| | A Massive achievement in more than one sense, Return of the King's all-digital crowd scenes achieved unprecedented scale
BY ROY SPENCER
Weta Digital's work on The Return of the King was significant in that it encompassed a broad range of visual effects: from digital creatures to environmental work; from the use of digital doubles to battle scenes with hundreds of thousands of digital extras; from Gollum to greenery.
"The workload grew exponentially from film to film, with the visual effects requirement for each film being twice as complex as the one before it," says trilogy digital models supervisor Matt Aitken. "It made for a rollercoaster ride when it came to production, but it also enabled the facility to develop tools and approaches incrementally."
Aitken was responsible for delivering all the creature, digital double, environment and prop models on the film; as well as developing new modelling techniques and approaches, especially around the areas of facial animation and geometric detailing. He also did some software development, developing a suite of tools called Grove that Weta used to generate foliage on Treebeard and the Ents.
The movie epitomised many techniques that are now commonplace in large-scale effects work, including crowd simulation. Weta used its Massive software to choreograph the clash of the AI-driven armies. Another highlight was the all-digital Gollum (right), animated from Andy Serkis's reference performance: a rare example of a virtual character both emotionally engaging and technically impressive.
The Return of the King's appeal lay in its ability to combine visual spectacle - including sights that filmgoers had never seen before - with intimate stories of real emotional impact. "I think the film really connected with audiences because of this rare combination," says Aitken. | 
Key effects
The battle for Pelennor Fields is the film's highpoint. It combined peerless crowd simulations of the clashing armies with the best creature work Weta had done up to that point, notably the gigantic Mumakil - all in an entirely digital environment.
"It was something we worked on polishing right up to the very last minute," says Aitke |  | |
|  | The first feature-length 3D animation, Toy Story proved that the medium wasn't just for kids - or only manageable within the confines of a short.
BY RENEE DUNLOP
Toy Story, the first feature-length film done entirely in 3D, gave the world its first real glimpse of what was to come. In 1995, people didn't think a CG film could get an audience to the theatre. Toy Story stuck out its tongue at such a notion. "We proved them wrong," says supervising technical director Bill Reeves. "If you have a good story and good characters, you can use CG to create a movie that does $200 million at the box office and accolades up the wazoo." Using the technology's plastic look to its advantage, Pixar cast the movie with playthings that came to life when no one was around to see.
Oscar-winner Reeves had previously worked on Pixar shorts with a team far smaller than Toy Story's animated cast. Pixar started with four people; three, including Reeves, were in software, and John Lasseter worked as the animator. For four years Pixar created short films, developing the software for six months while Lasseter refined the ideas for the shorts. By Knick Knack, they reached 8-10 people, including the animators and producer. How times have changed.
When contracted to do Toy Story, the company grew to roughly 150 people: an unheard-of number for a CG project. 50-70 were on the technical team under Reeves, developing animation software and RenderMan, one of today's industry standards.
During development, Reeves certainly didn't expect Toy Story to have the impact that it did. He and the team were too wrapped up in completing the project to realise the change on the industry - indeed, on entertainment in general - that they were about to set in motion. It wasn't until Disney previewed the movie roughly a year in advance of its release that Pixar began to get a glimpse of what was to come. Two films were shown, but Toy Story caught the most attention. Everyone who saw it wanted more. "Once you start hearing that, it lights your fire to get it finished and make it as good as you can. And when it got released, it was like, wow, amazing!"
Though technology constantly improves, Toy Story still can hold its own against today's films. While its technical scope, the realism of its renders, and even its box-office takings have all been superseded by later movies, the film remains a genuine classic. It was the first step in the 90-plus-minute playground where the gold star can be an Academy Award. | 
Key effects
RenderMan allowed the plastic shaders to work perfectly in a toy world, from Buzz Lightyear's gleaming spacesuit to the moulded green soldiers. | | |
| | Over 1,200 VFX shots were blended into the live action of the movie version of Frank Miller's graphic novel. Its sheer scale, on and off screen, reflects its ranking
BY ROY SPENCER
Zack Snyder's movie is based on Frank Miller's fictionalised re-imagining of the great Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which the last remaining 300 Spartan warriors fought vast Persian hordes on ancient Greek shores. The sheer scale of the clash, and the uncompromising artwork that Miller and his colour artist Lynn Varley set out in their comic book, necessitated the use of full manpower from a clutch of top studios including Hybride Technologies, Hydraulx, Meteor Studios, Pixel Magic, Scanline, Animal Logic and Screaming Death Monkey.
Looking back at Hybride's work on the film, its visual effects producer Daniel Leduc remembers spending a lot of time researching what ancient Greece might have looked like. "Although the history of the story is not so important, the set was," he says. "We tried to stay true with the geography and everything, researching pictures and constantly redoing modelling tests."
