Awesome Vfx

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 was one of those rare times when a sequel was even better than the first film. This video essay by CinemaStix looks at how Alfred Molina and effects technicians brought Doctor Octavius to life on the big screen. Amazingly, the medium- and close-up shots used practical effects and puppetry to bring his mechanical tentacles to life.

Long before CGI and digital wire removal, the Muppets wowed audiences by leaving the stage and heading into the real world. But how did Jim Henson and crew pull off these illusions that gave us classic scenes like the Muppets riding bicycles in The Great Muppet Caper? Alex Boucher digs into the clever, practical effects that made this possible.

Wren and the VFX team from Corridor Digital created this stop-motion film using 3D-printed objects. They started by doing a motion capture session, then rendered thousands of individual poses of Wren into snap-together model parts. As you can see from the behind-the-scenes video, it took a tremendous amount of time and effort to produce the 2-minute film.

When outies become innies in the elevator in Severance, they go through a trippy transformation process. Gav from The Slow Mo Guys shows us how its possible to replicate the visual effect using a motion control rig and a motorized zoom lens. It’s basically a modified version of the dolly zoom that’s been used to create unsettling visuals since Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ mind-blowing exhibition Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema examines the impact and influence of the sci-fi subgenre in films like Blade Runner, TRON, eXistenZ, The Matrix, and Ghost in the Shell. To accompany the exhibition, Magnopus created a unique mixed-reality virtual production.

Tesla is planning on putting its Optimus humanoid robots into mass production later this year. We suppose that means we’re one year closer to the inevitable robot uprising. SoKrispyMedia’s short film kicks off with an action-packed car chase and ends with Tesla’s bots doing battle with the humans giving chase to one of the company’s EVs.

This fan-made video pays homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Like the Mutara Nebula scene that ILM brought to life in 1982, these spaceships were created without the benefit of CGI. NJM Photo used AMT model kits and a low-budget motion control rig to capture the Starship Enterprise and the hijacked USS Reliant. Check out the BTS video here.

Instead of debunking another intentionally deceptive video, Captain Disillusion takes a look at a strange visual anomaly that people noticed in a 2024 Saturday Night Live sketch. For some reason, the artwork in the background of the scene had to be rotoscoped and replaced in post-production, and Captain D. wants answers.

Filmmaker and avid cyclist Quek Shio wowed us in 2023 when he shared his bike-building process in a smoothly edited video. Now he’s back with a new bicycle and a new video. Watch him conjure, duplicate, and put together parts out of thin air. If there’s stop motion, then this would be fluid stasis. Check out his Instagram post for the parts list.

Man Star Trek fans thought Captain Kirk didn’t get a proper send-off when he died in Star Trek: Generations. This emotional short film from OTOY and director Carlos Baena uses de-aging tech to bid a proper farewell to the Captain – and Spock. The nearly dialogue-free film was created with help from William Shatner and the Nimoy estate for the Roddenberry Archive.

The T-1000 in Terminator 2 represented a breakthrough in visual effects. Robert Patrick’s liquid metal body was a thing to behold in 1991. While the effect was created with CGI, Wren from Corridor Crew wanted to replicate it using practical effects. The trick was to make a 3D model to mold a gallium bust, melting it, then playing the footage in reverse.

NVIDIA hijacked the term “ray tracing” to market its GPUs. But it’s actually a CGI technology that’s been studied for almost 40 years. The stellar tech YouTube channel Branch Education applies its expert narration and 3D animation skills to explain the basics of the technology, the different forms of ray tracing, and the hardware required to conjure these visuals.

We’ve yet to see the fourth installment in the Bad Boys franchise, but the early buzz is that it’s another great action flick. This brief behind-the-scenes clip shows how Will Smith wielded a special camera rig to capture a visual that flips between a reverse perspective and a first-person view during a gunfight. We wonder if Will gets a camera operator credit.

There’s a real camera out there that’s the size of a grain of sand. But for this video, the guys from Corridor didn’t strap one of these technological marvels to a bee. Nope, they used a drone and their visual effects skills instead, giving us a fun bee’s-eye perspective on the world as the apian buzzes around. See how they made the clip in the Behind-the-scenes video.

Generative AI can be used for good or evil. In the case of Adobe Premiere Pro, we’re excited about the potential of its AI tools to improve video editing workflows with the ability to add or remove objects with just a couple of clicks and extend scenes if they don’t fit your timeline. They also are testing integration with models like Sora AI to generate entire scenes.

Mangazi Music has an awesome way of showing off his guitar-playing skills: the neck of his electric guitar shows lyrics and animations in sync with his performance. It appears that he uses a green screen and motion tracking to superimpose perfectly timed graphics onto the guitar, and the results are impressive.