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John Knoll on CGI, Tron And 25 Years of Change
StonyandCher writes to tell us John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, is using the 25th anniversary of Tron as a platform to look back at the last 25 years of visual effects. "The type of imagery that was possible to create at the time was very clearly computer generated; it wasn't going to fool anybody into thinking it was live action. That was a limitation of the technology that worked very well within the story, that fit right in and made a lot of sense: if you're telling a story about events taking place inside a computer, inside a big virtual environment, what techniques should you use? Parts of the film were done by shooting live action then doing rotoscope and other optical techniques over the top of it, but the stuff that really looked cool and stood out was the stuff that was computer generated."
The grpahics may have changed and look better, but the physics and implementation are still awful. When I see spiderman swing, he just falls too fast and the swing doesnt look natural with the cgi (like, his body doesnt react or stiffen to the G-force).
And when Cgi characters jump off something and land on the ground, most of the time it doesnt look natural. I mean, are they even using earth's gravity acceleration of 9.8 m/s2????
Seriously, look at the scene from the first movie where Peter jumps from building to building. it doesnt look naturally he's falling too fast, and when he lands, the way his body looks when he lands just doesnt look natural. looks as if he just fell 3 feet. his body should have crouched/sunk more.
Has ruined far more movies than it's improved. When used discretely and where necessary to the story it is fantastic tool. But in too many movies the creators have reveled in their ability to create more and more spectacular stunts and made a movie that showcases CGI talent instead of one with an interesting and well told story. Think the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park" versus the infamous Jar Jar Binks. One was done very well and effects were used in such a way as to cover the inadequacies of CGI (which are still present today), while the other--well, not so good.