I used to work in the film & tv industry. Here are some fragments of what I kept on my harddrive.
Here is a VFX reel I put together just for fun as an after-hour project. At that time I was working at Arri, doing postproduction work on film and tv-shows. To complete the reel I used Photoshop, Nuke, Maya and Apple Shake (yeah, Apple used to develop real tools for film!).
Source of the first shot (the castle) is just a photograph. I roughly modeled the basic structures out in Maya and projected the image onto the 3D mesh. That allows for moving the camera in 3D and viewing the castle from different angles. Of course the background needs to be somewhat extended behind the castle. There is a tool in Photoshop that I forgot the name of that allows for cloning pixels from one part of an image to another. The final shot was composited using Nuke. At that time it was probably the most powerful node-based compositing software that had proper 3D integration (Shake never really got that right, in my opinion).
The second shot was done using Maya (modelling and rendering the glass) and Nuke for compositing the real-life footage with the CG glass. The footage was shot on my Sony VX2000. Great cam! I sold it soon after, though.
For the "winter"-shot I got my friend to perform as an adventurer in a park during winter. Crazy, nowadays we don't have much snow around here anymore! Maybe, some day, some local school will use this footage to show children what it was like having snow in our park? I hope it never comes to that. Anyway. I did a bunch of pre-processing in Shake of the raw footage to mask my friend out. In hindisght, a greenscreen would have been the better option, but what can you do... Then, I used Photoshop to do what in film we call "mattepainting". That is, drawing things into the scene (mostly backgrounds) that blend with the original footage in a way so that it seems like it actually was there during filming. I definitely overdid the bloom effect on that one. Funnily I did not have a drawing tablet so I painted in the river with just my mouse. That was fun!
Last shot: Also a still shot somehere in the park. This one was done only using Shake.
Oh. And that phone number doesn't work anymore.