Much has been made about Mad Max: Fury Road and the film’s reliance on practical effects. Director George Miller has even said that 90% of the film is practical effects, an almost remarkable achievement for a big-budget summer action movie. But, just because the movie is mostly practical effects, there were still over 2000 visual effects shots used to accentuate what was done on set.

Australian FX studio Iloura worked alongside Method Studios and BlackGinger worked extensively to make what Miller shot on set in Namibia look ever better on screen. Says visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson:

I’ve been joking recently about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt driven film [...] The reality is that there’s 2000 VFX shots in the film. A very large number of those shots are very simple clean-ups and fixes and wire removals and painting out tire tracks from previous shots, but there are a big number of big VFX shots as well.

One of those scenes was the big desert sandstorm that Furiosa and the caravan chasing her drive into in the beginning of the film. Even though the majority of that scene could’ve been created inside a computer (and on most other films, it would’ve been), Miller still wanted to shoot the vehicles driving to keep the scene grounded with realistic camera movements.

In the gallery above you can take a look at some dramatic before and after shots from the movie that highlight how Miller and his team used computer-generated visual effects in the finished film. This should in no way reduce any of the enthusiasm or celebration of the film’s reliance on practical effects. What you see here is still very much a minor part of the film, especially considering the insanity you see on screen.

For even more on Mad Max: Fury Road, you can see more images here at FX Guide, which gets into some technical details on how these shots were created.

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