What I Am Legend Looks Like Without Special Effects

"I Am Legend" was a veritable hit in theaters when it came out in 2007, a sci-fi thriller that captured the minds of critics and audiences alike. This high-budget post-apocalyptic action movie stars Will Smith as Robert Neville, the last man on Earth. With star power like that, the movie drew in crowds but they also came for other reasons than Smith at the height of his career. Specifically, one of the biggest attractions of "I Am Legend" at the time was its special effects. They don't all hold up as well today, but it's safe to say "I Am Legend" wouldn't have worked without its special effects.

Behind-the-scenes footage and DVD extras give us insight into how the filmmakers created the world of "I Am Legend." In a two-pronged approach that involved shooting on location in New York City and adding extensive CGI to many of the scenes, the filmmakers devised a convincing overgrown post-apocalypse 15 years before HBO's "The Last of Us." The creatures that roam the abandoned city, known as Darkseekers, were fully CG, and other scenes were greatly altered in unexpected ways via the use of VFX.

"I Am Legend" ambitiously stretched the limits of VFX in 2007. So, we thought it would be fun to see what the movie looks like without them.

In an early "I Am Legend" sequence, Neville takes a joyride in his Mustang through the wreckage of the city. This sequence demonstrates immediately how this is not the congested, rush-hour traffic of New York City that we usually see. The former metropolis is wide open country now, a reality also suggested by the overgrowth and destruction we glimpse piled up in and around Neville's surroundings.

This section culminates in a stunt where Neville swerves to avoid some deer crossing the road. According to Warner Bros. UK's The Making of "I Am Legend," this ranked as one of the most complicated sections of the film to make. First, they needed to clear large sections of Manhattan according to the city's guidelines. Then, in order to capture Smith in the shots without relying upon a blue screen, the filmmakers used an (at-the-time) technologically advanced setup which involved a stunt driver controlling the car from an attached pod with the actor in the front seat.

As you notice from the photo above, this then required heavy CGI work to remove the equipment planted on the car. That is to say nothing of all the other VFX needed to transfer this sequence into the world of "I Am Legend."

Entering Times Square in "I Am Legend" marks the moment when viewers sense the scope of the damage the unleashed virus caused. The busiest part of the city that never sleeps looks utterly abandoned. Eerie stuff, and it sets the stage for everything to come throughout the rest of the film. Then, when Neville creeps through the grass while approaching the overgrown Times Square, we get to see the time capsule created by the apocalypse.

The Times Square on view here didn't exist. Despite shooting in New York City for a good while, the "I Am Legend" production could not clear Times Square for these sequences, so they were shot instead on a soundstage, which allowed for a controlled environment. Practical effects and props brought the tall grass and some cars to life, but the team relied on digital effects for everything else. 

We consider that some mighty impressive stuff — for the most part — for 2007.

This might not come as a huge surprise if you've seen the movie lately, or could claim a discerning eye for CGI back in 2007. One of the more noticeable bits of visual rendering, especially watching "I Am Legend" today, must be the animals. Even though humanity is all but wiped out, a number of animals continue to live in nature. 

The film's deer, in particular, look like CGI animals... because they are. In one early sequence that accentuates the problem, we watch them run in a large pack. Seeing many of the same animal, and not just one, tends to bring out the "uncanny valley" effect in "I Am Legend." 

The one exception to this rule: Neville's dog Sam, played by canine actors named Abbey and Kona. The rest of the movie's infected dogs in the movie were added in digitally, although for scenes where Smith interacted with them, a puppet helped elicit a physical reaction from him. More on that later.  

In the opening of "I Am Legend," director Francis Lawrence treats us to a bird's eye view of Manhattan. This represents just one of many establishing shots that help illustrate the decay and breakdown of the world since the outbreak three years before the movie takes place. VFX artists handled pretty much all of that hard work. In total, Sony Pictures Imageworks delivered more than 800 visual effects shots.

