This site has been posting VFX breakdowns since 2006. For years each one got its own short post: a line or two of context and a link to the video. That made sense at the time. It made the archive almost impossible to browse.
So here they are in one place, grouped by film, studio and type of work, with the context those original posts never had. Every video is linked. Nothing has been lost.
If you are new to this and want to know what you are actually looking at, start with what a VFX breakdown is and what to look for. This page assumes you already know.
Marvel and Spider-Man
Two separate Spider-Man continuities and the first Avengers film, covered here as they came out between 2007 and 2014.
The Avengers: the Manhattan battle
Originally posted 12.27.12
ILM’s breakdown of the third-act battle is a good study in scale management. The sequence needed a fully digital Manhattan that could be destroyed, populated and flown through, while still cutting against plates shot in Cleveland standing in for New York.
Watch for how often a shot starts on something real and hands off to full CG mid-move. That handoff is where the money goes. Watch the breakdown.
Building the Hulk
Originally posted 1.15.13 and 1.24.13
ILM walked through the Hulk build in two parts. The first covers the model and the anatomy underneath it. The second gets into performance, which was the harder problem, because this was the version of the character that finally had to carry Mark Ruffalo’s acting rather than replace it.
Muscle and skin simulation is doing a lot of work here. A creature that size reads as fake the moment its mass stops behaving like mass. Part one and part two.
The Amazing Spider-Man: the Lizard
Originally posted 9.25.12
The 2012 reboot’s Lizard was a full digital character sharing frames with actors in daylight, which is the least forgiving situation a creature team can be handed. This short breakdown covers the build and the integration. Watch it.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Electro
Originally posted 5.5.14
Sony Pictures Imageworks built Electro’s electricity using reference from neurological imaging rather than conventional lightning, which is why the effect branches and creeps instead of forking cleanly. It is a good example of picking an unexpected reference and letting it define the look.
The Electro transformation breakdown.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Times Square
Originally posted 5.14.14
The Times Square fight is a digital environment almost end to end. Imageworks rebuilt the square rather than shooting there, which by 2014 had stopped being the expensive option.
The tell is the signage. Real Times Square screens flicker and roll at rates a camera picks up unpredictably, so a rebuild has to fake that instability deliberately. Watch the environment breakdown.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rhino
Originally posted 5.20.14
The Rhino suit is mechanical rather than organic, which moves the problem from anatomy to hard-surface animation and weight. Imageworks breaks it down.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: the villains together
Originally posted 5.23.14
A broader reel covering Green Goblin, Electro and Rhino in one pass. Useful if you want to see how three very different character pipelines coexisted in one film. Watch it.
Spider-Man 3: Sandman
Originally posted 5.28.07
The 2007 film’s Sandman is still one of the better-aged effects of that era. Sony Pictures Imageworks photographed real sand falling, then used that data to drive a particle system, which is why the character dissolves in a way that pure simulation of the time could not match.
The original CGSociety article this post pointed to is long gone. The technique is worth knowing anyway, because the approach of capturing real behaviour and driving a simulation with it is now standard practice.
Industrial Light and Magic, 2019 onward
The Irishman: de-aging without markers
Originally posted 1.7.20
Pablo Helman led this one and it broke from the standard playbook. The usual approach to de-aging puts tracking markers on the actor’s face and a camera rig on their head, which works but turns a performance into a technical exercise.
Helman’s team built a three-camera rig that captured De Niro, Pacino and Pesci with no markers at all, so the three of them could act together on set in character. The age transformation happened entirely in post, across a story spanning five decades. Watch the process.
The Rise of Skywalker
Originally posted 2.5.20
ILM pulled artists from all five of its studios for this one: San Francisco, London, Vancouver, Singapore and Sydney. Roger Guyett supervised, with Patrick Tubach leading on the ILM side.
