While many decry the excess presence of CGI in modern movies, it’s ultimately just another filmmaking tool which can be used responsibly or recklessly. 

Indeed, many modern movies do overuse VFX elements to their eventual detriment, but the technology can also be hugely helpful for filmmakers with an acute understanding of when to use it – and when not to.

Often the best CGI is that which you never even notice, because it’s been used in a subtle and delicate manner to fix a small issue or add a little finishing touch to a scene.

That’s absolutely true of these 10 movie scenes, each of which used CGI in a wildly unexpected way, allowing it to slot effortlessly into the practical footage and ensure that most viewers never ended up noticing it.

“Invisible” CGI is a common component in most Hollywood movies, and every so often it’s employed in a manner so slickly ingenious that it deserves a long round of applause. 

These moments aren’t the big, grandstanding VFX triumphs that help films win Oscars, but they are quite astonishing in their own right regardless…

Though director George Miller tried to achieve as much of Mad Max: Fury Road in-camera as possible, there’s no denying the extensive amounts of VFX work employed to bring the filmmaker’s madcap vision to life.

Yet there’s an effect which appears in many of the movie’s shots that you’ve surely never noticed – the digital erasure of Tom Hardy’s earpiece.

No, Hardy wasn’t wearing an earpiece throughout shooting so he didn’t have to learn his lines – Miller originally shot a scene where Hardy’s Max finds an old earpiece and puts it in his ear, the implication being that it would help drown out the manic voices in his head.

However, Miller decided during post-production to scrap this facet of Max’s character, requiring the VFX team to paint out the earpiece in every single subsequent shot showing his right ear.

In addition to the above set photo showing the earpiece, if you look very, very closely at his ears throughout the movie, you can occasionally see digital imperfections where the erasure didn’t fully take.

Yet to 99.999% of people who have no idea about any of this, it’s basically impossible to spot.