In order to make Manhattan appear convincingly lifeless and worn, the "I Am Legend" VFX team added broken windows, collapsed rubble, and overgrown plants to exterior shots of the city. This angle is a great example of how all signs of life in the original shots needed to be taken out. This meant cars, pedestrians, birds, and, well, you name it. 

In this comparison, especially, you can see all the little, intricate bits of movie magic that needed to be done to clean (or more often than not dirty) up the frames. Vegetation is added and it spreads out over the street. These effects combine with the darker, moodier color palette to complete an image that feels completely different from what the camera initially captured. 

Behold another remarkable CGI shot from the film's establishing sequences. While it might not immediately strike your eye, as it's just another shot of dilapidated NYC, this shows a full highway and skyline of the entire city. If that's not impressive enough, though, your jaw just might drop when you see what the shot originally looked like when filmed.

To get the end product right, dozens of moving cars and vehicles were removed from the original shot of the highway and skyline. What began as a regular look at a busy city skyline was completely transformed into an abandoned highway. Even better, a pile of junked cars now takes up the space once used to travel and the whole street is flooded and completely unusable... if anyone remained to use it. This image serves as a reminder of the chaos of the night of the outbreak and how humanity destroyed itself. 

This scene featuring Neville at the Financial District's South Street Seaport, which he visits daily to check if anyone heeded his call for other survivors, boasts some of "I Am Legend"'s most complex background VFX. For the shots filmed on location at the seaport in Lower Manhattan, the city looming in the background provides an important aspect of the framing and photography. That left the VFX artists on the project some challenges, as it needed to now reflect the destruction in the rest of the city in fine detail across the backgrounds of each of these shots. 

To make this work, a matte painter created 2.5-D elements that added fire damage and broken windows to assorted buildings. This matte painting layer was then superimposed on top of the backgrounds from the shot itself. It also required the VFX artist to drop in elements that the filmmakers wanted in the background of the shot, including a bridge and highways, but didn't actually appear in the original shots.

When Neville comes upon an abandoned Mobil station to siphon some gas from the pumps, we get another glance at an everyday location that normally wouldn't be remarkable in the least. Well, aside from the fact that gas stations in Manhattan are already a bit of a rarity.

What's interesting about this shot before and after the effects has little to do with the overgrown, rusted gas station itself. CGI was deployed most noticeably here to drape a giant plastic tarp over what appears to be a previously quarantined building — back when there were people to quarantine. Next to, and overlapping with, the tarp there is a banner that suggests this is the case. A quarantine symbol on the banner implying that this building was once used as a containment site smart is a visual effects touch that makes the environment more visually interesting in a way that lifts up the storytelling and world building. This background image alone drives home the notion that the city and its denizens went through hell not too long ago.

That doesn't sound like a lot but, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

An early flashback sequence reveals not only our protagonist's location on the night of the outbreak but also what he lost. Filming and editing this sequence to have it make sense proved to be a big hurdle during the production of "I Am Legend." 

The issue? The pier that Neville and his family evacuate from doesn't actually exist in the New York City of 2007. Production brought in a barge and attached it to the shoreline — a massive undertaking. The evacuation's establishing shot had to be shot in two pieces and stitched together, another massive undertaking that required rendering a 3D FDR Drive and Brooklyn Bridge with special effects.

This one shot in particular shows the CGI highway with CG cars then layered on top of it. In the scene, military forces patrol the road. To bring them in, actors had to be shot first on a green screen and then later their images were added to the final composite image. This single frame ended up being almost entirely a digital collage of filmmaking magic, not just in spite of but because of how realistic it looks. This type of work is among the most underappreciated that VFX artists do.  

The evacuation ultimately goes very, very wrong for Neville and his family. After being separated from his wife Zoe (Salli Richardson) and daughter Marley (played by Smith's own daughter Willow), Neville is forced to stay on the island to help the military. In the ensuing chaos and bombing of the bridges in order to restrain the spread of the virus, Neville's wife and child are killed in a helicopter accident. 

