FIVE FILMS NOMINATED FOR VISUAL EFFECTS

The five films, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Free Guy, James Bond: No Time To Die, Dune, Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings are nominated for an Academy Award this year for visual effects were each selected for their own unique reasons. But what they all do share in common is that they show technical artistry that is exceptional. And usually they use some new techniques that people haven't actually seen before. Kevin Baillie worked in some of Hollywood’s biggest movies. There’s some really fun stories about how each of one these films was made. These films break down this year’s Oscars VFZ stand-outs. “Spider Man: No Way Home” has 2,400 visual effects shots in it, which is pretty much every shot in the entire movie and 12 visual effects studios with thousands of artists all over the world worked to make the film happen. You wonder why the credits are so long in these movies these days? And you might have thought that Tom Holland was wearing a suit throughout all of his Spider-Man action films and you’d be right. What you probably didn’t notice is that the suit was actually replaced in post-production with a suit that had a new design and had to interact with all of the lighting environments with all the action that he was in. A real technical challenge that they pulled off seamlessly. There were fully digital versions of every character in the film that were built. And some of the characters relied much more heavily on visual effects than others. Electro and Sandman are two examples of that. And those two characters are driven by what we in the industry called “effects simulations”.

The dust and the lightning, they are natural phenomena that are actually simulated by computers using the laws of physics to make them look real. A lot of people think about the Visual Effects Award as a technical award, but the Academy really considers whether the visual effects were used for a good purpose. Spider-Man deserves to be on this list based on its creative and technical merits and it obviously killed it at the box office. And it's really nice to have such a fun, wholesome film as part of the list of the nominees.

“No Time To Die” is the latest in the James Bond series of films. It’s actually the first James Bond film nominated for this award since “Moonraker” so it's been a while what makes this film really stand out amongst the other five is that the visual effects are there to really be invisible and to support the story rather than be the story. A lot of  illusions in this film really came as a collaboration between three different teams. The stunts team, the visual effects team, and the special effects team. Special effects and visual effects, they often get used interchangeably, but they’re two very different things. Special effects happen in the real world. Visual effects happen in the computer after the fact. For example, there’s a scene where a fishing trawler is sinking with James Bond trapped inside of it. And in order to do that, when we’re inside the ship, the special effects team built a giant 50-foot long version of the boat that they could submerge 20 feet into a water tank on a soundstage. And they could rotate it 360 degrees to really enhance the sense of peril. For every shot that was outside though, it was a completely digitally created version of ship made by the visual effects studio DNEG.