Sugar Wiki / Development Heaven

As the expression goes, "No one sets out to make a bad movie." That means even art which seems unimpressive still has tons of effort put into it. Whether it's a team of hundreds managing multi-week long shoots or a single person typing away on their computer, creating art takes a genuine effort, no matter the scale.

It comes as no surprise then how many behind-the-scenes stories come from working on these productions. They range from the benign to the terrifying, whether the creative process is a Troubled Production or relatively smooth sailing. Because of this, fandoms are extremely familiar with many making-of stories.

However, there are some production feats that, when fans learn about them, they are absolutely blown away they were possible. It's almost like the fans gushing about it died and went to Development Heaven.

Whether it's a set built at a mind-boggling scale, levels of research that would make an archeologist blush, animation detail that is more lifelike than life itself, stunt work that defies human abilities, or just inserting a detail almost any casual viewer would never notice, these achievements will make fans go crazy praising their efforts.

Sometimes the people involved are Doing It for the Art, but not necessarily. Some people just find it rewarding and have pride in putting a ton of effort into something, even if their ultimate motivation is the paycheck they receive.

Can overlap with Dyeing for Your Art and Visual Effects of Awesome. Contrast Development Hell (though not literally).

Do not link to this on the wiki, please. Not even under the YMMV tab.

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Films — Live-Action
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Advertising

• This Honda commercial, CG, right? It could've been, but why not go the extra mile instead?
• HBO's iconic 80s movie opener; so much so, there was even a short documentary produced about it. All of the effects in the logo probably could've been achieved with CGI, but instead, Liberty Studios—the company behind the logo—went all out with making it using practical effects. The entire city landscape was an actual model that was 10 feet wide and 30 feet long, with so much stunning attention to detail that it took over three months to fully construct, and during the making, smoke was pumped through in order to give it the appearance of a three-dimensional environment. The music that scores the opener was produced with a 65-piece orchestra. The HBO logo was made with brass, and the laser effects were achieved with light and camera tricks. Other than some superimposition effects for the family at the beginning as well as the ending title cards, practically no computer effects were used to create the opening. No wonder it's such a favorite of many!
• That Squatty Potty commercial with the baby unicorn pooping ice cream could have very easily gotten by with CGI, but the creators decided to go all-out with a full puppet instead.
• For Anheuser-Busch's 2021 Super Bowl ad, a different cinematographer was hired to shoot each scene in order to make every segment feel unique and like its own separate story.
• This ad for British home improvement chain B&Q features an entire house quite literally being flipped. While it's easy to assume that it must've been done with CGI, the production desginers actually built a 24-ton, six-story fully rotating set^note to put that into perspective, that's about twice the size as the rotating spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with a house and garden on each side, to use, which had to be filmed in a football stadium because no studio had space that large. Not only that, but everything—from the heroine climbing up and down the rotating house to the objects in the house feeling the effect of gravity and falling down as the house turns—was done practically, with CGI only being used for the ending shot of the neighborhood.

Comic Books

• Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is just dripping with cultural references. Actually, most of what Alan Moore does belongs here—Watchmen was originally just supposed to be an integration of newly acquired trademarks into the DC Universe, but Moore just didn't know when to quit^note there may have also been a certain amount of "we just spent money to acquire these guys and you want to kill half of them off in a one-shot series?" on the part of DC Editorial.

• When Fabian Nicieza was writing Nomad^note a Captain America spinoff that ran from 1992 to 1994, he wanted it to be more mature than your average Marvel comic book. Not only that, but he said straight out that he wished to sell Nomad to the same audience that read The Sandman.

• The 2013 run of Young Avengers written by Kieron Gillen has become famous for innovative layout design by artist Jamie McKelvie, especially the double-page spread for each issue. Gillen himself has joked that the main reason for their collaborations is mainly to show off Jamie's art.

• The cover for the third issue of JLA/Avengers. They could have simply put a generic cover with a dozen characters doing something vaguely heroic, but instead decided to draw every character who had, to that date, been a member of either team, no matter for how short, including staff, reservist and honorary members. EVERY! ONE! OF! THEM!◊ Kurt Busiek meticulously researched the history of both teams to compile a list of 208 characters for George Pérez to draw, making a beautiful piece of art and every geek in comicdom happy.
  • George Pérez does this all the time. For Crisis on Infinite Earths, Marv Wolfman told him to draw a cover with Lex Luthor, Joker, Brainiac, and maybe a few others if he felt like it. When Wolfman got Perez's cover, he discovered Perez drew every goddamn villain he could think of. Perez REALLY likes what he does apparently.

• Mark Waid's Kingdom Come is oozing with DC comic book lore, symbolism and biblical references among other things.

• Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. It introduces multiple new characters with their own backstories and speech patterns practically every arc as well as tying them into later stories. It's dripping with symbolism, historical and mythological references (a lot of which most readers wouldn't notice). That's just the writing. The art is equally full of things that they didn't NEED to do but did anyway.

• For Mother Panic, Tommy Lee Edwards collaborated with Don Cameron, a 3D artist, to design Violet's helmet and glider in order to be able to draw them accurately from any angle.

