A closer look
Hollywood spends hundreds of millions on state-of-the-art camera setups, only to pay VFX artists even more money to make the footage look like absolute garbage. To ensure the giant CGI monster in Cloverfield felt like it was genuinely filmed on a $300 Best Buy camcorder, artists didn't just add generic camera shake. They painstakingly mapped digital dust specks onto the virtual lens, programmed micro-stutters into the auto-focus algorithm, and artificially forced blown-out lens flares whenever explosions happened, tricking the brain into accepting a digital kaiju as a grounded, amateur reality.
