To accomplish this, as shown in Movie Magic, digital effects supervisor Tim Landry took an unused close-up clip of Lee, shirtless, wet, and shivering, and traced it with a rotoscope onto a computer. Once that was done, Lee's image was extracted and combined with a computer drawing of a broken mirror.

Though Lee was to have appeared in nearly all of the scenes left to be shot, the filmmakers completed The Crow using another actor as a double and a good deal of digital technology.

After a great deal of soul-searching, Proyas and the rest of The Crow 's cast and crew arrived at the conclusion that Lee would have insisted that they finish the film. With most of the actor's scenes completed, it was up to special effects house Dream Quest to fill in the blanks, which they accomplished in a number of ways.