The opening sequence of the Ghost in the Shell 1995 anime films remains one of the most iconic scenes in the franchise. The movie begins with the creation of a cyborg -- a being revealed to be the Major, the main character of the story -- and moves through the complicated process of building her.

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Watching the sequence play out now, it's clear how that "shelling sequence," as it's known, had such a huge impact on everything from The Matrix to HBO's Westworld. So when the special effects team working on the Ghost in the Shell live action film decided to recreate the sequence for their adaptation, they knew it was something they would have to do right.Watch the live action version's of the shelling sequence below:And here is the original anime's version for comparison:The live action version of the shelling sequence, which can be seen in bits and pieces in the exclusive behind-the-scenes featurette below, started by being mapped out as a joint effort between director Weta, Rupert Sanders, producer Avi Arad and MPC Animation Studio. From there it was a matter of making a physical replication of the different steps of the creation of a cyborg so it could be brought to life."If you look at things like the transitions of light through the skeletal structure and the exposure of the understructure the skeleton with the ballistics gel and the muscularity of the visual imagery and so on, you can start to appreciate at some level the challenges around building objects that can emulate this," said Weta's Richard Taylor during a visit to the movie's New Zealand set. "The animatronics required are some of the most advanced we’ve done."About 60 percent of the finished shelling sequence in the live action movie will end up being physical, practical effects versus being all digital. In order to make the scene not just a shot-for-shot recreation of the anime sequence but actually make sense within the world of this film, Taylor broke down what the necessary steps would be to actually make a cyborg."I did a diagram almost like a chocolate factory. Because if you were making cyborgs in the future, you would make them in no different way, mental way, than you would making chocolate in a factory today," said Taylor. "So I drew it as a factory, and the process and then I split each one of those out and then I did a drawing on how we were to achieve each effect. And then I showed those drawings to Ari and Rupert, and then the designers went and conceptualized each of those and then Jan [Roelfs, the production designer] took that concept and he did a much more beautiful way to visualize it."Arad called the move "brilliant," as it broke down the eight or so phases of actually going through the manufacturing process of making a cyborg. That way it not only made sense on the production side, but seemed like a real step-by-step creation within the world of the film."What was so great about that was, you’ll see, we all jointly made our own decisions of our version of it, but they broke it into pieces so we could understand exactly what it was. And, in ways in which it never dawned us to get as literal. So suddenly we could see, here’s exactly what’s going on," Arad sad. "So our ability to be creative on our own level was a million times better. It was just such a revelation was like, 'Ooh, that’s what’s actually happening.' So when we were doing our version of it, you could still keep the principles intact, but you’re not sort of chained to the superficial level."As much as the filmmakers and special effects team worked to make a version of the shelling sequence that made sense in their world, they also wanted to make sure the experience of seeing the movie would be "as if someone has stepped into the anime and brought it into the real world," said Taylor. Because of that, Taylor and his team intentionally were "paying homage to original source material or source literature" while also giving these sequences their own visual language.That is especially the case with the cyborg geishas and other technology within the film which were inspired by 17th century automata. "We have gone to great pains to develop that as a whole technology within the manufacturing of the robots, right down to tiny handmade clockwork cogs that drive all the muscularity of the face and the eyes," explained Taylor."The shelling sequence, we did a great deal of thematic mood studies, first of all. We use tone and palette and color, where Larry [Grier], who’s our senior art director on this film at the Weta workshop and resident enthusiast, got the guys to do these development studies around color shifts. Because it’s all about carrying an audience," said Taylor.Ghost in the Shell hits theaters on March 31st, 2017.

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.