20 Movie Scenes We Had No Idea Used CGI

This might come as a surprise to you, but that office chair you’re sitting in? That’s CGI. Weird, uh? You would think the fifth-dimensional hyper-sprites could have just given you a normal chair instead of adding it in post, but who knows, they’re probably perfectionists or something. Similarly, sometimes movies also use inconspicuous digitally-constructed images to achieve the exact shots that they need, and we can’t even tell. After all, CGI usually calls attention to itself precisely because it is used to achieve impossible images, right?

In this Pictofact, we take a look at a bunch of examples of CGI that we didn’t even know were CGI. We’ve studied scenes that seemed like CGI but weren’t and awesome CGI-like effects from the pre-CGI era. We’ve also giggled at how goofy CGI-heavy scenes look without it, and we’ve even cried looking at cases of awful digital effects. That was traumatic. Here, though, we focus on realistic, non-flashy CGI that in another dimension could have easily just been practical effects. In that dimension your chair would also be real, but now that we say it that just sounds strange. Seriously, take a look at the wheels. That is just hurried compositing, sorry. FX workers of the world, unite!