If you headed to theaters this weekend to see "Need for Speed," the film included some crazy stunts.
Audiences saw a Ford Mustang jump three lanes of traffic in Detroit and get airlifted by a U.S. Army helicopter.
One thing you may not have realized was that the DreamWorks' film was made entirely without any computer-generated imagery, commonly known as "CGI."
Director Scott Waugh — a former stuntman — wanted to make the action look as real as possible.
“My philosophy has always been that you can’t break physics because if you do it hurts the story because then the characters don’t apply to physics either,” said Waugh.
In Hollywood, while most films employ CGI, you may be surprised by the movies that opt out of using digital enhancements.
The weightlessness in "Apollo 13" was thanks to a military plane that recreated zero gravity.
When it came to achieving weightlessness on screen, Tom Hanks and the rest of the crew in 1995's "Apollo 13" had less help from Hollywood and more from NASA.
The cast and crew used NASA's "Vomit Comet," a Boeing 707 "that climbs to 30,000 ft. and then arcs into a steep dive, creating a 23-second period of weightlessness." Director Ron Howard liked it so much he put the set of the film right into the plane itself.
"If we’d had to do it with wires — if we really would’ve had to try to create the weightlessness with wires, I shudder to think what the movie would have looked like," said Howard.
Tom Cruise actually climbed the Burj Khalifa for "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol."
Even more astounding than Dubai's Burj Khalifa's height (2,722 feet) is that Tom Cruise actually scaled the upper levels of the building in "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol."
"When you’re on top and you look out, people are going to think it’s CG [computer-generated], and it’s not," Gregg Smrz, the film's stunt coordinator, told the L.A. Times.
While a green screen would have been a lot easier and safer, Cruise insisted on climbing with special harnesses and rigging about 1,700 feet off the ground (that's 250 feet higher than the Empire State Building) in order to pull off the seemingly impossible scene.
The face-melting ending from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was done using melting wax sculptures.
"Raiders of the Lost Ark" won the 1981 Oscar for Best Visual Effects, but the iconic "face-melting" ending used nothing more than practical effects.
"The melting of Toht, the Nazi villain’s head in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' required an innovative approach," visual-effects artist Dennis Muren told Vanity Fair. "It was decided that the head would be sculpted in wax ... filmed at a speed slower than normal, high heat was applied and the head appears to melt rapidly revealing layers of skin, muscle, and bone when played back at normal speed."
In addition, the ghosts that float during the Lost Ark ceremony were silken puppets floating in a tank of water.
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