Most people get into visual effects for the explosions. But not Robert Legato, the visual effects supervisor of Avatar and The Aviator, who also won Oscars for his work on Titanic and Hugo.

“Everything I end up liking is outrageously simple,” Robert tells the TED Blog.

In this thrilling talk given at TEDGlobal 2012, Legato shares how he created the launch scene of Apollo 13 “in a parking lot with a tin can …  and fire extinguishers.”

“If you believed any of the stuff that I just showed you, what you were emoting to is something that’s a total falsehood,” Robert says in the talk. “I find that really kind of fascinating.”

In his talk, Robert also describes creating effects for Titanic, which made use of real footage of the ruins of the ill-fated ship along with effects filling in the gaps. He also shows how he created the scene in Hugo where Sacha Baron Cohen’s leg brace gets caught on a train, by moving the platform rather than the train itself.

Robert tells the TED Blog that he loves the challenge of creating effects based on historical moments, partly because they give him a sense of being connected to people in the past.

“Shooting Titanic, it was a creepy feeling to look through the camera, tune out all the things happening on set, and see people diving off the ship into the water to save their lives. It’s something that only our crew and the people on the Titanic saw that day in real life,” Robert says, adding that he felt something similar while filming the scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts’ capsule parachutes to safety. “Only a couple people on the planet have witnessed the live image of a Saturn 5 capsule in the eyepiece of their cameras and photographed it splashing down.”

Robert is continuing his tradition of amplifying historical moments. He’s very curious about what’s to come for oscar nominations 2013 He is currently on location in New York, preparing to shoot The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese. But Robert still took a few minutes to share with you the five movies whose visual effects floored him … in their simplicity.

On 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): “I was just amazed by how beautiful it looked,” says Robert.

On The Godfather (1972): “It was the first time I saw the artform of movies — the perfect blending of the art direction, the cinematography, music, acting, directing, editing and everything else.”

On Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): “I wasn’t interested in visual effects work then, but I saw it and I thought, ‘Holy …’ I knew I was seeing something that couldn’t be seen anywhere else but in the cinema.”

On Blade Runner (1982): “The beauty of Blade Runner is amazing. It’s simple — a model with a bunch of lights shot in smoke. I knew I wanted to do stuff that looked like that.”

On Forrest Gump (1994): “I was amazed by the simplicity of one sequence — Forrest Gump playing ping pong. It made me believe that Tom Hanks was a champion ping pong player. I asked ‘How did [Tom] do that?’ not ‘How did they do that?’ It’s pedestrian stuff especially these days — computer animating a ball as [Tom] swung the paddle to a metronome — but it made me totally suspend disbelief. It was such an elegant use of the medium.”

Robert Legato’s life is about perception. He is a two-time Oscar winner for his visual effects magic, and in this spectacularly visual talk he dissects some of his most famous effects, showing how they use the brain’s processes to create the effect of reality.

Apollo 13

Working on this, he discovered something about how our brains work: “When we’re infused with enthusiasm or awe, it changes perceptions of the things that we see and what we remember.”

To re-create the launch of this historic craft, he assembled some stock footage of rocket launches and asked people to tell him what was most memorable about the film. Interestingly, people described different shots very differently from what was in the shot, like camera moves and cuts that never happened. They saw different things than he did. So he decided to re-create what they remembered, not what they saw.

He was fascinated by the fact that people could respond so emotionally to shots done in a parking lot. One of the most emotional parts of the movie was created by simply dropping a model from a plane. He filmed it himself, and he’s a bad cameraman, so it looked a bit like a documentary.

He showed the special-effects footage to an astronaut, who immediately said, “That’s wrong.” Legato was puzzled, so he showed him more footage, and the astronaut said, “That’s wrong too.” But the second shot was from his own mission, from outside the rocket he’d been inside. He had found it wrong only because he knew they were making it up.

Another astronaut, this time Buzz Aldrin, had an exchange with Ron Howard. He came up after seeing Apollo 13 and said, “I saw some shots I’d never seen before. What vault did you find that in?”

Titanic

What everyone knows about the Titanic (aside from things end badly) is that Bob Ballard discovered it, and James Cameron went down and got more footage. Everyone watching knew that the Titanic was real and the footage was real, so they immediately suspended disbelief.

Legato’s task was to produce footage that looked like what Cameron was doing — and more important, that felt the same. Once he know the ship had been found, he wanted to see it. So he needed to create an effect where the audience wanted the same thing he did. That led to one of the most famous Titanic effects shots, where the camera swings around from a sailing Titanic to the wreckage at the bottom of the sea. He created that shot by tracking what he was looking at as he went around the ship and paying attention to where he was looking. Then, he slowly changed things on the periphery until the brain cued the change.

Hugo

The film itself, directed by Martin Scorcese, is based on the trickery of movies — that persistence of memory is what creates moving pictures themselves.

Sasha Baron Cohen wanted to be caught and pulled along by a moving train, but there was no way to get the train moving fast enough to be funny. So Legato re-created an illusion from the early days of movies based on a simple principle: If you move the camera by a moving object, it looks like the the moving object is staying still and the still object is moving. So he built a moving floor; the train and Sasha Baron Cohen are standing still.

The final example Legato shows is a beautiful Steadicam shot — except it isn’t. As an homage to Goodfellas, one of Scorcese’s previous films, Hugo‘s crew wanted to make a single shot moving throughout a train station that created the feeling that Hugo owned the station. It was stitched together to feel like a single shot, but what you’re seeing is actually five sets, two different boys, shot over six or seven months. It was, Legato said, “the best reviewed shot of his career.” When he asked a friend why that was, the friend replied, “Because no one knew you had anything to do with it.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson