There was no screenplay, everything was instead laid out on detailed storyboards, which fit director George Miller’s artistic vision that depended on visual details to offer worldbuilding exposition. As Miller crafted his reimagining of his 1970s/1980s film series, production grew gradually more insane, seeing how the crew relied on practical stunts in the Namibian desert with elaborate large vehicles moving at a hundred miles an hour. Stunt actors had to leap from vehicle to vehicle in the air, and the climax utilized these long swinging poles that served as extra transportation between the cars and trucks. It got immensely difficult and dangerous to film the more than 300 stunts between the 150 uniquely designed vehicles for this motion picture, but it paid off.
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The action is unnaturally fast yet surprisingly fluid, the sound quality is earsplittingly loud yet crystal clear, and the views of the desert are every bit as spectacular and mesmerizing as a Renaissance painting. Every element chosen to make up this ambitious blockbuster is chosen with careful intentionality—the average person will be rewarded with multiple rewatches as new details will be spotted after every viewing that further illustrates this post-apocalyptic future where everyone’s been degraded to being mere things. So along with its pioneering new techniques in editing, sound design, and cinematography, Mad Max: Fury Road will continue to inspire other filmmakers on what “show don’t tell” really looks like.

With its anamorphic lens cinematography and its use of Ave Maria in the musical score, this darker take on the world’s greatest detective is essentially an independent art-house film that happens to have an enormous budget. As it lays out the story arc of Batman over a near-three-hour runtime, the story maintains a fast pace that balances its quicker moments with doses of symbolic imagery meant to represent the stark contrasts between beauty and death coming together. All these mise-en-scène elements work hand-in-hand to create some unforgettable adrenaline-heavy fight scenes, each held together by inky shadows that make various lighting effects such as flames and strobe lights stand out further.

​Yet it’s the designs that really shine the most, and not just because of the four hours’ worth of prosthetic work behind Colin Farrell’s Penguin makeup. The batsuit was made out of 3D-printed molded rubber and then stitched by hand, while Bruce Wayne’s eye makeup stayed on his face whenever he removed his cowl. Every location is the perfect stage for a spectacular action-packed sequence, each one sustaining a cold and grim color palette to match the way Wayne views himself amidst the city’s chaos. So even while this movie suffers from weak female characters and Colin Farrell’s ultra-hammy performance, The Batman deserves some appreciation for how it further elevates the artistic potential of motion pictures based on comic books.

To capture the big emotional rush that a finale deserves, the designers and VFX artists behind this highly anticipated eighth film give it their all. Starting with the battle at Hogwarts, the biggest action set piece the series has ever created, stone statues come to life, giants and spiders are spotted within the chaos, and a large amount of stunt choreography with teenage extras went into these sequences. To make things a bit easier while filming these very complex shots, many of the broken stone bits on the battlefields were made of a lightweight substitute. Though it’s not just Hogwarts, Gringotts is also revisited with an updated design to fit the darker, more realistic tone of the film compared to the first movie it was seen in.
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The filmmaking style also pulls no punches in capturing exactly what moviegoers during the 3D boom of cinema at the time wanted. Elements are constantly flying through the air, thousands of objects multiply inside a vault, a stark white set depicts an empty King’s Cross Station, a giant dragon flies through the sky, and even the approaches to filming a ghost and a snake are utilized in efforts that justify seeing the movie in 3D. So despite feeling incomplete as only the second half of a book adaptation, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Part 2 sets the gold standard for how a series finale should be handled.

With it being the beginning of the end, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Part 1 was part of the production crew’s final exam about everything they learned from the past decade of making a revolutionary cinematic saga. The scene of the seven Potters alone demonstrates how far the effects in the series have come, as six of the actors transform into Harry Potter with the power of motion capture. Then Daniel Radcliffe had to match the movements and mannerisms of every one of them as he played them in separate shots that were all combined into one.
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But that’s just a couple of minutes of screentime, another major difficulty for the set designers was the Ministry of Magic set, which got destroyed two movies earlier and had to be entirely rebuilt again. Other effects had to stretch the imagination of the VFX artists, such as by putting an LED suit on a dog to create the light of a CGI Patronus, while other scenes took weeks to plan, such as one taking place in Piccadilly Square that was full of over 500 extras. However, this film overall still feels incomplete as just the first half of a story, as one could argue that the last book was split into two movies to rake in more money. Yet this penultimate film in the series did what it needed to get done to get audiences pumped for the true finale.

