. The POTC trilogy is mostly crap, but Ill be damned if this isnt their crowning achievement.
 
This is indeed pretty amazing.

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It's so hard to make faces be believable. Maybe the fact that he was supposed to be all slimy and wet helped, but still. Amazingly real looking.
 
Even more amazing is that Jones looked even better in daytime shots. Many CG characters are restricted to the shadows to hide their technical deficiences, but not ILM with Jones.
 
My all time favourite effects:

Effects

- Speed Racer time period shifting
- Harry Potter (several)
Order of the Phoenix (fight scenes) + the portkey effect in Goblet of fire + movie-rendition of howler.
- Matrix glass ripple break + viewing in matrix code
- Bullet ricochets off superman's eye (Superman returns)
- Transformer transformations (first one)

Characters

- Old Benjamin/Young Benjamin
- Davy Jones
- Gollum
- King Kong (at times he looked great and times not so much)
 
Davy Jones and his crew in the POTC-movies (Jones was amazingly done, but the crew was on the same level), King Kong (the one played by Andy Serkis), Gollum, Two Face in The Dark Knight, just about everything in Big Fish, the backdrops in Sin City.

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Not really SFX, but the post-production on this movie really made it stand out.
 
Movies that are effects driven and awesome as a whole

The Abyss
Starship Troopers
5th Element (more love people)
Ghostbusters
Tron
 
Even though it's not even out, the new Harry Potter trailer was full of crazy impressive stuff.

I particularly liked the smoke effect creating the dreamscape with Dumbledore and Harry walking around a town.
 
Fincher films are full of awesome special effects that can be really subtle.

The cabbie murder scene in Zodiac was done with CG, as the camera stays directly above the cab as it drives around the SF streets... There's also a really cool time-lapse sequence when the show the construction of the Transamerica Building--much cooler than showing the characters just aging in a montage.

Fight Club has some great effects, too; the outer-space trashcan shot (if that makes sense) is extremely memorable, as is the scene with Jack basically living in his apartment/an Ikea catalog.
 
No love for the skeleton warriors from Jason and the Argonauts?

Beyond that most of my favourite special effects have been posted. The original King Kong, T-Rex in JP, the battle over Endor, Bladerunner's cityscapes, the Alien Queen ripping Bishop in half and pretty much everything else James Cameron has ever done.

I've always felt like Yoda in ESB and RotJ was the most realistic non-human character ever. CG has never come close imo.

The LOTR trilogy had some great miniatures, but the CG in those films was sub-par.
 
DarthWaiter said:
Top 5 worst movies ever for me:

Robocop
Ghostbusters
Blade Runner
Transformers
Children of Men
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I dunno.. maybe "Most Overrated". Worst movies ever is just plain ridiculous and you're making yourself look like a fucking muppet.
 
freethought said:
The LOTR trilogy had some great miniatures, but the CG in those films was sub-par.
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LOTR used a nice and clever combination of miniatures and CGI which imo holds up pretty well. Especially scenery shots like Minas Tirith, Isengard, etc. still look gorgerous because they didn't went overboard with CGI and used a great deal of actual sets, miniatures and "bigatures".
 
Personally, my favorite effects are in movies you don't even realize uses ANY effects and look like they were just shot normally. For example:

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Scene where Lt. Dan is picked up from bed

I'm actually kinda surprised we have no Gump props somewhere at our workplace. Lord knows we have plenty of other stuff just lying around. :lol

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GCX said:
LOTR used a nice and clever combination of miniatures and CGI which imo holds up pretty well. Especially scenery shots like Minas Tirith, Isengard, etc. still look gorgerous because they didn't went overboard with CGI and used a great deal of actual sets, miniatures and "bigatures".
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The more subtle uses of CG weren't so bad, but by the time you get to RotK and you've it started getting out of hand. The mumak's, the Ringwraith's flying steed and in particular Shelob all looked pretty lame. I never thought much of Gollum either to be honest, but that may have more to do with the design than the CG, which was better thanmost of the other CG in the films. I thought the Balrog was pretty horrible to be honest, but that may just be that I didn't find it scary r menacing and in the book I get chills reading that chapter.

In fact, that was the biggest problem wiht the CG in the films. It came nowhere close to how it looked in your imagination, whereas the physical sets and bigatures really did seem to bring Middle Earth to life.
 
ChoklitReign said:
EVERY single trooper? Now I know where the budget went.
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Forgot to reply to this...those scenes weren't really the most expensive or complicated to work out actually.
 
I watched it pretty recently but I remember being pretty impressed with the effects in Labyrinth. There was one part where someone sets a door against the wall then opens it and there is a hallway. It was pretty neat.
 
neorej said:
Davy Jones and his crew in the POTC-movies (Jones was amazingly done, but the crew was on the same level), King Kong (the one played by Andy Serkis), Gollum, Two Face in The Dark Knight, just about everything in Big Fish, the backdrops in Sin City.
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Jones' crew was very good too, but some were better than others and none were on the level of Jones himself. I'm not knocking ILM at all for that, in fact I think it's pretty interesting that there is a finite amount of time and resources that must be prioritized, down to a character-to-character basis within the same film. There must have been a million painstaking adjustments made on Jones to make him look as real as he does, and there just isn't the manpower to do it across the board.

LOTR is especially uneven--there are jaw-dropping wide shots and Gollum (of course), and then there are few seemingly simple shots that look inexplicably bush-league. (In particular, that shot of Isildur putting on the Ring in the prologue looks like it was made in 1981.)
 
Joe Shlabotnik said:
Jones' crew was very good too, but some were better than others and none were on the level of Jones himself. I'm not knocking ILM at all for that, in fact I think it's pretty interesting that there is a finite amount of time and resources that must be prioritized, down to a character-to-character basis within the same film. There must have been a million painstaking adjustments made on Jones to make him look as real as he does, and there just isn't the manpower to do it across the board.
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This isn't just true of special effects, you can apply this to any major film project or even game production or software development - if you're pushing a team to its absolute limits in terms of workload given a fixed deadline and budget, you have to prioritize. There's no way around it.
 
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