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Why Special Effects No Longer Impress
brumgrunt writes "When an advert for toilet roll now has a CG dog in it, have we come to the point where special effects have no lasting impact whatsoever? As Den of Geek argues, 'Where we once sat through Terminator 2 and gasped when Robert Patrick turned into a slippery blob of mercury, we now watch, say, Inception and simply acknowledge that, yes, the folding city looks quite realistic.'"
When was the last time you gasped at a car driving next to you? Yeah, people get used to technology.
Does this mean that directors actually have to focus instead on character development, plot, and pacing?
Now filmmakers will focus on compelling stories, complex characters, and complete worlds, right? Right? Please?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Some people here weren't even alive when Terminator 2 came out. Those people have lived their entire lives seeing flashy special effects in movies, therefore it is nothing special to them.
If you want to impress people, then stop churning out cookie cutter sequels and start using some fresh stories that will keep people interested.
Now let met get back to TMZ.
I don't just find CGI effects unimpressive, but fundamentally boring. They're good if they actually add to the story, but who cares if Keanu Reeves is fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound when it's all just created inside a computer? I could be impressed with effects in the pre-CG days when someone actually had to stand on top of a moving truck fighting a guy in a rubber dinoaur suit to achieve the same thing, but now, so what?
that moving pictures in black and white with no sound were once considered impressive as well.
"Where we once sat through Terminator 2 and gasped when Robert Patrick turned into a slippery blob of mercury, we now watch, say, Inception and simply acknowledge that, yes, the folding city looks quite realistic."
Right and we also used to sit and stare in awe as a person used a phone from their car to make a phonecall. Now if a call is dropped we curse whatever carrier we have even though the sheer concept of what that signal is going through is borderline witchcraft. And so help me god if that signal drops to one bar. I act as if that communication capability is some inalienable right.
Any technology developed for one generation can now be taken for granted almost instantly instead of taking several generations for gratitude to ebb. Seriously, you could build a machine that extends life indefinitely through five minutes of use each day and people will complain that one model tingles more than another. And if it stops working, they'll flock to the internet to complain that their life was shortened. And if their internet isn't working, some company just violated the Geneva Conventions.
As computers (both general and special) become more powerful, you'll see this is in movies more and more. It's going to be like sound recording. Decent recording equipment is so cheap you can record a passable album in your basement. We expect decent CGI now that it's relatively cheap. Terminator 2 was the most expensive movie to make when it came out. Wouldn't be the same price today. I could sit here thinking of comparisons all day.
I guess I would question the author with simply: "Where did you draw the line and why?" He talks about 30 years of special effects but, yeah, 30 years in any lucrative field or market would see some drastic progressive changes like this.
My work here is dung.
I'm still really impressed by the special effects that filmmakers managed in the 1950s. To do the same with the tools they had available would still be very impressive today.
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Off-topic maybe, but why do people use the word "advert"? It's like they're too lazy to type the real word, but they don't want to use too short an abbreviation, "ad", so they go with "advert". It's like saying "automo" instead of either automobile or auto.
Hey, I'm from 1890, you insensitive clod! STOP
FULL STOP
Who remembers the Matrix? I recall gasps in the theatre as the camera rotated around trinity in midair. That shit was tight. What about Avatar? Tons of people were impressed with the world of pandora and the 3D effects. Special effects can definitely impress, but only if you keep them moving forward!
Yes, we do take special effects for granted now since we see it all the time.
Wonder if we'll ever get SO used to it that when we see a man shapeshift into a strange form (in real life), we'll just be like "Oh...cool..so what do you want for lunch?"
Two words: Star Wars
Seriously - Star Wars "Episode I" sucked so hard I never bothered to see the other two prequels - just looked up the story online later.
The problem for me is that I'm not impressed with movies that use special effects to try and sell a shitty movie. You take a good movie and add special effects to it and I'm impressed. Terminator 2 was a good movie and they added some cool effects to enhance that movie. The latest star wars films were mediocre and no amount special effects would wow me. Transformers surprised me with how it engaged me and I thought the special effects were pretty awesome !
Go watch the Ong Bak trilogy where the stunts are all real. Or watch Alien where all the ships and systems looked like they could be from the future but were just parts of Vulcan bombers and other stuff lumped together. Human imagination is being made lazy by cheap fx.
Hopefully we'll see a backlash against FX and see directors building some great sets and models again.
If I recall Bill Hicks correctly, we'll soon be sending in the terminally ill as stuntmen to make death scenes more realistic. "Chuck Norris just kicked my grandma's head clean off!" - I'd pay to see that.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
My biggest problem is not the masses of CGI, it is the insistence of directors or photography directors that the camera has to fly around all over the place.
I would much rather have nice composed shots, nice panning shots. I don't want millions of different angles and machine gun edits (lots of edits per second).
So many films seem the same due to the above.
I'm pretty happy about that fact, because it means that now that we are beyond the gadgetry (still have to get used to 3D baloney, though!), we can focus on telling stories with these tools. It's not sufficient anymore to have something visually cool, it must have a reason to be exactly like it is. Which Terminator II did very well already, though.
Do not trust this signature.
There have been plenty of movies since Jurassic Park that have used CGI in impressive ways. Sky Captain, The Matrix, Sin City, and 300 come immediately to mind. For most movies it just doesn't matter, of course, because it's not used in very imaginative ways but that's true of anything in filmmaking...or anything creative, really.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Why would this be any different from any other aspect of modern technology, or anything else for that matter? People become accustomed to things. It's like when you had a PS car when you were younger, didn't mind it. Then, you moved up to something brand new and loved it until you became used to it. Now, if you were to go back to that same old PS car you would not believe you ever were able to tolerate that jalopy. It's human nature.
I saw the folding city in Inception and thought "Holy fuck, that is cool". I guess I must have been the only one then?
There will always be room for movies focused around spectacles and eye candy because of visceral thrill... Perhaps the article writer has lost his ability to suspend his disbelief, but I was loving every second of the sfx (actors floating) and vfx (folding buildings) of Inception.
I almost crapped my pants. I wish I could feel that way about a game today.
With the proflieration of computers into everyday life, and the never ending advancement of realism in computer animation, it was bound to happen that special effects are taken for granted. The other night, my wife had asked me if I thought the cliff they were driving next to in the last Indiana Jones movie was real or removed by computer. You almost couldn't tell. We are at the point where we expect special effects to give us the movie we want. We expect them to be so seamless that you aren't sure they are computer effects or not.
20 years ago, we clamored for the special effect that 'looked so real' in Terminator 2, but now if we saw a movie with those effects we would be unimpressed because so many people think someone with a camcorder and a computer could whip that up at home. While it may or may not be possible is another matter, but the perception is there and that drives expectations. I think the special effects in Inception were top notch exactly becasue I didn't notice any 'edge' of where the effect starts and where it stops. If I see a movie where I can spot the special effect, I refer to it as 'second rate.' But that's because I know they can do better.
"Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." — Inception
It is because the plots are as thin as the paper they are printed on.
Why?
It's called ubiquity. Once something, ANYTHING, is ubiquitous, it is then assumed to be normal, common, and easy.
I usually think "this is a great video game" when a movie can't shoot anything physical.
