THE BEST Vfx

Being in a car crash can be quite terrifying. But what might crashes be like if other cars were invisible? With a little visual effects trickery, Donato Sansone created this surreal sequence of car crash footage, in which one of the involved vehicles was digitally removed from the scene.

Phil is a skeleton. He quickly rose to fame on the big screen as a stop-motion superstar. Then, modern effects put him out of business. Michael Shanks’ (aka “timtimfed“) charming short film is a fun blend of live-action, animation, and VFX, and a loving tribute to the great Ray Harryhausen. Behind the scenes here.

Visual trickster Zach King pays tribute to the 1986 classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, faking out his parents and sneaking out of the house on a “sick day” with his buddy through the magic of digital and practical effects, optical illusions, and clever editing.

As much of the world is staying home to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, we’re all looking for things to do while we’re not going out. UK creative guy Rob Wakefield is having no trouble keeping his mind entertained while he self isolates, and took a little of his time to create this amusing little clip.

(PG-13: Language) Filming things against a green screen and then replacing that area with digital images has become the norm in visual effects shots. But with the dramatic improvements in rear-projection tech perfected on The Mandalorian, Mr. Sunday Movies wonders if that could spell the end of the long-standing chromakey technique.

One of the world’s leading shops for practical visual effects is Wellington, New Zealand’s Weta Workshop. If you need creatures, miniatures, vehicles, weapons, robots, or just about anything else, they’re your guys. Their 2020 reel showcases just a handful of their many incredible visual accomplishments over the years.

Gareth Smith & Jenny Lee’s enchanting video observes Los Angeles from a new perspective. Watch in awe as dancer-choreographer Jason Chong appears to dance across the city’s overhead power lines. Now before you go calling the power company, the illusion was done using VFX trickery by Smith and Theo Alexopoulos.

ILM takes us behind the scenes of The Mandalorian to see how visual effects tech developed with Epic Games are used to create the series. Rather than shoot on location or in front of a green screen, the series uses a gigantic, wraparound screen to surround actors with digital scenery which can move in sync with a camera.

Remember the part of The Matrix where Neo took the red pill? What if he took the blue pill instead? Ctrl Shift Face and VFX artist Chris Ume make us wonder no longer, with the help of some deepfake tech. If the concept seems familiar, you might recall this mashup. VFX breakdown and comparison clip here.

Doc and Marty trade in their DeLorean for something a little more spacious and eco-friendly in this very well executed bit of fakery from the guys at Fort York VFX, who managed to seamlessly graft Tesla’s Cybertruck into a classic scene from Back to the Future.

YouTuber Misozi-Salaryman put together this great compilation of his swordplay and other martial arts action, and worked with editor Vasco to embellish the clip with appropriate video game style visual effects. We like to think there was some guy off camera mashing buttons.

Everyone knows atoms are really tiny. But just how small are they? After putting the scale of the universe in perspective, Wren from Corridor Crew channels his inner Vsauce, illustrating the relative size of atoms, quarks, molecules, and cells by scaling them up to something a bit easier to comprehend.

While LEGO has bent some of its rules about violence by offering weapons with some of its Star Wars sets, the brand is still pretty much about clean, wholesome fun. But that didn’t stop Nukazooka from imagining a LEGO movie based on the world of Grand Theft Auto.

Visual artist Kevin McGloughlin teamed up with with musician Max Cooper for this mindbending audio-visual collaboration. Reminiscent of the work of the great Philip Glass, Cooper’s repetitive and driving sounds are reflected in surreal scenes which were digitally copied, tweaked, and pasted to repeat endlessly.

As we’ve seen previously, director Fernando Livschitz of Black Sheep Films likes to play with our assumptions of what could be real. In his latest short, he creates a new sort of theme park with some awesome-looking, but highly unlikely rides.

CGI animator Seth Worley shows us how to replicate the creepy Mind Flayer and its accompanying red lightning storm from Stranger Things using Adobe After Effects and a handful of Red Giant’s useful visual effects plugins. Now he needs to make the season 3 version of the monster inside of Starcourt Mall.

Caravane, Camille Boyer, and Nik Mirus created Club Palace – a mindbender of a video which toys with our perceptions, and will make you wonder if it was created with computer graphics, miniatures, or some combination of the two. Your answer can be found here.

Freestyle MTB rider Matt Jones shows off some epic tricks out in the forest in Red Bull’s beautifully shot short film which uses rotoscoped multiple exposures to peer into Matt’s mind as he works out and improves each maneuver. That loop de loop was totally sick.

While WhatCulture sometimes mistakes compositing and rotoscoping for CGI, the video is still worth a watch, as they show off a dozen times that VFX artists managed to create illusions that were so seamlessly integrated that you’d never know they weren’t real.

Reminiscent of the best in-camera visual trickery of the mighty Michel Gondry, director Oscar Hudson’s incredible music video for Bonobo and Nick Murphy’s chillwave track was created using forced perspectives with “a very small camera… and a very big set.”

Marcin Nowrotek’s abstract experimental short film was created with a Kinect sensor and volumetric digital effects to transform a scene of jazz musicians into the most beautiful music visualizer we’ve ever seen – as the sounds from the instruments influence the imagery.

(PG-13: Language) Jean wanted to try out his new basketball. Instead, he ends up taking us on a tour through his star-studded neighborhood, filled with the likes of Brick Tamland, The Dude and Superman. A silly short by Collectif HOTU.

Mocking footage of Boston Dynamics taunting its Atlas robot, The VFX artists at Corridor envision a robotics company that subjects its humanoid robots to all kinds of indignities during testing. While Bosstown Dynamics’ robot has a high threshold for humiliation, he eventually snaps. Behind the scenes video here.

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope came out in May, 1977. A few months later, ABC aired this gem, a one-hour behind-the-scenes special which went inside the production, with hosts C-3PO and R2-D2. It’s a wonderful watch for any fan of the franchise, and serves as a great time capsule of pre-CGI visual effects.