Hybride's lead CG supervisor Philippe Theroux believes the year-and-a-half they were allowed to spend on post-production affected the final look of the film: while the extended time for deliberation and research and development allowed Hybride to really hone its work on the 25 minutes of the movie it contributed to, it also meant that the team also had the troublesome luxury of being able to change their minds and re-examine their work at any point.
"This is part of the reason why it was a difficult film to work on some times," says Theroux. "When you have a shorter project - we normally only take six to eight months on film projects - people have to think faster and are forced to take decisions and to take direction. 300 had more testing occurring at the beginning, and we were able to mess with effects, saying 'Oh, try that one. Now try that one.' It's fun to do because you are doing plenty of research, but sometimes it can mean you never finish."
Building on its blue- and greenscreen work laid down in the Spy Kids franchise and Frank Miller's previous big-screen adaptation Sin City, Hybride's team of 95 artists put their experience to good use in 300's memorable second battle scene, and the character Leonidas' tense encounter with a vicious 3D wolf at the beginning of the film. | 
Key effects
From a 3D perspective, one of the challenges to overcome was the wolf character: a fictitious, frightening and repulsive animal that came from the depths of Frank Miller's fertile imagination, and that had to be re-created, in its entirety, using XSI. A cross-breed of hyena and wolf, with its mass of fur, strange gait and threatening facial expressions, it was a challenge for the 3D artists in charge of modelling, animation and texturing. On the director's request, an internal shader tool was developed especially to capture the snowflakes trapped between the wolf's coat hairs. | | |
| | The first film to star realistic CG animals set the bar for creature effects, opened directors' eyes to 3D - and, ultimately, rendered animatronics extinct
BY BARBARA ROBERTSON
Why did so many people vote for Jurassic Park? No one knows the answer to that question better than does Dennis Muren at Industrial Light & Magic, who won one of his eight visual effects Oscars for the film. "It was the first time we had been able to put living breathing synthetic animals in a live-action movie," says Muren. "No one had seen anything like it. The reality hadn't been done before; the naturalism."
Muren credits dinosaur supervisor Phil Tippett and, of course, director Steven Spielberg for pushing the unsafe documentary film style. "We wanted the animals to create the feeling that we wouldn't know what was going to happen next," Muren says.
Because creating CG animals was so new, Muren set up two systems: stop motion and CG. "The animators hadn't worked on real animals," he says. "No one had." Even though the CG animals soon proved themselves, Stan Winston's puppets starred in close-ups in most of the film. "When we started, I didn't think we could do anything closer than a full-length dinosaur in CG. But we pushed closer and closer. Near the end of the film, in the rotunda sequence when the T rex walks in and the raptor jumps on its back, I was confident enough to try close-ups."
ILM's 56 CG shots and 6.5 minutes of screen time also included a digidouble for the lawyer (actor Martin Ferrero) as the T rex snags him out of a bathroom, and a face replacement for a character who falls through the floorboards during a raptor attack.
Muren recalls: "George [Lucas] came by occasionally, and one time said, 'This looks pretty good.' I said: 'Yeah, I'm hoping we can do something like 2001, something brand new.' He said: 'You guys are doing it and you don't know it.' It wasn't until it was over that I realised he was probably right." | 
Key effects
The breathtaking glimpse of the bulky brachiosaurus moving gracefully in a field and the groundbreaking raptor and T rex fight near the end changed creature animation. | | |
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Ron Howard's tense space drama bagged an Oscar nomination for Digital Domain's slick CG artistry and detailed large-scale modelling techniques.
Many studios helped Sony supply the visual effects to set the man of steel soaring, as Bryan Singer swapped X-Men for Superman.
Marking Tim Burton's first major dalliance with 3D, Mars Attacks! features over 300 shots from Industrial Light & Magic, then at the height of its dominance over the Hollywood effects industry. 
Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi thriller enlisted the help of MetroLight Studios to handle digital effects in this take on a Philip K Dick short.
A demonic house is brought to life with 40,000 animation controls in this stylised, fully CG family feature, building on Sony's work on The Polar Express.
Audiences watched in awe as CG cattle and tankers were spat from vicious cyclones in Jan de Bont's tornado chaser movie.
With some of the most sophisticated effects created for a sci-fi movie, MPC's recent outing truly shines.
A teenage boy becomes the unwitting co-pilot of a sleek, sliver, spline-based 3D morphing spaceship in this Disney children's favourite.
Eschewing the kinetic violence of earlier instalments for the sombre confines of a prison planet, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley returned to face her xenomorphic nemesis once again - this time in a form augmented by Boss Film Studios' Oscar-nominated graphics.
The second Star Trek movie just beat TRON to the punch to create cinema's first landmark CG visuals, thanks to the terraforming 'Genesis' sequence.
