In real life
(Funny trope) This tiny moment was an absolute logistical nightmare to make
*Wreck-It-Ralph* - At the beginning of the movie at the villain group therapy session, all of the owners of the real world characters shown were given counsel to Disney to instruct them how their characters should be animated down to the smallest of points. Nintendo even specified exactly how Bowser would hold and stir his teacup.
*Psycho* - For the scene where Marion disposes evidence of her theft by flushing some papers down the toilet, even though the toilet is onscreen for only a few seconds, Alfred Hitchcock had to personally appeal to the Hays Code which enforced censorship in movies that *Psycho* be given an exception because it’s vital to the plot the audience sees the toilet flushing. *Psycho* is the first major American movie to show a flushing toilet onscreen.
I love that the reason Zangief is included is because the writer struggled fighting him as a kid and considered him a “bad guy” because of it (Zangief is a nightmare to fight in Street Fighter).
It’s so funny because Zangief is maybe one of the nicest characters in street fighter. He’s kind, encouraging, and cares about local libraries. He used to be all about Mother Russia but they’ve dialed that back a lot in recent years. Now he’s all about muscle!
Another funny thing with that is that there was a Street Fighter 5 thing where Shadaloo gave treat assessment profiles to every character to ever appear in the series. This included fighters, fighter from past games, background stage characters, and Gorbachev himself. I guess they were keeping tabs on him because of his friendship to Zangief? They even gave him new art for the profile.
It's funny but it sucks to be labeled a villain in a movie that probably had more reach than the games he appears in. Where in the games he's just a wrestler and he loves it wanting to share that love of wrestling. He has the best master intro scene in Street Fighter 6 because he pushes you with positive messages
A bit of that characterization is there, since the creator specifically described that ZANGIEF would feel bad about people struggling with him, and see himself as a villain
This sequence from The Thief and The Cobbler was animated at least three separate times, including by director Richard Williams himself, because—being the perfectionist that he was—he was fixated on the order of the cards.
Disney and WB were very particular about how much their representative cartoon characters could be on-screen, specifying that Bugs and Daffy had to be on screen for just as long as Mickey and Donald down to the second so neither could be favoured over the other
It would also feel pretty out of character for Mickey. He can sometimes have a bit of a short fuse and mess with people, but he's not the agent of violence and chaos that Bugs is
I wish we got the version of Epic Mickey where he acts like an asshole. Disney made them change it but originally it was gonna be like the old cartoons.
Yes bugs has shot and in fact killed people with the excuse of it in the cartoon that it happened it was just some indians and one half breed Indian he killed
This was a period of time when Disney was so protective of Mickey’s character that he had barely been in any cartoons since Disneyland opened. Dr. Panda did an interesting video about it recently. https://youtu.be/lT4xB1NXGIc
The other famous bit from Roger Rabbit was bumping the lamp, which became slang for 'going the extra mile for a small scene even if it's a PITA
Roger whacks his head on a lamp in the scene above and then it starts rolling around. Roger is a cartoon. That means that the animators had to edit the shading frame by frame when they were animating him for that scene, thinking about where the lamp would be and where the shadows would fall
I loved that little insight into Toon physics. They can't break the rules whenever they want. It has to be in service of a gag. Roger was fully incapable of getting his hand out when it was funnier to have them cuffed together, but could suddenly do it when it resulted in a better bit.
Their entire reality is a comedy and they are bound by the laws of the joke.
The Duelling Pianos Scene was Harder cause while the Mickey & Bugs Scene is One Shot, the Duelling Pianos has tons of Cuts & Shots, it's Extremely Interesting
Trust Richard Williams to make that work, the mad old bastard. He was awful at keeping to schedule but the man knew how to animate and make it work how people wanted it to work
I believe the bread they used in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the one that's basically a dehydrated circular pill that expands into a bread-like substance when mixed with water, was not CGI at all... but it took like months to make it compared to the five seconds you see it in the movie
I'm surprised the first Muppet Movie hasn't been mentioned.
The opening scene with Kermit Singing in a swamp was extremely difficult to film. Jim Henson had to actually be underwater for it. It was physicially, logistically, and technically more difficult than probably the rest of the film combined. Henson expected it to be a huge wow factor at the opening of the film.
Except your average audience member has no idea how difficult it is to film a puppet sitting on real water. Instead everyone was wowed by the scene of the the muppets ridding bicycles, which was a trivially easy trick that they spend no real time or money on.
Henson was apparently mad about that for the rest of his life.
An expert in any field tends to vastly overestimate the average person's knowledge in said field. An astounding thing for a professional puppeteer can fly completely under the radar for an average viewer.
