#7. The Dark Knight Rises -- They Actually Dropped a Plane
We're sorry to do this to your peace of mind, but we're afraid that a lot of what you just saw was real -- we guess Christopher Nolan could have used computer effects, but instead he got a real C-130 and tossed a bunch of real people out the back of it.
To set the mood, each stuntman had an earpiece where he could hear Nolan humming dramatic music.
Or sometimes without the fuselage at all.
"Holy fuck, that's a little too much." -Stanley Kubrick's ghost
"Models are for nerds."
The entire shoot was scheduled for nine days. Nolan did it in two, because fuck time, and fuck sanity, and most of all, fuck airplanes.
#6. Skyfall -- Fighting on (and Under) Speeding Trains
James Bond will do almost anything (and anyone), but he won't do CGI -- the filmmakers try to limit the computer effects to things that don't exist in the real world, like the invisible car or Denise Richards. This means that some of the most insanely dangerous scenes you saw in the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, were created the old-fashioned way.
For instance, remember the part where a full-size train smashes through a wall?
They did that for real. This was accomplished by hanging the train from inverted rails and then proceeding to smash that fucker through a wall. Because realism. Also, although they added Bond escaping from the train in post-production, Daniel Craig was actually on the set when this happened.
Earlier in the film, there's a scene in which Bond massages a bad guy's kidneys with his fists on top of a speeding train. This was also filmed using practical effects, by which we mean that they actually had Daniel Craig and another guy kick each other's ass on top of a real train, supported by wires no thicker than your finger.
You can see the wire on the last picture -- that's the only thing preventing the actor playing the bad guy from falling off. And yes, that's Daniel Craig himself going after him in the other pictures, not a stunt double. You can see his face more clearly in the trailerrific scene where he drops into the train from a giant hole in the wall, adjusts his cuff, and calmly walks off to pursue the bad guy -- that was all him, too.
In fact, the only scenes where CGI was used heavily were the one where Bond has to fight a Komodo dragon and the one where MI6 blows up, since even James Bond can't blow up MI6 and get away with it. Yet.
#5. Tron (the Original) -- The Film Was Shot in Black and White, Then Hand Painted
To the original's credit, it took a lot less time for CGI Jeff Bridges to look this silly.
To get the desired effect, the filmmakers had to employ cutting-edge technology ... from the 1930s. All the scenes set inside the computer were filmed entirely in black and white, after which they were turned back into individual cells that were hand painted in post-production. One by one. The process was long and tedious: First they had to enlarge each frame to a 14-inch still using a rotoscoping machine.
Then they'd put that image through another process to make it transparent.
Using this technique, they could isolate different parts of the image, like the faces, the costumes, and the part they wanted to fill with funky neon veins. They then photographed each element on its own and finally put everything back together -- the simplest images had around six layers, but others had up to 30.
So, that's 75 minutes of film at 24 frames per second. Using basic math, that means that they animated around 108,000 individual cells, each of which was composed of six to 30 different parts. This process was such a pain in the ass that animating a two-minute reel took the team two months, and they still had 73 more minutes to go ... so they just sent that shit to Taiwan and had some guys in a warehouse do it for them.
That's not Pac-Man, that's the Chinese symbol for "HELP US."
#4. The Spider-Man Films -- Real Web Slinging and Spider Reflexes
The effect was created by strapping a stuntman, or sometimes Spider-Man himself, actor Andrew Garfield, to a wire "no thicker than a bootlace" 60 feet in the air, which was connected to a winch on a rail. When they'd jump and reach the bottom of their swing, the winch would move down the rail, giving them a nice clean arc and unquestionably soiled underwear. Here's a clip of the system in action -- you can see the rails above at the beginning:
So in that scene where Peter Parker screams as he's learning to swing on a chain ... yeah, that probably didn't take a lot of acting.
This isn't to say that the original movies had no practical effects whatsoever -- remember the part where Tobey Maguire catches Mary Jane's lunch like it ain't no thing?
The pudding's stuck on the ceiling.
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