10 Recent CGI Movie Moments You Didn't Notice

Given that Damien Chazelle's Babylon is a glitzy celebration/indictment of the Golden Age of Hollywood, it's fitting that the film features minimal use of VFX.

And in fact, perhaps its most comprehensive and challenging CGI moments occur in the opening minutes of the movie, yet you'd scarcely know it.

Babylon opens with protagonist Manny (Diego Calva) attempting to transport an elephant to an almost impossibly decadent party being held in a mansion in the hills of Los Angeles.

While we know in our bones that modern filmmakers generally use digital animals wherever possible to prevent harm coming to real creatures, the elephant looks so mind-bogglingly photoreal in this case that one might assume at least some of the shots featured a real elephant, right?

Wrong. As Chazelle himself put it in an interview with Polygon:

"We couldn't shoot with an elephant. We did things to this elephant on screen that should never be done to any elephant."

As it turns out, there was never any elephant on set, with the movie's VFX team instead scouting an elephant from an American sanctuary, photographing it, and then rebuilding it as a CGI asset.

The actors instead worked with props to approximate the scale of the elephant, while for the infamous money shot where the elephant projectile-poops everywhere, a practical system was build to eject fake s**t onto the camera.

That's... quite the commitment to a bit which reportedly caused many to walk out of the movie in disgust.