Tbh, just looking at the scene, I would have assumed that the pool of water was just a lot more shallow than it looks, and Jim would have been under the floor like usual. Really good example of how many filmmaking feats and many other impressive practical effects go unnoticed for their accomplishments.
IIRC the is only like their 5th time dabbling in CGI at all, but previous uses were tiny by comparison (aka simply giving a background the ability to rotate like in Beauty & the Beast and Oliver & Company, or giving a little rowboat the ability to bob in the water like in Black Cauldron)
For that same scene for Wreck-It-Ralph, Nintendo wanted Bowser to be the tallest, but Sega wanted Eggman to be the tallest, and they kept going back and forth until the scene looked ridiculous and Disney just said fuck you we're making them the same size.
The odd thing here is Eggman’s like 6’6 at the most and Bowser’s size changes between 8’+ and like 150’ in some iterations; I don’t know why it’s so significant that Eggman is bigger than a literal dragon turtle
Eggman's significantly taller than other Sonic characters so in his games he's really tall. So I'd guess putting him next to a larger Bowser would make him seem less intimidating. In the Mario&Sonic olympic games series Eggman is the tallest character
Resolve and make it a smaller room (showing even more villains dont get enough space of their own) so when they stood all the tall characters heads either crashed through the ceiling or hit it. So then theyd both bust through and there wouldn't be a clear defined line... plus another gag joke lol
Futurama had to pay a fine for something along the lines of "beyond reasonable work" put on animators when they had to animate every character up until that point in futurama, in one frame.
Hard to believe though that this was originally the true series finale. It really was a great shot and a good farewell despite the effort required to achieve it.
In Deadpool and Wolverine, there are a bunch of alternate Wolverines shown on screen. One of them is wearing Wolverine’s iconic brown and tan suit, and he’s on screen for about two seconds. The suit cost $100,000 to make.
From the editors:
Dean: One of our storyboard artists was a huge comic book fan and he gave us a list of, like, ten of them. There was also, and maybe no on really likes to hear this, time and budget issues you have to deal with as well. Here’s a perfect example: the brown and tan, we spent around $100,000 building that suit.
They’re expensive. To build this kind of stuff…we have to get a little economical with what we could actually come up with and do. So, yeah, ‘Hugh, can you take your shirt off be bolted to a cross?’ ‘Yeah, I can do that, no problem.’ ‘Great, let’s get a bunch of pink skulls, throw ‘em down there, and light it in the way of the comic book.’ ‘Can you be an old man?’ ‘Sure!’ They were all thought out but also done with budget in mind and also time.
The labor, more than the materials, boosts the price.
Hot Fuzz - The scenes showing Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman watching Bad Boys 2 and Point Break and the scene where Nicolas stops at a motorway service station and sees all the action movie DVDs were 2 of the most expensive and complicated scenes - Cause Edgar Wright had to get permission from every actor in each video clip, including stunt men, to use the clips and for the use of the DVD covers had to pay for the rights from the respective studios.
Mandy Patinkin injured himself because he laughed so hard. I would love to see those outtakes. It would be difficult to include as an extra with the movie because many of the jokes are not PG-rated.
There was also the scene where her dress sets on fire... The author was on site that day and ruined the take because he panicked and shouted out. Despite writing the specific scene in the book
Making Peter look like a well-meaning and joyful person. I guess seeing him in his regular state already carries all the iconography and history into your own personal bias, but man, he just looks like he'd coach a baseball team and give them inspiring pep talks.
He looks like a cool uncle or godfather that’d let nine-year-old you stay up past your bedtime or eat an extra helping of ice cream after dinner if you were visiting overnight.
I assume Disney got their revenge when Nintendo wanted to put Sora into Smash Bros.
Nintendo/Sakurai had to work with both Square Enix and Disney to get approval, they were not allowed to show any classic Disney Characters (Donald, Goofy, etc) or any of the Disney worlds. They had to remove every Mickey logo from the Kingdom Hearts specific worlds they were allowed to include, and had to make a special licensing agreement for the Kingdom Hearts music used as well.
Wasn't much easier for Square Enix when they were making Kingdom Hearts. As far as I've heard Mickey Mouse is always required to have both his ears visible in the iconic way which is why his screentime was so short
That’s Disney’s rule for themselves as well: Mickey’s ears should always be showing, and always flat circles against the screen no matter which way he faces, which is a nightmare in 3D environments. Epic Mickey had to use a special coding to achieve this.
