Visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren and his team were asked to create organic special effects for ET to surround the potentially not-so-organic looking alien puppet. The famous scene of the boy and ET fying across the giant moon was mostly “real.” It took Muren and his team weeks to find the best spot to film a low moon among trees, and they used maps and charts to coordinate everything once they found the money shot. The only things not real are the characters, which were puppets added in post-production.