Digital Domain Built the Futurescape of The Fifth Element — Miniatures, CG and a 600‑story New York

Vision and scale

Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element still feels like someone’s fever dream of the future — loud, bright and a little bonkers. It has been reported that Besson leaned on French comic-art legends Moebius and Jean-Claude Mézières for the film’s look, and that the production imagined a New York stretching some 600 stories skyward. The result reads like a living comic book: flying cars, vertiginous architecture, and a future that’s more utopian carnival than noir dystopia.

How they did it

Digital Domain supplied the visual trickery. To stage traffic jams in the sky, the studio allegedly built police cruisers both as 1/24-scale physical models and as CG assets, swapping between them depending on whether a shot demanded real-world aerodynamics or digital acrobatics. The Manhattan streets were a hybrid too — 1/24 miniatures augmented by 2D mattes, with stock smoke and haze layered in to sell depth and scale. Small touches, big payoff.

People and craft

It has been reported that roughly 85 model makers and about the same number of artists worked at peak on the film’s more than 220 effects shots. Visual-effects supervisor Mark Stetson — a model maker turned effects lead — stepped in to bridge Luc Besson’s hands‑on direction and the technical demands of the show. The collaboration sounds famously intense: director as auteur, vendor as co-conspirator.

The emotional core

What sticks isn’t just the trickery; it’s the tone. Where Blade Runner made future cities grim, The Fifth Element chose daylight and whimsy. That shift matters — it’s not just another space opera, it’s a different way to imagine tomorrow. Want to feel optimistic about the future for once? This is the movie that dares you to.

Sources: theasc.com, Hacker News