We Spent 100 Days Recreating OPPENHEIMER without any CGI. Felipe and Michelle recreate the entire explosion scene or bomb scene (trinity test) from the Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, using practical effects only. The cinematography in this scene was particularly challenging to recreate due to the multiple lighting changes, and the fact that we don’t own a high speed camera. Also, Nolan and his director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema shot mostly on Imax, with lenses that were specifically crafted for this biopic: an expensive format that we don’t have access to. In order to recreate the Trinity Test shots, we had to build a bunker set from scratch, a miniature Los Alamos, and test multiple different chemical reactions to film the bomb at different frame rates. At the end, due to our budgetary constraints, we had to use color correction, some masks while editing in post-production in order to match every frame: but everything you see was achieved in Premiere Pro only without any VFX or CGI.

We spent 5 MONTHS recreating Oscar-winning films. For this cinematography challenge on a budget, Felipe and Michelle remake 100 years of Academy Award winning films, starting with the 2016 modern musical La La Land, directed by Damien Chazelle and starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. The scene is a complex one take shot that takes place towards the end of the movie, involving a dramatic change from silhouette to spotlight, that we achieved through DMX and a 4-axis camera movement similar to the one we recreated for The Batman Riddler's coffee shot, using a slider on top of a conventional dolly. The second film is Titanic, choosing a scene with a monochromatic color palette, where Jack sinks and Rose doesn't share the door with him. We wanted to match the tone without any color grading, so we used one LED light set to blue as our "moon" and a slider to create a camera trick for the sinking shot. The last film is Casablanca, a classic black and white film from 1942, and we wanted to see if we could achieve the iconic film noir look using modern cameras.

We Spent 65 Days Recreating Avatar WITHOUT Any CGI. We Tried To Recreate AVATAR Without Any CGI. We (fIlmmakers Felipe and Michelle) jumped on our hardest cinematography challenge yet...we tried to film James Cameron's Avatar (the way of water) without any VFX, no CGI, nothing! Everything must be achieved through practical effects and in LIVE ACTION. So we chose two different shots. The first one was a close up of Neytiri, so Michelle had to do Na'vi cosplay without any prior experience in special effects makeup. Then we built a set at home that was supposed to look like Pandora, and with a slider, we managed to pull something kind of decent (not really). For the second shot, we chose one of the most famous images in this movie, when a Tulkun is holding Lo'ak (Jake Sully's son) hand underwater. This was incredibly hard to replicate because we had to use miniatures, and a giant fishtank to place our cameras underneath. Then, in post-production, we had to do a lot of color correction and we did add some live action water texture, because the ocean current was simple not there....in a fishtank.

We Spent 150 Days Recreating THE BATMAN. So in this episode of filming movies with zero budget, filmmakers Felipe and Michelle try to produce an entire scene of The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, with less than $300. The cinematography in the Riddler's coffee cup scene is particularly difficult to achieve because there's a 4 axis camera movement that requires expensive equipment that we don't own. But with some patience, a lot of video editing in Premiere Pro, doing some color correction in Davinci and stabilizing in After Effects and Blender, we managed to deliver somewhat of a decent shot! and we only used a slider and a dolly!