​As the series nears its end, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince establishes just how much darker the journey of the title character can be. Now, that isn’t to say the artistic quality ever improves, because this movie, in particular, suffers too much from awkward love subplots and a lack of chemistry between the teen actors. However, the dramatic spectacle is a massive improvement from the five preceding films, starting with the destruction of the Millennium Bridge. From there, each scene is its own contained showcase of miraculous designs married with groundbreaking visual effects. One of the standouts to demonstrate the VFX work and design work coming together is Fred and George Weasley’s joke shop, which is packed full of delightful detail after delightful detail.
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The costumes also are constructed with much care and attention to detail to make everything about the wearer’s personality instantly recognizable. Those types of costumes are most apparent in the wardrobes of Professor Slughorn and Luna Lovegood, who ironically are the film’s two most impressionable characters. To add to the escalating challenges of filming these movies, much of the cast, particularly Rupert Grint, had to go through more physical training than ever before. With the cast and crew’s toilsome efforts to create something truly special, the two-part series finale now has a glorious red carpet rolled out for its entrance, in turn setting the stage for the standard all other tentpole blockbusters must meet.

As the Harry Potter movies continue growing darker and more mature, each one proves to be a grander technical achievement than the last. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix hooks in the audience early on with the spectacle of the Order of the Phoenix flying on broomsticks over London, and every element used to generate this sequence comes together seamlessly without a single giveaway of a green screen in sight. These types of effects look even better though in the Hall of Prophecies, an environment made entirely on the computer. Among the CGI creatures that contribute to the film’s tremendous visual effects include thestrals, dementors, patronuses, centaurs, and a giant.
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The effects with the wand fights are likewise an improvement from the previous four movies, as they were arranged by a dance choreographer, and the wands were made out of rubber so they wouldn’t break while filming. The designs are also unlike anything seen throughout the rest of the Wizarding World up until this point, particularly the enormous Ministry of Magic set, which took twenty-two weeks to build and looks like it was built with 100% authentic materials. So no longer is this Wizarding World limited to just gothic-inspired designs, now it’s stepping into the look of a Churchill-era London. Thus, despite the messy plot, this fifth installment to the series continues proving just how much of an impact it left on the art of blockbuster filmmaking.

In the fourth cinematic installment of the legendary Harry Potter series, another new director, Mike Newell, comes on board with a different approach to the Wizarding World. That includes kicking off the film with the immense spectacle of the Quidditch World Cup, which features a campsite and a larger-than-life colosseum. Then from there, the French Beauxbatons Academy of Magic and the Northeastern Durmstrang Institute are introduced, providing greater context to what the wizarding community is like in other parts of the world. Yet that’s still at the start of the movie, virtually every other scene is a showcase of incredible technology and design work merging harmoniously.
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The Black Lake sequence was perhaps their most daring sequence yet, as Daniel Radcliffe had to spend six months learning how to dive, and then had to spend long days shooting underwater in Europe’s largest water tank. Aside from the fact that filming this kid underwater was challenging enough, the use of underwater bluescreens also proved to be groundbreaking. Equally as impressive are the icy silver designs for the Yule Ball, all topped off by gorgeous dresses and lovely accompanying music to demonstrate the incredible work of the set and costume designers. While Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire may be considered by most to be the worst of the saga due to its disloyalty to the book, it still proves how technologically innovative the series continues to be.

The Harry Potter series takes a darker turn from the first two installments, and with the visionary director Alfonso Cuarón now taking control, he brings the blend of practical and digital effects to the next level. Numerous magical objects are rigged inside the set to move on their own, some of which were even consulted by real magicians. Other visual effects tricks included the hippogriff, which had both CGI and a mechanical figure used for the actors to interact with, as well as Professor Lupin’s horrific transformation into a werewolf. Also, the dementors were originally going to be puppets filmed underwater and then reversed, but this ultimately didn’t work out and was just used as reference footage for the CGI animators instead.
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The Hogwarts castle also looks much different from before with more detail, particularly in how the moving paintings are utilized. Plus, with this being an Alfonso Cuarón film, there are many long takes stitched together to look like an even longer seamless take. Yet the greatest symphony of practical effects in the entire film, or in all of cinema perhaps, is Aunt Marge blowing up, which was done with almost no CGI. This isn’t to say that the quality of the script or acting ever got better compared to the first two movies, but the wild magical tone marks Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as the most ambitious movie in the series yet.

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!