• Ultimate Marvel: The main thing of the Ultimate Marvel, from day one to its very end, was to take creative risks and try things that would never be attempted in the prime universe. Some of those attempts were lauded successes, such as The Ultimates (The Avengers as a state-sponsored group), others were largely failures such as Ultimatum (even killing for good all the X-Men's sacred cows), but the risks have always been taken.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes became known (later on, at least) for the high degree of realism and accuracy in its occasional depiction of dinosaurs. Bill Watterson also insisted on doing the inking himself, and many of the Sunday strips were done in watercolors.

Fan Works

• Paradoxus (Winx Club, World of Warcraft): The four authors took the time to strengthen and fix the inconsistencies of the worldbuilding of Winx Club by carefully mixing it with that of World of Warcraft (without overrunning one over the other and keeping them independent) and Norse Mythology (which both franchises draw from to varying extents). They also researched PTSD so their characters' psychological trauma was handled correctly. To top it all, Word of God has it that they've traced a detailed genealogical tree for all of the Dragon's Flame keepers along with their familial relationships with the Royal House of Solaria. Something similar was done for the nymphs and their reincarnations over time.

Films — Animation

Studios

• In The New '10s Disney renaissance for the Disney Animated Canon, the animators at Disney have been pushing the limits of animation and CGI far beyond what's necessary to just tell the story. Their films are showcases of animating things either considered insanely difficult to do or done with a complexity not previously seen before: hair (Tangled), snow/ice (Frozen (2013)), cityscapes (built from a complete city design) (Big Hero 6), fur (Zootopia), and water/ocean (Moana).

• Pick a Pixar movie, any Pixar movie. They had to tone down the water for Finding Nemo because it was too real-looking. Pixar mentioned that they learned during the filming of Toy Story that the story has to come first. They had a 60% or 70% finished movie when they sat and watched it... and were revolted. With a deadline looming scarily close, they tore it completely apart and made the amazing movie we know today.

Standalone films

• In The Adventures of Tintin (2011), the chase scene in Bagghar, from the point where Snowy jumps into Sakharine's jeep to the point where Tintin catches the falcon by the dock, is done as one shot, over two and a half minutes long. And it's an action scene following multiple characters across an entire city. Great snakes!

• For the scene in Alice in Wonderland in which Alice grows gigantic while inside the White Rabbit's house, animators built a prop house for Kathryn Beaumont to sit in - and they sketched it for reference. As they also needed to see how Alice moved while inside the house, they then rebuilt it with transparent walls.

• The Bad Guys (2022) was a breath of fresh air for the animators, having abandoned the traditional CG-animated film look and now blending 2D and 3D visuals, both in effects and motion. It helps that the film was directed by studio veteran Pierre Perifel (his directorial debut), who had developed a "proof of concept" trailer himself that the team could always refer back to for inspiration for the film's tone and sequences. And for most of the crew, the film became a bright spot that helped keep them going through the worst of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

• For Bambi, Walt Disney wanted the animals to be more realistic and expressive than those in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, so he had Rico LeBrun, a painter of animals, come and lecture to the animators on the structure and movement of animals. The animators visited the Los Angeles Zoo and Disney set up a small zoo at the studio so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals.

• For Coco, Lee Unkrich hired Adrian Molina as co-director and lyricist and used a Latin American voice cast since the film is set in Mexico. For the role of Miguel, Unkrich wanted a child actor whose voice didn't hit puberty during production and who can sing; appropriately enough, Anthony González, who was 12 years old like his character when he was selected for the role, is a Mariachi singer.

• Coraline. As if the sheer amount of Fridge Brilliance and Foreshadowing in the writing isn't enough, apparently the animation is good enough that many uninformed people thought that it was made with CGI.
  • For Coraline, they made more than 20 puppets, each one taking months to make. And since it uses puppets instead of clay, they had to make thousands of mouths that they painted individually and replaced between frames.
  • The average production speed will typically produce only a few seconds a day, assuming no mistakes are made. The film is 100 minutes long.
  • The garden scene? The mice circus? The theatre with hundreds of Scotties? They did all that in stop-motion. The mice circus alone took 2 months to animate.
  • Most of the flowers in the garden scene really lit up. It's not digitally enhanced.
  • The lady who made the costumes actually knits them, using the same techniques that would be used to make full-sized clothing but with needles the size of human hairs.
  • The hair for the characters had to be "injected" one by one.
  • The scene where the Other World "disappears"? They did that in stop-motion too.
  • They wanted to shoot the movie in 3D, but the sets were too small to fit 2 cameras side-by-side. So what did they do? They shot each frame twice from different angles with a single camera. The result was a movie with some of the most highly-regarded 3D effects ever.

• The various figures used in Corpse Bride were animated using a very intricate clockwork system built inside of them, replacing the stop-motion industry standards of using multiple expressive heads.

• Pretty much all available information on the development of Encanto suggests it was a pleasant experience for almost everyone involved. Directors and animators were intrigued and fascinated with Colombian culture on all levels from architecture to indigenous beliefs, and there was an unique brainstorming method called "familia" in which Latino employees got a chance to discuss their personal life experiences and give their two cents on the writing.