It's not mercury that he turns into, it's a mimetic polyalloy, and I still pee myself whenever I see that. Didn't you know that's what it was??! It's liquid metal, liquid magic!
The trailer for Real Steel makes me think many explodey thoughts. Admittedly it's because the trailer looks seamless and intimate and doesn't at all look like it's using trickery (as opposed to, say, Transformers, which used a lot of moving bits to hide some flim flammery).
Suspension of Disbelief is critical to enjoying a movie. Now, CG no longer stands out and I can suspend disbelief far more effectively than ever before. Sounds like a good thing to me.
Everybody in the movie industry worships the big score. Big capital is banked on the hope of a big hit. Big expensive special effects are seen as a means to that end.
But modern effects technology also enables the production of quality-made inexpensive films. And things are only going to get cheaper . . .
I, for one, welcome the arrival of our new independent movie production overlords!
If Arthur C Clarke was right in saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then commonplace technology is banal and not worth mentioning. When the first films came out, directors would put in gratuitous shots of autos and trains rushing towards the audience as they knew it would get gasps and screams. These days I don't think you'd find a director hoping to have audiences faint in the aisles if they included a shot of a train rushing towards the viewer.
Hopefully as another poster has written, the focus will shift to well written scripts and plots. But there's probably another shiny thing round the corner....
But kinetics are still off when motion capture isn't being used. We need tools that limit the animator to work within the acceleration limitations of what's being animated. Too fast acceleration is usually what gives a CGI shot away. It robs objects of their weight.
A witty
I am just waiting for the Office Space CGI remake...
When I was young, I liked the explosions and cool FX too. These days I'm much more impressed by a strong script, and original idea, good acting, etc. Those are MUCH more rare (and special) than CGI or cool stuntwork. Anyone can throw a bunch of money at something and make it LOOK cool. It takes a lot more to find that truly clever screenplay.
Chris Nolan impressed me about a hundred times more with "Memento" than he every will with any lame-ass Batman movie.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Movie special effects are like nasa and the moon, nobody gives a damn any more. How about a nice game with a decent compressed code that doesnt need an intel x23094 cores and 5 gigs of vram. Make a decent game for regular non space age computers and that will be as impressive as starwars in 1970s, in 3d, HD and with a naked princess Leia
Overexposure to anything will cause people to become less impressed. The very first cinemas didn't even try to show movies with stories, it was just everyday stuff filmed in motion. People freaked out at the sight of a locomotive coming at the camera. Who could blame them? Their whole frame of reference was still trying to come to terms with moving pictures projected against a giant screen. The illusion was entirely too convincing.
Just think back to things that impressed you as a kid. I can think of many movies I loved then that don't hold up today. Some things don't hold up as much because you had a fonder memory as a child that cannot be replicated as an adult and some things you just had to experience at the time to see them as revolutionary. I get this a lot with movies that are considered classics. Something like Easy Rider I consider to be a very dull movie, unfocused to the point of being pointless. Fans say that you have to see that movie in the context of the time to fully appreciate it, to see how it broke from what had been done before.
Good storytelling has been the only constant for quality across the years. Tell a good story with good characters and you'll keep people interested. Most SFX movies continue to bore me to tears because they suck but a character like Gollum keeps blowing me away. I've yet to see another CGI character with that kind of presence and it was truly as much of an acting job as a piece of technical artistry.
I think another part of all this is that practical effects involve a degree of effort that makes the viewer shake his head in wonder, breaking the suspension of disbelief in the story itself to consider how hard it was to pull off in real life and thus commanding even more respect. I see CGI spiderman flipping about and I say "Meh, nice render." I see Jackie Chan doing something stupid and insanely dangerous and I think "Wait a minute, he could get hurt here! This is real!" And then you watch the credits and see just how badly he got hurt. You look at the Blues Brothers movie and consider all the cop cars they wrecked, consider that they didn't just CGI in a car for the Illinois Nazi drop but actually rented a helicopter to drop a real car over the city... Some people might not think about it in those terms but that's the way it strikes me. The sheer freakin' effort is worthy of respect.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
...so why do you want CGI to continue to be intrusive?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Lets compare Independence Day to say Avatar. In Independence Day they actually blew up a small scale replica of a city with mini explosions. In Avatar you had them all behind keyed behind a stunning computer generated background.
I think the combination of high def and computer generated graphics took the luster of explosions away. Watching Independence Day, Star Wars, Terminator 1 and 2, etc are still really cool to watch simply because they couldn't over rely on computers to do the graphics. They had to physically make the explosions.
What we describe as "interesting" is really our brains reacting to a discongruity in the environment just something we don't expect to be there or can't immediately categorize. The issue is that the Human brain can't take a lot of "interesting" before it breaks down. As a result our brains found the means to just "accept" most things it considers normal even if they are amazing. The interesting thing about all this is that the more detailed a given person's analysis of a particular subject, the less this will affect them. People who do computer graphics are more likely to be taken by the very small variations in two CG approaches, where a layperson just sees two examples of CGI without much discernible difference. The same is true of any subject, at first the layperson is amazed, if they dig deeper they lose the initial interest and can lock the whole subject away as a nebulous "accepted thing", but if they become an expert they start seeing the variations themselves and have to accept each bit to lose their fascination.
-- Adam McCormick
Perhaps it's because I only watch movies periodically and savor them. Eat steak every day and it gets boring.
This times 1000. We have the tools now, but very little worth putting them to use on.
I wish people would stop saying that the VFX are ruining moves. We're a tool used by the director (or, more often, by the studio) if that Director (or again, the studio) fail to utilize us within the story properly, how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?
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Whoever started this thread is stupid. It's not the simple matter of using VISUAL (not special that is explosions) effects. It's the IDEA behind it that is important. As with all art.
Lots of films without special effects are pretty awe inspiring.
The three decent Indiana Jones movies and just abut every James Bond movie generally have a lot of exciting action scenes without heavy use of special effect - just some old school stunt work. I've not seen it on the big screen, but I hear Ben Hur's chariot race is pretty impressive too.
Special effects are a tool. Unless a film is literally a special effects showcase, movie makers should rely on traditional cinematography and simply use the special effects to get those shots that can't be done with a camera.
Whoah!!
You mean that dog is a computer?!?
Robert A. Heinlein, in his 1950 essay "Where to?" mentioned as a law of nature that a nine-day wonder is taken as a matter of course on the tenth day, and Frederic Brown, in his 1954 story "Preposterous" told of a man who lives in a future so advanced even we haven't gotten there, and that man took for granted things like the "Fourth Martian War" and the "Immortality Center" who ridiculed science fiction and at the end of the story, "he quirtled."
Consider this: I was born in 1949, the year the transistor was invented. A few years ago, I realized I had on my person 1. a cell phone. 2. A PalmPilot and 3: a 60Gigabyte iPod. I suddenly realized that all of that represented more transistors, more raw digital storage, and more raw computer processing power put together than existed on all Earth the year I was born, and probably for several years after that.
