What Great Shows Look Like Before Special And Visual Effects

We don't always talk enough about visual effects when we talk about the components that make up a great film or television series. Quality writing, acting, cinematography, and production design are essential and mutually complementary, of course. But the realm of VFX is equally crucial in the way that it simultaneously informs and is informed by those other disciplines, often constituting the key ingredient that allows a scene or a shot to accomplish its goal — whether that goal is steeped in authenticity, scariness, wonder, tension, or surrealism.

In that sense, comparing the before and after of shots featuring computer generated imagery (CGI) and effects can be highly instructional. Thanks to the showcase reels released by many VFX studios and behind-the-scenes featurettes, it's possible to get a side-by-side glimpse at what several great TV shows look like prior to the addition of digital effects. The comparisons are sometimes amusing, sometimes revelatory, sometimes unbelievable, and always a testament to what resourceful, inventive, and indispensable professionals VFX artists are. Here are some great examples of what some of your favorite TV shows like "Game of Thrones," "Orphan Black," "Westworld," "The Boys," and more looked like before VFX.

The interplanetary conspiracy plot of SyFy and Prime Video's "The Expanse" was given a frightful charge towards the end of Season 2 by the introduction of the protomolecular creatures known as "hybrids." Created by kidnapping children and infecting them with protomolecules, the hybrids were the most terrifying outgrowth of Project Caliban's effort to bend the discovery of the protomolecule to political and economic human interests.

Although they were originally children, the creatures — some standing as tall as 9 ft — were decidedly not childlike in appearance. In fact, to bring them to life, the show had adult performers create their movements while wearing motion capture suits, as revealed in a Spin VFX reel. Those movements were then translated into the hybrids' grotesque physical presence and nightmarish body language via CGI animation. Watching the show, you'd never guess that those moves came from an actual human being — which goes to showing how enormously talented and deeply under-appreciated motion capture performers are.

HBO's wildly imaginative and unorthodox "Watchmen" series, at once a sequel and a reimagining of the original Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comics, had a tough act to follow when it came to masks. The ever-shifting inkblot mask worn by Rorschach in the comics is, after all, among the most iconic superhero visuals of all time. Given that Rorschach himself is absent from the show, with the mask appearing only over the faces of the white supremacist Seventh Kalvary cult members inspired by his writings, expectations for an equally striking new vizard seemed even harder to meet. But they were met, and then some, thanks to Looking Glass.

The costumed alias of Tulsa police officer Wade Tillman (Tim Blake Nelson), Looking Glass wore a reflective mask that covered his entire head, making him look, by turns, like a walking mirror and a smudge of empty space. The vast majority of the mask's appearances were achieved with CGI. Although there was a real-life silver lamé mask available on set, it was used sparingly because Nelson couldn't see through it (via Polygon). Plus, a MARZ VFX reel reveals that, for one particular shot in which Tillman rolls up the mask, Nelson wore a black-and-white balaclava with a special motion tracking pattern and transparent mesh over his eyes. The mask and some of the character's face were then animated digitally in post-production.

A lot of the unique magic that made BBC America's "Orphan Black" an overachieving cult favorite among sci-fi buffs came from the coexistence of the various Project Leda clones. It was staggering enough to watch Tatiana Maslany completely transform her voice, face, and body language in order to inhabit each specific clone, sometimes convincingly playing clones giving performances as other clones. But things got even more impressive when two or more clones appeared simultaneously in the same shot.

Many such shots were pulled off by having Maslany interact with acting double Kathryn Alexandre, who was then replaced by Maslany's other performance(s) via digital compositing in carefully motion-controlled shots. For more static shots, meanwhile, the VFX crew sometimes used a simpler technique: They simply placed tennis balls on tripods corresponding to the key locations where either clone would be, and then had Maslany "interact" with the tennis balls. One particular shot of Sarah slapping Rachel, as seen in the Intelligent Creatures VFX reel, is especially amusing to watch in its unfinished form. Acting opposite a double is one thing, but convincingly playing off of a tennis ball? There's really nothing Maslany can't do.