Beyond the environments, Kijimi and Exegol among them, the team had to bring Leia back using Carrie Fisher’s unused footage from the two previous films. That is an unusual constraint: the performance already existed and everything else had to be built around it. The film was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the 92nd Oscars. Watch the breakdown.
The Mandalorian and the Unreal Engine
Originally posted 2.11.22
This is the one that changed how television gets shot. Rather than green screen, the production used a wall of LED panels displaying an environment rendered live in Unreal Engine, tracked to the camera so the parallax stayed correct.
The practical win is lighting. An LED wall throws real light onto the actors and their costumes, so reflective armour behaves correctly without a compositor faking it later. How it works.
Transformers
ILM built the robots across the whole series, and the transformation shots were a genuinely new problem. A robot folding into a car in one continuous move means every part has to go somewhere, and the audience can follow it.
Transformers (2007)
Originally posted 5.13.07
The original featurette on Michael Bay’s first film, where the part counts on the robots ran into the thousands so the transformations could hold up in a single unbroken shot. Watch it.
Dark of the Moon (2011)
Originally posted 2.9.12
By the third film ILM was compositing robot-on-robot fight choreography into real Chicago locations, much of it shot natively in 3D, which doubles the compositing work and leaves nowhere to cheat depth. Two breakdowns: the first and the second.
Television
Television VFX runs on shorter schedules and smaller budgets than film, and it shows up in the choices these teams make rather than in the finished quality.
The Walking Dead
Originally posted 4.20.11
Stargate Studios handled the effects, and their reel is a lesson in what a zombie show actually spends money on. Not the zombies, mostly. Practical makeup covered those.
The budget went on emptying Atlanta. Removing traffic, people and modern signage from a real city, then adding abandonment back in, is the invisible work that sells a dead world. Watch the reel.
Game of Thrones
Originally posted 1.17.12 and 10.2.12
Pixomondo became the show’s primary vendor from season two and won a Creative Arts Emmy for Blackwater in 2012. The early seasons split work across several houses, which is why these three reels look so different from each other.
Set extension does most of the heavy lifting. Castles built to a practical height and continued digitally, coastlines replaced, armies multiplied. Pixomondo, Ed Bruce and BlueBolt.
Stranger Things: Running Up That Hill
Originally posted 6.28.22
The scene reads as Sadie Sink sprinting through woods. It was shot on a stage against blue screen, with the forest added afterwards.
Worth watching because the effect is emotional rather than spectacular. Nothing in the finished scene announces itself as an effect, which is exactly why it works. The breakdown.
Science fiction features
Prometheus
Originally posted 9.17.12 and 10.15.12
Ridley Scott split the work across several houses, MPC and Weta among them, covering the alien landscapes, the Engineer creature work and the medical pod sequence that has to play as one continuous take.
Two breakdowns here. The fxguide episode is mostly interview and covers the thinking. MPC’s compositing reel shows the layers.
Dredd
Originally posted 1.26.13
Mega-City One was built on a modest budget, and the slo-mo drug sequences are the standout. Those shots were captured at very high frame rates and then treated, rather than being generated in post, which is why they hold detail that a speed ramp would smear. Behind the scenes.
John Carter
Originally posted 10.1.12
The film is remembered as a financial disaster. The creature and environment work was not the reason, and the breakdown is worth watching on its own terms. The Tharks are four-armed digital characters carrying dialogue scenes opposite live actors, which was not a solved problem in 2012. Watch it.
Blade Runner 2049: recreating Rachael
Originally posted 2.26.18
MPC rebuilt a young Sean Young as a digital double, which is the hardest version of this problem. The audience has a reference: the 1982 film. Any drift from it registers immediately.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. MPC’s breakdown.
RoboCop (2014)
Originally posted 4.2.14
Framestore’s job on the Jose Padilha remake was making a largely digital suit read as real hardware with weight, worn by a person, rather than as a shell dropped over an actor. The breakdown.