What surprised me wasn't that I took these items for granted, but that, essentially, I was wearing them as part of my clothing.
only if the velociraptor wins...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Who remembers the Matrix? I recall gasps in the theatre as the camera rotated around trinity in midair. That shit was tight. What about Avatar? Tons of people were impressed with the world of pandora and the 3D effects. Special effects can definitely impress, but only if you keep them moving forward!
That's the main truth; really, people are only interested in effects if it's pushing boundaries of some kind. Avatar was pushing the realistic 3D boundary (I still haven't seen any other non-animated 3D movie where the 3D is continuous like Avatar (they usually just create multiple planes on which they map different 2D onto them), Matrix pushed that bullet time rotoscoping, etc.
On a link off the end of the OP's story (http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/265869/have_modern_visual_effects_robbed_us_of_reality.html) the author mentioned things like the Bullit car chases and Butch Cassidy crashes were impressive because you knew someone was sticking their neck out to do those things. In a sense, it was their way of pushing boundaries, physical ones.
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Actually, you found something...
Anything goes on screen, but the fashions in real life haven't really changed in 50 years if you skip over the 60's.
That's a little depressing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Lately, movies seem like an excuse to show special effects with no regard for plot.
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Moreover, the youth of this generation is completely desensitized to it, likened to a forensic investigator at a gory crime scene. Star Wars is saved due to it's 'cool' factor, but Toy Story 1 is shrugged off. Story and originality are very important, and it's great to see films that aren't remakes or sequels. But I will be at the Tron premiere tomorrow night, and that's because I connected with the original. The fact that it's in 3D is meaningless. The film makers of today are being forced to lure audiences in. It's a bit sad because who knows what's next? Holographic projection? It all boils down to the elusive "block-buster", and content is the unfortunate victim.
This signature has The Force
There's no respect any more when it's done for real.
There's a minor movie in which the female hero runs down the side of a 40-story building with a rope reeling out behind her for support. As she nears the ground, she flips to land feet-first, and starts shooting. That was real. The run down the side of the building was done by a stuntwoman, and the landing and shooting was done by the star of the film. Most viewers assume it was faked. It wasn't.
Overdoing it can make things worse. "Kick-Ass" has Hit Girl in three fights. The first two were plausible, which made Hit Girl credible - she had the right weapons and tactics to benefit from her small size and speed. The final one was overdone, with flying on wires, an impossible reloading sequence, and dumb tactics.
I clearly didn't watch Terminator and Terminator 2 for effects. Yeah, they were nice and same time disturbing (nuclear explosion in a city, burning alive and blowing children into pieces, thank you), but story what was enough compeling. While being pure action, it has so many levels... Cameron knows how to tell the story.
Did I watch LOTR or Harry Potter only for efects? No. Did I enjoyed not so succesful Constantin? I did, and it was because of story.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Hoban 'Wash' Washburne: This sounds like something from Science Fiction.
Zoë Washburne: Honey, we live in a space ship.
Hoban 'Wash' Washburne: So?
Now that was can create anything that can imagined, our directors and writers just need to up the score on their imaginations. Oh, look, a blue alien thing that looks a bit like a cat.
It's not a new tool anymore. Now the trick is to use the tool in an artistic manner.
Computer art used to be someone looping random calls to shape routines. Now you really have to create something compelling.
how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?
Allocating all the funds towards "yet another explosion" instead of ... well virtually all other expenses.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A movie shouldn't make you go "WOW!! THOSE SPECIAL EFFECTS ARE AWESOME!!!"
It should make you go "WOW!! THAT MOVIE WAS GREAT!!" REGARDLESS of the special effects. If the special effects add to the sense of wow, great. If the special effects make you notice them AS special effects, they're not doing their job.
Heck, a scene in Avatar distracted me because of the special effects. The "tree of life" or whatever it was called. I saw the "tentacles" hanging down, and my first thought was "wow, for such a high-budget movie, you'd think they'd do something other than clear plastic tubing with strand of glow-wire inside." Then I realized that the entire scene was CGI, and was impressed by the CGI so realistic, I thought it was a bad physical prop. I completely ignored the actual plot of the movie for a good minute while thinking about the special effects. That is a BAD thing for a movie maker. (Well, except Lucas, who uses special effects to hide the lack-of-plot...)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
in those older movies, like Terminator 2. There is something special to them that is not so pronounced in current day CGI.
I think that it has to do with early CGI having more visual artefacts which IMHO increased sublimeness.
In other words, today it looks too realistic, while our brains is always more alert with object that have out of place lightning or aliased ("pixelized") shape.
Other cause could be that movies were better 20 years ago. More originality in scripts, more time involved in planning, shooting, preparing actors, and better CGI planning because it was very expensive to start rendering something and then figure out you want to change something. These days movies have to be shot in a short time frame, so everything is rushed with lots of clichees because it takes time to invent something new.
Once the technology was affordable and ubiquitous, one could really see the deep, deep cheese the human race was capable of producing. Newsletters with 15 fonts, bad vector clip art, etc.
If only the animators had thought ahead, gotten their stories straight, and said "Oh, no, it still costs a bazillion dollars a second for that kind of stuff.. but we can do it if you really want it."
Avatar would look like Battlestar Galactica.
take that up with management not the worker bees
The real problem is they dont use them sparingly anymore. They use CG in fucking EVERYTHING, so no one thinks they are cool anymore.
Back in the day of CG effects they cost so much to use that they were only used in limited amounts to enchance a movie like say in terminator 2. But now they use them for fucking everything, even for blood instead of using practicaly effects. So no one gives a shit anymore because we are utterly drowned in computer effects.
Not to mention when you use computer effects in large amounts its not amazing anymore because we can all tell whats CG effects and your mind is removed from any false reality of the movie by them because you can tell their fake and thus makes them look less impressive. Wether they are bad CG effects or the very best CG effects you still know its fake on a concsious level and that removes your ability to suspend disbelief and get into the movie and when that happens your not impressed.
The fine art of practical effects went down the toilet thanks to the big budget special effects summer blockbuster movies and george lucas put the final bullet in its head.
There are two levels to visual effects. One is what you see. The detail, the quality, the lighting, texturing, etc. In other words, how realistic it merely looks, which is more art than anything. The second is the physics and mechanics of whatever is being portrayed. That is where most movies screw it all up.
Everyone keeps mentioning Avatar, but it's not just how pretty it looks, but the physics and mechanics are all at least superficially realistic. Machines are bulky and slow moving, animals are organic and subtle, etc.
I'll name a few movies that totally screw up the special effects. Oh, they look nice, but the physics are so over the top that it destroys the movie.
One is Van Helsing. Tons of potential in that movie, but they screwed up the mechanics of the effects horribly. One scene shows the heroine being carried up in the air by a winged vampire and dropped. She flops around like a rag doll in such a ridiculous way that it literally insulted the parts of my brain hardwired to process physics.
Another is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Again, wonderful visuals and attention to detail, but the part where buildings in Venice fell like dominoes, and the method they used to stop it was to fire a guided missile (in the year 1899) to knock down even more buildings? Jumped the shark right then and there.
Transformers was yet another. Somehow the robot's mass and bulk would quadruple when converting from a vehicle into a robot. Just didn't feel right, although it was intricate and detailed.
