15 Movies That Said "To Hell With CGI" And Used Fascinating Movie Effects The Old School Way

Here's a fun fact: both halves of "Barbenheimer" have really cool scenes in them WITHOUT using CGI.

1. In Barbie, the traveling sequences resorted to some old-school filming techniques with pulley systems, cellophane, and conveyor belts.

@barbiethemovie / Via Twitter: @barbiethemovie

2.Oppenheimer's special effects artist, Scott R. Fisher, told Total Film Magazine that the explosion of the atomic bombs was all practical filmmaking. "It's mostly gasoline, propane, any of that kind of stuff, because you get so much bang for your buck. But then we also bring in stuff like aluminum powder and magnesium to really enhance the brightness, and give it a certain look ... We did a bit of that on this, because we really wanted everyone to talk about that flash, that brightness. So we tried to replicate that as much as we could."

These got me wondering what other scenes in movies look like CGI but aren't. Luckily, I found a thread on Quora asking the same question, so here are 13 other impressive examples of practical effects.

3.The text at the beginning of Star Wars that sets up the movie was filmed with a camera gracefully scrolling down printed text.

4.The "barrel of monkeys" rescue scene from Iron Man 3 was not CGI. Instead, Marvel enlisted Red Bull's Skydiving Team to play the civilians and Iron Man, as well as act as the camera operator. The team did between 50–60 jumps from about 12,000 feet to get the sequence down.

5.While on the subject of superheroes, it took Tobey Maguire 156 attempts and zero CGI to catch all of the items on Mary Jane's lunch tray in Spider-Man.

6.The Lord of the Rings used forced perspective to create the height differences in the movie.

7. Director Jon Favreau tweeted the entire rest of the film was CGI except for the very first frame in the live-action remake of The Lion King, which was actually photographed in Africa.

@jon_favreau / Via Twitter: @Jon_Favreau

8.The hallway fight scene in Inception was practical magic where they created a replica of the hallway in a rotating drum, the actors fought in the rotating drum, and a camera was mounted and rotating in synchronization.

9.The Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey was all practical effects. A 30-foot by 30-foot machine was made to control the long exposure shots of colored lights. The person responsible for the sequence, Douglas Trumbull, said, "We just kept shooting. We had this slit-scan machine running 24 hours a day for months to produce that sequence."

10.The Stay-Puft Marshmallow scene in Ghostbusters was practical. An actor in a Stay-Puft suit with a rigged head to create multiple facial expressions waddled down a 1/18 replica of NYC. The VFX artist said 1/18 was such an uncommon scale, they had a hard time finding models for it. Finally, he came across a police car at Toys 'R' Us that was the right measurements, bought all of those cars around Toys 'R' Us stores in Southern California, and refinished those police cars into civilian cars, fire trucks, and emergency vehicles for the scene.

11.Sigourney Weaver made the basket in Alien: Resurrection on the first take. No movie magic was used. Ron Pearlman said she had been practicing and practicing the take but had never made it until the first time the cameras were rolling.

12.The transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London was all done with makeup. It took actor David Naughton 10 hours a day for six days to get the makeup on. Rightfully, it won the 1982 Oscar for Best Makeup.

13.While most of the film used CGI, arguably the most memorable scene in Jurassic Park used a 9,000-pound animatronic T. Rex. The robot took 16 weeks and three tons of clay to make.

14.In Escape From New York, the wireframes displayed aren't computer-generated. Instead, models of New York were made in all black and the edges were outlined in white paint. The footage was then shot and colorized.

15.Lastly, in Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock's steel tentacles were controlled by engineers and puppeteers!

Have you seen any movies with impressive practical effects? Tell us in the comments below!