What's Wrong With CGI?

Nothing, when it looks good.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 23, 2018, Original Post Date: Jan 23, 2018 ---

I don't quite agree with that. I could have probably tolerated episodes two and three if the effects – and lightsaber fights – were better. I can tolerate TPM because it simply looks better and has more entertaining action.

 

I personally think CGI is great as long as its good quality and used in the way it is supposed to. I mean just imagine the prequels with mini sets. It wouldn't be the same.

 

There are a lot of levels to this question.

Surface level: Practical effects give fantastic elements a groundedness that cgi simply cannot achieve yet. Puppets have their own goofiness, but at least you feel that something is really there with the actors. I think some of the best so stuff comes from practical effects enchanced with some CG touch up.

On a deeper level, when you need to design an actual prop and figure out how to make something work in real life, you're forced to really think things through. There's a lot of evidence that, often, adversity produces artistic greatness. The challenge forces creators to engage on a deeper level. When everything is possible through computers, you simply don't have to engage with your world as much. You can be more passive about the whole thing or, at worst, lazy. You get creature and vehicle designs and movements that wouldn't work in real life, and the viewer picks this up intuitively. Or you end up using CGI to cover up poor filmmaking choices on set.


I think the newer films do a generally good job being responsible with CGI. But Lucas, I would argue, got pretty lazy with it. All the burping and farting CG creatures on Tatooine don't seem to serve a purpose other than to say, "Hey! Look what technology can do!" Good use of cgi would just blend these creatures into the scene. Calling attention to them with gags intentionally pulls the viewer from the scene to show off new technology.

And listen to the exasperated effects guy on the AotC commentary. They used CG to write in characters that Lucas forgot to put in certain scenes, even to move Anakin's hand to create romantic chemistry that hadn't been captured on set. Lucas let the freedom of cgi trump the need for careful filmmaking.

 

It’s the basic nature of the uncanny valley – what our brains interpret as ‘real’ and how that affects our suspension of disbelief. Computer AIDED effects is one of the greatest things to have ever happened to the VFX industry. It’s when you prominently put CG next to live action that things can get screwy. You’re seeing a ‘real’ thing next to a clearly ‘unreal’ thing. That detracts from the immersive experience. For me, it’s not practical versus digital, it’s the two working together seamlessly. One enhancing the other, not replacing.

Even if 99% of the PT wound up being CG based, I truly believe a more competent and practiced filmmaker focusing George’s wild imaginings within the confines of a well told story would have instantly made those movies 100 times better. No doubt in my mind.

 

CGI is always wrong. Everything should look like The Dark Crystal.

 

CGI isn't inherently bad, but it's bad when either:

A) It's used for pointless things. For example, the pear in Attack of the Clones. There is no reason for that to be CGI, you could have literally bought a pear and put it on a string and it would have looked way better.

B) It doesn't look good. The prequels actually have pretty good looking CGI- when it comes to machinery. The CGI aliens look pretty awful when viewed up close, however. (Wat Tambor is an exception for me, although he is mostly machine.)

 

What's wrong with CGI?

Everything is wrong with CGI currently.
The field is in a catastrophic and nightmarish mess.

Back in the 90's, you had roughly maybe 50 CGI shots. Now, it's north of over 2,000.
And this work is NOT easy. Not by a long shot.
One of my old child-hood friends is Chris LeDoux, he runs Crafty Apes and has a considerable portfolio at this point (see IMDB link).
To point out how hard this work is, I'll just point out that his team only had one task for Dr. Strange: the cape.
Yep. That's it.

And that's not uncommon. The new way that VFX tend to be handled is by a massive storm where I doubt most people in the film even really know all of what's going on.

Here's Dr. Strange by department.



For that film, there's just under 1,300 people working in visual effects on a film with a staff of just over 2,500.
This 51% of the film crew is spread out over 30 different visual effects companies in almost as many different locations, ranging from nearby in California, all the way over to England, upward to Canada, and also over to the South East in Atlanta, Georgia - just to list a few examples.

Next time you finish a film, let the credits scroll by and note when the VFX section hits and how long you'll be sitting there watching the names and companies roll by.

The issue currently has next to nothing to do with laziness, or any character flaw of business persons such as producers, nor does it have anything to do with CGI itself. Believe it or not, there's far more CGI in films than most people probably realize. At this point, it's in movies that you would otherwise think don't have a single VFX shot at all because it's just in the backdrop; cleaning up and making a set look better, or aiding to correct some lighting issues.
Sometimes it'll be to fix period piece settings and nothing more.

The reason that the crew, however, is so vast is because the way that VFX is managed during production has changed radically.
It used to be that you had mostly one primary company, like ILM, and the VFX scenes would be worked out very carefully because everything was such a task to accomplish anything at all.
Even after the ball got going it was still very in-house style of production.

However, as the medium grew, the business production grew as well. Now it's about speed and quality at budget.
The VFX industry is in a boom at the moment, and it's also nearing a moment of crashing.

Several States have offerings to VFX companies to set up in their state and they'll pay, sometimes, up to a third of the production cost for their first year's worth of films. Not all States offer that level of enticement, but they do offer various attractions; and none are California.
Deadlines are set before the division of VFX is established.