So I think that's why special effects typically don't impress, because they lack the engineering (in a literal sense!) required to underpin effects to at least a token level of realism.
Better known as 318230.
It's "sauce", dammit, "sauce"!!!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So you're basing your opinion on trailers, commercials, and little else? The movie isn't out yet and you're already saying it's forgettable "shit"?
You make a good point here. But on the other hand - those trailers, commercials, etc. are produced by people who are paid fairly large amounts of money to make people want to go see the movie. If this material, which ought to be the best representative material of the film, fails to impress people, then there actually is a fair chance the movie itself isn't worth seeing.
Bow-ties are cool.
What if I told you that in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" that Brad Pitt was entirely computer generated for the first third of the film. That's right. Brad isn't even in the first third of the movie. It's entirely CGI. Impressed? Yes. Effects still impress. They just often SO good that you don't know that you're impressed.
I'm quite partial to original series that you find on USA: Burn Notice, White Collar, Psych, Covert Affairs, etc. It not the best writing and production, but I'd rather watch any of those over pointless sitcoms any day (I also prefer the longer format). Several of these shows have been using CGI or cheesy digital effects in places that really surprised me. In Covert Affairs all the external aerial shots of the CIA headquarters are rather cheesy 3D, and don't add much to the show and ultimately take me out of the story and annoy me each time they are shown.
Also in one of the seasons of White Collar for 4 or 5 episodes every time Peter meets his wife, they are obviously in a studio with a green screen and the New York background is being inserted digitally. I later found out this was because the actress playing his wife was pregnant and couldn't travel to New York where they shoot on location most of the time. I still don't understand why they had to be outdoor settings in every scene though, and the overall effect was so bad that I wanted to puke and ended up fast-forwarding through those scenes rather than be distracted by how bad the effects are.
I suspect that overall the technology has gotten alot cheaper and more than ever the 'fix it in post' attitude is taking over when studios and networks are trying to tighten up on costs, and increase profit margins. This is in turn leading to cheaper and cheaper digital effects that end up really distracting from the end product rather than making it better.
They tried that in the second and third installments of the Matrix trilogy and it put us to sleep.
Wait, there were sequels to the Matrix? I don't remember any sequels to the Matrix...
Bow-ties are cool.
that included great special effects was Kubrick's "2001". Oh, wait... those effects were mostly NOT CGI!
I always thought the point of CG was to make a scene that didn't look like CG. I think some movie directors would argue that if you notice the CG then the CG was done wrong. Some of the most spectacular scenes in LOTR had CG in them but it was a subtle blending of CG (massive amounts in battle scenes) with natural new zealand scenery, sets, models, and actors.
I've noticed a trend in recent years for cartoons to be rendered in 3d, with 3 modelling etc used for the characters. Sometimes this is done quite well, e.g. handy manny looks quite nice, has a good style, but others fail miserably. You get the feeling any old person is just manipulating some already made models. In fact I'm sure a lot of the time, a computer is just manipulating models. I really miss the 'glory days' of the 80's with real cartons, hand drawn by real artists.
I'm surprised that TFA doesn't mention video games as a reason special effects aren't really impressive any longer. I first saw a folded city in the 2003 PS2 Atlus RPG Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. However, the warped Tokyo of Nocturne wasn't photorealistic, but bleak and minimalistic. Why should I be impressed by special effects in movies when I've grown up playing ever-more-advanced video games?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Unfortunately, it's the only substitute we have. So since most writers are unable to come up with worthwhile plots, characters we can connect with and layers of complexity, we're just gonna have to put up with yet more
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ideally special effects shouldn't be special as in to call attention to themselves. They should just be used whenever something can't be shot easily in reality (or can't be shot at all). They should be like any other tool in movie making where you just use them to tell a story.
A simple example would be something like crowd creation/replication. You have a scene like a big football game. Well actually hiring 100,000+ extras would be really problematic. So instead use CGI to deal with it. Been done a number of times and works real well.
Basically you go to computer effects when you need to, when it is cheaper or easier or whatever. You shouldn't be doing it just to try and make people say "Wow that is a neat effect." Ideally things should be so seamless that people can't tell what is live action, what is a model, what is computer generated and so on. That the whole thing just looks perfectly believable.
The CGI puppy in the mentioned Andrex advert looks awful. Good effects shouldn't lift your suspension of disbelief if you're at least trying to go with it. A problem I have with CGI is it often tries to be completely realistic and so in doing so fails utterly. Toy Story animation is awesome partly because you can slip into the animated world, everything is consistent. But move the setting into the real world and anything wrong stands out and is jarring. That CGI puppy looks awful in a way that a very basic cartoon puppy wouldn't.
Given it follows Nolan's brilliant "how did we get here" Cafe scene in inception where he plays the audience's familiarity with movie editing, and Ariadne's lines, I'm tempted to assume (though not convinced) that he had similar intentions with the folding city a little later. The effects are very well done yet the imperfection is jarring and starts pulling you out of the movie in much the same way as the dreamer starts rejecting the reality.
So CGI has become cheap. Unfortunately I think this has left us with cheap CGI. The computing may be impressive but they're missing the talented professionals who know how to make it work. The old films with once-groundbreaking effects still look better than many today, despite all the developments, because it still takes talent to use it.
So the medium is the message...
"... and the viewer is the content." I found this with some help from Google. There used to be a CBC mock-up where an actor portraying Marshall McLuhan gave the entire quote but only few-even amongst the geeks and nerds seem to recall that.
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
I am much more impressed watching Jackie Chan do nearly superhuman stunts than watching other actors on wires doing actual superhuman stunts. I cannot stand watching martial artists flying hundreds of feet into the air while kicking the crap out of each other or swordfighting. I'd much rather watch Jackie Chan scale a 12 foot fence using only his own power.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Quite frankly, I would be more impressed with a good Claymation movie than Inception.
There is no work involved in SFX anymore.
Notice how the article is addresses "special effects" and just about every comment is a gripe about CGI? This is the fundamental problem. As suggested by the cliche "to a hammer, everything is a nail": CG would be Hollywood's hammer. This is truly sad since there are numerous instances where CG is the *inferior* choice. Take a look at a Space scene in a Star Trek TNG episode or even Star Wars, and you will see what I mean. There is something organic and substantial about real models that just can't be replicated by CGI. Granted, they have come a long ways, but everything just *feels* smaller and much less grandiose when you take physical models out of the picture. And whenever I see a film where Liam Neelson is doing his own stunts, this jumps out at me and pulls me into the story. Replace this Liam Neelson bad guy busting scene with a CGId up screen shake-fest and I start falling asleep.
As others have pointed out, good stories seem much harder to come by these days.
I think back fondly to Forrest Gump - a movie CHOCK FULL of "special effects", none of them "visible". Every one added something to the story or visual style of the movie in a totally realistic way.
I think Transformers 2 finally confirmed for me that stuff blowing up wasn't enough. Why someone bothered to make The Expendables I have no idea.
Actually, production companies mostly allocate money to themselves. VFX companies have been dropping like bees lately from bankruptcy as clients demand more, better work faster and for less money.
