Behind-the-scenes ‘Pacific Rim’ video reveals the movie magic behind those robots and monsters

While “Gravity” might have a lock on that Best Visual Effects Oscar already, Guillermo del Toro’s mega-sized action flick “Pacific Rim” is sure to give the VFX-laden space thriller a run for its money.

Legendary effects house Industrial Light & Magic recently released a detailed VFX breakdown of their work on the "monsters vs. robots" throwdown, and it’s an impressive testament to their work on the film. The three-and-a-half minute reel represents two years of painstaking work by ILM’s San Francisco, Vancouver, and Singapore teams.

From transforming Toronto’s enormous Pinewood Studios into the gargantuan Shatterdome, to building, animating, and lighting every moving part of the film’s skyscraper-sized Jaeger robots, to bringing the city-stomping, acid-spewing Kaiju to life, every single thing about the VFX in “Pacific Rim” was larger than life. Even all the ocean water that the bots and monsters fight in had to be built from the ground up in a supercomputer.

As del Toro told Yahoo! Movies Canada last year, ILM had their work cut out for them bringing “Pacific Rim's” Jaegers and Kaiju to the screen.

“We knew that once we got to the digital stage, we couldn’t cheat. On the drawing board you can cheat anything -- you don’t have surface penetration. If an arm bends, you can pretend that it’s bending, but if it’s a 3D model and two plates collide or penetrate each other you have a clash,” the filmmaker revealed. “So I said, 'Let’s design them with a lot of flat surfaces and then in between those flat surfaces have a very intricate bundle of movement.' . . . That’s what I call robot porn!”

The VFX reel barely scratches the surface of the work ILM did on the film. FXGuide has a ridiculously in-depth feature on almost every aspect of the company’s efforts on “Pacific Rim.”