DreamWorks' first 3D feature told the story of Z, an ant that dares to go it alone, who is voiced unmistakably - and with added neurosis - by Woody Allen.
Aardman Animations provided the stop-motion, but the first feature-length outing for Nick Park's clay characters was augmented by MPC's 3D effects.
2010 was a milestone in traditional effects, but this space mission to understand the fate of the USS Discovery One updated it for the digital generation.
The first in a long line of modern VFX-powered superhero flicks, and a comic book conversion that didn't alienate the fans.
From cult hit to effects powerhouse: David Twohy's budget horror sci-fi flick helped launch UK visual effects facility Double Negative.
Director Robert Zemeckis relied on facial and body capture to tell this family-friendly story, based on the kids' book by Chris Van Allsburg, but this train took a detour through the 'Uncanny Valley'.
An early outing for Blue Sky in this modern Wesley Snipes vampire flick. The series' 'vampire dusting' scenes would be much aped by later movies.
It lost the Oscar to Finding Nemo, but this charming film harnessed 3D in the service of a superior story.
It could never have the impact of the original, but Pixar's sequel to Toy Story is a feat in its own right.
The historical accuracy of this modern wartime rescue mission may be dubious, but the effects certainly aren't.
The turn of the millennium threw up a crop of war movies. As a film, Pearl Harbor was lacklustre, but Industrial Light & Magic's effects were solid. 
ILM created the film industry's first photorealistic character: the menacing stained glass knight in Barry Levinson's tale of the young British sleuth.
Jurassic Park's sequel upped the ante in tracking and match-lighting, and almost matched its Oscar win. 
It's not all about the powerhouse US studios, you know. BUF proved that Europe can do VFX too.
Adding new digital mutant heroes and villains to X-Men's roster, this superior super-powered sequel continued to wow the audiences.
Spaceships go 3D in Nick Castle's sci-fi fantasy. The movie is widely held to be the first use of CG to represent real-world objects in a movie.
With its striking blend of semi-realistic backdrops and cel-shaded characters, Shinji Aramaki's animation also turned heads in the West.
At the time the longest ever digital effects shot in a movie, the opening powers-of-10 sequence still holds its own today.
Lush and painterly in appearance, Vincent Ward's Oscar-winning vision of heaven looks unlike almost any other modern 3D-enhanced movie.
French sci-fi fantasy Immortel (Ad Vitam) was released a few months earlier, but writer-director Kerry Conran's retro-futuristic fantasy was the first movie entirely shot on bluescreen that most US audiences saw.
Most of Hollywood worked on Michael Bay's blatant blockbuster, but Armageddon's $140 million budget was to prove well spent.
Forget Bowie: the owl in the opening sequence is thought to be the first ever photorealistic animal on the big screen.
Invisibility (and greenscreen work) has never looked so painful as in this Paul Verhoeven thriller.
While other movies strove for realism, The Mask was one of the first to use 3D to mimic traditional cartoon-style effects, to gleeful effect.
The natural successor to The Lord of the Rings for the Christmas audience, Narnia features a wild bestiary of digital creatures. 
The second Oscar-nominated Ghibli movie after Spirited Away, Howl's centrepiece is its eponymous, monstrous 3D building.
Spielberg's pet project helped pioneer the on-set visualisation of digital effects, and placed actors freely onto virtual backdrops. The results were suitably slick.
Mainly featuring stop-motion animation techniques, Tim Burton's best movie of recent times is also subtly augmented by MPC's 3D work.
Ang Lee's Oscar-winner helped break Wu Xia Pan balletics in the West, thanks to its impressive visual effects work.
Director Chris Nolan may have revived Batman with a return to a darker tone, but Double Negative reinvigorated its digital effects with a slicker touch.
A return to form for ILM, this summer blockbuster was completed on one of the tightest schedules ever.
In Jurassic Park, ILM made giant reptiles walk. But for Dragonheart, they made a Sean Connery-voiced dragon lip-sync too.
Going on to win an Oscar, Spidey's second outing featured better digital cloth and, of course, Doc Ock.
Visually distinct from its US precursors, this Aussie 3D feature confirmed the Animal Logic studio as a major player in the feature animation sector.
Another major early use of 3D animation within a Disney movie, thanks to the frantic and wildly populated wildebeest stampede.
A wide range of weird and wonderful creature effects feature in Industrial Light & Magic's 250-odd VFX shots on this extraterrestrial action blockbuster. 
Sony's all-swinging digital Tobey Maguire did whatever a spider could, and helped launch one of VFX's most enduring modern franchises.
A standout at Siggraph's Electronic Theater this year, Children of Men's virtual childbirth scene packs a visceral punch.
With the effects work on the film rising to over 2,000 shots, Yoda himself went digital in Episode 2.
