Badmovies.org Forum

 I just read a review of Revenge of the sith that made some comments about CGI, and said that the old days when people made worlds with wood, clay, paint, blood, sweat and tears were better than today when you just "push a button".

Well, BEEEEEE ESSSSSSSS!!!!!!

 I've recently tried to get into 3d modeling and I can tell you that people who are good at it work hard at it and it's a very, very hard field to get good at. Someone may think that its easier to build a 3d CGI model and make it look real than it is to build a real model and paint it up/dirty it down.

Well, I don't think so. Making photoreal CGI 3D is damn hard work, and if someone thinks it's so damn easy, let him or her go get some 3d modelling and rendering software, like blender 3d or Bryce, both of which are free, and let's see him or her show us all how easy it was to make a convincing 3d render that looks real.

I'm not going to argue which is "better", as lots of cheap CGI looks like crap and a lot of cheap live action/modeled stuff looks like crap too. I'm not going to argue which is harder to do. What I am going to say is that anyone who thinks CGI is easy is ignorant and really insulting a lot of people who work hard to make good CGI look good.

It's not just "push a button". I've tried some 3d modelling and cgi, and it's hard as hell.

I've been making this point on this particular forum for years.  As is far too often the case, too many people commenting about {Just_About_Anything} know absolutely NOTHING about it...certainly on the Internet.

The part that gripes me is that if the CGI is done well, these same people don't even notice it (and thus don't complain about it)...so, in general, their sample space is biased toward bad (or cheap) CGI.  It's like holding the fx in ROBOT MONSTER as the standard for costume fx.

Of course, the real problem with CGI is its overuse...using it in places where it is not necessary and/or it becomes the focus of the film.  I love movies and have made an amateur study of how they are made for about forty years, and I don't think a movie should EVER be "about" the visual effects - a showcase for what the visual guys "can do."

Pixar is successful because they focus on story, and build their CGI world's to tell that story.

I'd wager that a film like Robot Monster DID do more than it's share of damage to the reputation of costume FX, as did other films of the day. Fast forward to modern day times, and a film like Van Helsing makes you feel the same about CGI. That movie was wa-ayyy overblown with CGI. As you said, overuse and focal point really renders it useless.


I'll drink to that. Seeing many of their movies, you immediately get caught up in the contextual world they build, and everything else is secondary.   Story is always first with Pixar.

Good Cg can at times be indistinguishable from live action, but many times it's used in places where live action would have worked better or it becomes more of a focus than practicle special effects would have been. 

Still, For the most part, I always get more of a sense of reality from things practicle effects, if for no other reason than the fact that you can tell people are actually interacting with it. 

Frankly, I see no reason why more people don't use Cg to enhance the practicle effects giving you the best of both worlds. 

I still find much more charm in a bad rubber suit than I do a bad CG monster. 

cliche fanboy post: cgi (good or bad) is the worst thing to happen to movies since, well......i can't really think of how to end that. i just find it pointless and it tends to distract you from the film itself. and yes, i studied 3d animation in college, and let me tell you, it's not easy work, but at the same time i think it'll be just another passing trend like the current revival of 3d.

You think CG special effects are a "passing trend"?  What will come after, exactly?  In any case, it's already been far too long to be called just a "trend" - it's been over 15 years since it became a Hollywood mainstay.  And there are absolutely no signs of it stopping, or going anywhere.  Effects pictures have been around for over 100 years now, and in all that time the only instances a technique has truly gone away is when something significantly better replaces it (like digital matte paintings instead of actual matte paintings).  So, until "constantly improving computer generated special effects" is replaced by...  Something we can't even comprehend at this stage...  There's no way CG work is going anywhere. 


Yes.  Not enough appreciation goes to this type of artwork.  Which is exactly what it is - art.  Done by, in big budget pictures, often dozens or even hundreds of people.  It is, in many cases, more work than more traditional techniques.  The upside is it often requires less time on set and such, which can save money in other areas.

Another upside is that advances are cumulative...develop a new shader, and it can be reused, for example.  Or code to model a given phenomenon, etc.

Well, this can cause crappy results, too...(cue sand-morph scenes from THE MUMMY (1999) ), where an effect is overused just because "we developed it, we have it now, we have to USE it!"   :lookingup:

Good CGI is seamless - it goes unnoticed.  THE FINAL CUT used some CGI that I defy anyone to notice was even CGI lest they knew it was there.  In that particular case, I cannot imagine a reasonable (and cheaper) way to produce the effect by traditional means.

