Why do so many people seem to hate cgi?
polycounter lvl 10
I feel like whenever I watch documentaries about special effects, or listen to people like Adam Savage or Ray Harryhausen talk about working in movies, they seem to sort of resent and talk down about computer graphics. Do you guys think it's got a lot to do with the older generation of movie makers sort of resenting change or do you think that they're right about "practical" effects always being better than CGI?
Personally I kind of have a middling opinion. I like what directors like Guillermo Del Toro are doing, where they have a very mixed usage of both practical effects and CG. Pacific Rim for example utilized the strengths of both mediums.
What's your take on the whole discussion?
Personally I kind of have a middling opinion. I like what directors like Guillermo Del Toro are doing, where they have a very mixed usage of both practical effects and CG. Pacific Rim for example utilized the strengths of both mediums.
What's your take on the whole discussion?
Replies
There's always going to be things that are not practical for practical effects, and there's going to be things that will always look tacky/unconvincing in CG. And vice versa, really. Use whatever's more appropriate for the situation, that's what seems more sensible.
Insisting that one or the other is "always" superior, that's just silly.
Personally, I can't stand heavy use of CG in films. I would rather have spiderman on wires and stuff then CG-spidey flying around with rubber limbs. I think movies need to have that suspension of disbelief.
and
are wildly different things
Also, and quite ironically, I would venture to guess that for a while old school practical guys actually had a better eye than CG artists themselves when it comes to spotting bad CGI - things like bad lighting and exposure for instance. Therefore their stance is quite understandable, even if it is somewhat tinted with nostalgia.
Also, and regardless of how advanced CGI becomes, there is just no way for it to be all real-time and in-camera - which means much less control on set than when using practical effects, and much, much more iterations being required ... and then there's render times ...
On our end, I think we are biased the other way around because we are just way too used to CGI and we tend to forget how striking practical effects actually are. I was just watching the first two Hellraiser movies the other day, and it was quite obvious that the skinned body makeups would put any CGI render to shame, even today. So wet and slimy ! Delicious stuff
Otherwise I don't care. There have been great movies with tons of CGI where it was appropriate, well integrated to support the story and well executed. But there's far too few movies where it's done right.
Unfortunately CGI is often treated like tabasco sauce. Your food is boring and tastes like crap? Add tabasco.
Sorry that was a bit sensationalist of me to title the thread like that. I should maybe have used "resent" instead of "hate." :poly136:
I'm happy with my work yes but I do have to protect myselves too when it comes to unfair pay and stuff.
Too many films are putting an emphasis on the CGI over the actual content of the film - frequently the CGI does nothing to enrich the film or the story being told. There are now three hour films where the plot is so vacuous, the entire script can be written on the back of a beer mat - the rest is filler; expensive CGI filler.
It seem like the budget is all in the look, and nothing in the story.
That being said I think he does a good job of qualifying that on his podcast by saying that the best CG is the stuff the audience doesn't even have a clue is going on. Stuff like the compositing work a lot of movies do today to get a set just right. Check out the wolf of wall-street demo real that's been floating around to see what I mean.
Now that aside I think there is a large bandwagon trend going around amongst the armchair movie-maker types who like to lump all the bad special fx we've seen together with a lot of the good and right it all off as terrible. Quite too many of them seem to be looking through rose colored glasses at the old way of things and forgetting just how bad some of that stuff looks compared to the fx we see today.
A few cracked articles and a large push from reddit seem to have made a lot of people bag on the industry. Oh well I guess they get to have their cake and eat it to.
IE I like Star Wars Guys and the massive scale and scope of the project bring in the big bucks BUT DAMNED IT ALL BE if Lucas/Disney use a computer to do it.
James Gunn though went out of his way to use a lot of physical props and sets . He was well aware of what does and does not work and has experience in both ends of the spectrum with Scooby Doo and Slither.
Actually, most CGI is so fantastic and so well made we never notice it, some front and center pieces in some movies will stick out though.
It's all mental though, we expect the racoon to be cgi, we don't expect that entire background in a criminal series to be cgi.