It may have made it look like 2D, but the sublime Studio Ghibli first experimented with 3D here.
New York froze over spectacularly in Roland Emmerich's big-budget blockbuster, as many effects shops came together to create apocalyptic VFX.
Building on its earlier short Geri's Game, Pixar's second feature-length 3D animation brought subdivision surfaces to the big screen.
Nothing in it had quite the impact of bullet time, but the Wachowski brothers' first Matrix sequel marked the first outing for Universal Capture, a high-definition image-based facial performance capture system.
Crowd simulation comes of age in James Cameron's weepy disaster flick. Digital Domain's hundreds of CG actors propelled this Titanic movie to success.
The 3D elements that establish the eponymous hero's place as an unwitting participant in the key events of the 20th century are discreet, but they're there.
Lots and lots of digital bugs - plus some impressive digital doubles - propelled Paul Verhoeven's satirical space war movie to VFX stardom.
An overlooked gem, Brad Bird's pre-Incredibles take on Ted Hughes' much-loved children's story pioneered cel-shaded 3D on the big screen.
The first foreign film to win an Animation Oscar, Spirited Away built on Ghibli's earlier dalliance with 3D.
Notable for the 'superpunch' shot: the first close-up representation of facial deformation on a computer generated human character.
Britain's first Oscar win for visual effects, thanks to the sterling work done by The Mill's now-defunct film division on digital crowds in the Colosseum scenes.
Thanks to new supervillains Venom and Sandman, the latest Spider-Man movie raised the bar on Sony's VFX work yet again.
Winner of 1996's Oscar, Independence Day's massed 3D ships and planes still hold up to scrutiny today.
ILM's aquatic 'pseudopod' alien took 3D graphics to a new level for James Cameron's undersea thriller.
Mamoru Oshii went on to embrace 3D in bigger ways, but it all started with this futuristic police thriller.
No Oscar this time for Pixar, but the animation still gets your motor running in John Lasseter's latest 3D feature.
Cursed pirates turn from humans to skeletons to startling effect in Gore Verbinski's ocean-going comedy.
The film that brought anime to the US box office also features some early 3D, in its 'Lego bricks' sequence.
A surprise worldwide hit, the virtual creatures of Pan's Labyrinth charm and unnerve with equal frequency.
Advancing the cause of 3D pre-viz, I, Robot featured some superb effects work from a clutch of major shops.
It was overlooked at the Oscars, but Luc Besson's camp space romp was recently named one of the Visual Effects Society's top 50 movies.
Even more effects-heavy than its precursors, the final Pirates movie looks a good bet for an Oscar next year.
David Fincher's anarchic quest for truth and destruction revolutionised the use of photogrammetry and 3D previsualisation in cinema.
Blue Sky's prehistoric creature feature debut marked the emergence of a third major player in the landscape of American all-CG features.
The opening space battle set the tone for a VFX blockbuster. General Grievous was the icing on the cake.
DreamWorks' second CG feature introduced audiences to Mike Myers' loveable ogre, and launched the studio's biggest animation franchise to date.
The film that brought CG to the attention of the masses. MAGI's Light Cycles became a cultural icon.
Pixar's fourth feature is a joy throughout. Sulley's fur was later used to demo the benefits of RenderMan.
No Oscar, but Sin City's digital backdrops later propelled it to the Visual Effects Society's top 50 films of all time.
One of the key visual effects movies of recent years, thanks to its performance-captured scurvy sea dogs.
Pixar's fifth full CG feature showcased some impressive undersea lighting and rendering techniques. The Oscar was just a formality.
Weta continued on its Oscar run, taking Kong's fur simulation and facial animation to new levels of realism along the way.
Gollum may have already featured in the previous movie, but the world's best-known virtual character truly turned heads here.
Succeeding where Brad Bird's previous film, The Iron Giant, failed, this everyday of superpowered folk is perhaps still Pixar's finest achievement to date.
What the original Star Wars trilogy was to traditional effects, Peter Jackson's LOTR was to 3D. All three movies in the trilogy make our Top 100.
Square's all-CG feature pioneered top-notch, near-photoreal animation techniques, but its characters ultimately fell foul of the Uncanny Valley.
Michael Bay's robotic battle royale featured some incredibly complex character rigs, courtesy of ILM.
Described as "the best children's movie ever", Pixar's everyday tale of a rodent chef loose in a Parisian kitchen has been garnering rave reviews. 
Long before digital photogrammetry techniques allowed the 'bullet time' concept to be applied to live-action, the concept was alive and kicking in cel animation. Michael Gondry was an early adopter in his live-action video for The Rolling Stones' 'Like a Rolling Stone', where a camera whizzes through a room full of partygoers frozen in mid-motion. 
