Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects from 1990 to 2004

Film Title/Year and Description of Visual-Special Effects	Screenshots
Pearl Harbor (2001) This film was most noted for the recreation of the infamous 1941 attack, with scenes digitally created, including hundreds of World War II era airplanes, ships and vehicles, along with the fire and smoke from dozens of explosions.
Shrek (2001) A fully computer-animated, colorful fantasy film (from DreamWorks and Pacific Data Images), and the first Oscar winner in the newly created category of Best Animated Feature, by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. The realistic-ness of the characters was actually scaled back to have a more "cartoony" look. DreamWorks used a "proprietary" photo-realistic facial animation system (first used in Antz (1998)) - a layering process to build the image of a character's face, starting with the skull and then gradually adding computer re-creations of muscles and skin. The image was wired with hundreds of controls to allow for an almost limitless number of facial expressions, movements and realistic lip-syncing. One of the film's realistic touches was two small beauty marks on Fiona, one on her left cheek and one on her upper chest. The film also featured the most advanced CGI liquid and fire effects of the time, in the scenes with the fire-breathing Dragon. Followed by the biggest box-office earning animated film ever, Shrek 2 (2004).
Vidocq (2001, Fr.) (aka Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq) Director Pitof's dark 19th century crime fantasy Vidocq (2001) was the world's first-completed theatrical feature film shot entirely on Hi-Def digital video. This first full-length, all-digital film was shot using a Sony HD-CAM 24P1 (1080p, 24fps) high-definition digital camera, producing astonishing visuals. It was released a year before George Lucas' and Hollywood's first big-budget all-digital production of Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002).
Waking Life (2001) This animated, R-rated ground-breaking experimental film was first digitally shot on a mini-digital video camera as a live-action film, and then edited normally, complete with double-exposures and composited effects. In the next step, 30 artists graphically 'painted' the characters via computer (with a process called "interpolated rotoscoping") to create the illusion of a cartoon in motion. The animation was then transferred to celluloid, producing a hyper-real, stylized comic-book look. Director Richard Linklater would later use this technique for the traditional narrative A Scanner Darkly (2005), and Richard Rodriguez' Sin City (2005) would use a similiar method of animation (see below).	before after
Winged Migration (2001, Fr.) This incredible bird documentary was famed for its almost complete lack of optical visual effects and some of the best camera work ever done in film history, especially the completely astounding sequence in which a moving camera followed a migratory tern for thousands of miles as it soared above the Earth in the clouds, and at one point panned more than 180 degrees around it. Filmmakers used several remote controlled and conventional planes, helicopters, hot-air balloons and gliders to film the awe-inspiring flying birds. [Director Jacques Perrin was also responsible for the landmark insect documentary MicroCosmos (1996), which used special cameras and lens to photograph insects up to the scale of humans.]
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (2002) - Special Edition re-release There were numerous digital 'enhancement visual effects' made to the original 1982 version of this Steven Spielberg film, for the Millenium Edition, mostly rendering the friendly animatronic alien in the original as a computer-animated figure. This allowed ET to be seen underwater and blowing bubbles during a bathtub scene, among other minor tweaks. One notable PC change was that the guns in the hands of FBI agents were miraculously changed into walkie-talkies.
Spider-Man (2002) This blockbuster comic-book hero feature film included the extensive use of digital body doubles (a computer-generated superhero), and the digital removal of wires, cables and rigs from many shots. Almost every car in the original film shots had to be removed and replaced with digital models. In the CGI-enhanced Costume Montage sequence that lasted about a minute, over 40 live-action and graphic elements were combined as Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) brainstormed to create a costume for himself. Segments with Spider-Man required shooting in front of a greenscreen, while the villainous Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) had to be shot in front of a bluescreen. Also, in the final battle scene in an abandoned building between Spidey and the Green Goblin, to ensure a PG rating, digital effects transformed the red blood from the hero's mouth into clear liquid spit. And in respect for the 9/11 tragedy, the shot of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, between which Spider-Man had spun a web to snare the maniacal Green Goblin and caught a passing helicopter instead, was removed from the final cut of the released movie (in its final reel), although the image remained in one of the film's trailers.
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) George Lucas' film was the first big-budget, Hollywood feature film completely shot and exhibited in digital HD video (non-celluloid), with a 24 fps high-definition progressive scan camera. (See the earlier Vidocq (2001, Fr.) above.) Also with an extensive use of digital matte paintings.
The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) The Matrix Reloaded introduced high-definition 'Universal Capture' (or U-cap) or image-based facial animation into the special effects lexicon -- i.e., the fight scene in Reloaded between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and 100 Agent Smiths (Hugo Weaving) used this technique. Five high-resolution digital cameras recorded the real Agent Smith's actions to produce data which was fed into a computer, where a complex algorithm calculated the actor's appearance from every single angle the cameras had missed, and used them to generate digital or 'cloned' humans indistinguishable from real humans. The Matrix Revolutions featured the first realistic, very close-up representation of detailed facial deformation on a synthetic human, during a face punch. This scene occurred during the final climactic fight between Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) and Neo (Keanu Reeves), when Smith was punched in the face.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) CGI effects were used to startling effect - when first revealed - to seamlessly turn the cursed Black Pearl pirates, led by Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), from normal humans to skeletons ("The moonlight shows us for what we really are"). In the film's conclusion during a moonlit night, the 'undead' pirates snuck up on the British Royal Navy and the HMS Dauntless by walking across the ocean floor in skeleton form, and then crawling up the ropes on the sides of the ship undetected.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004) This apocalyptic disaster film about global catastrophe used 50,000 scanned photos of a 13 block area of NYC to create a 3D, photorealistic model of the city - with that model (a digital backdrop), the downtown metropolis was destroyed by a giant digital tsunami wave and then frozen. The film also featured the longest ever CG flyover shot for the opening ice shelf scene.
Immortel (Ad Vitam) (2004) Like Able Edwards (2004), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) and Sin City (2005), this film seamlessly blended live actors with computer generated surroundings. It was one of the first films to use an entirely "digital backlot" (i.e. all of the actors were shot in front of blue- and green-screens with all the backgrounds added in post-production). In addition, it also featured live actors interacting with semi photo-realistic CGI "humans".
The Incredibles (2004) Pixar's computer-animated feature film by writer/director Brad Bird, their sixth one, was the first of their films to feature human characters for the main roles, such as Bob and Helen Parr (alias Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl), among others.
The Polar Express (2004) This Robert Zemeckis film further developed motion capture technology found in the pioneering Peter Jackson film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). It was marked by the first innovative use of the process of 'Performance Capture' -- a motion capture system by which an actor’s live performances were digitally captured by computerized cameras, and became a human blueprint for creating virtual, all-digital characters. Every character in the film was created using 'motion capture.' It was IMAX's first full-length, animated 3-D feature. Unlike existing motion-capture systems, Performance Capture simultaneously recorded 3-dimensional facial and body movements from multiple actors, using a system of digital cameras that provided 360 degree views. This allowed actor Tom Hanks to play many very different digital characters (the boy, the father, the conductor, the hobo, and Santa Claus) in the same film. Zemeckis went even further with this technique in his film Beowulf (2007).