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I'm a Gen-X'er. As much as I like computer graphics technology, for the most part it all looks fake. Bring back the good ol' photographic/optical means of visual effects (NOT special effects, those are what they use on set, such as pyrotechnics, fog, etc.). Anyway, I'd still put up any of the visual effects from the late 70's-early 80's films - the original Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, etc. - against anything that's out today. Sure, computers can help you achieve a much, much larger scope of things in a shot, but for real realism nothing beats the old photographic techniques. The one exception I would say to that is stop-motion animation - one of the fakest things I've ever seen.
I wish that a certain subset of Star Wars fans would STFU about a change which is completely ignorable if you choose to not watch the altered version of the movie, and doesn't even really change a thing anyway.
There was a period in which that wasn't much of a viable option, unless you wanted to watch on VHS or laserdisc. Even now, the DVDs you can buy with the original versions of the film are needlessly downgraded in quality (for instance, letterboxed as opposed to anamorphic widescreen). I can understand that producing another digital master of the film based on another source isn't a trivial thing, but I'm not about to waste money on inferior product either, you know?
I can see your point about STFU and all, but I think there are very good reasons to hate the change to the Greedo scene. It's almost incomprehensible that Greedo could miss from that range. Their edit to make it look like Solo dodged was laughable. And what was gained? Someone, somewhere feels a little better about accepting Han Solo as a hero, just on the basis that he didn't shoot someone who already had a gun pointed at him, until after they'd shot first? It's a change for the worse applied to a film I like.
Of course, there's lots wrong with the special editions... How about that highly redundant Jabba scene they added back in? The scene was known to fans already, and from that perspective it was interesting to see it completed and reinserted (with the original Harry Mudd Jabba replaced with the giant slug Jabba, of course... Who knew the big guy even could slump around a hangar bay?) but it basically just told us all the information we'd just heard in the Greedo scene. Some of the other changes they made were quite a bit worse IMO than the Greedo scene. And they didn't fix some little things that they probably should have...
Sometimes revisions of old movies works out nicely (i.e. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture") and sometimes it doesn't ("Wrath of Khan: Director's Cut")... When it doesn't,. the results can be pretty awful. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
I wish people would stop saying that the VFX are ruining moves. We're a tool used by the director (or, more often, by the studio) if that Director (or again, the studio) fail to utilize us within the story properly, how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?
In the same way vodka ruins Bob's personality. Of course it's actually Bob's problem, and vodka is just a neutral tool that can be used for bad or for awesome, but it would still miss part of the point to ignore the vodka's role in enabling Bob to start sucking. Before vodka came along, Bob was okay most of the time. Well, some of the time.
Just to be clear, when we (or I) say "VFX are ruining movies", we are blaming it on the lack of creativity of Hollywood. It's just unfortunate yet true that the existence of affordable and good VFX allows that lack of creativity to flourish.
There's a lot to be said for limitations and how it can make movies better.
Look at Jaws, Spielberg's breakout movie. Think of how horrifying the opening scene is, when you never even see the shark as the woman is (you presume, under the water) being torn apart. How often that movie is positively compared to Hitchcock, the master of suspense. Yet that's not the movie Spielberg set out to make! Originally, it was going to be a crappy monster movie in the ocean with Jaws front and center the whole time literally chewing up the scenery. But because they couldn't get their giant hydraulic-powered animatronic shark to work in salt water (the ocean's just a big wavy lake, right?), he had to make adjustments and go for a much subtler, and ultimately more effective, style.
Or the biggest example of something "ruined by VFX": Star Wars. Lucas luurved his effects even back then and Star Wars had the best around. But nevertheless, they couldn't afford to do endless lightsaber effects so we only had a few instances of them being used heavily in dramatically important moments, and so they were more awesome. He couldn't have a million jedi and robots and lasers to make them all stupid and boring. He had to have real locations and sets that looked real and that actors could interact with. He had to have character moments because he couldn't fill the entire movie with action sequences to make you forget that you didn't care about anyone on screen. Hell, maybe the only reason we didn't have a bouncing spinning light saber Yoda in Empire was because there was no way for him to do that on the end of Jim Henson's hand. Well, that and Lucas had little to do with that movie...
Anyway.
I know it's not the VFX studio's fault that so much VFX is used in place of actual good ideas and story and character. It would be completely ridiculous to blame you for doing your work better, faster, cheaper. But uh, that's exactly what enabled a lot of this crap. It would be completely ridiculous to say VFX companies shouldn't accept checks from the producers of crappy movies, but uh, that's exactly what you'll have to start doing if you don't want to hear "VFX are ruining movies" anymore.
Hey, actually, I never thought to ask that... Do effects companies ever turn down work? Good actors will turn down work, because they don't want their name associated with some piece of crap. Maybe if only the directors with talent or just good ideas got to work with the best VFX, maybe something positive would happen. *shrug* I don't know.
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I prefer the original Twilight Zone and Outer Limits.
It's the problem of the tail wagging the dog. The VFX department is so large, and builds such a momentum, only the strongest-willed directors have the force to keep them in check.
And often it's the technically minded directors (like David Fincher, an ex-VFX cameraman) understanding what they're asking people to do, who get the best out of these sorts of crews.
Much of the VFX is sorted out in advance of the shoot, with storyboard, animatics, previz, and sometimes working up whole sequences. After principal photography's finished, when things don't work in the edit or don't tell the story, the sheer amount of time and money invested in these sequences can be hard to throw away.
You need a powerful creative brain at the helm to make a good case that overturns the logical arguments of VFX supervisors and the other members of what is largely a technical team.
... are only finally beginning to catch up with our imagination, special effects is a huge field unto itself and so far most special effects go for a pseudo-realistic style, but there are many other styles explored in other areas of storytelling and entertainment.
I wish people would stop saying that the VFX are ruining moves. We're a tool used by the director (or, more often, by the studio) if that Director (or again, the studio) fail to utilize us within the story properly, how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?
exactly. VFX only ruin a movie if a fucking moron like Baz Luhrmann reads a magazine and gets excited about the amazing things that can be done... but you could (rightly) say that the movie was ruined before it got anywhere near a post house.
the explosions are usually done in camera btw... and the compositing required to stick the actors in front of it are not at all difficult or expensive - the work experience guy can roto that in less than an hour.
If you want stop-motion animation that looks realistic, check out Dragonslayer. They used a technique called "go motion" that really made stop-motion look fantastic. The technique was used in other movies... like Empire Strikes Back (for the Imperial Walkers, for instance), but Dragonslayer did it better, if you ask me. Dragonslayer was even up for a visual effects Oscar because of it. Raiders of the Lost Ark beat them out that year. ;-)
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
I don't watch movies to "be impressed by special effects." I watch them to enjoy the story. The better the effects get, and the more they can use them whenever they need them, the more latitude they'll have in telling stories. I've seen the insides of huge spaceships (starship troopers, various treks, star wars), ancient cities (various movies have shown Egypt as she might have been), whole planets (avatar)... dragons, aliens, and who knows what I've seen that I didn't even know were CGI... geez, what's not to like? If I never see another TV-show class "alien" with an obviously glued on nose and caked-on makup, that'll be just fine with me. And when the time comes, as I hope it will, to put Niven's Ringworld on the big screen -- or even just a General Products spacecraft hull (or a Puppeteer!) -- I'll be expecting some faaaaabulous CGI. Likewise the next time someone seriously does a WWII naval or air battle, or a martian landscape, or magic, or... Why *would* you use real stuff these days, even presuming "real stuff" applies to the story at hand?
