Visual Effects
Visual Effects, or VFX for short, are image elements in films, series, or advertising that did not exist in front of the camera but are created afterward on a computer and inserted into the shot. Today, AI programs are increasingly taking over work steps that used to cost weeks of manual labor.
Visual Effects are all parts of a film image that did not really stand in front of the camera. A dragon, a destroyed city, or a spaceship are built on a computer and rendered into the filmed scene. Inconspicuous things belong here too: a removed electrical box, a different sky, a deleted camera rig. The English term has become established internationally, abbreviated as VFX. It is important to distinguish this from so-called practical effects, which are created directly on set: a real explosion, a silicone mask, a model car on wires. Visual Effects, by contrast, are only created after filming, in post-production.
Why a billion-dollar market depends on it
Big blockbuster films are hardly conceivable without VFX these days. A superhero film often contains more than 2000 individual effects shots, and a considerable part of the budget flows into their production. The reason is simple: digitally destroying a city is cheaper and safer than actually blowing it up.
For the film industry, VFX is also a planning tool. If weather, daylight, or a location don’t fit, much can be corrected later. This shifts costs from filming to post-production. At the same time, it creates pressure: studios calculate tight schedules, and effects companies often work with very slim profit margins.
For a few years now, a second topic has been added. Programs that can generate images and videos themselves are reaching right into the middle of this business. For investors and observers, VFX is therefore a good example of how AI is reshaping an entire industry. At the same time, streaming providers are producing more series than ever before, which further increases demand for effects.
From the filmed image to the finished dragon
The process almost always follows the same steps. First, filming happens, often in front of a green or blue wall. This surface can be reliably removed by computer because its color does not otherwise appear anywhere in the image. This is called keying. What remains is the actor, cut out against an empty background.
After that, the software needs to know how the camera moved. In so-called tracking, it analyzes distinctive points in the image and reconstructs the camera’s path through space from them. Only this way does the inserted dragon move exactly along with it. In parallel, the digital object itself is created: a wireframe model, a surface on top of it, plus an animation. A computing process called rendering turns this into finished images with light and shadow.
In the end, compositing brings all layers together: live-action footage, digital object, smoke, color correction. This is exactly where AI comes in today. Neural networks, meaning programs capable of learning, can cut out people without a green screen, age faces, or fill in missing parts of an image. A common misconception is that AI delivers the whole effect at the push of a button. In practice, it speeds up individual work steps, while control remains with the team.
Where VFX show up in everyday life
They are most visible in cinema and series. Almost every major production lists several effects companies in the credits, often from Canada, India, New Zealand, or the United Kingdom. Advertising spots, too, often consist largely of digital images, for instance when a car drives through a landscape that doesn’t actually exist.
On a smaller scale, you encounter the same techniques on your phone. The filters in video apps separate your face from the background and overlay objects on top. This is technically related to keying and tracking in cinema, just in real time and with less precision. The blurred background in video calls also belongs to this family.
In the news, the term currently comes up mainly in the dispute over AI. It concerns jobs, digital replicas of actors, and the question of whose images an AI was allowed to use for training. The 2023 Hollywood actors' strike was partly about exactly this. Related, but not the same, is the term deepfake: there too, faces are digitally replaced, but usually without consent and with intent to deceive.