Blasting an art on the basis of its bad examples is pretty weak...

I was kind of on the fence about CGI, but I think I’m starting to appreciate it now.  Thanks to my daughter’s obsession with the Harry Potter movies and Labyrinth, I’ve been able to study both of these movies closely.  Harry Potter uses quite a bit of CGI and Labyrinth, for those that don’t know, is a Jim Henson movie using  muppets, make-up, and machinery, although it did have some CGI in it and actually was one of the first movies to have a CG animal with the owl in the beginning credits.  Comparing two characters, Dobby from Harry Potter, and Hoggle from Labyrinth, upon the first few viewings, I didn’t see them and think “Hey that’s CGI!” or “Hey! That’s a costume/muppet/robot-thing!”  Both are great examples of the best of the best, and I can see and appreciate the hard work that went into them.

I still like the idea of a bunch of guys building a robot or making a monster suit for some poor sap to lumber around in for my entertainment better than a bunch of computer nerds sitting in a fluorescently lit office making CG trolls, but as long as I don’t notice it when I’m watching the movie, I think I can get over it.

Those Matrix fight scenes strikes me as the worst offender here. 

I think the amount of bad CGI we see is testimony to just how difficult it is to make good CGI. Having played around with it myself, there is a hell of a lot of time and effort and patience that goes into making any remotely realistic object, never mind a whole scene.

A lot of us don't like CGI for three reasons:

1. Good CGI is hard, but bad CGI is far too easy, so we get a lot of it.

2. Even good CGI is used far too much in some movies, and it is a big part of the overemphasis of action and spectacle in movies, at the expense of everything else. When you can show virtually anything onscreen, you don't have to be selective in what you show, or compensate for what you can't show in other ways. Movies get overloaded with effects.

3. We like the old-school effects and admire the artistry of the people who did them well. CGI is replacing those kinds of effects, so we see it as a threat and a slap in the face to the artists and movies we cherish.

We tend to employ defense mechanisms, such as being disproportionately critical, derisive or even angry where CGI is concerned, dismissing it as a passing fad or whatever, but the fact is, it's a legitimate filmmaking tool, an art form in its own right, and it's not going anywhere. I think we could see a lot more improvement in movies if we stopped the knee-jerk bashing of CGI in general, and started expressing what we really mean. If you use CGI, don't do a half-assed job of it, or you're better off without it. Put something besides spectacle in your movies, like good acting, a plot, characters we like. And we should try to articulate what we like about the old-school effects in more useful terms than "they looked better" or "they took more effort." Why did they look better? What qualities did they have that other techniques lack?

I don't care how easy or how difficult CGI is. This is completely irrelevant to me. I just generally don't care for it. When I see CGI, particularly bad CGI, what invariably enters my mind is "look, it's CGI" and it just kills it for me.

Sorry. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.

My complaint about the use of CGI, is so many movies are JUST CGI effects with no regard for story, acting, plot etc.  All those summer blockbusters come to mind.   

I did see a making of HellBoy thing and that was amaizng the amount of work they did to make a realistic and well done "real" image that they then gussied up with CGI.  That was amazing stuff (and one of my fave films of recent years).

Its when effect are the movie, as oppsoe dto being part of a movie that drives me batty,

-Ed

So, something about it just rubs you the wrong way in a way that you can't describe.  Right?  That actually makes more sense to me than most arguments against CG do.

On that note, I guarantee you there's tons of CG you've seen and never even realized it.  Stuff like minor background elements, matte effects, alterations of real objects, etc.  A lot of stuff like straight drama has minor CG elements sprinkled in these days, just done in a way you'd never know.

Oh, I have no problem with that. CGI and digital effects in general are industry-standard at this point. When CGI is the centerpiece, I find it is nearly always easily identifiable and looks like s**t to me. In other words, it looks like a video game to me. Even some of the background elements come across as a video game. Bad CGI is bad CGI. When I watched The Mist it stuck out like a sore thumb. All I'm saying is, when I stack the average CGI, and even some of the best CGI against, say, the work of Rick Baker, I'll take Rick Baker every time.

That's a good point. The badly-done, improperly used CGI, is going to make more of an impression because it is more noticeable and more identifiable as CGI. Ideally, CGI should not stand out, and when it's used effectively, it can slip by us without setting off our CGI alarms. That could skew our perspective somewhat.

