CGI...will it ever end?

[Cheecky-Monkey]

My dear sweet Jesus, I just saw the Star Wars episode III trailer, will it ever stop? The effects look pathetic!
I want other's opinions on CG.

[Mr_Vindictive]

Quick Answer - NO

Longer Answer - CGI is considerably cheaper and easier than old school FX.  Don't expect a change anytime soon.

[Fearless Freep]

CG is another way to get something done

All effects look fake or 'unreal' in one way or another  It's always been the filmakers job to do the best he can with the talent and budget he has.  Big budget allows better artists and more resources; whether those resources be foam rubber or models built or computer power or just time.  Talent can take any vision and any material and make it 'better'  Lack of talent cannot create something not there.

[trekgeezer]

There is CG in almost every movie made now. Most of the time it's invisible.

I' m glad they have it as a tool now or a lot of stories could never be made into movies.  Even the CG in a lot of tv series and B movies is looking better these days. But when I see a big monster coming, guess what? I know it's fake no matter how they made it. I really get tired of hearing people ranting about it .

[AndyC]

I'm inclined to agree with Freep and Geezer. It's all in the work that goes into it. There is lazy, sloppy CGI and there are lazy, sloppy traditional effects.

Personally, I love miniatures and makeup and animatronics. I give credit to filmmakers who opt to use them when others wouldn't. I don't relish the thought of technology ever reaching the point where it becomes effortless to create effects, or, God forbid, it becomes possible to really replace live actors.

That said, I think CGI is a great tool when it's used properly. There are even a few effects you simply can't achieve any other way. Yes, it's overused by some filmmakers, and there is a lot of crappy CGI out there. Even big-budget movies have been known to turn into video games in spots. But there are quite a few that look pretty sharp as well.

Frankly, knee-jerk bashing of CGI in general can get pretty tiresome. And there is a little more to being a film connoisseur than finding fault with things.

[Fearless Freep]

Wonder how many people decried blue-screen when ther were invented and started to get used?

[Cheecky-Monkey]

To Skaboi--Exactly! It's cheaper. Doesn't take time, skill, and little effort. practical effects, even fake-looking ones, at least take some hand-crafted work.
In my opinion, CG should be used to digitally incorporate practicle effects into live-action photography. Example:

Say you have a scene with a 100-ft monster bursting out the top of the building. Sounds like something than would require the creature to be CG, right? wrong.

First, shoot the shots without any effects in them, simply with actors reacting and screaming or what not. The scene would have been storyboarded carefully enough so the camera opperator will know where to point and shoot for the shots of where the creatures will be.

Secondly, the creature can be done as an anamatronic puppet, shot against a blue screen.

Third, have a miniature replica of the roof built (Or, if framed from below, simply having debri flying in the air.) that is capable of exploding outward, or have the creature puppet itself burst from the miniature, saving you from the next step.

Finally, incorporate the creature puppet over the miniature building top, over the live-action shots, and you have your desired effect.
 Granted, it would be cheaper to do this with CG, but would it be convincing?
Nope.
Hopefully some of you see my point.

[Eirik]

To paraphrase a recent remark by a US military officer: CGI is an awesome hammer... but not every problem is a nail.  

The brief bit of the trailer I caught had what appeared to be a CGI wookkiee (maybe I am mistaken and it was just the lighting, but it looked like CGI).  There is no excuse for taking what looked like an extremely REAL alien in 1977 and making it look fake by animating it in 2005.

I think a lot of directors have overused CGI.  Jarjar is another example.  There is NO reason not to have a guy in a suit for that character.  The CGI was distracting every time Liam Neeson spoke to him and wasn't quite making eye contact.  The ships looked less real than in 1977 too - they looked like cartoons.  

Huge crowds from far away, the monsters in the arena in Episode II, some of the droid and cityscape stuff - fine.  But using it to solve every special effects problem as Lucas seems wont tod do is lazy and it doesn't work.

[dean]

Lucas seems to be the main offender in abusing CGI effects.  Although some may call it breakthrough filmmaking [digital filmmaking, with almost entire sets done in CGI ala Sky Captain] but most would say its over the top.

But as mentioned already, CGI has some great uses, and is able to put things on screen which would be impossible to see, even with the use of minatures and animatronics.

There's always a negative and a positive to any new technology, and this is no different.  What it amounts to is proper and improper usage.

Improper: The rubber man effect of the Matrix Trilogy when Neo and friends are fighting, spinning around, looking like they are made of rubber.

Proper: The use of CGI in Constantine, especially with the Angels, which really looked pretty neat, and wasn't used in the heavy handed approach of Lucas and co.

CGI isn't going anywhere, what we do need is perhaps a course on proper use of CGI which all big budget directors should attend.

[daveblackeye15]

I like CGI when it's used well and the right way, but I'll always love animatronics and puppets and other FX more from the Really great stuff to the really bad laugh out loud stuff. I cringe when I picture the great Deadly Spawn effects replaced with the CGI effects of the Scifi original pictures CGI monsters.

[ulthar]

Cheecky-Monkey wrote:

> To Skaboi--Exactly! It's cheaper. Doesn't take time, skill, and
> little effort. practical effects, even fake-looking ones, at
> least take some hand-crafted work.
> In my opinion, CG should be used to digitally incorporate
> practicle effects into live-action photography. Example:
>
>

I submit that you don't know what you are talking about.  CGI, the good stuff, is neither cheap nor easy.  It's hard enough to do a full CGI film like "Monsters, Inc." or "Shrek" and it's something completely different to seamlessly incorporate cg into live action.  Neither are easy.  If you think this stuff is easy, go try it and get back to us on how 'easy' it was.