• Fantasia was such an ambitious and groundbreaking project that it required its own sound system.

• When a director completes a film at Pixar and has finished promoting it, they usually take a year off to relax and perhaps find inspiration for their next film. After Finding Nemo was finished, Andrew Stanton took a small team of writers and artists and spent that entire year planning the general story and working on the design of the characters of WALL•E, simply so he could work without deadlines or pressure.

• In Grave of the Fireflies, most of the outlines were done with brown rather than black in order to give the film a softer feel. This had never been done in an anime before, and was a great challenge to the animators. Brown is harder to animate than black, as it doesn't contrast as well. Black was only used when absolutely necessary.

• Horton Hears a Who! (2008) came along after Dr. Seuss' widow declared that all future film adaptations of his work would exclusively be animated, as a result of the widely-panned Cat in the Hat live-action movie. As such, they worked to adapt Seuss's visuals to animation in a way that also stuck when Illumination took on The Lorax a few years later.

• In the Fall of Gravity is an extremely well-animated short that is made by this trope. The whole film was done by one guy, who did everything from the sets to the figures he's animating. What's more impressive is that he built facial mechanisms never before seen in stop-motion specifically for the film, controlled by cables instead of wires or replacement mouths. it really must be seen to be believed.

• In Kung Fu Panda, the directors proposed the famous rope bridge fight and were delighted at seeing the animators blanch at the idea. That wasn't because of how hard they knew the sequence's production would be; rather, it was because they knew such a scene had never been done before. It's that kind of attitude that helped create the film and made Dreamworks Animation grow its beard.

• The fight scenes in The LEGO Ninjago Movie were choreographed by an actual martial arts team and Jackie Chan himself helped translate them into animation while keeping the limitations of the LEGO minifigures in mind.

• Lilo & Stitch is one of the only Disney films since the company's heyday that can truly be called "experimental": complete creative control was given to a small team, who designed the entire production and characters to resemble of one employee's personal drawing style. It was also the first since Dumbo to use watercolored backgrounds (that's right, the first one in over 60 years). The result is something intimate and completely distinct.

• The animators on The Lion King (1994) went to Africa and studied real animals to ensure that they were portrayed as realistically as possible.

• Luxo Jr.: John Lasseter's aim was to have this computer animated short finished in time for SIGGRAPH, an annual computer technology exhibition attended by thousands of industry professionals. To do so warranted working around the clock: Lasseter slept in a sleeping bag in his office and would ask his assistant to knock on his door to wake him up in the morning. The team were able to finish the film in time for SIGGRAPH, where it received a standing ovation before the first screening had even finished.

• While Next Gen is a decent film in its own right, it serves as a testament to the power of Blender Foundation's flagship open source animation software. Almost the entire film was created using software that anyone can get a hold of completely for free!

• The Nightmare Before Christmas required an entire production studio to be built up from scratch in four months and took over three years to film, utilizing up over a dozen sound stages, a phenomenal amount of space. It was also a technical innovation: a special motion-control camera was created to allow for more sweeping cinematography.

• The Peanuts Movie had several of Charles Schulz's relatives on board, with his son and grandson being among the writing team. In addition, the animators made the effort to make their CGI look as close to the original television specials as possible, by not utilizing motion blur and giving the movie an overall 2.5-D aesthetic.

• For The Polar Express, to ensure that every last bit of detail for operating a steam locomotive was as accurate as possible, Skywalker Sound and the production team worked closely with the Steam Railroading Institute to get everything right. As detailed in the 2004 December issue of Trains Magazine, the crew recorded every sound from sliding down the loaded tender and running Pere Marquette 1225 at 30mph to hear it at work just for that extra authenticity. The only things changed from 1225 was replacing its whistle to that of Sierra Railway 3 to homage Zemeckis' work on Back to the Future Part III, and it's smokebox was given a recessed headlight to better match the book.

• The Prince of Egypt was a huge artistic undertaking for DreamWorks. For example, there were 1,192 scenes in the movie. 1,180 of those scenes featured special effects. And not just things like fire tornadoes or the Red Sea parting (that 7-minute sequence alone took 318,000 hours of rendering), but wind, sand, rainwater, and lighting. The animators also spent two weeks traveling around Egypt to get a sense of the architecture and art style for the film.
  • The writers consulted with over a hundred religious officials from varying sects to make sure they got as close to the heart of the story as possible.

• The Secret of Kells, especially since it's all about medieval art in the first place. And it shows.

• Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas had its team go to an incredible amount of effort to make sure that the CG models for the ships and cities were accurate to a tee, once again for a film intended for children.

• Toy Story 2 was originally intended to be direct-to-video. But Pixar actually set out to make a movie that was just as good as the first, and Disney milked it with a theater release as a result, even though they nearly accidentally deleted the whole movie. Pixar is very well-known for this.

