The world of effects in films has definitely come a long way from special effects to the dominated realm of visual effects. In the past few years, we’ve seen movies constantly trying to push the boundaries of visual effects, trying to achieve more realistic and believable visual effects that can hold up next to the real actors and not know the difference.
To get a great glimpse into where we’ve come just in the past decade, take a look at Gollum in The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers and compare him to Gollum in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. As technology advances and the tools used to create these out of this world characters so do the quality of what is on screen.
The recent release of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes features extremely realistic apes, and many advancements in terms of motion capture and the visual aesthetics of the apes like the rendering of the fur. For example, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was one of the first films to use motion capture on location, and not in a specifically designed motion capture studio.
More films are being shot largely on green screen stages, leaving the rest of the film up to the VFX artists. VFX is as much of a part as many blockbusters like The Avengers or Pacific Rim as the actors themselves. While VFX is often seen as icing on the cake of a film, it’s becoming more of a center piece. If you want to share some of the films that inspire you as an artist, whether it’s with practical effects or visual effects post them in the comments below!