While watching VH1 on Sunday night, I saw a music video for the new Nine Inch Nails song "Only." Directed by David Fincher, the clip features some of the best use of digital effects I've ever seen. Fincher also put CG to impressive use in the films "Fight Club" and "Panic Room." Which got me thinking: Fincher just might be the only filmmaker capable of making digital effects look real.

Big name directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have been putting tons of CG into their films for years, yet for all their hard work, they've never truly succeeded in seamlessly integrating digital images into the action. The dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park," while awe inspiring, simply don't look like they're really standing next to the actors. Similarly, the undersea world featured in "The Phantom Menace" doesn't look like the ocean bottom. Instead, it looks exactly like what it is: a computer generated version of the ocean bottom.

Larry and Andy Wachowski used CG to good effect in 1999's "The Matrix" and its sequels, but the surreal nature of the world they created for those films made it unneccessary for the digital effects to look "real." In fact, given that the characters were breaking the rules of their world, the eerie, unreal quality of the effects was a big reason why they worked.

Fincher, however, places his effects directly into the real world and succeeds every time. So if film tech pioneers like Lucas and Spielberg can't seem to succeed at seamlessly integrating their effects into a film, how does Fincher make it look so easy?

Simple. By focusing on the fine details of everyday objects.

In "Fight Club," he spent hours with his effects crew making sure that a single bullet could be seen tumbling out the side of a character's cheek. In "Panic Room" the CG mostly involves the interior details of a house -- things that actually exist and can be seen but which a camera can't reach. And in his Nine Inch Nails video, he uses digital effects to simulate the behavior of ordinary desktop items, like a coffee cup, a spoon, a perpetual motion machine, and a pin art toy.

Spielberg and Lucas, on the other hand, put all of their effort into creating effects spectacles that are so massive that no amount of fine tuning could make them look real. Ten years of post-production wouldn't be enough to work out every little glitch in the Imperial Senate scenes from the "Star Wars" prequels, and as a result the finished scenes have a sheen on them that's just a bit too smooth and a bit too shiny. That sheen is exactly what makes it obvious to everyone that something is computer generated. Take a look at the crowded battle scenes in "Troy." Or the giant ape in the trailer for Peter Jackson's "King Kong." You'll see that same sheen.

Because Fincher pays such close attention to the smallest of details, you'll never see that sheen in his projects.

So if you want to see a real digital effects master at work, don't waste your time with over-budgeted, studio-engineered, spectacle movies. Watch a music video instead.

To see Fincher's video for "Only" by Nine Inch Nails, visit the band's website.