"Metalhead" was different from most episodes of "Black Mirror" for a lot of reasons. With its stark black-and-white cinematography, in-media-res opening, sparse world-building, and bare-bones plot, it often felt more like a survival horror tale than the kind of elaborate sci-fi parable the show was used to offering up. None of that grittiness would have been possible, of course, if the killer robots that drove the plot weren't completely believable as heavy, clunking hunks of metal wandering in search of their next victim. So it may surprise some people to learn that all of the robots were 100% CGI.

A DNEG VFX reel showcases all the complex animation that went into creating the robots, which needed to feel at once highly artificial and highly real, with movements both mechanical and scarily forceful. Their weathered and slightly reflective metal surfaces, meanwhile, required several layers of careful rendering in order to blend seamlessly into the episode's realistic ambience.

If you think USA Network's "Mr. Robot," with its nose-to-the-ground tale of relatable tech paranoia and socioeconomic turmoil against the backdrop of a hacker revolution, was not the kind of show to feature CGI heavily and significantly, think again. Like many of the technical features that made the show great, the VFX work was discreet enough to be almost imperceptible to the untrained eye, yet it was still very much there.

Cinematography buffs may well pick up on the trickery just from watching the series, but for those that don't, a reel by FuseFX showcases the digital compositing that made Sam Esmail's incredibly elaborate camera movements possible. On the fifth episode of Season 3, "eps3.4_runtime-error.r00," special care was required in order to make the whole 45-minute episode look like a single unbroken shot. 

In a scene that follows Angela (Portia Doubleday) overhead as she walks to the edge of the E Corp office, with the camera slipping past the building's outer wall, the view we get of outside was constructed with CGI, while Doubleday herself was merely standing to one side of a tracking-marked studio wall. It's a shining example of a complex visual effect that may not have been "necessary" from a pure narrative standpoint — the camera could just as well have stayed with Angela inside the building — but still proves indispensable to Esmail's free-flowing visual concept.

Mike Flanagan's horror series have been among the few Netflix original productions to retain a sense of texture and unique style unblemished by house rules for standardized visual grammar. Although reception to each of Flanagan's five creations for the streamer has varied, they've all been acclaimed for their aesthetic panache, and particularly for the ease with which Flanagan manages, as director, to make their terrifying supernatural elements feel grounded and believable. Just look at his use of VFX on "The Haunting of Hill House."

The paranormal events taking place in the titular mansion were largely accomplished through CGI animation, but you might not even guess just from watching the show, as the technology's deployments are subtle and quite realistic. Several of the hallucinations involving bodily disfigurement experienced by the Crain siblings in the finale, in particular, look real enough to pass as makeup effects, but a SPIN VFX reel reveals that they were largely digital creations. For the scene in which Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) claws out her eyes and tears uglily at her own face, Reaser had to mimic the actual motion of clawing off her face, and the shot was then rendered via CG into its final nightmarish version.

The depiction of major United States cities ravaged by the apocalypse was among the elements of "The Last of Us" that fans were most eager to see translated from game to series. Sure enough, HBO's adaptation delivered mightily on that front, using its ample budget to impart a genuine sense of scale to its destruction. Particularly impressive are the scenes that find Joel (Pedro Pascal), Tess (Anna Torv), and Ellie (Bella Ramsay) making their way through a derelict Boston in "Infected," the first season's second episode. While those scenes weren't actually shot in Boston, they still let their real-life location do a lot of the legwork.

The city standing in for Boston on the episode is Edmonton, the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta. A VFX reel by DNEG reveals that Edmonton's cityscape was shrewdly integrated into that monumental mayhem design. In one especially memorable shot, which finds Ellie looking up at two dilapidated skyscrapers that have collided and merged into each other, Ramsay was actually looking at Manulife Place, a notorious high-rise in downtown Edmonton. The reel also reveals that all the iconic Boston buildings and structures seen throughout the episode were added in post-production. It was sterling design and VFX work by any measure, but given how well-known buildings like Manulife Place are, Edmonton residents might have had a little trouble suspending their disbelief.

