Something I needed to say...

[RCMerchant]

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.

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. 

[WildHoosier09]

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.

[ulthar]

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 (    ):  No TOY STORY for YOU!!!    

[The Gravekeeper]

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.

[Jim H]

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?

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.

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.

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. 

[Flick James]

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 (    ):  No TOY STORY for YOU!!!    

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.

[Flick James]

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.

[AndyC]

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.

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.

[WildHoosier09]

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.

[ulthar]

I just ran across Martin Anderson's Den of Geek interview with John Carpenter.  Carpenter had some interesting things to say about his view of both traditional effects and CGI.

We just spoke to Dean Cundey and he says that more care was taken with shot composition in the pre-CGI days, when there was little or no chance to fix it later. If that’s true, have you kept that good habit in these post-CGI days?

[laughs] I haven’t really worked that much with computer graphics. I’ve worked a little bit with ‘em, and they’re a great tool, but they’re still just a tool. They’re a great matting tool, now…things can look pretty good. It’s really excellent, and you can do a lot of nice things with it. Dean would know more about that than I would.

Does it ruin the verisimilitude of the film, for you, to know that there was nothing actually there?

But that goes back to the history of movies – there was nothing there on King Kong. There was nothing there on the Ray Harryhausen films. And on a lot of my movies – there was nothing there in The Thing! They looked at nothing. We didn’t have the effects, so they looked at the wall. That’s just part of movies; that didn’t bother me.

I remember watching Constantine and here’s what-his-name in hell…you know, it’s gonna be fake, whether it’s a set, or computer animation, or whatever it is. The guy’s not really gonna go to hell, so I accept all that.

Would you like to really get your hands on that kind of technology, with a big budget?

It isn’t an end in itself – it’s a tool. If the story’s great, I’d work on it.

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.   

[Flangepart]

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...

[The Gravekeeper]

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?

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).

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

[Flick James]

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 ( ). 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?

[ulthar]

You're trying to get me to embrace CGI.

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).  

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?

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:

Q: You mentioned something, a comment a couple of minutes ago about "thank god we didn't have CGI back in the day." So that begs the question, for this particular outing, are you going to employing CGI to help recreate The Fog, or are you going to be using a combination of things with CGI?

CARPENTER: Well, The Fog is going to be dealt with in a couple of different ways, practically and with computer graphics.. But see, I don't, this is my own opinion. I don't think CGI in it of itself is very scary. Creatures don't look too scary. [They] look fake. Things don't move. They move too fast. There's no inertia… I shudder to think what The Thing would look like if we had to do it with computers. Honestly... It wouldn't work.

(from Jeff Otto's interview on movies.ign.com )

I shudder at that thought, also.      

[Flick James]

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.