Looking at you Boardwalk Empire. I couldn't believe how much of that show was CG. :poly115:
and the audience, at least me is like "ehm, are you talking about that weird mask faced jeffbridges, the rubber doll count doku is replaced with, or the videogame cutscene orc that somehow found its way into middle eath?" and the filmmakers put their fingers in their ears and yell "NANANANAHAAH, way lower production costs, NANANANAAH"
in the cases where i havent noticed it, i obvouisly have nothing agianst it. im just suprised that any art directior or the movie making eqvialent that have been working on those films would have said "yup this totally works, it doesnt want to make me tear out my eyes or anything"
Actors are more engaged, and team work is better. it puts more of the work in pre-production than in. At great as CG is, it's much more of a group of hermits working in a closed room.
It also plays a huge part in the role of design, designs become more grounded when they need to be built.
For example.
Vs
Lets face it. Something magical happens when things are made into physical objects that live in spaces.
http://www.pinterest.com/pascalblanche/juicy-junks/
The Thing prequel is a good example. Take a look at the movie (or the trailer if you'd prefer not to waste a couple of hours) Now go take a look at the work that ADI did for the movie on Youtube, which was then completely removed in favour of mediocre CGi, without notifying the practical effects team.
*ducks*
You say that like it's a bad thing!
Nuh-uh!
The 3 Movie the big clash at the end. Grey CGI dwarfs versus grey cgi orcs with a greyish mud background, horrible scene composition.
CGI are not bad in general but they must accept that cgi are not always the first choice like close up shots for a scene. I mean when a director dont like a scene he can play the scene a dozen times until he is satified. What is when the scene is computer generated? How much time consume the rendering and can the director render a scene a dozen time? What is when you have a water leak in a ship but the water must be computer generated. You have the whole scene and the water comes later. After 3 weeks you know that the scne was not really good and the cgi will never be good because of the camera angle. Do you think they can always make the scene new or must he accept a bad cgi effect.
It's interesting to me how once directors get massive budgets, their imaginations go wild and they go and blow it on spectacle. It was similar with the matrix trilogy, first one was a perfect example of how to use CG and integrate it into the story, the 2nd and third overused it and the films were kind of ridiculous as a consequence.
Most memorable was Interstellar which was completely spectacular from start to finish, and i mean spectacular to the point of me staring at the screen with my kisser open the entire movie. One of the best movies i have ever seen both CG wise and "movie in general" wise.
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I came out of it with a complete inability to pretend that films are real, both with CG and practical stuff.
second, did anyone watch Life after Pi?
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the big take away is that the visual effects industry is stuck in a rather silly business model. Visual effects are EXPENSIVE, and only sometimes look great.
Story is Queen. Someone earlier in the thread mentioned Rocket Racoon, which I think is a good example of something that worked rather well, but wouldn't have been convincing at all 20 years ago. If a method of making something works, and convinces you it's real, and you forget it's fake, and enjoy the movie, your effects are working.
Budget is King. I think there's been a bit of a realization lately that CG often isn't convincing enough for it's price tag, and practical effects often just look more convincing for things where you could use either. Have you ever sat in a movie and gone 'huh? that seems like a silly direction to take the film.' Maybe it's because they wanted to do something else, but it cost too much, so they had to settle.
Practical effects are getting better too. Look at the difference in books vs film before peter jackson's LOTR. How many books had epic battles with thousands of non-human participants? Lots of them (yes, I'm generalizing here). Movies? not so much.
The technology gets better, but it's also costing a lot to do it. The technology is also helping make practical effects easier too. Stuff like flat screens. The PADD's in ST:TNG, and how many ipads and screens I used to make sci-fi looking data pads and such. CG is getting better, but so are practical effects.
...I think I've made a muddle of all this now.
Swear to god he did more damage than Zod in that one.
haha. Peter Jackson makes some of the very best and some of the worst use of CGI. I guess that makes him a real master
"It is so much better when they use real apes like this and not overuse cheesy special effects!"
And every single one aggressively agreed!
Joy!
I'll never let them live down their idiocy.
As CG at least will be part of whatever art replaces cinema as the dominant and most socially relevant artform. Cg should then be required academic study so all the cheesy cg can be spotted but brilliant hard work will not be dismissed either.
Exactly,
Popular kneejerk opinion by an army of ditto heads reacting to the lowest common denominator only.
On the bright side...
Most practicing a cg discipline aer rabid practical fx fans as well. And as some have pointed out, both fields are only getting stronger.
That isn't the argument.