In this shot in particular we see the Brooklyn Bridge collapse in a flaming wreck. In order to make this happen, the VFX artists first had to remove the bridge entirely from the initial shots that were taken. Then, the entire Brooklyn bridge had to be added with VFX for it to be destroyed in this sequence. Since they were shooting on location and couldn't actually destroy a bridge – we would hope that part is obvious – this was the best workaround.

Thus, the bridges were first removed from the shots and then rendered entirely in 3D so the sequence could benefit from the most explosive — and heartbreaking — results possible.

"I Am Legend" features a scene in which dozens of Darkseekers attack Neville as he sits in a minivan. The special edition Blu-ray special feature "Turning Manhattan Into a Dystopian Wasteland" calls this scene the nighttime demolition derby. This sequence looks like it was shot in New York, but the filmmakers rendered it entirely on a green screen. Most of the elements outside the car were added digitally, making this one of the film's most special effects-heavy scenes.

In the scene, Neville drives into his surroundings, trying to get the Darkseekers off his ride. The entire environment needed to be computer-generated. This consisted of many disparate technical aspects, including a 360-degree matte painting for the background, CG water, and CG bridges and highways. Naturally, all the infected attacking Neville were also CG. The only practical props in the scene are the car itself and the downed telephone pole that comes crashing down, giving Neville a chance to escape.

While some might remember "I Am Legend" for its gripping action and others for its ahead-of-its-time CGI, still others recall it only for the scene where the dog dies. Yup, they killed the dog! Neville and his companion Sam, a German Shepherd, cross a bridge and are attacked by a pack of ravenous, infected dogs. Neville walks away without a scratch, but Sam isn't so lucky. Anyone who's seen the movie knows the scene that comes next is the most tragic.

While he does his best to keep them off him, there is a moment when one dog tackles Neville and starts chomping at his face. In order to make the stakes feel as dangerous as they should be, a puppet of the dog's face and mouth was used. A behind-the-scenes clip depicts an actor in a green screen suit holding a dog head puppet. Special effects were added afterward to remove the actor and complete the dog's torso, giving it a completely different look from the vicious puppet. This breakdown should probably turn a pretty intense scene into a silly moment of two grown men playing with puppets, but we can't deny that dog head puppet is pretty darn scary. 

"I Am Legend" exploded into an international box office and critical success, but, in retrospect, some aspects of the movie haven't aged well. We've already mentioned the pack of running deer, which didn't look convincing back in 2007. And, today, the full CGI Darkseekers look awkward and silly in certain lighting. But going the VFX route wasn't always the plan.

Initially, director Francis Lawrence wanted to use actors wearing prosthetics and makeup to play each of the Darkseekers on screen. Parkour specialists were even hired and trained for these roles before Lawrence realized that the visual direction didn't feel convincing or menacing enough. Rather, he sought a combination of animation and motion capture. Motion capture was still used as a base for the movements of the creatures, but supplemental animations made the performances feel more erratic and creature-like.

The film's VFX unit also needed to devise the translucent appearance of the Darkseekers' infected skin. To do this, each Darkseeker model contained three meshes, or layers; the thin translucent layer of skin, the musculature beneath, and the skeleton for lighting purposes. Making sure these creatures looked convincing in all lights was key to pulling off the movie's special effects. Some might say they didn't quite hit the mark.

The VFX artists for "I Am Legend" created two models that all the other Darkseekers were copied from. The  Alpha Male and Female were based on facial and motion capture performances. Using these two scans, six body types were digitally built for the infected human characters. Secondary characteristics were then generated in order to create the 43 distinct digital models that reappear throughout the film.

This meant that Smith didn't always act opposite physical bodies in shooting scenes with the infected creatures, but in the The Making of "I Am Legend," we see a scene where Smith did act alongside the motion capture performer. When Neville tests the would-be cure on an infected woman, the audience watches along with him, hoping against hope that it will start to work. That is until she starts to thrash and go berserk. In the behind-the-scenes feature, we see that an actual woman in a motion-capture suit performed this stunt on set. 

However, other scenes like the aforementioned demolition derby would have been impossible to film safely even using motion capture, hence why CGI was so useful for capturing the scale the director and crew sought for the movie.