So, you have over 2,000 shots to model, shade, wrangle, color, animate, and I'm not going to list every aspect of VFX, but let me put it this way...there's hundreds of separate components to one shot, and a nearly a specialist for each.

Now spread that out over 30 companies in different geographic locations - no one seeing each's work, except those who are in post; leaving to post to clean up any issues regarding matching and color correction.

This is an assembly line approach, which is great, but currently the employment of VFX in this way is young, naive, and clumsy.
It'll get refined and better, but there's going to be huge earnings and sweeps of losses along the way.

The VFX team that won an award for PI, for example, went bankrupt in the same year.

I'm thrilled that my friend has a company, but I keep waiting for that message where I hear they had to close up shop and shut down.
I hope I don't, but it's almost every week at this point.

What I'm getting at is that it's a scattered mess, and everyone's specializing in one little thing - like a cape, or just a bus flinging through the air, or just a weather storm in one scene, or they may have just taking on all shading work, or wrangling, etc..., and the business hasn't gotten fully used to the the dizzying array of VFX management just yet and is mostly answering the management issue with post at the edit.

It'll eventually get better at some point, but it'll get a lot worse first.
ILM is like IBM of VFX, but what's needed at this point is a sort of Microsoft, Google, and Apple of VFX. A polishing, and networking mastery of the current wild-west-like environment.

There's nothing wrong with CGI itself, but the industry of films is struggling to learn how to use the new available option of outsourced assets, and it'll be pretty messy for a bit until the industry find the right model that works for everything, almost every time, without sacrificing scores of people to the cinema god.


Cheers,
Jayson

 

It was brought up in a similar thread, didn't see it here, but it was a post about how bad FX/CGI is easily forgiven if the story is tight and you feel immersed.
I was rewatching Fellowship of the Ring on Netflix and there are moments that look so bad but I didn't notice until I had paused at one of these moments and became self aware of them. The way Jackson told the LOTR story, you forget it's bad/dated CGI work and just begin to feel immersed in the story. Being a great story is so much more important than CGI quality

 

I think this overreaction to CGI . . . is simply an overreaction.

 

That’s precisely my feeling. Convincing VFX can assist with the illusion of cinema, but I’ll forgive just about anything if you can deliver a compelling story.

 

It's why horror is at it's best cheap. It forces the emphasis to be on story not the gore/violence.
I feel the same way about Sci-Fi for the most part. Fantasy is along the same route.
A great example is Guillermo del Toro. With a HUGE budget he gives us....Pacific Rim. With a small budget he gives us Pan's Labyrinth and Shape of Water.
The emphasis goes into story over visuals.

 

It's also the difference between 'studio project' and 'passion project' though.

 

That's true.
And the rumors of his $200 million dollar budget Hellboy 3....

Oh Guillermo...

 

Look for more small films that are more focused on drama than big budget power-houses after the next few years.
The first thing that will likely happen is huge pushes with volumes of money - more 200 to 300 million budget movies, and more big opening weekends that falter after.
More films barely making it over the 2.0 over budget line.

Then you'll see more 50 Shades of Grey-like films. Say what we want about those films (I have a few choice words in the sound of vomit), but they cost about as much as Star Wars IV would cost adjusted for inflation today (~30 to 50 million) and just kill it on the return on investment rating because of how small the budgets are.

In oh...I'll guess somewhere around 3 years...maybe 5....we'll see a surge of these things.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

It, Get Out...anything by Blumhouse really...

 

CGI is too often used as a crutch in some modern movies. However, that doesn't make the technology itself bad. In fact, some of the best visual effects I can think of come from a marriage between the practical and the digital. Look at The Force Awakens, for instance. You have a lot of CGI usage, but pretty much everything that the characters themselves interact with is actually a physical object, with CGI being used to expand scenes past the set, make the practical stuff look better, and for things that can't be done practically.

Here's a picture of the actual Finalizer Hangar set:



You can see that everything in the foreground, things that actors will be interacting with, is physical.



Most of the CGI in the final composite is in the background, letting the two merge together in an almost seamless manner where any imperfections in the CGI are virtually unnoticeable.

 

I Don’t Care How Much CGI There Is At All, I Don’t See The Problem Everybody Else Has With It









This Is Unrelated, But Jar Jar Wasn’t The First CGI Character On Screen, It Was TC-14

 

What? The two FO pilots are CGI? I didnt notice that before. Very well done.

 

CGI is great, when used properly, and that depence from situation to situation. Sometimes, CGI looks great in a shot that is 100% CGI. Personally, i think CGI works the best in combination with practical effects, were the VFX-artists can works of something that was really in the shot.

 

CGI is great when used in moderation. I think the original model ships look more realistic, and tangible than a CGI one. The way the light hits it, or something I really dont know, but to me you can't beat it along with good lighting.

Cgi does get dated over time. They keep having to update SE EP.4 Jabba every few years. The 97 version looked terrible. Though the 83 puppet is still awesome. Granted some of the puppet aliens do look like muppets in HD. I still prefer the original puppet Sy Snootles.