10 Amazing Practical Movie Effects Shots Everybody Assumed Were CGI

Nobody is going to tell you that Darren Aronofsky's masterful sci-fi romantic drama The Fountain doesn't feature a hefty amount of CGI, but so many of the elements assumed to be digital were really achieved practically.

Because the film's budget was halved to $35 million during pre-production, Aronofksy was required to get creative in order to convincingly achieve his hallucinogenic deep space effects throughout.

He ultimately decided to eschew CGI wherever possible in favour of macro photography, hiring specialist Peter Parks to create surreal imagery by reacting chemicals and bacteria together and filming it in extreme close-up.

All in all these effects only cost $140,000, and during post-production the footage Parks shot was composited together to create a dreamlike landscape quite unlike anything audiences had ever seen in a film before.

Though some of the sequences were indeed embellished with CGI, the gorgeous, otherworldly backdrops are entirely practical elements, yet rendered unrecognisable to the layperson due to the magnification involved.

Parks perhaps put it best himself:

"When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you're looking at infinity...That's because the same forces at work in the water - gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space."