Creatures and environments
Kon-Tiki: the shark
Originally posted 10.16.12
Norwegian house ILP built the whale shark sequence and it remains one of the better digital sharks put on screen. Water is the compounding difficulty: the creature has to be right, the surface interaction has to be right, and the light passing through both has to agree.
Kon-Tiki was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Watch the breakdown.
Troll Hunter
Originally posted 11.20.10
Andre Ovredal’s 2010 found-footage film delivered convincing giant creatures on a budget of roughly 3.5 million dollars. It did it by choosing conditions that hide seams: fog, night, handheld camera, limited visibility.
That is a legitimate craft decision, not a cheat. Knowing what not to show is most of low-budget effects work. The breakdown.
Cloverfield
Originally posted 12.28.12
A 22-minute making-of covering set extension, match move, camera tracking and the creature. The constraint that defines the whole film is that every shot has to survive being degraded, shaky, in-universe handheld footage.
Effects normally get easier when the image is worse. Here they got harder, because the camera motion is violent and unmotivated and still has to track perfectly. Watch it.
Anonymous: Elizabethan London
Originally posted 9.15.12
Roland Emmerich’s 2011 film rebuilt Elizabethan London almost entirely digitally, from the Globe to old St Paul’s to the Thames waterfront. The work went to Uncharted Territory, the studio Emmerich founded with Volker Engel, who has supervised most of his films since Independence Day.
One of the strongest reels on this page. Watch it.
Commercials and music videos
Short-form work gets less attention and is often held to a higher standard, because a thirty second spot gets rewatched and paused in a way a feature shot never does.
The Mill: VW Black Beetle
Originally posted 5.28.11
Car commercials are one of the hardest disciplines in CG. Automotive paint is a multi-layer material, the body is a huge curved mirror reflecting everything around it, and the audience knows exactly what cars look like.
The Mill built its reputation on exactly this. The shot breakdown.
The Chemical Brothers: Wide Open
Originally posted 2.5.16
A dancer gradually becomes a hollow 3D-printed figure across a single continuous take. The Mill tracked the real performance, built and rigged the structure around it, then matched lighting and shadow so the transformation stays anchored in the room.
The one-take format removes every hiding place. No cuts means no opportunity to fix a mismatch between setups. The process.
Open source and independent
Tears of Steel
Originally posted 11.7.12
The Blender Foundation’s first live action science fiction short, made specifically to push the compositing and camera tracking tools that had just landed in Blender. The film was the test case and the feature development was the point.
That is worth noting on its own. An open source project funding a short film in order to find out what its software could not yet do is not how commercial tools get built. The breakdown, and more on where Blender went next in how it became a production tool.
Oats Studios: ADAM: The Mirror
Originally posted 10.13.17
Neill Blomkamp’s Oats Studios rendered this entirely in the Unity game engine, years before real-time rendering became normal practice. It reads as a proof of concept because that is what it was.
The behind the scenes, plus the shorts themselves: part one and part two.
MPC
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Originally posted 1.28.13
The forest chase is the sequence worth studying. Extreme slow motion, heavy atmospherics, digital environment extension and a moving camera, all stacked in the same shots.
The breakdown peels the layers apart one at a time, which is the most useful format these reels come in. Watch it.
Fast and Furious 6
Originally posted 5.4.14
Vehicle work at scale, including the runway sequence. The interesting part is how much is practical and how little of it you can pick out. MPC’s reel.
About this archive
These entries were originally 34 separate posts published between 2007 and 2022, most of them under a hundred words. They have been consolidated here and rewritten with proper context. The date under each heading is the day that entry first went up on this site, and the old URLs redirect to the relevant section on this page.
Videos are linked rather than embedded, deliberately. Thirty-odd embedded players on one page would make it painfully slow to load, particularly on a phone.
Some of these videos will eventually be taken down. That is the nature of linking to material hosted by studios and vendors. If you find a dead one, let us know and it will be replaced or removed.
For newer breakdowns, the VFX Breakdowns category carries everything published since.