10 Movie Scenes You Didn’t Know Used CGI Trickery
2. The Napkin - The Fighter
Like Brokeback Mountain, nobody really remembers The Fighter for its standout CGI.
A few crowd shots were beefed up here and there, but for the most part, what you see is what you get. However, surprisingly, that doesn't extend to something as simple as Mark Wahlberg holding up a napkin.
An early scene finds Wahlberg's Micky Ward trying to get a phone number off Amy Adams' Charlene Fleming. After she writes it down on a nearby napkin, she hands it to Ward, who holds it up to show his friend.
But the filmmakers weren't allowed to show the phone number onscreen, for legal reasons. As a result, the visual effects team was forced to recreate and digitally manipulate the napkin in post-production to make the number impossible to read.
Tim Carras and Josh Comen - two of the movie's visual effects guys - explained how this worked in an interview with Post Magazine:
“We had to recreate it [the napkin] and do a lot of different experiments. There was a lot of hiding the number in the creases and folds of the napkin, and dialing up and down the motion blur to make it hard to make out. We took a stack of napkins and spent a few hours learning how to forge Amy Adams’ handwriting... and then the compositors took those and warped it and folded it, and made it fit into the scene.”
In the end, this shot went through the most iterations out of any in the film, and took way longer than it had any right to.