• For Toy Story 3, the studio could have had any actor play the now-grown Andy. Instead, they tracked down the original actor, who had basically retired from acting at that point, to reprise the role. In fact, there's nary an other Darrin in sight in the third film - every returning character is voiced by the actors who voiced them in the first two, except for Slinky, and even then it was only because Jim Varney died. Special mention goes to Don Rickles, who was 84 when he voiced Mr. Potato Head for Toy Story 3... and even after his death just before Toy Story 4 went into active production, allowed his estate to search through decades of unused recorded dialogue to reprise his character.

• For Turning Red, they researched everything in the film to be as accurate and authentic as possible while fitting the intended stylized aesthetic. This ranges from the food, to all the many, many Canadian and Toronto specific details. They adeptly blended multiple styles not just in the visuals, combining 3D animation with anime, but also in the score which cohesively integrates period appropriate western and Chinese music styles. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climax where according to the director's commentary "It has to be every single department is having to function at the very top of their game".

• For Up, the producers actually flew the animation team to Venezuela, to the mountain range that serves as the inspiration for Paradise Falls in the film. The crew went on an exhausting (and potentially life-threatening) all-day hike up the mountain, but it was worth it for the magnificent views they got at the top, which inspired most of the film's imagery. Then a sudden storm rolled in, and they were trapped on top of the mountain for hours, while strong rains and wind slammed them. Eventually, a helicopter was able to rescue them.

• Originally in WALL•E, the story had it that EVE got electrocuted by AUTO instead of WALL•E, and WALL•E fixes her while in the Garbage Chamber. A preview screening caused Andrew Stanton to realize it didn't fit the emotional flow he wanted to convey. Despite the fact that the scene was 95% complete and the film was only a few months away from release, the animators started from scratch and completely redid the scene, so that WALL•E was electrocuted, and EVE's motivation was about helping WALL•E, rather than just achieving her directive, which makes the story better.

• Wolfwalkers, according to this interview, had the "Wolf Vision" scenes pre-visualized and built in a virtual reality environment. Rather than simply keeping those scenes to the virtual reality engine, the animators printed out the 3D model frame-by-frame and re-animated all of it on paper with charcoal and pencil. This gives the scenes a uniquely three-dimensional feel while still being hand-drawn.

• The original plot for Zootopia was scrapped and reworked from the ground up just 9 months before the intended release date (Nick was the original protagonist). That didn't stop the studio and the dedicated creative team from producing a film with incredible animation or storytelling, though.

Literature

• The Lord of the Rings and all related books that were written by J. R. R. Tolkien. It's no exaggeration to say that the saga represents his total life's work ^note  Well, slightly, considering that Tolkien also was the youngest ever professor at the University of Leeds, was a Professor at Oxford (twice), spoke twelve languages, and wrote the best Modern English translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and an academic critique of Beowulf which completely transformed perception of Old English literature. It's just that detailed. And to think that the entire world, complete with intricate mythology, fleshed-out characters, and delightful poetry served one purpose: to serve as a backdrop for the out-of-whole-cloth-created languages that the English professor had constructed. Boggles the mind, it does.

• L.E. Modesitt's Saga of Recluce fantasy series also uses highly detailed and accurate descriptions of mundane activities such as woodworking and blacksmithing. Such details are used as metaphors for and illustrations of both character development and the mechanics of magic in his world.

• Gustave Flaubert wrote only three completed novels during his life due to being the perfectionist's perfectionist. Besides his famously agonizing search for le mot juste — 'the correct word', or the exact word(s) needed to produce the effect he wanted in any given scene — he went and scrupulously checked every fact (down to attending medical examinations to ensure his medical histories were correct).

• Similar to the examples above, Dune contains a sprawling universe adorned with myriad details and complicated histories, economics, and ecology. Frank Herbert loved to show his work. It began as work for a newspaper article ("They Stopped the Moving Sands"), but he became so enthralled that it became a passionate epic. He never even got around to finishing that article.

• Many Science Fiction writers do this. There are stories of Heinlein sitting at his kitchen table with a slide rule, pencil and graph paper trying to work out how fast his spaceships would be moving and how much fuel they would need.

• Luigi Serafini's enigmatic Codex Seraphinianus. Twenty-some years agone and still nobody can figure out the language. Great art though.

Music

• "I'm Not in Love" by 10cc took fully 254 vocal overdubs and liberal use of tape loops and other then-state-of-the-art technology to produce its unique vocal sound. It's a stunning technical accomplishment that is frequently compared to the accomplishments of Queen on "Bohemian Rhapsody", and it became 10cc's biggest hit.

• The Beatles:
  • "I'm Only Sleeping" from Revolver (Beatles Album) has a backwards guitar riff on it. And it was a complete accident.
  • On the solo side of things, John Lennon woke up on January 27, 1970 with the concept of "Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)" on his mind, finished writing the song in an hour, then managed to round up George Harrison, some other notable musicians, and Phil Spector, and they recorded the song that night! It was released ten days later.
  • The fact that Paul McCartney came up with the tune to "Yesterday" in a dream and played it to others to make sure he didn't plagiarise it.