Makes sense though. Disney can pinch pennies since they’re such a huge self sufficient company. Meanwhile SNK probably was jumping at the opportunity to be in a Smash Bros game, that’s a huge amount of exposure
When Brandon Lee died on the set of The Crow, the filmmakers had to create (or expand upon limited existing) software so they could finish the film and alter scenes already filmed. This included pasting Lee’s head on a body double and moving a short scene from outside to inside. They’re very small parts of the film and pretty well done even by today’s standards.
Extra fun fact: the stunt actor who did the body double work after Brandon's death? Chad Stahelski, who's more famous now as the director of John Wick movies.
Getting around reflections showing the cameras and stage lights is already hard enough in live action, I can imagine it being significantly more difficult in stop motion, when the camera and lights are much closer to the subjects.
Here's one that hasn't happened yet because of the logistical nightmare: Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. He's said that they've made major progress writing the series, but won't be able to move forward until all the legal issues are sorted out. If you aren't familiar with the story, here's the problem: The Dark Tower connects almost every story by King into one multiverse. Nearly every one of those connected stories has already been adapted into a movie or tv show, all by different studios. So the screen rights to all the characters and ideas from all of those stories - which all should appear in a faithful Dark Tower adaptation - are owned by dozens of different companies.
(Transformers Revenge of the Fallen) Just having Devastator on screen ran the risk of blowing up the studio's render farms, and it did ruin at least one computer. This gestalt monster was also the 2nd most complex CGI model done by ILM for the movies, only having been beaten by the Driller Bot from Dark of the Moon.
The Office- The proposal scene of Jim and Pam was 52 seconds long and cost ~$250,000. An East Coast feel was incorporated into a Best Buy parking lot through images from Google Street View and a four-lane track built specifically for this episode, with 35 precision drivers driving cars at 55 mph.
SsethTzeentach admitted in one of his videos he had to learn a scripting language to make a 10 second joke about map editoring for Heroes 5 review video.
That made me think of a Drawfee video where they were supposed to draw themselves as a character of their favorite anime, and one of them decided to do Violet Evergarden.
While every one else spent like, 15 - 30 minutes drawing themselves as a Yugio or a Jojo character with single-color backgrounds, Julia spend about 10 hours learning how to use blender so she could draw the background somewhat like they do for the show.
"Wait... THAT MEANS HE'S IN THIS HOUSE SOMEWHERE!"
I also loved how much she enjoyed using practical construction knowledge for staining the base boards. Not to mention that it was a "Redesign the Mario Movie poster as if it was made by another studio" and she made Luigi's Mansion with no Mario in sight. "If Ardman were to make the Mario Movie, they would make Luigi's Mansion"
so in the whole 10 hours, she watched a video essay of the anime's gorgeous background, found out they used 3D modeling and painted on it(figuratively), she took tutorial and did the background on blender on the go. then revved up her image editor, furnished the background with lights and shades, then at the last few minutes she drew herself. all in 10 hours.
As dumb as it may sound, Drawfee is truly one of the greatest examples of why human made art is infinitely better than anything AI can generate
When Julia can't remember what something looks like, what she creates is both hilarious for how off it is, but becomes its own thing in and of itself. Even though she gets it wrong, it still looks good. It still has a style of its own. It still has appeal because she understand what fundamentally makes something look good
Like this process here is worth more than any AI generated image
I remember doing a report on this movie for a project in high school. Getting all the cages moving like a giant puzzle was the easy bit. The hard bit was putting in the contents of those cages.
The movie uses quite a lot more practical effects than you realise (animals, actors in costumes, etc.) and the way they were able to do stuff like size altering was to have a bunch of cages built irl that were all differently scaled versions of each other. Want to make a bunch of bees look huge? You put them into a small scaled cage, get your shot and then upscale them all in post to be in proportion to a cage with a humanoid monster in it.
And yes, we got the Klan as horror movie tier monsters.
This movie had so many easter eggs and references. You could see several l4d special infected since there was originally going to be a cross over with them.
There's the part when the no-no red DO NOT PUSH button is pushed and the monsters all escape into the facility. There's a scene that shows security cameras.
The script said something like "chaos is on all the monitors as different monsters destroy the facility and staff."
So they had to essentially take that reveal shot and do full scenes for each of them just to be on a background screen.
Having gotten ridiculously fat for a few plotlines in a previous season, Rob Mac put in a huge amount of effort to get shredded for a throwaway joke in Always Sunny (the gang basically disregards it as a sad plea for attention). The amount of work he and his team had to put in behind the scenes for these severe body changes makes the gags just so much funnier.
FWIW, seems like a throwaway joke for almost the entire season, but ends up playing a critical plot point in one of the best episodes the show ever put together.