CGI definitely has a distinctive look about it, even when it's done well. I suppose how natural it looks will depend on what you're used to. Kids who grew up with CGI aren't going to see it the way we do. I have no difficulty watching stop-motion monsters and robots, having grown up watching them. I would even say the stop-motion jerkiness adds something for me. The monsters look more monstrous and menacing. I look at the ED-209 scenes in Robocop or the endoskeleton in the original Terminator, and I think they're perfect, while many others would find the stop-motion cheesy and dated. Same with the 80s chroma-key effects that look so crappy today. They looked just fine at the time.

It's just a matter of what we're used to. And the nature of CGI allows it to be continuously refined. That CGI-ish look has lessened considerably over the years, and will probably continue to do so.

The only thing that worries me is the thought that the day might come when it is easy to crank out movies without actors or sets or costumes or anything. It could be the end of movies. Mind you, if anybody could make a movie with anything in it, at a cost of only time and imagination, then good storytelling would be the only way to stand out from the crowd. Making a movie with that level of technology would be analogous to writing a book. The tools are available to anyone, but relatively few have the skills to write something a lot of people would want to spend hours of their spare time reading. Making movies cheaper and easier to make might well save us from overblown schlock in the long run.

I gotta go with Paquita on this one. I went to see I AM LEGEND and had high hopes,being it's a classic Richard Matheson story-how can ya go wrong?-and expected some cool Living Dead type vampires or something...and got rejects from a Resident Evil video game. Even if they were just pasty looking vampires as in THE LAST MAN ON EARTH or the OMEGA MAN....it has the human element....not fancy cartoons. For things like dinosaurs and such...I guess it's ok. But even then,the old Harryhausen dinos had a certain...I dunno...charm to them.

I'm an old fart, I guess.  :lookingup:

Back when mankind was telling stories with voice only, a caveman picked up a stick and drew images on the sand to illustrate his point.  Others started doing this and it became popular.  Then other cavemen complained about how stick-sand technology was being overused and is over-rated and abused the artform that is story telling.  This tale has repeated itself for all eternity, I imagine back in the day when "talkies" came out there was complaint about how having sound in the movie ruined it.

Movies are good, or they are bad: for example- Ice Spiders is a bad movie, the fact that it is made by sci-fi chanel dooms it from the start.  The fact that spiders can't survive in cold temperatures is doom to it too, the fact that it has bad acting, bad story, bad directing, bad continuity all point to it being a bad movie.  Having some underpaid, no-name, actress lay on her back and flail her legs at what is obviously nothing and then dumping some extremely crappy looking CGI spider into the scene on post production (e.g. the spider is well lit and casts no shadow?) is simply keeping with what is the norm for this movie.  Its a bad movie, the CGI doesn't change that fact.  In a good movie all special effects are so seemless you believe what is being shown, this is the same whether it is CGI or puppets and strings.

Flick,

JimH basically made my point, which is, you miss the good CGI because you don't even notice it.

I will continue to use as my example the movie THE FINAL CUT.  If you have not seen this, please give it a watch (it's a cool film, imo).  There's CGI in this movie that I say you won't notice as such and will not know it's there unless you watch the "Making Of" extras.  And, it's central to the story points (good or bad, it depends on if the story works for you, but the CGI elements are not the kicker).  Not all CGI is "in your face;" some of it is quite well done and very, very subtle.

I doubt there has been a movie made in the last 20 years that has not employed some element of CGI. THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990), for example,  used CGI for some of the under water submarine shots, and those are quite noticeable (though fairly innocuous).

If you don't like bad, unseamless CGI, fine - I don't disagree with you.  If you don't like ALL CGI, that's certainly your prerogative, and I won't even argue with that.  BUT...I assert that that is tantamount to saying that you have not enjoyed a movie in the last 20 years (or thereabouts).  You really might be surprised some of the places/ways CGI is used.

Final Shot (   :bouncegiggle:  ):  No TOY STORY for YOU!!!     :bouncegiggle:

My feelings toward CGI are thus: it needs to be justified. If your story simply cannot be successfully translated to film with practical means, then CGI becomes a viable option. Otherwise, what's the point? I'm thinking of the CG blood in "Land of the Dead." What was the point? Realistic blood spurts have been done with simple and inexpensive mechanisms for decades, so what was the point of spending more money and hiring more people to CG in an effect that the crew on set could have done just as well? (The headless priest and some of the more decomposed zombies, I can understand doing CG work for. Puppets and costumes can go a lot farther than people give them credit for, but there are some things you just can't build and operate with machines).

Besides, you just can't get the same candid actor scares with CGI that you can with puppets. Check out the chest burster scene from "Alien." Those were real screams.

To reiterate: I don't hate CG, I just think that its use needs to be justified just like anything else in art.

