Spielberg’s most famous shot features no digital trickery
The scene in which Elliott and E.T. soar past the moon in silhouette is one of Spielberg's most wonderful memorable moments and images, also one of the interesting facts about Steven Spielberg. When you realize that practically everything we see was captured on video, it's even more remarkable. Finding the ideal location for filming required weeks of scouting by the effects team, Industrial Light and Magic. To determine the ideal moment for a full moon to sit low amid the trees in that location, they consulted maps and astrological charts. While Elliott and E.T. were scale models, everything else is real and has been shown in movies before.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich are just a few of the Spielberg movies from the first half of the 2000s that make use of this paradigm, though not all of them do so to the same degree. Each of these performances uses a "matricial" symbolism that combines in-utero existence with technology, depending on the genre to which it belongs, to redefine the subjectivity of a man and make him better equipped to deal with the "problems" of his day.
In a filmmaking career that has lived on the cutting edge of visual effects trickery, it may be the least technologically advanced moment. All of his full-length movies have featured some sort of special effect, from barnstorming showstoppers like the across the moon bike sequence in E.T. to grace notes like the flash of light as the Nagasaki bomb explodes in Empire Of The Sun, the sped-up cloud effects above the mailbox in The Color Purple, and the digital vistas of New Hampton in Amistad that subtly enhance a story or imperceptibly create a world. No one has used the current state of the art with more flair and dexterity than Spielberg if George Lucas didn't create it.
