The Fountain ~ Digital Effects

In this film by Darren Aronovsky, beautiful surreal scenes of an alternate world and a mayan jungle detail the non CG parts of the film with magic and wonder.  A company from Toronto called Intelligent Creatures took on the task of forming the "tree eden" bubble world as well as the forest and  other such effects of the movie.  Using a green screen laden background, they constructed a physical tree with other natural roots, etc. and filmed the shots in a rather basic and plain sort of way.  Later on, they composited in-numerous layers of effects on the background and characters to almost completely remodel the origional footage.  Overall there was a total of 234 shots created.

source~ http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3866