The legendary Harry Potter series continues its reign with this second adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s bestsellers. Just like in the first movie, this one knows how to intentionally place every design element to give crucial information about Hogwarts’ dense history and the people who walk through its walls, while also being genius showcases of imagination. Yet it’s the special effects that shine, right down to the digital backgrounds that make the miniature models of the school feel much bigger. There’s also plenty of effects choreography in the sequence where the flying car gets caught inside the whomping willow, which imaginably had to take weeks to film.
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Yet that’s still child’s play compared to the creatures that were all made with a mix of digital and practical effects: pixies, mandrakes, ghosts, giant spiders, a phoenix, a basilisk, and of course, the ever-lovable Dobby. There are even mechanical effects used to create these enchanted objects that perform household tasks in the Weasley’s home. However, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is still guilty of all the narrative problems that came with the first movie and does nothing to fix them. Even so, this proved that The Sorcerer’s Stone was not just a one-hit wonder, all of the books J.K. Rowling had plans to write were officially about to see the light of day in cinemas, and in turn, influence the franchise treatment of all modern blockbusters.

Even with a problematic screenplay void of much any logic, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is still a fine textbook example of designing an immersive fantasy world onto the silver screen. When it came time to figure out what Hogwarts would look like, J.K. Rowling herself was brought on board to draw a layout of the whole campus as a reference. Then the production crew visited universities throughout England for design inspirations, meaning many places within Hogwarts were filmed at real historical landmarks across the UK. Among the sets built for the movie included the Dickensian aesthetic for Diagon Alley, which didn’t have a single vertical line in the architecture.
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As for some of the special effects used to bring this Wizarding World to life, it’s populated with a sorting hat, a dragon, a troll, a centaur, a Cerberus, and many ghosts. But one of the most clever effects in the movie is Hagrid, who was realized with a body double wearing a mechanical face; everything he touched and interacted with in specific shots had identical props, sets, or costumes of a different size for other shots to sell the illusion that Hagrid was enormous. The efforts put on by the production crew to bring J.K. Rowling’s creation to the visual medium resulted in a whimsical, magical experience—an excellent start for the cinematic series that went on to influence all other cinematic franchises!

To create The Lion King, the animators poured their whole hearts and souls into each animal they put onto the screen. They even brought real lions into the studio as references for their work, just like what Walt Disney did with his animators for films like Bambi and The Lady and the Tramp. Other digital effects made the beautiful African landscapes feel bigger than life, such as by implementing mist, sunbeams, and changes in camera focus to give a sense of perspective. Together, all these ambitious techniques make possible the unforgettable moment when Simba sees the vision of Mufasa in the sky.
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However, the film’s greatest accomplishment is the stampede—an endeavor in computer animation that accomplished a vision impossible to be met by traditional hand-drawn animation. First, a digital wildebeest model was made off of a hand-drawn piece of animation, and then to get hundreds of these models running together, a new software was developed so the wildebeest wouldn’t collide with one another. Yet the hard work of these animators would’ve been futile without the legendary musical score, with talent including Tim Rice, Elton John, Hans Zimmer, and Lebo M- a South African composer. The result is a definitive motion picture event designed at the same grand scale as Hollywood epics such as Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. So today, it’s remembered as one of the most influential animated films ever made.

While this famously underperformed at the box office, The Shawshank Redemption’s life on TV and video helped make it into the classic it’s known as today.  With its innovative use of cinematic spectacle that enhanced the story’s various complex morals, director Frank Darabont’s masterpiece presents a rich understanding of the rarely explored world of prison. Each of the stories and substories told within this overarching story about Andy ranges from suspenseful to heartbreaking, together encapsulating the most complete depiction of prison life in all of cinema.
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It's all thanks to the production crew that made this relevant character study tick; filming took place in a real prison facility that had been previously shut down, which must have created plenty of challenges for the cinematographer when it came to maneuvering through the prison walls with wide high angles. The soundtrack works just as well in giving the movie’s melancholy tone, not just because of Thomas Newman’s score, but also because of the iconic scene where Andy plays opera tunes on the speakers to demonstrate the therapeutic power of music. These examples were among the many sequences that clearly had to be difficult to realize in both sound and image, yet they all worked perfectly. Its ending leaves the viewer with a realization that when prison becomes all one has ever known in life, the outside world no longer feels so welcoming. It raises the question: What is freedom anyway?

With its masterful use of violence and compelling world of nostalgic pop culture, Pulp Fiction remains among the most influential films from the 1990s. Several of its components are included with the specific purpose of paying tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as by sneaking in the old Hollywood trick of projecting a background while someone’s inside a car to give the illusion that they’re driving. Many of the characters, particularly those played by John Travolta and Uma Thurman, are designed to resemble movie characters from that golden age as well. Yet with this being the career-defining film by director Quentin Tarantino, he gives those tropes his own wild spin.
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That includes a wicked soundtrack, natural conversational dialogue, and a nonchronological story structure where each chapter has a different hero. Together, these different stories paint a full picture of the hilariously unsettling world of Los Angeles crime, where everyone feels like cartoonish exaggerations but in fact, are not. Holding together all the insanity is Jules, one of the most morally complex characters in all of cinema, who believes he has the responsibility of doing the Lord’s work, upon seeing the deeper evil around him compared to the evil he does. There’s so much more about this movie that has become so iconic over the years; it wholly earns its reputation as a memorable experience that shifted around the entire identity of what a movie could be.

Forrest Gump is often known for its revolutionary use of actual archive footage, which was realized through a laborious augmentation process that at the time changed visual effects in movies. For these shots, Tom Hanks was filmed against a bluescreen, given a grain filter to match the archive footage, then put in with the necessary adjustments, such as when he had to shake John F. Kennedy’s hand. In addition, the art director had to recreate some of these locations exactly and the lips of these past figures had to be morphed to move to a recording replicated to sound like their voices.
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Yet there are more groundbreaking special effects in this ever-popular movie. That includes Lieutenant Dan’s amputated legs, which were realized by actor Gary Sinise wearing bluescreen stockings and elements painted into the frame digitally to sell the illusion. That includes the digital ball put into the ping pong matches. That includes putting Tom Hanks into the movie Birth of a Nation. That includes the crowd around the reflecting pool in Washington DC that was made with only a crowd of around a hundred people. That includes the intro shot of the feather—the longest special effects shot ever done at the time. There’s so much to this one-of-a-kind blockbuster that made it not only a dazzling spectacle but a textbook example of a universal crowd-pleaser that has something in it for everyone.