I've been doing computer programming for 25 years+.  I written everything from low level hardware drivers in Assembly to web-based user applications.  In late 1999 or 2000 or so, I needed a 3-D renderer for a small project, and rather than finding an existing one (and taking the time to learn how to use it), I derived the 3-D/2-D transformation equations FROM SCRATCH, and wrote my own wireframe renderer.  You think that's easy stuff, bub?  Go get a PhD in Physics, Math or Physical Chemistry (or similar field) and come back to talk to me.

I've used several modeling/rendering tools, such as TrueSpace, Ayam, K3D, aqsis, angel, and others.  The skill required to use these tools to perform artistic renderings of life-like OR purely imaginary objects is way past the skill I have in this reguard, much less producing smooth and realistic appearing animation.  CG animation is either dynamical or 'stop motion,' and neither is a black box technique open to 'just anybody.'

The special effects used for the dynamical models are not trivial, either.  The fluid modeling in "Shrek" for example was based on real Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), which is a numerical solution of the Navier Stokes fluid equations.  In other words, after doing a bunch of math, this is like solving 10,000 equations in 10,000 unknowns, THEN applying optics via raytracers and the like.  None of this is easy stuff; there are dudes getting Engineering PhD's studying how to solve equations like this.

Finally, the computational technology is not trivial, either.  Big Idea (the producers of Veggie Tales) have over 500 compute nodes in their render farm, and have a full time staff of about 10 people whose sole job it is to maintain these systems.  And they do 'low budget' rendering.  The system at Industrial Light and Magic is one of the most powerful computers in the world.  Cheap?  Nah.  This is a multimillion dollar computer system - the power bill to run it for a month alone is probably many times what you make in a year.  Well, at least I know it's more than *I* make in a year.

You may not like the visual appearance of CG effects because you are expecting something different, or perhaps simply because your taste lies in a different area.  That's fine; I've got no problem with that.  But don't discount it as "cheap" or "easy" because you don't happen to like it, and certainly don't bash it when you don't know what it takes to produce it.

You want a film that the cgi is very seamless (and not a bad film to boot)?  Check out "The Forgotten."  There's some really high quality CGI in that film, and it really fits the tone and mood of the film.

[odinn7]

Geek.... ;- )

[Mr_Vindictive]

Ulthar seems to have taken quite a bit of offense in the thread.  

When I said that it was cheaper and easier, I didn't mean in all cases.  Just as Ulthar said, Shrek and the like take a LONG time to make.  And I'm sure it is not easy at all.  I was referring to films where CGI is used as a replacement for latex/old school fx.  

Take Resident Evil for example.  I have no doubt that it was easier and more cost effective for the makers to use a CGI "licker" rather than hire a fx studio to create one out of normal materials.  

The story is quite different when it comes to full on CGI features.  I've read about people spending nearly an entire year on just making a couple of trees.  Factor that in with the rest of the detail in the film and you start to realize just how much patience and time go into these films.  

When it comes to the Star Wars films, you KNOW that the CGI effects are much cheaper than the standard effects that were used in the past.  And I'm sure that they are much much quicker and allow Lucas to realize his vision.

But I do hate that everyone gets upset whenever this topic arises.  I don't mind CGI.  I used to, but over the years I've began to get used to it.  We all might as well get used to it, it's certainly not going to change.

[AndyC]

I don't think anybody here gets up in arms if someone wants to judge a particular piece of CGI on its own merits (or lack thereof), or even argue that it was misused in a certain instance. Broad, baseless attacks on the medium in general (or on anything in general) are a different matter. For some, CGI is like a little rubber hammer on the knee. We know it's a favourite bugaboo of Cheeky-Monkey, for example. The question posed in this very thread paints CGI as some silly fad that should just go away (and this from somebody who never lived in a time when there wasn't CGI), which is ridiculous, and more than a little pretentious. People are bound to get tired of reading that sort of statement again and again.

We have a fairly smart and broadly-experienced group here, so the standards are pretty high. That means we have to be prepared to back up anything we say. I think that enhances the kind of discussions we can have.



Post Edited (03-17-05 11:16)

[ulthar]

Skaboi Wrote:

>Ulthar seems to have taken quite a bit of offense in the thread.

Not really offended; actually, I started to type a sentence to the effect "I don't mean to sound defensive about this."

AndyC wrote:

> I don't think anybody here gets up in arms if someone wants to
> judge a particular piece of CGI on its own merits (or lack
> thereof), or even argue that it was misused in a certain
> instance. Broad, baseless attacks on the medium in general (or
> on anything in general) are a different matter.

> The question
> posed in this very thread paints CGI as some silly fad that
> should just go away (and this from somebody who never lived in
> a time when there wasn't CGI). People are bound to get tired of
> reading that again and again.
>

Exactly.  I find Jar-Jar just as annoying (and poorly done) as anyone else.  But the overgeneralization that "all" cgi is as bad as the Jar-Jar's of the world is, as most overgeneralizations are, is baseless.

I think it's fair to say that when the cgi is "good" and seamless, it is not even noticed. So, it goes uncriticized.  When it is bad, it's easy to spot.  This makes it an easy target for critical comment.

And finally, just for the record, I too hope that cgi never fully and completely displaces classical techniques.  As a kid, I was a big fan of Lon Chaney and his make-up techniques.  Lon Chaney Jr's transformation to the Wolfman in the original "Wolfman" took like eight hours to film, one frame at a time.  The cameras were sandbagged and he was essentially strapped motionless in the chair.  Charlie Hallahan in "The Thing" was 'built' into the operating table effect for about 8 hours before the shooting even started.  That's commitment.