"Why CG Sucks (Except It Doesn't)" Video

I do not think that all CG "sucks", but the CG (like practical effects) needs to be done well. Poor CG (like poor practical effects) can take a viewer out of the moment. However, I think it helps the actors in dramatic scenes if they can see who or what they are interacting with. Practical effects seem less necessary in action scenes.

 

good video but one thing that still annoys me is why aren't they using a physics simulation program when the cgi artists use a sequence like when a car is crashing for example ?

 

"Gee if CGI is rendered well, it's actually not so bad. It's only awful when rendered poorly or quickly.

...that's the entire summary of this.

Duh.

The more CGI a film has, the less time and money there is to do it well.

By reducing the CGI you have more time and money to make your CGI to look good.

The other issue with CGI is it hurts the performances. We forget there's actually art to this folks. It doesn't just have to look cool and have the white alpha male win in the end, it needs to actually tell a story and even better tell a story that resonates and matters.

You also get a sense of craft. Instead of reusing all the models of the Golden Gate bridge for the seventh time in a film, you instead build a puppet like BobbaJo and because its physical, requires craft and patience, your performances as a whole begin to rise.

There is no "with us or against us" with the discussion on CGI.

It's merely a recognition that films that rely on it almost exclusively tend to do a very poor job of rendering it (Transformers, Green Lantern are clear examples), while films that use it only when it ENHANCES a scene or the story itself, tend to do a better job of using it (Lord of the Rings, Batman, The Force Awakens).

Nodody wants to abandon CGI that's a straw man, we want to abandon BAD CGI and relying on CGI so heavily the performances are lost in the process. One way to ensure your CGI is better is to use less of it.

It's the standard QUALITY vs. QUANTITY argument, we believe less usage will produce better quality usage.

EDIT - Also I can't believe it uses Forrest Gump as good CGI, the effects in that film are awful at several junctures. The gross insertion of Forrest's head into key history moments laughably bad.

 

yes some were not perfect.

if i were in charge of directing a film i would choose my cgi artists carefully and see what kind of artwork they can execute excluding the usage of computers. if the artist can create hyper realistic textures using any other too then its great but it means absolutely nothing if it looks horrible when you actually animate it. i think storyboards need to evolve.

 

And volume matters, as a coder I can tell you the more code you have to write, the less chance of it being designed well. That's part of what happens to Transformers, there's SO MUCH CGI and it has to be done for a specific budget or it won't be profitable. So you get piles of junk.

CGI has a place, nobody argues otherwise, it's not a binary question for action films. It's a matter of curtailing its usage so that when you do use it you have the time and money to do it well.

Bad CGI ages worse than practical effects too.

There are scenes in TPM that look much worse than even some of the stuff in Empire Strikes Back. CGI in the late 90's and early 00's was particularly crude and isn't aging well at all.

 

well put.

its as if the the directors of the first well executed cgi films of the 1990's understood that there is a strict limit of level of playing field for cgi usage.

 

To reiterate some of the points made already: nobody is advocating that we completely do away with CG. The argument is about the reliance of CG, the overuse of it. The best results are when the two schools are used together.

Take Mad Max: Fury Road. For all the (rightful) hype over its practical effects, there was still a considerable amount of CG in the film, but it was almost exclusively used to enhance the practical. The result was one hell of an action flick, and it's one that not only looks timeless now but will age extremely well.

Now take Peter Jackson's Middle Earth trilogies. The LotR trilogy did use some CG, but it primarily used practical when it could and those films stand up very well against the PT, which came out around the same time but has very dated looking effects. The Hobbit trilogy, however, abandoned much of the practical in favor of CG and the results were very mixed; instead of epic action sequences, most of what we got looked like video game cut scenes because most of the action is put on rails instead of flowing naturally. (Having read quite a bit on the production of that trilogy, I think the CG might have been a budget issue. When it was still supposed to be only two films, there was a lot of work done to prepare practical effects, some of which were even shot, but once it got stretched to three films the CG was used in order to tighten the budget; many of those practical effects, such as the orcs that were similar to LotR, were rendered over with CG in post in order to create continuity in the look of all three movies.)

Most big budget movies today use the bare minimum of practical effects, choosing to rely on CG for its cost effectiveness and "sleekness." The mantra of the TFA crew, that they're using mostly practical effects, is not only meant to hearken back to the OT era and assuage us of any ties to the PT, it's a way of telling us that they actually care about this film, this franchise, beyond just making a cost-effective movie with a large return from the box office.

 

Great video. Thanks for sharing.

 

I mentioned this in another thread, the idiots that take this "debate" too seriously are missing the WHOLE bloody issue. It's about BALANCE! The point is to blend both to make it look real, don't show me the CG, immerse me in your world!

 

Cg are getting so good these they that even I can't tell what's CG what's not. I watch Game of Thrones a lot and I didn't even realize they CGd the hell out of many things I thought were practical, like castles and cast extras and carts. Freaking food carts and curtains and blast.

There's good CG and Bad CG. Jurassic world, bad. Jurassic park, good.

 

The thing that bugs me about CGI is that it is hurting the indie film making crowd. These days the standards are a lot higher than they used to be, and it is running people out of the business even before they get into it.

 

CG used as a tool = good thing.
CG used as an excuse for poor imagination or bad writing = bad thing.

 

Speaking of CGI . Have you seen this ? Apparently Lucas Film did some major upgrade for TFA and they now use some 5000$ monster graphic card in their computers.
http://www.slashgear.com/nvidia-cre...at-helps-them-make-star-wars-faster-19374493/

"The fastest card on the planet"
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/03/heres-your-first-look-at-c-3po-and-r2-d2-in-the-force-awakens/


http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/03/n...t-monster-the-quadro-m6000-pro-graphics-card/
"In addition to the new Quadro range, Nvidia also unveiled a Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) workstation that packs in no fewer than eight Quadro M6000 cards. Naturally, it’s designed for insanely intensive rendering tasks such as photorealistic digital 3D models that can be interacted with in real time.

With a total system memory of 256GB, 2TB of SDD storage and 20 physical cores, the Quadro VCA is being billed as the fastest platform for GPU rendering on a single node. It will cost a cool $50,000. Bargain."

Jesus!

 

And that's what Lucas did. He had the ideas but focused too much on the CG. He had too many, as I refer to them, "yes-men" around him. Altough many of them were fans and didn't want to upset Lucas or something such as.
And yes, there must be balance between CG and practical effects.
Still... I love the PT because I love watching Star Wars, no matter what. Well except for a certain movie released in 1978 and some movies and cartoons concerning the inhabitants of the Forrest moon of Endor. Ok, there is some to hate...

 

It's one thing to incorporate CGI, and a completely different thing when 99% of what you are seeing in a shot is CGI. It might as well just be a cartoon at that point.