One of the side effects of CGI is our inability to appreciate the effort that goes into a good movie scene. A few decades ago, you could look at a shot from a movie and instinctively know how much time and energy went into it. You could see the production design, the costumes, the makeup, the lighting, all of which required people to make real things with their hands and put them in front of the camera. These days, we just chalk everything up to computers without thinking much about what that means.

That’s why I enjoy this new trend of special effects studios walking audiences through their work on key action sequences. We’ve seen VFX houses put together reels for everything from Game of Thrones to Deadpool, and each time I watch one, I feel like I’m getting a chance to see some of the effort I may have missed the first time around. The latest of these reels comes from Moving Picture Company (via Heroic Hollywood), who recently released a breakdown of the climactic fight scene from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Check out the short video above.

It’s easy for us to acknowledge the VFX work for characters like Doomsday, but like most special effects-driven films, I always enjoy seeing the way various images and background are composited together to create an immersive environment. Everything  —  from the skyline in the background to the piles of rubble in the foreground  —  have to be just right, and catching a glimpse of each layer individually brings back a little bit of the effort to the movie. It’s easy to become numbed to the potential of visual effects in an era where anything we imagine can be thrown on the screen with just a few clicks of the mouse; videos like this remind us that the work of skilled digital artists shouldn’t be ignored just because we didn’t get the Batman and Superman movie we wanted.

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