• "Williams Mix", the closer of clipping.'s album CLPPNG, is one of few existing faithful recreations of John Cage's piece of the same name, a composition for eight simultaneously played magnetic tapes. The group commissioned Tom Erbe — the first person to recreate the piece from its original score — to construct a similar piece out of samples from all of the clipping. music that had come out, following Cage's original instructions. Aside from the extreme commitment and significantly diminished public interest in a musique concrète piece, the group reportedly also had to pay a fee to Cage's publisher.

• The David Crowder Band put a lot of work into their music videos. "SMS (Shine)" is a standout example, being a stop-motion animated video done with Lite-Brite pegs that tells a story, with elements from within the story interacting with the world outside of the screen. A behind-the-scenes video demonstrates the excruciating amount of work involved.

• Depeche Mode and Dave Gahan's solo album, Hourglass. In contrast to the likes of Songs of Faith and Devotion and Ultra a decade prior to Hourglass itself, anyway, Dave Gahan, Andrew Phillpott, and Christian Eigner all happened to produce the album with little issue or conflict, especially with there being none regarding Dave Gahan himself; and the outcome of said development that is the fully-refined product definitely shows the dynamic that was present worked out in the end.

• Foo Fighters' Wasting Light is Dave Grohl's love letter to analog recording, literally reviving its Garage Band days by recording in Dave's garage. It was also a practice in the self-discipline a performer is required to have when working with limited resources: the band practiced the songs for weeks until they were absolutely perfect before recording a single note.

• Peter Gabriel spent 16 hours lying perfectly still beneath a sheet of glass as animators manipulated him frame-by-frame for the "Sledgehammer" music video and found himself completely drained by the end of the shoot. He later said that if anyone was willing to put themselves through the experience, they were welcome to copy the video's style.

• Kate Bush
  • Her groundbreaking usage of the Fairlight CMI is also worth mentioning as she was one of the first artists to use sampling in her music with glass breaking in her hit single Babooshka and used it in such experimental ways in her albums Never for Ever, The Dreaming, and her magnum opus Hounds of Love. A recent interview with Brian Tench (the sound engineer on Hounds of Love) revealed her throwing bricks into a pool and recording the sound through the Fairlight for The Ninth Wave. Kate and her crew also went trainspotting to record the perfect train whistle she wanted in her song "Cloudbusting", which she eventually just used the Fairlight to give the ending the train whistle noise she wanted. Yes that is not a real train, that sound was wholly created by the Fairlight. The Fairlight CMI cost her £90 per hour(!) to use at Abbey Road, so she bought her own and made her own recording studio at her house, all out of her own pocket. And everyone who worked with her on all her albums gush about how lovely she is and how positive she was, no matter how stressed out she justifiably was. She just loves music and creating music for herself and her fans so much.
  • Kate Bush's devotion to writing, producing, and singing her own songs has rightfully earned her a legion of fans, and her usage of a headset microphone for her concert The Tour of Life (using a wire hanger to boot) was the first of it's kind and paved the way for Madonna and Britney Spears to use it for their own concerts. Also writing her first number one single "Wuthering Heights" in one night at the age of eighteen is just another impressive feat to add to her repertoire.
  • Her personal contributions to her music videos, many of which she directed, and even the ones she did not, she would sketch out storyboards, costume ideas, and implement her own ideas of what the choreography should be for what she wanted in the music video. Kate Bush paved the way for many artists and why she is continually being discovered for her impressive artistry.
  • Kate has often spoken about creating music and her videos as a creatively expressive outlet and never believed in suffering for one's art, a heartwarming message to convey about the creation of art. If that is not development heaven in a nutshell I do not know what is.

• La-La Land Records is renowned for the amount of time and dedication that goes into their sets. When remastering the scores for Friday the 13th Parts 1-5, the original 3-track master tapes were missing, so they took the 5.1 surround sound film stem and remixed all the audio for a complete and definitive release of the scores.^note  Part VI was the exception as its master tapes were used for the album's release. Friday the 13th Part III & The Final Chapter in particular originally consisted of mostly stock music from Harry Manfredini’s scores from the first 2 movies with some original cues by Manfredini thrown in there. The team at La-La Land Records painstakingly reconstructed the original scores to match how they were presented in the films.

• The story behind the cover of The Nice's Elegy is a prime example. While listening to an advance copy of the album, Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis had a mental image of a desert scene covered with plastic red soccer balls. He and Aubrey Powell actually went to the Sahara to shoot it. To quote an anonymous poster at Album Art Photos:
  "[Hipgnosis] had to take these balls to the Sahara, inflate them, place then on sand dunes as far as the eye can see, repeat this because of the winds moving the balls, remove the footprints as best they could, then take the photo. No CGI. A lot of hard work, but an iconic image."

• When Nirvana recorded In Utero, Steve Albini indulged Kurt's dream of capturing a lot of ambient noise from a tiny recording space. They not only miked the amps and drum kit, but also the walls, ceiling, and floor with duct tape. Balancing this tone achieved the dark, claustrophobic sound Kurt was chasing in his mind and that turned out to be antithetical to what Geffen Records wanted.

