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

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.