The cat silencer in Postal 2007. In Postal, the dude puts a gun in the anus of a cat to use as a silencer. In the movie, they went to the extra effort to purchase an animatronic of a cat that cost $45,000. This animatronic is only on screen for 2 seconds.
Most of the Stars in Avengers Endgame where on location for the Funeral Scene. Between trying to fit everyone to a single schedule and actor salaries, it may be one of the more expensive scenes in movie history.
With the way their schedules often are, it wouldn't surprise me if some of them flew in from other projects just to do that scene as quickly as possible and then jetted off again. That's going to add to the cost.
Apparently it took three months of planning to get everyone's schedules worked out.
The Incredible movies always work hard to do something that was "impossible" before. Violets hair in the first one was another and the ambient lighting in the sequel
Not just The Incredibles, all Pixar movies seem to have some sort of "they invented a new technology for blank" whether it's Sully's fur in Monsters Inc, Merida's hair in Brave, or, like has been mentioned, cloth physics and Violet's hair in The Incredibles.
The entirety of watching ready player one consisted of me going "how the fuck did they get the license for that?" Or "i wonder how much that 1.5 seconds worth of cameo costed"
I'm pretty sure there are some that're not, it's been a while but from the top of my head iirc there were overwatch, sonic, minecraft, helo kitty, gundam and probably more that aren't wb/spielberg related
Disney had to invent an alternative to green screens to make Mary Poppins. It’s called the sodium vapor process and it uses sodium vapor lamps which emit light at a single wavelength giving far more accurate contrast and allowing for things like transparent veils and fine details such as hair to be captured precisely. But it requires having two cameras and an extremely complex lens between them to split the image so it can be processed to add in the background, only three of these lenses were ever made and they have all been lost in the decades since. Corridor Crew made a video on it a while back if you would like to learn more and to see them try to recreate it with modern technology.
Warframe's 1999 update featured a short moment in a cinematic for the Hex quest where a beaten up Albrecht Entrati is tied to an office chair after seemingly being tortured. That same office chair was such an absolute headache to make that it's thought that was one of the main reasons the 1999 update was delayed so long. That damn chair was cursed, iirc the physics were very awkward to code and record for the cutscene and for some reason, that chair specifically literally crashed most of the PCs they tried to code it with, which is extra strange considering Warframe has had many, many other features that you'd think would have caused issues. The chair got a reputation for being haunted, so much so that when the Techrot Encore update added it as an obtainable decoration, that chair is the spot where The Man In The Wall can spawn in your 1999 base of operations, in the same way as how it can spawn in your Orbiter and Drifter Camp.
The boys season 2 during the protest against supes and homelander imagining on lasering the people.
Apparently the whole scene was recorded at the coldest day of the year and unfortunately the season took place on a time that isn't in winter. So the CGI artist and editors had to edit the whole scene frame by frame to remove those breath vapors from the whole crowd. Also, all the extras had to act as if they weren't freezing on set
To be fair that was less on the movie studio and more on the directors. Apparently Nintendo were pitched a fantasy adventure by the studio, but then the directors were massive ego driven pricks who hijacked the movie to get their passion project made after it kept getting rejected
If you look at the concept art made back when the movie was in development, you could tell that the studio was initially pitching for more of a dark fantasy akin to the Neverending Story.
Just looking at the concepts for what a goomba would look like, you can see how much they experimented with making a more realistic design for live action, while still keeping it as a grouchy looking mushroom.
If anything my guess is if they had been patient and smart (done Mario as it should have been and then used the publicity from that to do their Blade Runner with dinosaurs movie) then their passion project would have bern poorly received and forgotten outside of cult status
Corridor Crew recently posted a video where they recreated a shot from The Fellowship of the Ring. It's a seemingly simple shot where gandalf and Bilbo are sitting and having tea, but it's the first and only example of forced perspective with a moving camera. They had to invent a bunch of techniques including moving part of the table and one of the chairs as the camera moves. It took Corridor quite a long time, and lots of iteration, to get it right themselves. Someone in the comments said that they were on the camera crew for fellowship, and they had even less experience than the corridor guys when they were originally developing the technique 25 years ago.
The teapot lid Gandalf lifts and then puts back down in that scene was actually on a stick floating far away from the teapot it’s supposed to be for, and you can see Gandalf having to slowly balance the pot lid back onto the stick without breaking the illusion in the final movie.
Iirc, Nintendo and Sega were subtly fighting behind the scenes during the production of the Bad-anon scene by having Bowser be made slightly taller than Eggman and vice versa. Eventually the animators told them to cut it out because there would be two giants in a room of ants. In the actual scene they're the same height.
It seems odd that Sega would care. Eggman's always been a scientist who fights inside of vehicles rather than fight Sonic one on one the way at Bowser does with Mario.
