Visual Effects Oscar Nominees

The Academy Award for the Best Visual Effects Nominees for 2022 are out! Here is the list: 

• Dune
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
• Free Guy
• Spider-Man: No Way Home
• No Time to Die

These five contenders for the Best Visual Effects for 2022 are definitely going to be close. Each movie has its own unique visual effects that make it a bit difficult to anticipate who will be at the top. Although I myself have only seen three out of the five nominees (Dune, Free Guy, and Spider-Man: No Way Home) I can still give some thoughts based on them from the vfx breakdowns that were shown at the Bake-off a couple of weeks ago.

Not only are these movies full of visual effects, but there were also a lot of special effects involved. Both Spider-Man: No Way Home and No Time to Die had a lot of special effects in them. Many real-life explosions and cars were flipped over for Spider-Man No Way Home. They performed controlled explosions in environments where they could capture them and use them later on for assets to be composited in. They also did that with cars being crushed by having them up on a machine that squeezed them with a blue screen in the background. The movie No Time to Die also had special effects where most of the car stunts were done in real life. Scenes with car chases and crashes were real and made in controlled production set environments. One of the scenes where James Bond’s car is spinning was a special effect. With technology continuing to improve, many people thought that there would be a decrease in special effects in the film; but that is not the case. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. Because our technology continues to improve, it allows us to create new ideas for coming up with special effects and integrating them into visual effects. Visual effects aim to make the imagined real, but nothing can replace special effects because nothing is more real than reality.

Full CG environments and characters, along with effects, were significant parts of Dune, Free Guy, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. In Dune, they had to create multiple environments such as a rainy environment, a grassy one, and of course, a sandy one. Many of those shots had CG set extensions along with full CGI environments. One shot of the desert city was full CG, and so were some of the water landscape shots. Those were not the only CG elements in the movie; the giant creature in that film was a full CG monster. Although the beast was under the sand half of the time, the effects team had to create tons of simulations to depict the creature’s movement vibrating through the sand. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings had even more CG creatures in their film. They had to create little furball creatures, mystical foxes, and multiple dragon creatures in the secret land. There were numerous shots where two CG dragon creatures battled in a fully CG environment. Not only was there a ton of animation and look development involved but so were fx because the battle was all happening while it was raining! And although there weren’t as many creatures in the movie Free Guy, there was plenty of animated CG characters and environment involved. The whole setting is within a video game, so the visual effects team needed to create an entire CG environment for multiple scenes. And not only did they have to create environments, but they needed to destroy them too. In one scene, towards the end of the movie, the city is being crushed. The fx team had to do a lot of work for running simulations on rigid bodies and destruction sims.

Every single one of these movies was a fantastic visual roller coaster to watch. If you haven’t seen all of these movies yet, I highly recommend doing so! So, after all of these talks about the nominees, who do you think will be awarded the Best Visual Effects Oscar?