• OK Go is rather well known for this, with their humble YouTube roots and quirky but awesome music videos. In their "This Too Shall Pass" music video, they had what is arguably one of the longest running and most complex Rube Goldberg machine EVER.

• Art-pop duo Pepe Deluxé delayed the completion of their album Queen of the Wave, because one song, "In the Cave", was composed specifically to be performed on the Great Stalacpipe Organ, which was undergoing extensive repairs at the time. They waited six years for the organ to become playable again; the song they played on it was two minutes long.

• Taylor Swift's Folklore was announced 16 hours before its official release without any promotional beside her announcement on social media. Also notable is that the album came out less than a year after her last album Lover. Not even Swift's label knew about the album until hours before its release. The album was written when her 2020 tour was postponed because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. She and her producers created the album in total remote conditions, with the concert movie The Long Pond Studio Session - filmed and released after there is a vaccine widely available for Covid 19, is the first time they are in the same room together. The album was critically acclaimed, won a Grammy for Album of the Year and was the best selling album of 2020.
  • Her next album Evermore is even more impressive, with Taylor wrote the first song in between filming the Long Pond Studio Session, and released 6 months right after releasing folklore. The album received critical and fan acclaim, though has some shades of Tough Act to Follow because it has to follow folklore massive success.

• During shooting of the Little Big video "Hypnodancer", Sonya mentioned she hadn't had one completely comfortable and/or accident-free shoot in years. And yet, she soldiers on.
  • In "Hypnodancer", at least one of her dresses scratched her while she wore it and her shoes cut off blood circulation from her feet. She also showed up to the final day of shooting (which they couldn't delay due to external circumstances) sick and speaking with a raspy voice.
  • In "Go Bananas", she could barely breathe while taped to a wall.
  • She had a physically trying underwater scene while dressed in a full dog costume in "Rock, Paper, Scissors".
  • Saving the worst for last: while shooting a scene where she stood on a bar and fell from it, faceplanting, for "I'm OK", she actually broke her nose.

• Remember The White Stripes' video for "Fell in Love with a Girl"? Michel Gondry actually filmed the band members, then converted the footage to pixels all before using stop-motion LEGO to create the thing.

Pinball

• One of the notable aspects of Big Guns is how its backbox is noticeably taller than those of most other pinball games. Why? Because artist Python Anghelo insisted he needed the extra height to accommodate his castle artwork.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering: Forget the elaborate Worldbuilding. Forget the year of playtesting put into each of the quarterly sets. Forget that nearly every set has a unique identity without resorting to cheap gimmicks. The true sign that Magic is unbelieveably intricate is the official web site. The "Daily MTG" section alone is around half a million words a year of behind the scenes insight, pointing out Easter eggs, All There in the Manual, strategic advice, tournament coverage, and previews of upcoming releases, with little if any Phoning It In.

• Take a look at a card from the Yu-Gi-Oh! CCG. Then another. And another. Chances are, you'll see familiar monsters popping up in the artwork of each other's cards, or spell or trap cards that might not even apply to them. Look at enough of them, and you'll notice a pattern...a pattern that tells a story...a story that is much deeper and involved than you'd ever expect from a mere card game. The card game's wiki does its darndest to chronicle these stories, which includes knights falling into corruption (or salvation), Cybernetics Eat Your Soul, survival in an Alternate Universe, and a battle for control of Hell itself.

Theme Parks

• The Disney Imagineers put excruciating amounts of detail into the designs of rides, gift shops, and just the ambient scenery at the theme parks (at least much as they can achieve with the budgets they are given). Many of the "authentic-looking" props in period-specific areas like Frontierland and Main Street, USA are actually authentic antiques, not replicas. "No one will ever see it" is not considered a good enough excuse to skimp. The policy is to create something that Walt Disney would approve of, and he was such a stickler that he would rather indefinitely postpone the opening of an attraction than let it open before it was perfect.
  • A really great example of this is The Haunted Mansion. The hearse drawn by invisible horses? Real (though, despite popular urban legend, it's not Brigham Young's hearse). The stretching pictures? Actual paintings, they spend weeks on one animatronic in the attic before scrapping it for something else completely when they didn't like how it looked.

Toys

• The designer interviews for the Transformers toylines are always fascinating because everyone involved seems to love the source material and working on it. The engineers even love just coming up with designs, even ones that might never be seen, such as a Soundwave whose minions leap out of his chest in sequence and transform in mid-air or Rhinox as a voyager, just because he could use the extra mass and design budget, or a line of real-life military vehicles at 1:24th scale, which would result in toys the size of computer towers that would cost over 60 dollars apiece. And, in defiance of rising petroleum costs and geometrically increasing complexity, a Transformer purchased in 2011 costs about the same as it did in 1996.

Visual Novels

• Corpse Party is this. Team GrisGris was pretty much four people making a horror game with the RPG Maker 98. The game had loads of characters, notes and multiple endings, leading to it gaining so much popularity that it not only got a remake by the now much larger team, full with voice actors and all, it also spawned an anime, a manga series, and multiple prequels and sequels.

