One of the most notable benchmarks from my perspective was Life of Pi. Rhythm and Hues broke new ground with the character and environment work on the film and paved the way for more amazing work by filmmakers and studios in subsequent films like the Planet of the Apes trilogy, the Jungle Book, and the Lion King. Animals can be animated and rendered with pitch perfect realism.
Drilling down, there are two sequences in particular that have stuck in forefront of my brain for the better part of the decade more than any others.
The first was Lola’s work creating the “skinny Steve” sequence in Captain America: The First Avenger. The composting work and integration of Chris Evans face and performance onto the body of another actor was seamless and helped create a believable origin story for the title character. Lola’s work on this project, their de-aging work, and the effectiveness of these storytelling visual effects has spurred other lines of technological development raising the bar further with even greater fidelity, new software, and hardware at other studios in films like this year’s Gemini Man and the Irishman. The augmentation of performances, fully digital humans, and hybrid techniques are inching the industry closer and closer to doing for humans what we’ve seen done so seamlessly for animals. I predict that the next decade will see the first fully indistinguishable human performance visual effects in a major project. Some might argue that we’ve already seen it.
The second sequence that I just loved and can’t seem to get out of my head was the final confrontation on Alex Garland’s film Annihilation. While it wasn’t groundbreaking visual effects on a technical level, it was profoundly effective on a story and character level in a way that I found deeply satisfying and captivating. The Mandelbulb “alien” confrontation in the bowels of the lighthouse was the first mesmerizing moment. I believe it was done in Houdini and its undulating form, color, and illumination created a memorable raw alien form I hadn’t yet seen in a movie. The following symmetrical dance and fight between the protagonist and the doppelgänger was such an innovative use of performance capture and music brining story and theme together without dialogue. It epitomizes, for me, innovative visual effects serving to tell a story in a way that it couldn’t have been done otherwise. Not my favorite film of the decade, but certainly one of my favorite sequences by far.
Other standout visual effects that deserve an honorable mention from my perspective would include; Black Swan (the mirrors and the end sequence), Ex Machina (Ava), Her (those exterior environments of a future LA), Mindhunter (so many fantastic period environments), and Blade Runner 2049 (everything about it).
My top two films of the decade had only some invisible visual effects and make up effects; Call Me By Your Name and Border. If you haven’t seen those two films, do so. They’re both excellent. I can’t wait to see what realtime rendering, machine learning, and AI bring to the next decade of visual effects.
