10 Movie Scenes You Didn’t Know Used CGI Trickery

6. The Entire Movie - Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain isn't the first movie that comes to mind when you think about mind-blowing special effects, but with no exaggeration at all, the entire movie is littered with some exquisite CGI, green screen and compositing work.

A behind-the-scenes look at some of the movie's effects work speaks for itself: flocks of sheep, mountains, clouds and clumps of trees are all examples of things that were either added or enhanced in post-production, and the seamless integration of this work is so good that you'd never notice without first being told.

Here's a specific example. In the below shot - which is a composition of several different images - the sheep in the background have been duplicated and colour-corrected, because an insufficient number of the animals were available for the director to shoot with on the day.

Brokeback Mountain CGI sheep
Focus Features

Brokeback Mountain isn't a complex movie in terms of its scale - there are no explosions, car chases, shootouts, or anything of that sort - so it's surprising to learn that a simple romantic drama requires the use of so much special effects work.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!