Movie Landmarks for CGI Effects?

Daniel German asks: "I am in the process of preparing a lecture on the influence of computers and computer science in the movie industry. I'd like to include excerpts from the most important landmarks, and in order to give credit where credit is due, I'd like to ask for help from the Slashdot community. What are those movies and moments? The Westworld robot vision; the city landscapes of Blade Runner; Final Fantasy; Toy Story; the water beings from The Abyss; the starting sequence in Forrest Gump; bullet time; and so on. What do you consider to be the scenes that have become landmarks in computer generated special effects in Movie History? I am not only looking for Science Fiction, in fact, I'd like to have a wide range of examples on how computers have altered the way that a director can bring his or her vision to the screen "

Comments

Fincher & Jeunet

[babbage]

In my opinion, the two most interesting modern masters of special effects, by a wide margin, are David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Fincher is probably known to most Slashdot readers as the director of Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room, among others.

Jeunet is a French director, and wouldn't be as well known if not for the fact that Amelie was such a big hit a couple of years ago. In addition to that movie, he's also the director or co-director of City of Lost Children and Delicatessen.

(Interestingly, it turns out that Fincher and Jeunet also did the last two Alien movies, Alien3 and Alien: Resurrection. Neither reviewed very well, but both directors have gone on to establish pretty good reputations; it would be interesting to go back & watch them in comparison to their more recent work. In any case, I haven't seen these two movies, and they're not why I choose them as among my favorite modern filmmakers :-)

---

In any case, the thing I love about these guys is that, unlike a company like Pixar or a director like (say) James Cameron, these guys have digital special effects so ingrained into the way they make movies that it's no more of a gimmick than, say, choosing a camera lens of film stock to work with. Their movies are for the most part not gratuitous special effects extravaganzas, full of the standard pyrotechnics, monsters, and other gimmicks that are the hallmark of the standard, standard boring effects fare. (Okay, maybe trolling just a little in that last bit... :-)

Just to pick a few random examples off the top of my head:

• In "Amelie", almost the whole movie is washed over with a greenish-yellow tint. The first impression this gives may be a sense of the old sepia-toned movies & photographed, but that's not right: sepia tone is tan colored, not green or yellow. Jeunet got the effect by digitally pushing the color palatte in post-production so that, like the choice of soundtrack music, the tint of the film would help set the mood. Very subtle.
• In "Panic Room", Fincher does of a series of tracking shots that would be impossible to do with a physical camera. One of these shots has the camera make a perfectly straight zoom from one end of the apartment to the other, going smoothly over furniture, under cabinets, and through the handle of a coffee pot. In another shot, the camera zooms through a keyhole to shows what's going on in the next room, and in yet another shot the camera goes in through a ventilation grate, down the duct, and out another grate in a different room. These camera shots are only possible because the coffee pot was never there, the keyhole was either not there or was part of a carefully done jump-cut, and the ventilation shot is all cartoon, seamlessly blended into the rest of the action.
• In "City of Lost Children" -- which is a really wonderful movie by the way, like a weird, beautiful 21st century fairy tale -- one of the characters is a hitman who's weapon of choice is a trained flea assassin: as he plays his music, we see the flea leaping down the street, finding its quarry, jumping on the scalp, and injecting a poison among the hair follicles on the skull. All of this is done from the flea's point of view: those hair follicles loom as large as oaks. But there's little gratuituous about it: if you want to have a flea