If people are watching movies to be impressed, I guess they must have some motivation really different than mine. Not to say that sometimes I'm not actually impressed - but that's not what I lay money down for, that's for certain. Tell me a story. Do it well. Convince my eyes; convince my ears; do it so well that I don't have to suspend my disbelief, just go around it and immerse me in what, as best I can tell, is some kind of reality, Please sir, may I have another?
Bitching because CGI is too good, or widespread? Incomprehensible to me.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
yep, just left one.
it left a bitter taste in my mouth.
clients can be such dickheads sometimes.
the good ones are great, but the mediocre ones are horrid. they never know what they want and expect you to show them, then change their mind and expect it re-done for free (failing to realise that slightly changing the camera move is not a small quick change, but one that requires the entire scene to be re-rendered).
It's the problem of the tail wagging the dog. The VFX department is so large, and builds such a momentum, only the strongest-willed directors have the force to keep them in check.
You are insane. VFX companies are entirely at the will of the director/studio heads. Please cite an example of it being the other way around.
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This is an excellent comment with excellent points, thank you. With those well stated points I would have to agree, it works as an enabler.
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Are you an Aslyum refugee or another of the recent closures? del Toro just opened up a new shop in Marina Del Rey, might be worth checking out if you're looking for work- called Miranda.
Also, this is my favorite comment in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1910342&cid=34553970
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I know this thread is mostly about movies, but I'm going to chime in on television. For me, this is where some of the biggest improvements have happened. The visuals we've been enjoying in BSG, Caprica, V, Enterprise - None of them hold a candle to the FX in the originals. Heck even animated dinosaurs on the Discovery Channel are very impressive to look at. Of course I realize that if we got an episode of DS9 full of space dogfighting we knew that that next week's episode was going to occur entirely in Quark's or on a baseball field - But nevertheless it was impressive.
To be impressed, they need to really do something that you know is really difficult.
Who cares if you blue screen a car jumping 60' over a truck (gone in 60 seconds 2000 edition).
But the original is still impressive today.. The car really did the jump.
A real person on a real ledge 60 stories up is tense.
A real person on a fake ledge 60 stories up is a yawn.
A fake person on a fake ledge is only there to tell the story-- not to be impressive.
That's okay if you have a good story and at some point the person needs to walk on a ledge over the street.
It's not okay if the entire point of the scene is how dangerous walking 60 stories up is (or how close the CGI rendered blade came (Last Avatar) or how far the car jumped over a truck (gone in 60 seconds), etc.
There are things with Martin in Lewis in the Colgate comedy hour which are so impressive, I don't think people do them any more. They are swinging and tossing around this 5' dancing lady-- at one point Lewis falls backwards, bending at the knees, to his frikkin shoulders-- JUST as her feet swing through/over him, and he literally bounces right back up off his shoulders to a standing position. This was on LIVE TV. They really did it. If they were even slightly wrong he would have been kicked hard and things would have collapsed. There was real risk.
It was really cool.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Does this mean they'll start focusing on story and character development, instead of special effects now? Wait this is hollywood, prepare for more remakes of movies made 15 years ago, "reboots" of movies made 5 years ago, and plenty of sequels.
When "Avatar" came out the local radio movie review show also reviewed "Bright Star" in the same show. The contrast showed how little effort had gone into script, dialogue, plotline, pretty well anything apart from special effects in "Avatar". It looked like if you gave Cameron's special effects guys and money to Campion (or any of dozens of others, she just happened to have something that came out at the same time) they could have turned out something better than Fern Gully with Smurfs.
Well, from Hydraulx's Skyline downwards, really. But most VFX-heavy Hollywood blockbuster movies are put together in this way - and suffer from this problem. On paper, yes, the director determines the creative direction of the VFX shots. And the post house will revise shots, again and again if necessary, at the director's will.
But this is on a shot-by-shot level. VFX houses bid for jobs based on shot counts. Some VFX houses, e.g. (I work in London) Framestore, Mill FIlm, Molinare, bid on films on the basis that they put up investment funds based on winning the VFX work. These houses have their eye on pitching for future work, based on the current shots they're doing.
So you end up with companies producing work based on the in-house resources and proprietary techniques/technology they've developed. When hair/fur shaders finally became viable to render, furry creature movies popping up everywhere, Realflow/fluid sims = poseidon and a bunch of other fluid related films, massive/crowd-sims = the one meeelion zombies/marauding armies category of VFX shot.
This has always happened throughout film-making - films being realised because of what's technically possible. But the VFX process is so expensive, so labour intensive, so time consuming, that moving things around, at a creative level, is like turning a supertanker around on a sixpence.
In the end, producers and financiers play safe, pre-viz first, go for the tried and tested, the post-house's recommendation. Then reassure the director by giving him/her the illusion of control over these shots. They're such a significant portion of the budget, the director has no more true control over them than they do casting.
Allocating all the funds towards "yet another explosion" instead of ... well virtually all other expenses.
It doesn't cost any more to write a good screenplay.
Actors are still a significant portion of the budget, more so than VFX in most features. And long gone are the days where directors have to shoot a film with a VFX supervisor sitting over their shoulder saying "Yeah that shot will be really hard, don't you want to do a lock off?" If anything the exact opposite is happening, directors are more and more just shooting regardless of everything being perfect and assume that the VFX will fix everything amiss. If anything that should make the films better if it means the director isn't being slowed down waiting for the art department to finish moving around background details.
If there weren't VFX in films the budgets would definitely shrink. But they wouldn't re-allocate those funds to the writing or directing it would just disappear from the budget.
Lastly I disagree with the premise that things are getting worse let alone that VFX are to blame. There was tons of garbage produced in the 50s, 60s, 70s,80s and 90s. For every Transformers there is a Steven Seagal movie or Santa Clause vs the Martians.
Crappy movies aren't a new phenomenon nor are they becoming more prevalent--it just seems that way because we forget all the shit we blocked out over a 10 year period and remember the 1 maybe 2 movies a year that were good.
Look back over the last 10 years:
LOTR
Gladiator
Letters from Iwo Jima (A movie only made thanks to CG)
The Assasination of Jessie James
Sweeney Todd etc etc...
I think the 00s were one of the best decades for film. And a large number of the films leaned on CG to help tell their stories. Imagine Gladiator without Rome and the Coliseum.
Do effects companies ever turn down work? Good actors will turn down work, because they don't want their name associated with some piece of crap
If a movie has good effects, but is still crap, you say 'that film was crap but the effects were good'. If a movie has crappy dialog, you say 'those actors sucked'. Star Wars Episode III is a perfect example of this. The actors in that are all competent, but their performances were horribly wooden because they had nothing to work with. The effects looked good though, so those guys aren't going to be short on work. My somewhat rambling point is that it's much easier to judge the effects independently of the rest of the film. It's much harder to judge an actor independently of other factors in the film.
