The world is mostly green for contemporary film and television actors. Occasionally blue or gray but mostly green. They spend their days walking on green floors past green walls and interacting with people in green bodysuits. Sometimes, an actress like Emilia Clarke on Game Of Thrones will have to pretend that what looks like a wad of green fabric on the end of a green mop handle is a dragon. Once the computer effects artists have worked their magic, a scene like that can be effective and convincing. In its raw form, however, the moment is absurd. Clarke, for instance, looks like she’s acting opposite a grotesquely deformed Swiffer Sweeper. These are the lessons learned from “20+ Movie Scenes Before-And-After Special Effects,” a roundup of comparative images at Bored Panda.
What sets this particular article apart from other, similar surveys is the use of a horizontal slider that allows the reader to toggle back and forth between the original on-set image and the finished effects shot. With the slider all the way to the right, an image from Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland looks like this:
All the way to the left, it becomes this:
So sorry, folks, Wonderland isn’t even remotely real or tangible. It’s just some big soundstage somewhere with actors in pear-shaped costumes tottering around on stilts. No biggie. Now, some might look at a collection like this as an opportunity to ponder just how for CGI effects have advanced in recent years. Or it could be a chance to demonstrate that digital effects are so pervasive in modern film and television that they have moved well beyond the world of science fiction and fantasy and are routinely being used in dramas as well, as in this shot from The Wolf Of Wall Street.
Honestly, though, the real fun here is to move the slider all the way to the right on every picture and just enjoy watching actors looking completely ridiculous. Gaze upon Kristen Stewart in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, petting what is supposed to be a wolf but is actually some dude in a gray zentai suit.
And here’s Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight with little metallic donut things stuck to his face and neck. One almost wonders if the scene would have been more visually interesting if the effects team had just left it this way.
