The 1994 film The Mask starring Jim Carrey was a comedy fantasy that people loved for its silliness, but that overshadowed the technical skill required to make it as silly as it was. Watching it today, almost 30 years later, the movie's visual effects are taken for granted. At the time, they were fairly experimental, and it took a lot of work to pull them off. Mixing live action and computer-generated animation had never been done before, and every scene in which it happened had to be shot in multiple ways to be blended later. Therefore, the timing and spacial orientation of each element had to be coordinated to work together even when they weren't shot together. When this kind of work is done well, you are less likely to notice it, so it's a mixed blessing for the animators and computer pros who put in so much work to pull it off. -via Digg