• Hotel Dusk: Room 215:
  • It was in development for almost 2 years, just so developer Cing could make the comic book style character animations, which were done frame by frame.
  • Last Window was being developed while Cing was facing bankruptcy. While the game was being translated for an EU release, Cing did file for bankruptcy. The game is arguably even better than the first.

• Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- was scripted almost entirely by one developer who did the massive undertaking of putting together all the CGs, visuals, sprites, and backgrounds for the final product and mastered the timing of coding every graphical image to line up with the script, doing all of this little by little over the course of several years. The visuals themselves drew production out even longer just for the sheer graphical intensity of the art team putting their all into it. It all paid off as the VN is considered to be one of the most gorgeously engaging visual novels currently out there.

Web Animation

• Halo fan Phillip Kang worked on his machinima film, Halo: Eye of the Storm for two years before finally releasing it, with each shot taking approximately 5 hours to capture, due to having to replay the same campaign stage over and over to try and make each shot as perfect as it could be, due to not being able to control the AI.

• Rooster Teeth—before they even begin to write a series, they study and pull apart the game they use, sometimes for months beforehand, as they did with Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction and Halo 3.

Webcomics

• FreakAngels, a webcomic produced by acclaimed comic writer Warren Ellis and drawn and inked by Paul Duffield. They turn out six full-color, elaborately detailed pages (which can consist of anywhere between three and six panels each), all at once, every week. The only time they take a break from their schedule besides holidays is to let Duffield have a brief rest from the strain of producing that much quality artwork on a regular basis (and such breaks are only for a week).

• Dan Shive of El Goonish Shive puts extra effort into certain aspects of making strips. He makes sure the composition of the scenes he puts his characters in are realistic even if its only for one panel. He researches things for the comic like obscure facts about World War II. He even ensures that when a character exposits seemingly meaningless Magi Babble as part of a montage, everything he says actually has a basis in something real In-Universe.

• Girl Genius as well. Just take one look at the comic, from the amount of detail in the backgrounds to the thought put into even the most minor characters, and it becomes pretty clear that the Foglios have been working up to this their entire lives.

• Tom Siddell sprinkles Gunnerkrigg Court with surprisingly accurate references to subjects like mythology and Medieval western martial arts, though it's unclear how many are simply subjects he was already interested in. However, it is known that Tom researched lock picking specifically for the comic. He even bought a set of lockpicks, because he wanted to depict it accurately, even though the subject has only come up on two pages.

• Howard Taylor, in over twenty years^note Starting June 2000, to its conclusion in July 2020, never missed a single day of Schlock Mercenary, for any reason. Whenever technical issues threatened to break this record (including an explosion at the data center that houses the comic), he used stopgap measures such as putting it in the blog, just so us loyal readers could get our daily dose of Schlock from SOMEWHERE on time.

• For Katusha: Girl Soldier of the Great Patriotic War, writer and artist Wayne Vansant made multiple trips to Ukraine and interviewed dozens of people who were there in World War II. The equipment and settings are accurately drawn, and the battles and atrocities shown are (or are based upon) real events.

• Lackadaisy creator Tracy Butler did not have to maintain the accuracy of the architecture, clothes, and phrase choices of the 20s, but chose to, and is sticking to it.

• Spacetrawler: In order to keep his vehicles and rooms consistent from panel to panel, Baldwin makes computer models of all of them. Even the ones that Baldwin initially intended to use for only one page, like Pierrot's hoverbike.

• xkcd:
  • 1110: Click and Drag is, simply put, a single webcomic frame with the dimensions of 165888 x 65536 pixels and the populated size (disregarding fillers) of around one gigapixel. You explore it by, duh, clicking and dragging.
  • 1190: Time, a graphic story updated once per hour over the course of four months. (The author's site only contained the latest image, but numerous fan-made browsers were created.)
  • 1446: Landing, a shorter variant of the former, updated every five minutes over 12 hours during the Rosetta landing, in real time.

Web Original

• Felix Clay of Cracked has attempted to interview an old, angry lady, attended an orgy, went through intense gastric distress, and dealt with some craigslist creeps. For the sake of his column.

Web Videos

• This is standard operating procedure for all Chip Cheezum playthroughs:
  • His dedication to making sure "It Has To Be This Way" could be heard in all of its finery meant he fought Armstrong and did a perfect run five times. And he did it again for the same fight in the Jetstream DLC.
  • The Metal Gear Solid V LP, which intercuts between three completely different playthroughs, censors spoilers in the credits at the start of each mission, and puts Ground Zeroes back into The Phantom Pain at the the point where Chip feels it was excised from the main experience.

• There are times when Civvie 11 will go the extra mile for a one off gag:
  • There's a level in Heretic called "The Dungeon" and since that is also the colloquial nickname for the Department Of Special Corrections, Civvie codes one of the Department's corridors in the Doom engine just to have Corvus run around it for a bit. He could have otherwise just had a Heretic weapon bob about in the intro.
  • For April Fools 2021, Civvie did a video on the supposedly unreleased Hellraiser NES game by Color Dreams. Not only did this involve rendering a whole new NES setup, cartridge and Lament Configurations and all, but coding a fake game out of it too.

