Think big-budget Hollywood films like the new Spiderman film are the only ones using tons of visual effects? Wrong! Even some of the smallest indie films can use mountains of CGI to do things that would either be dangerous or difficult to shoot more than once, or to enhance whatever on-set effect they were trying to pull off. In this fantastic VFX breakdown from Nordisk Film Shortcut (Martin Madsen was the VFX Supervisor), go behind the scenes of Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives and see just some of the many visual effects that were necessary to pull off the final vision, including removing dolly track and adding all sorts of blood and bullet hole effects.

This is most certainly not for the squeamish, as there are plenty of blood effects and brutal sword cuts:


The removal of dolly track and replacing floors and walls is probably something you wouldn't expect in a movie that reportedly only cost about $5 million dollars, but they did a ton of it in the film. Plenty of low-budget films do lots of little effects, like removing telephone poles or getting rid of cars in the background, and this film was no different. Like with any film, the best effects are the ones you don't notice as being fake, and Only God Forgives has a ton that I would never have thought for a second were actually CGI.

This is Nordisk's VFX Showreel from 2013:

Here is the NSFW Red Band trailer for the film:

If you've seen the film, The Film Stage also shared their thoughts on the film. Here is that podcast:

Links:

[via The Film Stage]