Usually it's because those take a lot more time.  Which, in the end, means CG blood actually costs less (significantly so, in certain cases) in many circumstances.  Sometimes, as well, on low budget productions they may only have access to a shooting area for a limited time, or an actor or actors with limited schedules, and CG blood may be the only possible way to do it in time.  Blood squibs also add an extra element of danger to a shoot (they're explosives) which is one reason many shoots use CG blood now. 

There are also circumstances where CG blood is used because they can't ruin the environment they're shooting in (borrowed place with carpet, historical site, etc).

In general I agree with you, BTW.  While I can enjoy some CG gore, practical stuff will always have the real appeal.


That's the best example of bad use of CG I think I've ever seen.  They just didn't look good, and they were quite literally mutated humans, but physically they weren't THAT different.  Why not just use some good makeup?  It would have looked WAY better, and been far more effective than the weightless ceiling monkeys in that film. 

You're trying to get me to embrace CGI. I get it. Let me be perfectly clear. I don't hate CGI as a means of graphically representing something in a movie. I embrace CGI on it's own terms. Pixar movies? Love 'em. I also don't doubt that there has been CGI and I didn't even know it was there, but there's very little of that, I assure you. I have a better than average eye and I can detect CGI better than most. Don't take this as an agist thing, but I would wager that many people over a certain age, who did not grow up with CGI in movies, are better at spotting CGI effects simply because they spent their formative years watching real car crashes, real scenery, and makeup/creature effects such as in films like The Thing (1982). Those things were either good or bad as well, and we marvelled at the good and laughed at the bad. I find it less easy to laugh at bad CGI, it just makes me mad.

Creative use is creative use. I get it. If a movie using CGI is impressive, it's going to be impressive not because of the CGI, but because it was made by creative and gifted people. Pixar is the perfect example. There are plenty of CGI animated movies other than Pixar, but how many of them are as good as the Pixar body of work. But please don't tell me there is lot's of CGI that I don't know is there, because you don't know my eye. You would probably be surprised at how much I can spot. And it's not because I'm an expert in the field, it's because there is an organic "something" that is missing.

And just to illustrate further that I am not just a CGI hating curmudgeon, I do like the use of it by people like Frank Snyder, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller.

I would even say most people will forgive CGI that is less than seamless if all the other elements are outstanding. Maybe the filmmakers didn't have the budget to pay for the kind of time, equipment and expertise needed to do it right, or their vision exceeded the available technology, but the story is good and we like the characters. If a movie is good in every other way, I don't see any difference between overlooking some obvious CGI and ignoring the visible wires holding up the Martian ships in War of the Worlds, or the extensive use of stop-motion in Clash of the Titans, or animatronics that don't quite look natural.

The problem is when movies focus too much on the effects, and neglect everything else.

I do agree, however, that something is lost when we create things digitally. The actual spaceships and robots used in the first three Star Wars movies are still in existence, as physical objects that can be seen and touched. The same cannot be said for the prequels. The loss is not so much to the movies as it is to movie history.

I though about this briefly and there is an excellent film at the opposite end of the spectrum from Ice Spiders.  That would be Terminator 2: it uses CGI which truly represented the height of technology for that time period and it shows.  It works though because they are trying to replicate something that is ethereal looking (the T1000) so having this glossy shine over on it and other aspects that we would today consider to be less than "seemless" fits the storyline.  With or without CGI this is an excellent storyline, excellent movie because it doesn't rest on the SFX but rather tells a compelling story the SFX simply enhances.

I just ran across Martin Anderson's Den of Geek (http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/63568/the_den_of_geek_interview_john_carpenter.html) interview with John Carpenter.  Carpenter had some interesting things to say about his view of both traditional effects and CGI.



It therefore seems the "acting against nothing" argument is a bit of a red herring.

I love his final point...it all comes down to story.   :smile:

Any tool can be well used ot poorly used. It's all a matter of the users skill.
Now if we could get some good work out of the tools in the film purchase dept. at Sy-Fy...

Fair enough. I hadn't really thought about that angle, but that does make sense.

Such is the way with things.

A year ago this same argument on this site would have had the vast majority bemoaning the loss of more organic approaches to special effects and the soullessness of CGI. Now, much more members on this site are accepting of it. I'll admit to being a curmudgeon, but, like I said, I'm not s**tting all over CGI, I simply miss real car crashes, real explosions, and real fake blood ( :wink:). I have yet to see a CGI crash that is as good as the train wrech in The Fugitive. Somebody has to at least agree with that, yes?

