I don’t get to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button until Sunday (ahead of a February 6th release in the UK) but I’ve seen all of the clips and trailers and, frankly, find it all a bit funny looking. The first thing that comes to mind is the Orville Redenbacher Popcorn commercial David Fincher directed a couple of years back - presumably as a test bed for some of the tech he went on to call upon for Button. Obviously, the passage of time and an increased budget mean Button has far better fx, but there’s still something similarly uncanny in the results.

Word got around in the last 24 hours about The Science Behind the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a site that reveals how the many FX in the film were conceived and accomplished.

I’d guess the site has been designed and built to let members of the Academy in on these secrets (well, to an extent), the better to secure their votes. The site is password protected and, unfortunately, the password just now appears to have been locked, to stop us many non-voters using up bandwidth, perhaps. All is not lost, however, as Rope of Silicon have embedded one of the site’s videos.

The site username was sfx, the password was buttonsbuttons but, now… I’m still looking for a new set of credentials. When you beat me to them, please share into the comments. They will come to light at some point - these things always do.

The Huffington Post recently recorded a video interview Steve Preeg of Digital Domain, who handled the CG Benjamin, and he gave a very concise, clean explanation of the basic techniques employed. The clip also contains a visual demonstration not unlike those featured on the promo site.