Every Frame, Every Fix, All at Once: The Silent Power of Invisible VFX
In every frame. Every fix. All at once.
Hey everyone,
We made a short video about video editors with AI superpowers. Check it out:
We know a lot of you are already using AI behind the scenes, whether it’s pulling selects, structuring a story, or punching up a rough cut. Because if you've spent any time in a real edit room, you know the truth: Great editors have always used tools. To clean things up, save time, tell better stories.
This week’s essay is about that exact tension. Not around AI, but VFX. The kind that doesn’t make the trailer. The kind you’re not supposed to notice.
We’re talking: cloned extras, erased reflections, fake snowstorms, CG breath. Prestige films that pride themselves on realism… but were practically built in post. It’s not deception, it’s design. And the more you look, the more you realize: every frame is a fix. Invisible VFX is the industry’s worst-kept secret. And just like the early days of AI, it got dismissed, mocked, and misunderstood, until it became the backbone of how movies get made.
That arc feels familiar. Because we’re at the start of the next one. Next week, we’re dropping another major update to Eddie. But for now, settle in for this one. It’s got Fincher, Glazer, and a whole lot of movie magic hiding in plain sight.
Let’s get into it,
—Shamir
What if we were to tell you that every major film released in cinemas today not only has some VFX but most likely a ton of it?
Once seen as the enemy of “real” filmmaking, top-tier VFX is now so seamless, you’d never know it was there.
It’s the silent workhorses of modern cinema. Not the cape-swirling, fireball-hurling kind that scream “blockbuster,” but the ghostly touch-ups that lurk in every frame: skies swapped out, blood digitally wiped, walls rebuilt, extras cloned, shadows erased.
Visual effects have quietly become the industry’s dirtiest open secret. Not because they’re shameful. But because nobody wants to talk about them. And yet, they’re everywhere. In every frame. Every fix. All at once.
The Secret Life of VFX
VFX had a branding problem.
VFX started as a tool to enhance practical effects but by the 2000s, studios realized they could skip the set entirely. Why blow up a car when you can simulate ten for half the cost?
Case in point:
Imagine you wanted to shoot the infamous sequence of Neo fighting 100 Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded. If you wanted to shoot that practically, you’d need 100 stunt doubles in identical suits and sunglasses, a camera rig that can track every punch and spin without tripping over itself, and weeks of choreo, rehearsal, and retakes. Not to mention a budget ballooning with every reset and injury waiver.
Or... you could build a digital playground.
That’s what the Wachowskis did. They scanned Hugo Weaving’s face, created CG stunt doubles, and choreographed the chaos in a 3D space where physics bent as easily as code.
But still, people called the VFX shitty.
For decades, VFX has been pigeonholed as the tool of excess: dragons, superheroes, alien invasions, bloated budgets.
Framed as the death of cinema’s soul. Practical = pure. Digital = fake.
This false binary hardened in the mid 2000s with the superhero blockbuster boom. But even then, prestige films were also quietly deploying VFX in surgical doses.
The directors just never led with it in interviews. Because subtlety doesn’t sell.
And no one wants to admit the emotional realism of their scene relied on digitally replacing a Starbucks sign or painting in a perfect dusk sky.
The Gospel of Control
Before (Still from Girl With Dragon Tattoo)
After (Still from Girl With Dragon Tattoo)
Fincher’s films The Social Network, Zodiac, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are masterclasses in invisible effects. Entire college rowing sequences were shot with green screens. Harvard never granted location access, so they made their own campus in pixels. Skies were color-graded. Snow simulated. Buildings extended. Even breath in cold air? CG.
Fincher gets what all great filmmakers do.
Filmmaking isn’t real and it never was. Chasing “reality” is a fool’s errand.
The job of a director isn’t to replicate our world, it’s to represent it. And sometimes, the cleanest, quietest, most truthful way to do that… is digital.
Digital breath. Digital buildings.
Even digital blood.
Zone of Interest: The Auschwitz Illusion
Before (Still from The Zone of Interest)
After (Still from The Zone of Interest)
Most recently, take The Zone of Interest. Jonathan Glazer’s hauntingly restrained portrait of domestic life beside Auschwitz.
An arthouse indie on the surface.
As grounded and austere as cinema gets. Critics hailed its documentary-like realism, use of natural light and sequences that play out completely in real time. Glazer even used 10 cinema cameras rolling simultaneously like reality TV to paint a picture of domestic life.
Only practical lights were used to enhance this sense of reality.
And yet, nearly every single frame was digitally altered.
Before (Still from The Zone of Interest)
After (Still from The Zone of Interest)
The perimeter walls, guard towers, and smoking chimneys were fully CG. The sky, reshaped. Shadows, curated.
What looked like cinema vérité is, in fact, heavily designed.
It’s the magic trick of our time: the most “real” film of 2023 was built on complete artifice.
VFX as Fix, Not Flash
VFX was never just for fantasy. It was a tool for control. And now, that reality is unavoidable because a kid with After Effects on a laptop can pull off shots today that would’ve cost studios millions two decades ago.
It’s a repair kit, an architect, a silent DP. Filmmakers use it to cover boom mics, add extras, correct weather, fake time of day.
In The Revenant, entire snowstorms were CG. In The King’s Speech, Westminster Abbey was built in post. In The Favourite, walls were extended and lighting enhanced. These are period pieces, prestige darlings and not popcorn CGI fests.
It’s not a cheat. It’s the evolution of filmmaking.
And it’s often thankless.
Enter AI: The Next Taboo
Now comes the new(ish) kid on the block: AI.
Depicted as soulless automation, a death to human creativity. But like VFX in its infancy, it’s already being used. Quietly. Artfully. Occasionally brilliantly.
Enter The Brutalist, the 2024 Best Picture nominee. Editor Dávid Jancsó let it slip that they used AI to tweak Adrien Brody’s Hungarian. Jancsó, a native speaker, blended his own voice with Brody’s and Felicity Jones’s via Respeecher, correcting linguistic stumbles that even months of dialect coaching couldn’t fix.
Predictably, purists panicked. Director Brady Corbet stepped in, clarifying this wasn’t automation gone rogue, it was the post equivalent of contouring.
But it didn’t stop there. Generative AI tools were also used to simulate the brutalist architecture of László Tóth, populating backgrounds with digital renderings.
Corbet summed it up: “There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot .”
And that’s the point. It’s efficient. The same way Fincher adds fog and removes pimples, The Brutalist used tech to serve the art, not smother it
The Quiet Future
Film AI seems to be following the same arc as VFX.
Mocked at first. Treated like a shortcut instead of a skill. But over time, it’ll be folded into the toolkit,less a threat and more a new mode of thinking.
Maybe it’ll start with rotoscoping and cleanup. Then dialogue smoothing. Then world-building. Maybe one day, even the dreaded assembly cut will get some digital assistance.
And like all invisible tools, it won’t scream when it’s working. It’ll whisper. It’ll support.
As another ghost in the frame, helping us all believe in the most beautiful lie ever told: cinema.