No, not really.  If you don't care for it, you don't care for it.

My only gripe, and I am NOT saying this is the position you took/are taking, is the "bash CGI" tact that so many do use, when what I think they really mean is "bash BAD CGI."  I've seen SciFi Channel "Original" CGI output that was absolutely horrible, and of course, who can defend Jar-Jar (or just about any other effect in SW:TPM)?

I also cannot stand the overuse of CGI ... using it when it's not the right tool for the job (which may be a hard call to make sometimes).  



I guess where we do differ is that I don't think CGI is any more soulless than stop-motion or make-up effects, etc.  I LOVE 'classic' effects and have made a study of how they are done since I was about 5 years old.  I'm a big fan of Harryhausen's body of work, as well as Bottin, Stan Winston and a host of others.  I'm with you on the point that if CGI completely displaces traditional effects, we all lose.  With that said, I think there is a place for it and the biggest problem is the QUALITY not that it exits or is used.

I've taken the opportunity to read several other John Carpenter interviews today (since posting that excerpt above) and have found a common thread throughout several of them.  Carpenter repeatedly gets asked about remakes (which gets the same "soulless" kind of treatment a lot of times), and his answer is, I think, very enlightening.

In a nutshell, he says on the topic of remakes that movies are so abundant nowadays...new releases every week, etc...that it is VERY difficult to have something that stands above the noise in the advertising.  With the instant branding and built-in fan appeal of a remake, part of the advertising hurdle is solved - name recognition is a powerful force in marketing.  So, essentially, it's not that studios want to rape the originals, but rather that they HAVE to make money (or shut down) and doing that is getting harder and harder due to the "glut" (I think he used that term in one of the interviews I read).  There's only so many screens, only so many TV spots to buy, and only so much money to buy advertising.

So, yes, a remake is a shortcut, and one many of us might deplore.  But it's a business decision to solve a very real problem.  I find it interesting that Carpenter does NOT extend the 'hate' toward the concept of remakes that many fans do (even remakes of his own movies, so long as he gets paid for the use of his intellectual property).  He perfectly understands the strategy and I gather sort of welcomes it if it keeps a given studio alive so that directors continue to have distribution channels for their movies.

An interesting take from an insider, that.

Okay, so I've been thinking that we can probably safely extend that to the 'overuse' of CGI.  Yeah, a real train wreck has better "feel" and presence on the screen, but what if that's the only way a given movie could be made?  My point is that I can forgive lower quality visual effects (CGI or otherwise) if the story and character elements are there.  Further, I do argue that many who bash CGI DO accept "unrealistic" traditional effects in movies they enjoy, while at the same time bashing CGI for not being "real" enough.

So, in a sense there is a double standard.

On that note, however, I will leave you with another Carpenter quote from a different interview:



(from Jeff Otto's interview on movies.ign.com (http://movies.ign.com/articles/632/632087p2.html) )

I shudder at that thought, also.   :smile:    :cheers:

Ulthar, I think we're just quibbling over little stuff at this point. I think we're a little more on the same than both of us realize. I think you just lean slightly one way and I lean slightly the other. Nothing wrong with that.

You're absolutely right when you say that bad effects are bad effects. I think the only area in which I differ with you significantly is from the angle of "bad movie" appreciation, a big part of what we do here. I find, and this if my personal opinion, that I can laugh more at bad effects that are more traditional than CGI, while I find it difficult to laugh at bad CGI, I just find I don't like it and don't find it funny.

To me, it comes down to this: stop-motion typically features a very personal individual representation, the hands out work and artistic expression of one or only a few people's vision whereas with CGI, you often have dozens to hundreds of people working on different elements and it tends to lack that same individual focus. I find movies with CGI monsters it's rare that said monsters put forth as much personality as creatures of the past brought to life by more individual creative processes. The characters seem less characters to me and more just there like video game characters, nice to look at if well done but somehow lacking that soul, that depth, that element of realism that makes me think what I'm seeing is even but for a brief moment real and not a cartoon.  That's not to said that CGI hasn't been well done on occasion (any film that gets you caring about its characters succeeds in my opinion but if I have no feeling about the thing being presented and if it never strikes me as being a real feeling creature, I can have no empathy for it) - Jurassic Park did a great job with it IMO as did the 2005 King Kong movie and the Lord of the Rings films yet I can't say I've ever cared for any CGI character as much as I cared for the stop-motion King Kong or Ymir, the suitmation Godzilla or the make-up created Wolf Man or Frankenstein Monster.