One of the most underrated horror series of the 21st century, AMC's "The Terror" came out of the gate swinging in 2018 with a season set in the icy, deadly waters of the Arctic. Originally intended as a miniseries, before season 2 took on an anthology format, the season chronicles the infamous 19th-century lost expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds) and his subordinates, most notably Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris), as they attempt to successfully cross the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific for the first time. It's the kind of stunningly immersive and atmospheric series that can make you feel as though you're actually stranded on a ship in the Arctic ice, freezing and starving and going insane along with the crewmates. In what's sure to be a shocking production tidbit for anyone who's experienced the show, none of it whatsoever was shot on location.

The Arctic-set scenes in "The Terror" were actually shot on a massive soundstage in Budapest, Hungary (via IndieWire), and it was up to the visual effects crew to create the show's striking setting. As revealed in a UPP reel, the majority of what we see in "The Terror," from the ice caps to the water to the ships seen from afar, was animated with CGI. For scenes featuring the actors, scenic ships were placed amid green screens, and environments were added in post-production.

The character of Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) himself was largely a practical effect on Netflix's "Stranger Things." To embody him, Bower underwent prosthetic makeup sessions as long as eight hours, and the characterization was then enhanced digitally. Vecna's victims, meanwhile, were primarily a feat of CGI.

To animate the sequences in which the psychic monster slays his victims by twisting and breaking their bodies, digital models of the victims' actors were created. Those models were then matched to the actors via performance capture, allowing them to retain key expressive elements of the performances in question even as CGI artists put them through grotesque distortions. In a VFX reel by RodeoFX, actress Tyner Rushing, who played Virginia Creel, is shown to have had tracking dots marked on her face for Virginia's death scene.

Considering how much time and effort it took to properly characterize even one single "The Walking Dead" performer as a zombie, it should come as no surprise that the series used human extras sparingly in scenes that would call for lots of them. But fans of the show still might not be quite aware of how many zombies in the show's crowd shots were created with CGI.

As early as the pilot, the AMC hit series was already using CGI animation to create its trademark shocking imagery of entire cities overrun with zombies. A Stargate Studios VFX reel reveals that, for the pilot's infamous closing shot, an aerial take of a street corner in Atlanta that's swarming with walkers, just a few dozen live performers on a practical street set surrounded by green screens were used. The rest of the environment, from the streets to the buildings to the hundreds of surrounding zombies, was all digital animation.

The second season of Hulu's "Castle Rock" borrowed the character of Annie Wilkes from Stephen King's bibliography. But instead of adapting "Misery," the season peers into another chapter of Annie's life, following her (played by Lizzy Caplan) and her daughter Joy (Elsie Fisher) as they find themselves stranded in Castle Rock, Maine. On the first episode, Annie kills John "Ace" Merrill (Paul Sparks) to protect Joy, and then she goes to the construction site of Abdi Howlwadaag's (Barkhad Abdi) future shopping mall to dispose of the body.

It's there that Annie nearly falls to her death when a chasm opens on the ground, swallowing Ace's body and leaving Annie hanging on to the edge. Although scenes involving such steep falls usually don't involve placing the actors at significant heights, a Fuse FX reel shows that the shooting of that scene went for additional authenticity — as well as a more organic sense of visual geography for the CGI artists to work of off — by having Caplan hang over a gree-screen-covered safety mattress several yards below her.

The two-part series finale of Showtime's "Penny Dreadful" is among the most controversial that television has seen in years, thanks to its unexpected abruptness and what some fans perceived as a lack of emotional resolution. Be that as it may, it's still a work of great visual refinement, and one shot early in the episode is a testament to that.

On the first part of the finale, titled "Perpetual Night," we find London engulfed by darkness, its air filled with poisonous fog, its streets deserted and littered with rats and vampires. This macabre state of affairs is introduced in the early scene that sees Florence Seward (Patti LuPone) get into a scuffle with Renfield (Samuel Barnett) in her office, and then she learns that there are frogs crawling up through the drain of her sink. Although most elements in the shot are CGI — including the sink and the majority of the frogs — some real frogs were filmed crawling out of a drain in a blue chroma-coated sink to make up the central portion of the composition, as seen in a MR. X reel. The liveliness and authenticity of the real frogs makes the imagery that much realer, and that much more skin-crawling — exactly the kind of attention to detail that made the show so consistently great.