• Drawtectives:
  • Julia Lepetit carefully designed the Crescent Hill Mansion was so that all the backgrounds matched up exactly with the map and fit together in a logical way. And this was achieved by drawing out all the perspective manually in 2D, without any "cheats" such as Cel Shading.
  • Karina Farek personally took the initiative to make the epilogue picture a Fantasy Party Ending featuring just about every character appearing in the show.

• Economy Watch: The creator is very open to suggestions and develops the storyline in a way that fans would most likely enjoy.

• Noah Antwiler reviewed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for The Spoony Experiment right after having his wisdom teeth taken out (2 operations) and while stoned out of his mind on Vicodin just because the fans begged him to. That's dedication to your art. And after his "Health update" v-log...to think he kept up with everything as well as he did — getting through Kickassia, going to conventions, putting on heavy costumes, practically melting under hot lights — with a heart condition that makes him feel like he's dying if he overtaxes himself.

• BrainScratch Commentaries are a group of people that do commentaries over numerous video games. Each member always records their game footage off a video card or capture device to get the best quality out of their videos and to have their footage look legit when playing off the actual video game console rather than using emulators or shaky cameras. The only time the crew uses emulators is when they can't get a physical copy of the game or their recording glitches out.

• The film used to shoot the faux Grindhouse trailer The VelociPastor was scratched manually in a black room. Then it was baked in an oven.

• Man at Arms is a show where a Hollywood blacksmith makes replicas of various fictional swords. In an early episode, he imported over a thousand dollars worth of material from Argentina so he could make Sokka's Space Sword out of actual meteorites.

Other

• Antoni Gaudi designed his Sagrada Familia in ridiculous detail, carefully outlining each decoration, even the ones no human would ever see after the construction is complete (like little dove figures in small niches at 100 m altitude). When asked about that, Gaudi replied: "Well, of course, these are for the angels to see." Gaudi started working on the church in 1883. It is currently about 50% complete. It has been largely funded by voluntary donations. It will, hopefully, be finished in 2026—in time for the centennial of Gaudi's death.

• Charles Lauzirika is a sci-fi fanboy who was put in charge of 20th Century Fox's DVD production team and has created some of the most well-known DVD sets and film documentaries of all time. Notably, during the production of the Alien Anthology, he not only fought to get the uncut version of his Alien³ documentary "Wreckage And Rage" released (which required an epic amount of wrangling with Fox executives for close to a decade), but he also went back to the "workprint" edition of the film that was constructed for the Alien Quadrilogy release in 2003, assembled every member of the supporting cast whose voices couldn't be picked up on the temp track, and had them re-record all of their lines. He also served as the producer of Blade Runner: The Final Cut, in which he brought Harrison Ford's son in to replicate his father's dialogue for voiceovers that were hard to hear, and had Joanna Cassidy reshoot her famous run through the glass windows so continuity errors from the original film could be corrected.

• The reason why video releases for The Criterion Collection command premium prices is because each film's restoration and/or transfer is supervised by some of the best film engineers in the industry, and it allows for the company to produce carefully-curated sets for prestige films. Compared to "barebones" video release, each Criterion edition often includes a full-color booklet that features essays or remarks from the director discussing the historical or cultural significance of their work, long-form video documentaries that are often praised by fans for their thoroughness, and (for older films) featurettes focusing on the restoration techniques used to bring said films up to the highest digital quality.

• Discotek Media has licensed many older anime that may have otherwise never seen the light of day. Among many other things, they also managed to find the TMS dub of Magic Knight Rayearth, which was thought to have been lost, and include it on the Blu-Ray release of the series.

• Many early great masters of Western art, who did most of their work, now hanging in major museums, for commission. Though even then, they hardly phoned it in. Michelangelo Buonarroti was initially not enthused about the Sistine Chapel commission and if he had done a simple ceiling fresco, he could have gone to his more fulfilling work in sculpture; instead, he decided to go overboard.

• The Pantheon, a temple, and later church, in Rome. The dome, aside from being a perfect hemisphere with a diameter of 43.3m (142 feet), implies an imaginary, second hemisphere, the pole of which touches the floor exactly. Given the size of this space, a considerable margin of error would have been considered acceptable, but the architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, wanted it to be perfect. And this in 126 AD.
  • The art critic and historian Robert Hughes notes in his book Rome that the Pantheon would never be built today: no one would insure it, no one would even propose it, because no one would think that you could make something like that safely out of poured concrete. And they'd be dead wrong: Thanks to a unique and brilliant design, the Pantheon has stood for nearly nineteen hundred years, and shows no signs of collapse.

• The Parthenon sculptures. Most temple sculptures were only carved in full detail on the front because the back would never be seen; however, the Parthenon sculptures were carved in full detail, front and back. Chances are no-one saw that for thousands of years.

• Google Doodles; sure, the site's text can just be the same every single day, but numerous artists take upon them to draw something to relate to various countries' events, celebrity birthdays and such.

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