Film: Astonishing look at The Great Gatsby before and after VFX work

Date
9 July 2013

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At the risk of sounding like a little girl who has just discovered that (spoiler alert!) Father Christmas isn’t real, this short released by Chris Godfrey, the VFX supervisor on Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, has my jaw hanging open and dribbling slowly with incredulity.

The film shows how the set looked before and after VFX work was added to the shots, revealing how the art deco palaces, stunning sunsets and towering New York skylines were conjured out of a sea of green screens and blue sheeting, and then manipulated to make happily bewitched viewers like myself believe that they were real. Set design fanatics should also check out the comments section for detailed explanations from Chris as to how the unbelievable effects were achieved; the amount of work that has gone into shaping the film into the VFX masterpiece it turned out to be is absolutely staggering. If you can watch the clip without pausing, rewinding, skipping and rewatching then you’re far wiser to the wonders of movie-making than I.

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The Great Gatsby: Before and After (still)

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The Great Gatsby: Before and After (still)

Above

The Great Gatsby: Before and After (still)

Above

The Great Gatsby: Before and After (still)

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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