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I think a lot of us can acknowledge that CGI from 15 years ago was better than it was today (I mean look at Marvel's awful CGI compared to POTC) but if people ever doubt this claim, use Tim Burton's 1999 film Sleepy Hollow as proof.

See this photo of the Headless Horseman? It looks completely normal right, like they just used some practical effects and maybe a little bit of editing to cut the actor's head from the footage, right?

WRONG

That entire collar is CGI. As discussed in a featurette that came with some DVD copies of the movie (which I own) when using a blue cowl to cover the actors head so they could edit it out, the editors noticed that part of the collar kept getting edited out in the software. So every single scene of the Horseman when he is Headless had to CGI in the collar of his jacket. And for people who haven't seen this movie, easily 97% of his scenes he doesn't have a head.

For reference, here's what it looked like when they filmed a scene where the Horseman actually has his head, thus no CGI was used in this clip.

Aside from the collar being a bit more broad in this, it looks exactly the same. If it weren't for the featurette explaining that they used CGI, you would never know that one of these photos used CGI.

Some more photos of the CGI collar:

While this movie did have a good budget, this was still 1999. And the CGI looks so good that you couldn't tell it was CGI.

Here is a Youtube upload of the featurette, they start talking about the CGI at around the 15 minute mark (15:37 exact if you just want to see the part about the collar of the jacket).

Old CGI used to be so good before Hollywood started relying on it for everything and severely overworking their underpaid workers to do all of the CGI.

#tim burton #sleepy hollow #movie cgi #visual effects #Youtube