10 Recent Movie Effects You Thought Were CGI (But Weren't)

Oscar-nominated drama Pieces of a Woman opens with a jaw-dropping long take scene in which Martha Weiss (Vanessa Kirby) gives birth to her child, who heartbreakingly dies shortly after being born.

The mind-boggling technical complexity of the sequence - namely the fact that it's captured in a 24-minute single take for real with no digital joins - left many convinced that the baby had to be a digital creation.

Considering that the baby appears in just the final two minutes of the scene and could easily risk blowing an entire take, a CGI baby would've made a certain amount of sense, but director Kornél Mundruczó instead made the bold decision to use a real one.

The baby and its mother waited outside of the apartment while each take was being shot and were quickly sneaked into the room for the climax, where the baby was placed beneath Vanessa Kirby following its "birth." The director said:

"We had an amazing Montreal French mother gave the opportunity to shoot with her baby. She was really part of the shot. It was a real baby and you can watch it on [Kirby's] face. That connection is the whole movie, and it would never happen [with a CGI baby]. It's impossible."

The result is absolutely seamless, and the only VFX elements present in the entire scene were the umbilical cord and the baby turning blue before it passes away, which for obvious reasons were literally impossible to execute practically.

Considering that the likes of Twilight and American Sniper have proven how a janky digital baby can ruin a pivotal, emotional scene, it was most definitely the right decision to go practical here, if also an undeniably risky one.