10 Visual Effects Facts From These Box Office Hits You Probably Didn't Know

Like what you see? Find out more about the incredible visual effects used in films at this year’s BFX Festival.

GRAVITY (2013)

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For the spacewalk scenes in Gravity, only the actors’ faces were shot, everything else was created digitally using a nine-foot cube light box and industrial automobile manufacturing robots.

JUPITER ASCENDING (2015)

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Production of Jupiter Ascending saw a mutli-cam array dubbed ‘panocam’ come to life. This features a set of six RED EPIC cameras stacked in two tiers of three and offers a chance to shoot panoramic plates that could then be stitched together.

EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014)

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Visual effects account for more than 400 scenes in this Warner Brothers blockbuster, including the film’s fiery finale in a flooded, fully CG Paris which required large-scale environment work and impressive simulators.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (2014)

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In creating Thanos for Guardians of the Galaxy, Luma Pictures developed a new facial animation system to re-create Josh Brolin as a fully CG Thanos.

THE LEGO MOVIE (2014)

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A combination of computer-generated imagery and advanced stop-motion animation was used to bring to life the production of The Lego Movie.

MALEFICENT (2014)

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The Maleficent film's animators took 3-D scans of the actors making a broad range of facial expressions, recording skin-pore accurate digital models which were later used for motion-capture.

AVATAR (2009)

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For Avatar, James Cameron teamed up with Sony to pioneer a specially designed camera system, called the 'holy grail', which used lightweight, dual-lens and hi-definition digital imaging to create really advanced 3-D images.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (TRILOGY)

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The character of Gollum in Lord of the Rings was digitally created by using 13 cameras pointed at different sensors attached to actor Andy Serkis' costume.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

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There are more than 2,000 visual effects shots in Mad Max: Fury Road.

HARRY POTTER (HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, 2011)

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The Hogwarts School of witchcraft and wizadry in this series was completely CG-rendered.