1917: Best Visual Effects?

So, I was discussing the Oscar winners with one of my friends today and it was going all smooth until the guy said, “Did 1917 even have any CGI to win the best visual effects?” Well I am sure you must have been wondering about 1917’s win over CGI giants like TROS and Endgame. Visual effects are the only category where commercial giants can compete toe-to -toe with the ‘high class’ or the less commercial movies. So, what was there in 1917 which got it an Oscar in best visual effects for having almost negligible CGI as compared to the almost realistic Hulk and Thanos in Endgame or the de-aged gangsters in The Irishman? Well, 1917 won an Oscar not for having the best visual effects but for the best usage of those visual effects.

The best thing about the movie is that it is shot and edited in such a way that the whole movie looks like a single shot which gives you the war experience in real time, now shooting the whole movie in a single take with all the commendable work done by Roger Deakins going perfectly fine wouldn’t have been possible, so the movie was obviously shot in multiple takes. But how these different shots are made to look like a single shot? This is where CGI came into play and in fact played a major role in it.

There are several instances when the scene gets cut and a new scene starts without us even noticing for example when Schofield and Blake go into the dark bunker or when Schofield jumps over the ledge into the river while escaping from the burning town. This is because the scenes are stitched together in a very subtle manner. This technique has been seen in movies like Rope (by Alfred Hitchcock) or in Birdman. Whenever a character walks behind a tree or a dark object or whenever the object covers the whole screen, a cut takes place and CGI is used to generate computer images of the object and hide the transition. For example, the scene in which Schofield jumps into the river, he actually jumps onto a blue mat with no water around it, the water is added post-production with the help of CGI and the cut which takes place is very cleverly hidden in through CGI. This same technique has been used several times in the movie and while some of them are for explicit, some of them go unnoticed.

There have been some conventional uses of CGI in the movie as well like the plane crashing scene or the bomb craters in the climax run. But the use of CGI in between the cuts made the ‘oner’ possible in a movie in which the longest single take was only 9 minutes long! All in all, 1917 is a sheer example of good editing going hand to hand with excellent sound mixing and cinematography which proves that good CGI is not all Thanos or The Totuk Makto in Avatar it is something more subtle and unnoticed and plays a major role in places we don’t even recognize.