As I see it, the whole point of the video was that there are holes in the dancer one can see through, to the wall behind - how was that pulled off?
I remember, a loooooong time back, back when CGI did not exist, there was a movie called “Death becomes her”, with AFAIR, Meryl Streep in it, where there was the same effect. So how was THAT done, then?? (pulled off back THEN, that is).
And, of course, the question: can <whatever it is that’s needed to do this> be done in Blender?? 
Thanks.
CGI is a lot older than you think. For example lightwave came out in 1990, and that movie came out in 1992. Westworld (the movie, not the hbo show) was the first movie to feature cgi:
Seeing through someone is an old trick that is fairly straight forward, provided you don’t move the camera.
The scene in ‘Death becomes her’ (at least what I could see in the trailer) is a fixed camera. So, you take a blank plate of the background, then you simply blend the footage of the actress with the hole masked out and reveal the BG plate behind.
For the wide open video, the camera is not only moving, but it is hand held (albeit with a steadycam rig of some sort). Since it is hand held, the background plate had to be rendered from laser and photometric scans of the environment. On top of that, the lighting was entirely natural, and there were clouds moving across the sky, so the lighting conditions changed throughout the single shot.
It’s quite an impressive feat, but it took dozens of people months to make that video.
Could you please explain these terms - “blend” and “masked out”, using NON-Combustion terminology or whatever? As I pointed out, that was probably done Not-On-A-Computer, though of course, I wouldn’t know. (it’s one year after Terminator 2 btw). What’s actually going on?
And, the question: could this be done in Blender? 
You mean they scanned the room and then recreated it in some 3D software??!! Is that what’s going on??
IIRC, yes… That is what they did.
That way they had a consistently lit environment for 3D. I can also recall they did a ton of tracking on the shot plates to match the 3D environment and the dancing girl.
The ‘making of’ above will explain some of the proces, there was some more work involved as usual 
rob
Interesting article on Death Becomes Her vfx, it had quite a lot of digital effects, definitely not pre-cgi by any measure: https://vfxblog.com/2017/07/30/death-becomes-her-ken-ralston-20th/
Oh OK OK, I just take “CGI” to be 1995, Toy Story, for some reason Obviously, stuff existed before that
Yeah, I’ll check out that article.
Where’s Sterling Roth though?
As robwu said, that’s pretty much how they did it. They built a virtual backdrop set, then camera tracked it to the movement of the camera. This gave them a clean backplate of what was behind the dancer, who they also motioncaptured in previous runs before they filmed. They used this mocap data to animate the digital ‘hollow’ dancer. Then it was a matter of masking out the real dancer, compositing the virtual backdrop and overlaying the digital dancer. There’s a good write-up of their workflow, along with that making of video posted earlier in this thread.
I don’t exactly know why i stumbled about this only yet but:
Actually it’s moving a bit…
so it’s even more aweseome for the time…
But this is even more more awseome…