This is part of the reason why it's so tempting to spend money on effects. It's much easier to judge that you've got value for money from good effects than it is from good script writing or from good acting. You give the effects guys money, and they come back with more explosions. You spend more money on actors, and what do you get? Maybe a more cohesive final work, but you probably won't really know until the critics tell you.
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Context, story, character. (and a great sound track nails it)
For years now we have had full length films and animated series done with rendering, so of course some 30 second special effect scene doesn't impress anyone.
A special effect is superficial; it is shallow in both the intellectual and emotional sense.
It isn't drama, it isn't comedy, it isn't suspense, it isn't mystery.
It doesn't advance any character development. It may be part of the plot, but a poor special effect will substitute for a great one without damaging the plot.
I'm sure the first typeset stories were pretty impressive. People probably wanted to see them and go, "Ooh. Ahhh!" simply for the production techniques.
While that was probably a fun period, it's also fun being able to live in a world awash with books where the quality of story-telling is the important thing, not the typesetting.
-FL
Like big-name actors?
I am trolling
All the work editing Forrest into various bits of historical footage; that too.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Obligatory pedantry:
Special Effects are practical: makeup, pyro, animatronics.
Visual Effects are what we think of as "CGI" which can include all sorts of 3D, 2 1/2 D and 2D imagery.
Ok, now that that's settled: I work in the industry. I have a rather VFX heavy film I spent the last year of my life on opening this weekend, in fact.
I miss practical sets. I miss DP's that can light worth a shit. I miss having somewhat original scripts (hell, I'll take a script that *wasn't* cobbled together from marketing research for a franchise/reboot) to work on. Most everyone in the biz are huge fans of Guillermo del Toro who has been championing a hybrid approach: CG augmentation of as much real stuff as possible.
That said... the best effects are invisible, or you're so engrossed in the story that you don't notice them. With the exception of films that are supposed to be stylized/fantastical/unreal, if you notice that you're watching an effect, I haven't done my job properly.
I'm tolerant of bad CG as long as there's a decent story. If you don't have a decent story or a somewhat original idea, you're wasting my time as a filmgoer.
I saw T2 the first week it came out. No one 'gasped'. It was very impressive and a milestone (and still a great watch) but it wasn't THAT mind blowing. If one had seen The Abyss this wasn't much of a shocker from a special effects point of view. Special effects technology has been a gradual a progression, and some movies have "firsts", but it isn't necessarily unexpected or unbelievable (even to typical moviegoers) at the time. I'd easily put Avatar as more of a 'leap' over its contemporaries than T2 was over its contemporaries, and that was a recent movie, so I think there is still significant room for improvement.
I have this same idea in my head as with demos in demoscene. You can make a old system do a lot with animation but that is just animation.
The real impressive thing is when someone actually finds a way to rotate a filled cube smoothly on a old system Instead of showing just some precalc frames.
In old movies you had real miniature explosions/models and all kinds of stuff, you needed to think outside the box to get these kinds of effects look good. They even looked realistic (altough you could sometimes see trough those).
You kinda wanted to see what they could pull off.
These days I almost just see the pre-rendered background doing stuff, it's nowhere near as impressive as they can make it do anything. There are no limits really.
It's kinda same as watching an animation player on a demo that does awesome complex 3d. It might look freaking brilliant but again, you could just replace the animation frames to be anything else.
This is why I still think that many older movies have better effects than modern movies where you can just make that explosion 4x bigger with little to no effort at all.
special effects as well as camera angles, plot devices, and other cinematic techniques - looking at those old films, such aspects of the film seem mundane now, but were pioneering when they came out. Hmm, I'd suppose that if done well they'd blend seamlessly with the rest of the movie anyway.
In your 50s range, thinking of Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", which was a simply amazing film anyways. (I suppose any 'special effects' there would have mainly been choreography of the chaos of the final battle scene)
To go further back, D.W. Griffith, "Birth Of A Nation" - even though it glorified the KKK, it was a landmark of cinematic technique for the time.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I look at it more in terms of maturity, where the technology proves itself through subtlety rather than through going over the top. Less is more.
And my moment of CGI maturity was in the movie Amélie. I didn't realize how often the director used it until I watched it with director's commentary. They used CGI for really the most frivolous things, although it was the frivolous things that made the movie awesome.
The article touched on how CGI gets cheaper and accessible to small filmmakers, but I think the real beauty of CGI happens when it allows people to get something they wouldn't ordinarily be able to get without studio backing or lots of union workers. Virtual sets and virtual actors have already been done, but they're still time-intensive and space-intensive, even if the hardware is getting cheaper. I want to do a shot-for-shot remake of Citizen Kane with my iPod Nano's camcorder, and I want to play all the parts.
The intersection of great story and great effects is a holy grail of sorts. Each side by itself misses something
An analogous observation in music: Musicianship itself, and/or the attitude/energy/showmanship of the musicians themselves
More of a dual continuum than a 2x2 matrix
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The human visual and auditory systems only have a certain degree of acuity, as defined by our physiology. The optic nerve for example can only carry so much information into the brain each second. The point is, the technical advancement vs. coolness curve must saturate at some point. With music for example, a well-mastered CD produces effectively perfect sound for the typical listener.
Visual effects are beginning to reach a similar point. The pixel resolution and color fidelity are nearly there, and with pixel-perfect control it's only a matter of time before any effect we can dream of becomes possible to create at reasonable cost.
We aren't there yet though. The first filmmaker who produces a simulated human that truly fools me into thinking it's real, will completely blow my mind. I think that will be the end of the line.
> good stories seem much harder to come by these days.
Good stories are relatively easy to come by, it just takes some work. There are thousands and thousands of new manuscripts a year, and more books now than there have been at any other time in recorded history. Most of them are bad, but it's still easy to find a good one if you have an ear for it.
But that's where the problems *Begin*, not where they end. You still need to get people with money to agree that it's good, and you need to show it has marketing potential, and you need to find someone with tens of millions of dollars that it has potential. You need big names to agree to it, you need to find excellent cinematographers, and you need some screenwriters to buff it up who can write and who can write for your target audience. (Certainly there are excellent screenwriters, but despite the higher barriers to entry, there are also a LOT of horrible screenwriters.)
Basically, you need people with a sense of cadence, you need people with good technical skills, and you need people who are cute and really good at playing pretend. You also need someone to manage those people. And a few tens of millions of dollars.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Return of the Jedi.. the original. Luke stands above the Sarlacc and you see the skid he's on. It has marks on it, its obviously being used quite heavily. It looks dirty, dented, cheap.
AND that was realism.
Now... We have stuff looking soo good and slick that its simply easily to spot its fake WITHOUT wearing glasses (like I do).
The first example is something people still speak/chat about. The second.. Something you might get a laugh from.
GEE, I WONDER WHY!
Must be my glasses ;-)
"Special effects are just a tool: a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an ends unto themselves. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." - George Lucas
Shame he didn't follow his own advice.
Do effects companies ever turn down work? Good actors will turn down work, because they don't want their name associated with some piece of crap.
It's not QUITE the same thing. A "good actor" who clears 20+ million a year can afford to turn down a crappy movie, because they don't HAVE to do it, and there are 10+ good movies about to be produced, the directors of which are eagerly trying to sign the actor for less than half the projected budget of the movie. However, for every good actor that turns down a crappy movie role, there are 100 up and coming stars who are knocking each other over in sheer desperation hoping to get it.
