An Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor picks the 5 movies that floored him visually

http://ted.com/talks/view/id/1524

Most people get into visual effects for the explosions. But not Robert Legato, the visual effects supervisor of Avatar and The Aviator, who also won Oscars for his work on Titanic and Hugo.

“Everything I end up liking is outrageously simple,” Robert tells the TED Blog.

In this thrilling talk given at TEDGlobal 2012, Legato shares how he created the launch scene ofApollo 13 “in a parking lot with a tin can …  and fire extinguishers.”

“If you believed any of the stuff that I just showed you, what you were emoting to is something that’s a total falsehood,” Robert says in the talk. “I find that really kind of fascinating.”

In his talk, Robert also describes creating effects for Titanic, which made use of real footage of the ruins of the ill-fated ship along with effects filling in the gaps. He also shows how he created the scene in Hugo where Sacha Baron Cohen’s leg brace gets caught on a train, by moving the platform rather than the train itself.

Robert tells the TED Blog that he loves the challenge of creating effects based on historical moments, partly because they give him a sense of being connected to people in the past.

“Shooting Titanic, it was a creepy feeling to look through the camera, tune out all the things happening on set, and see people diving off the ship into the water to save their lives. It’s something that only our crew and the people on the Titanic saw that day in real life,” Robert says, adding that he felt something similar while filming the scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts’ capsule parachutes to safety. “Only a couple people on the planet have witnessed the live image of a Saturn 5 capsule in the eyepiece of their cameras and photographed it splashing down.”

Robert is continuing his tradition of amplifying historical moments. He is currently on location in New York, preparing to shoot The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese. But Robert still took a few minutes to share with you the five movies whose visual effects floored him … in their simplicity.

(This post was copied directly from here – TED Blog)