The Academy Awards show for that year was also one of the highlights, and low points, for 1995.  Digital Domain had a huge party based on their 2 year Anniversary and their very first Nomination for Best Visual Effects.  Anticipation for the film was fairly high and the competiton, Babe, although good, wasn't considered as flawless as Apollo 13 (does that sound bias?).  But sometimes... well, sometimes things don't turn out like you'd expect them too.  The awarding of the Oscar to Rhythm and Hues for Babe was very disappointing and basically became the fastest party disrupter I've ever been witness to.  Moments after declaration, the DD parking lot became a scene from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World as partygoers made their mad dash to escape the loss.  The sad thing that most people watching this film don't realize is 100% of all the effects for this film were all recreated.  NO stock footage was ever used.  Sigh.

To shoot the finale of the feature they basically needed to fill the streets of downtown LA with partygoers celebrating the eventual turn of the century.  In a clever marketing ploy, the production studio declared a huge rave block party was happening downtown, proceeded to hype the hell out of the situation on TV and radio and then charged admission to party-goers.  That's right.  They were smart enough to make the public pay for the shoot.  At least, partially smart.  The problem was not enough people showed up so Digital Domain had to digitally recreate a huge crowd filling every street visible in the helicopter shots.  After months of tracking hell (recreating the camera move in a digital environment so things you create digitally will line up with the live action scene), DD finally created weebles (you'll recall that weebles wobble but they don't fall down) using low resolution geometry that resembled the playschool characters and populated the area with the CG characters.  Due to the fact that there were so many digital characters need to created the crowd, no one really looked closely at the renders until the first pass of them was complete.  Upon further inspection though, they realized that all of the characters were upside standing on their heads.  Given that the look of the shot had been defined, the animators left them like it, a crowd of upside down digital characters.