Hollywood being a star-making machine above all else, it was not surprising that the buzz on 2000's release of Cast Away was all about the weight Tom Hanks gained and then dropped to give life to his character's years of privation. The real magic behind the film wasn't revealed until much later-that the island peak over which the hero clambered was a mud pile overlooking a California parking lot, and that much of the tropical environment seen on screen, from breakers to mountaintop, had been fashioned inside a computer.

Reliving the production, George Joblove breaks into a delighted grin. "Any shot that had ocean or sky in it," says the senior vice president for technology at Sony Pictures Imageworks, which created the visuals, "was pretty much a special effect." The film's software-generated scenes not only featured action and compositions that would have been impractical and expensive to shoot on location, but also contained elements such as windstorms and enormous waves that are virtually impossible to create in the real world.