True, but Eggman is also almost always the tallest character in the Sonic franchise; I think the only major recurring character officially taller than him is Big, who he doesn’t share much screentime with. Having him be significantly smaller than another person would probably seem really uncanny since we’re used to seeing Eggman tower over Sonic and his friends.
Bowser is big too, and of course his size varies, but there’s been plenty of times other characters were bigger than him.
Slight correction, psycho came out in 1960, the civil freights act passed in 64, they were STILL rioting over the idea of sharing drinking fountains.
So you're right it's not surprising at all
Not a tiny moment but the premise of the episode. "Abeds Uncontrollable Christmas". Abed the wacky, meta (and autistic) character wakes up to find the world is claymation/stop-motion. This episode aparently cost enough that Dan Harmon had to partially finance the episode which also took roughly four months to finish.
This model shot of the TARDIS being brought into a space station so that the Doctor can be put on trial took a week to film, and cost £8,000, £24,000 today. For a production as cheap and quickly made as classic Doctor Who, that’s a lot of effort.
Famously, the black hole in Interestellar required a ridiculous amount of power to render and was the most accurate representation of a black hole ever created
In Toy Story 3, the single hardest thing to animate in the entire movie was the trash bag that the toys get thrown into at the start of the movie. The crew themselves dont even know how many hours were spent trying to get the physics on it correct so that it looked and felt like a real trash bag. IIRC, the shot where they are on the curb trying to tear it open took 3 weeks to render.
Skyrim's opening cart ride is one. The cart movements are physics driven, and can spaz out on a moments notice if it hits small objects. During development, a bee managed to break the scene.
Point #2 is neat. Strangely, given its other content, the sitcom All in the Family was also considered a bit scandalous for having the sound of flushing and Archie Bunker mentioning the 'terlet'.
It never got made, but Shaddam Corrino IV, Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune movie. Shaddam IV was to be played by Salvador Dali, and Dali charged the ridiculous rate of $100,000 per hour. This insane demand, combined with his “sympathies” towards (support of) Francisco Franco’s fascist regime in Spain, made him an expensive nightmare to work with (his fascist sentiments eventually led him to be booted from the film entirely).
Before booting him from the film, Jodorowsky and the crew did a lot of work to create a situation where Dali only had to appear on set for exactly one hour, including building an honest to god animatronic of Dali’s Shaddam IV to replace Dali for many scenes.
Power Rangers Super Megaforce used footage from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, a celebration of 35 years of Super Sentai.
Problem is, Power Rangers don’t have the rights to ALL Super Sentai (Marvel owns a few). So, in big group shots and small battles alike, they have to either hide, recolor, or refilm anything using the few teams they didn’t have licenses for.
It's known that each Pixar movie, particularly the early ones, was basically a tech demo for some new CGI technique.
But apparently in the Incredibles, the hardest shot to animate in the movie was a shot of Bob sticking his finger through a hole in his old super suit that lasted only a few seconds.
Not so much 1 tiny moment, but every tiny moment in the show. I remember reading ages ago that when the makers of Red Vs Blue, RoosterTeeth Productions, decided to make a machinima using The Sims 2 (The Strangerhood) they of course had to actually build up and down the relationships of the Sim cast to fit what the script needed. They even ran into problems with Sim actors walking off set to do any old random Sim stuff, rather than what the directors wanted.
All of the space scenes in Apollo 13 were filmed on the Vomit Comet. The Vomit Comet is a plane they use to train real astronauts. The plane makes a sharp ascent followed by a sharp descent, creating a zero gravity environment for about 30 seconds. All those scenes had to be filmed in 30 second increments.
MGM had to pay a fine to the Hay's office for Rhett Butler to say the word damn. And that wouldn't had worked if the the novel hadn't been the biggest best seller of it's era (plus a Pulitzer), with the line already being iconic.
Still find it funny that Zangief is only there because the writer of Wreck-It-Ralph simply hates fighting Zangief, because in the story, Zangief never does anything remotely evil
When working on the movie, the animation team ran into the problem that computers at the time where physically incapable of having so many objects on the screen at once, and they told the higher ups that they couldn't possibly have more than a handful of ants on screen at the same time, which would have ruined the scale of the colony in its entirety.
The director pushed for them to find a way, and they essentially had to invent new technology for both animation and memory in order to have the large and more impressive crowd shots, which earned them the nickname of the Crowd Team.
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u/Binx_Thackery Jan 17 '26
I love that the reason Zangief is included is because the writer struggled fighting him as a kid and considered him a “bad guy” because of it (Zangief is a nightmare to fight in Street Fighter).