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.

This is kevin bailey.

He's worked on some of Hollywood's biggest movies.

There's some really fun stories about how each one of these films was made.

Let's Break Down this year's Oscars Vfx Standouts.

Mhm Spiderman, No Way Home has 2400 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 credits are so long on movies these days.

And you might have thought that Tom Holland was wearing a suit throughout all of his Spiderman action in the film.

And you'd be right, but you probably didn't notice is that that 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 that he was in with all the action that he was in.

A real technical challenge that I think 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.

Their natural phenomena that are actually simulated by the computer 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.

Spiderman deserves to be on this list based on creative and technical merits and it obviously killed it at the box office.

And I've got to say that it's really, really nice to see such a fun, wholesome film as part of the list of nominees.

No Time to Die is the latest in the James Bond series of films.

It's actually the first James Bond film to be 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 the 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 troller 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 ft into a water tank on a soundstage And they could rotate it 360° to really enhance the sense of peril for every shot that was outside though it was a completely digitally created version of the ship made by visual effects studio.

Dean.

The premise of Dune relies on putting us into a totally fictitious universe, but every aspect of this movie work so well together that we actually believe that it exists and that were there with Paula treaties.

Everything about how they filmed, Dune was really designed to be as if they were shooting the real scene in front of the real camera for example.

Whereas a normal movie would use blue screens or green screens behind an actor when they're planning to put a virtual world behind them.

They didn't want to do that on this film because blue screens and green screens, they kind of bounce blue or green light onto the actors and it sort of makes some artificial looking and the artists have to do a lot of work to undo that artificial.

Instead.

What they did is they used white or sand colored screens behind the actors in this film.

Now that made the jobs of the composite er whose job it is to put the virtual background behind the actor quite a bit harder.

But as they say no pain, no gain and as a result of being sand colored light bouncing onto the actors instead of green or blue light.

Once the composite er was done with their job the shot just looks completely natural as if you shot it right there in the desert.

The dragonfly inspired flying machines that they fly on.

Iraqis are called Ornithology Tres And the production actually built a bunch of life size full scale Ornithology tres so that the actors would have something to sit in and touch and they would fly those things around on cranes or attach them to motion bases which are these big mechanical hydraulic machines so they can move them around and have the actors actually believe that they're flying around in these things for scenes that required digital ornithology Tres The production still went through the trouble of shooting real helicopters in the shots and then they replaced them with the digital Ornithologist.

Er Now you might say well why do they go through the trouble of shooting a real helicopter?

Well by doing it that way we make sure that the shot looks plausible because it was something that was actually filmed for real the imperfections in the camera motion and the vehicle motion.

They all kind of tell our human brain that it's real.

The shot really looks plausible because of the fact that the ornithologist motion is based on a real helicopter and the camera is moving in the way that a real camera would move and the imperfections involved and all of that really would be impossible to create by visual effects artist from scratch the giant city of rakhine was actually built as if they were designing a real city in that real environment.

You notice that there's not a lot of windows in there to keep the heat out.

They even went as far as to figure out what the flow of the wind direction given the surrounding geography would be.

And then placed sand in spots where it would actually naturally accumulate based on that wind.

And when the visual effects studio d.

Neg built the city, they also had to build it with destroying it in mind because the Harkins were going to come and unleash missiles and a giant laser on it and tear it apart.

The scale of the world of Dune was incredible.

And the director of dan even knew he was telling me a story about how when he was working with Jessica Ferguson and she was acting in one of the final scenes in the film where they're facing off against one of these giant sand worms and he kept directing her to look higher and higher and higher and you know, she's a great actress, she did it but it wasn't until when the final movie was on the big screen in front of her that she came to and said, oh now I get why you're asking me to look that much higher.

Those things are huge, right?

Everything in the world of dune is giant.

So the entire team really had to do what Rebecca was doing on that day.

They're imagining in their heads, whether it's the sand worms or the cities or the spaceships, they're having to imagine in their heads how giant all this stuff is when they're filming the actual movie as the sand worms close in on us, the sand kind of begins to liquefy around the actors.

And when I was watching the movie and this scene in particular, I was wondering like how did they do that in the computer?

It's so good.

And it turns out they did it for real.

The special effects, the physical effects team.

They buried a steel plate underneath the sand and then vibrated it intensely and that created this really cool pattern on the surface and caused the actors to really sink into the sand.

Dune was a film where not only was the directing and acting superb, but all of the craft's visual effects, special effects cinematography, sound music, They all work together and they clicked in a way that really every craft elevated every other craft to create a work of art.

What happens if you don't stay in the pocket?

What does that mean shang chi and the legend of the 10 rings really belongs on this list because of the fantastical worlds that are created really from scratch in the film along with a kitchen sink variety of characters and natural effects that are in the movie, even though the world's themselves were oftentimes fully digitally created, the team opted to shoot real people or real vehicles in a field instead of creating everything from scratch.

And a good example of this is our introduction to the mythical location of Tallow.

We follow a car through a few bamboo shoots that they had there on stage.

But you look at the final film and it's a giant bamboo forest of the lake and mountains, right?

And the reason they do this is because if we have reality to test ourselves against, that helps us make the end result look as real as it possibly can.

The martial arts work in the film is beautiful and it is augmented by swirling leaves and dust that helped to make really magical choreography look actually magical.

One of my personal favorite moments from the film, even though it's really short.

So beautiful is when water starts to emanate from a room and hangs in midair and the actors actually get to interact with it in a way that is just beautiful and emotional.

There are a lot of really fun mythical characters including Morris, who's Ben Kingsley's sidekick.

What?

Oh, what is that?

Who?

It manages to somehow be extremely cute and funny despite the fact that he doesn't have a face now for animators that are the ones responsible for bringing these characters to life, bringing that level of emotion across without the character having a face is pretty tall feet.

Not all of the visual effects in shanghai were of the fantastical variety.

Some of them were more invisible.

For example, some of the more elegant and long stunt fight scenes involved stunt actors and martial artists doing the fights and then the teams use deepfake technology, artificial intelligence driven technology to take the faces of our hero actors and transpose them on to the martial artists.

All of that combines to make shang chi a fast paced visual spectacle that really has the kitchen sinks worth of visual effects techniques in it.

Yeah, Yes.

Free Guy, which largely takes place inside of a video game in a fictitious city called Free City makes some really great deliberate choices to blend the line between reality and the digital in a way that the hero character whose name is guy played by Ryan Reynolds, that he doesn't notice everything that's happening around him no matter how insane it is, buildings are exploding, People are running around on fire.

It's just part of his everyday normal experience.

And it really creates a unique concept and that uniqueness is something that the academy really responds well to when nominating a film like this towards the climax of the film.

Guy faces off against a super muscular adversary named dude.

The joke is that dude is a version of guy.

They actually shot a real bodybuilder as a foundation visual effects artist.

Got to work on taking footage of Ryan's face and swapping it onto the body builder to create the seamless illusion that Ryan was fighting a muscular version of himself.

Free Guy was a great example of a combination of technology and creative choices coming together to make something that we really haven't seen before.

It's fake.

We don't matter that building that's fake this street, it's fake, that car.

The thing I love about this list of nominees is that every one of these films is on here for a different reason.

They all made great choices about which techniques and tools to use to tell their specific stories.

And I really enjoyed watching these films and talking about them and hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about how they were made.