bad title eh? i mean, which movies without apparent Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), where one wouldn’t even think had CGI, were actually mostly made out of CGI?
Forrest Gump had tons of digital effects, from adding Tom Hanks into archival footage, to erasing Gary Sinese’s legs.
Stranger than Fiction
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The HBO series John Adams used a lot of CGI backgrounds that weren’t obviously CGI. They could have been shot at actual locations that looked like that, but weren’t, presumably for cost reasons.
You’re going to be seeing a lot more of this. When a film like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow can be almost completely shot on CGI sets, you can see how pervasive this is going to be. The film The 13th Floor had a lot of such CGI as well (pretty ironic, considering the film’s theme), mostly to add in lots of elements for 1930’s LA.
Are you sure? I’m pretty certain that virtually all the effects were “in camera”.
For me, “Pleasantville” is the epitome of the non-special-effects special effects movie. I believe at the time of its release it set the record for scenes with SFX. The trick is that the movie was filmed in color and changed to black and white, not the other way around. All the scenes that are half and half involved some painstaking work.
I’m not sure if this one fits with what you are asking, but Let the Right One In has a lot of CGI, but to the casual viewer would appear to have no CGI.
Huh - you’re right. From IMDB:
The Others is a good example.
It’s a classic style ghost story, and doesn’t appear to use any technology that wouldn’t have been available to Alfred Hitchcock or Robert Wise. But most of the outdoor scenes are in dense fog, which would have required either waiting for fog (people waiting around - expensive) or using a huge number of fog machines (unreliable and difficult to control). Instead, they shot the scenes on a clear day and added the fog digitally.
This was the one I was going to mention. FWIW, I own that watch, and it doesn’t do 1/10 of what the movie shows it doing.
**Titanic **won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects due, in part, to extensive use of CGI.
Many viewers were surprised at the win, not realizing that they had seen lots and lots of well-done CGI…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Stay is a great movie in which reality slowly unravels. Much of this is accomplished with digital effects (more editing and compositing than CGI elements, if you want to be strict about it) that are often so subtle (especially early on) that a lot of viewers probably won’t even notice them, on the first go-round.
Really? Like what?
Eh? I find it hard to believe that people were surprised Titanic won an award for visual effects. I would hardly describe it as a “non-CGI”-looking film.
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it, but I seem to remember the effects looking more “real” than other CGI-films of the day. I think the only reason it really sticks out as a huge special-effects extravaganza is because all the press it received for spending so much on the special effects (if I recall correctly, it had the largest budget of all time at release, and kept the record for some time). I think if you watched the movie without knowing that, it wouldn’t stick out as much.
I didn’t really pay much attention to the pre-release hype, and also thought it looked pretty CGIish. Not that the CGI was bad for the time, but it was certainly noticable for what it was.
A Very Long Engagement
You’d swear they traveled in time back to Paris in the 19-teens and 20s.
What, they weren’t tipped off by the sweeping, bow-to-stern helicopter shots of a full-sized Titanic chugging across the Atlantic? Because that was* my* “Wow, nice effects” moment.
But yea, I hear ya.
Spiderman seemed to have extensive CGI; I would assume the in-costume Spiderman swinging through the streets was entirely CGI.