A effect company, however, probably doesn't really care if the movie itself sucks, as long as the effects turn out well. Nobody's first bad impression of the new Star Wars movies is that the effects suck. The effects are great. It's just the story, actors, direction, dialog, marketing, etc... that suck. ILM isn't losing any sleep over Lucas's failure to produce movies that are as epic as he hyped them to be. The criteria for an effects company would most likely be "how much are you going to pay us?" and "will your check clear?"
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Hell, maybe the only reason we didn't have a bouncing spinning light saber Yoda in Empire was because there was no way for him to do that on the end of Jim Henson's hand. Well, that and Lucas had little to do with that movie...
Point of nerd order; Henson was not Yoda's puppeteer. Frank Oz was Yoda's puppeteer, as well as his voice.
I still admire the effects used in the original (and, IMO, only good version of) War of the Worlds. Particularly the shields around the martian war machines and the little sizzling burn marks their electromagnetic "legs" made on the ground as they moved along.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
nah, i'm in Australia. it's been bad here for a long time.
no union worth a crap either. we work because we want to live the dream. then we are worked until we hate it, for money that can barely keep the car running.
then they go under, and you go back to your old job and fuckin' love it :)
I wish you guys would talk specifically about "visual effects", which is what you mean, as opposed to "special effects".
Generally speaking, "Special" = on-set, physical and "Visual" = stuff created or mostly completed in Post.
Get it right. Your opinions are hard to take seriously when you can't even get that part right.
Duh, shoulda remembered that.
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Frank Oz, not Jim Henson.
"There's a lot to be said for limitations and how it can make movies better."
But those movies you list EXIST because of special effects. And they are impressive because of them. Star Wars without aliens, light sabers, star ships and alien worlds would be a western. Jaws without the shark would be what exactly?
FX enables directors, producers and writers to ruin movies about as much as sound and color and 3D. In any case, it's older than all of those. Saying FX ruins movies provides an excuse for crappy movies and the people who make and like them. Nothing wrong with making and liking them but at least admit that they suck.
Generally speaking special effects refer to in-camera or on set effects work, while visual effects are computer generated post-production effects.
CG removal of wires in flying gags..
No more do you try to use vibrating piano wire. String that sucker up there with1/2" steel cables. Leap tall buildings, jump off cliffs..
CGI makes it much less exciting to be a human sandbag.
This is the question I'd like TFA to address and I hoped that some of the comments here would provide me some pointers for further reading.
I'd really like to know whether there's any fMRI research going on or scheduled addressing my working hypothesis that Hollywood movies and CGI effects in particular rewire our brain and alter our perception of what is real and what is unreal. I mean, if education, both informal (preschool) and formal (school) actually manages to do the same (because by definition education is rewiring), movies and TV can and do effect our ability to discriminate between "objective truth" and, say, "conspiracy theories". It's the notion of a reality distortion field.
The TFA describes a gradual threshold rise to both what is perceived as novelty and what is able to trigger and maintain our attention span. The term "numbing" should not be interpreted as habituation and accommodation, where senses are getting increasingly insensitive to repeated stimuli. This is going to develop into a vicious circle and a dead end: sometime in the future moviegoers will rush to the theaters to experience the ultimate CGI effects, the ones experienced by death itself.
I am glad that we are still rather easily triggered by instances of the uncanny valley and reject (either consciously or unconsciously) some percepts as "unnatural". This means that our deeply rooted wardwired human instincts are resistant to tampering and that there's still hope we'll be able to judge what's real and what's an artifact when this decision becomes life critical, say in a battlefield.
I know all this is no real science breakthrough, but still it is good to remember that in fact it's not us watching the movies, it's the movies watching us.
I could watch the crudest animation or story telling as long as there is a real story with no plot holes. I don't watch many modern movies- they are all special effects and no story. Why care about explosions when I don't care about the characters?
I'd rather watch South Park than Mission Impossible 3.
As someone who was fortunate enough participate in cinematic CG as it evolved to dominate film making, I've given this a LOT of thought and have come to a few conclusions:
1.LESS IS MORE: Absolutely true, not having enough money seems to always lead to tighter, more exciting, more engaged film making.
2. MIX IT UP: In the pre-computer era, you would always mix models, matte paintings, optical composites , and full size sets so that the audience's eye-brain wouldn't catch on to the weaknesses of any single technique.
3. TRUE MAGIC: My grandfather who worked on the original 'Fantastic Voyage' told me that for some shots the blood cells were Cheerios. Look carefully at Thunderbirds, Capt. Scarlet, etc and you'll recognize all kinds of household items which masquerade as ships and structures of that imagined future. Doug Trumbull recently revived paint mixing techniques from 2001 to create a swirling cosmos for a modern astronomy digital HD film. There is true alchemy in taking ordinary things and painting, cropping, and perhaps filming in reverse or up-side down to turn them into something else entirely. Cloud tanks are WAY more fun than running fluid simulations. Al Whitlock and some degree Peter Ellenshaw were masters at in-camera effects for perfect composites. See Coppola's "Dracula" - done entirely with in-camera effects. You have to PLAN these shots carefully to make them work.
4.TOO REAL: It struck me watching 'Voyage of the Dawn Treader' that everything is too real. This has been the holy grail of film making and particularly computer VFX. But this was a kid's fantasy (with deeper meaning) Everything about the ships, the swords, the locations, the costumes, the monsters, the spirits, was so fully material, that I was getting antsy about all of the make believe story stuff. How did we have battles without blood and nasty casualties? How did we get from point A to point B with no sensible navigation? Where the hell do people go to the bathroom? If you're going to give me absolutely real - I start wanting ABSOLUTELY REAL. Referring again to traditional matte painting - the best are very rough, just enough to trick you.
5. DIGITAL MET FILM - AND WON When we were struggling to render a few frames of a shiny box, a few people had the vision to see that digital imaging could make whole movies. I don't think that we quite envisioned that they could truly create alternate realities. Most people have no idea that most of what their watching is synthesized from nothing. No set, no model, no camera.
The true leverage is that now an unlimited number people distributed in time and space can contribute to the creation of an image. In the past, only so many people could build, photograph, an act in a film frame. Now, if need be, a thousand hands around the world can do their part, all pre-planned, orchestrated, and combined into an assembly line of dream-forging. If it doesn't feel real, it's because at some level it isn't.
The tactile, textural, visible film image is surrendering to the cool controlled perfection of the digital image. We have won the battle for reality. The next battle is to reclaim our humanity.
Boobs
What does Alice know of Bob's drinking problem? Would she be so quick to exchange keys?
Painting two moons on the sky over Tatooine gives the movie more a magic touch than any CGI later onwards. Lucas killed the illusion, he gave to every boy, that it might somehow at least eventually possible to build a space ship from old electronics of a pile of garbage, when he did everything digital.
It's the not the use of special effects that no longer impress. It's the complete lack of attention paid to physics. Special effects people think that because they can draw it or generate it then it should be in the movie. It has always been that way, but even more so lately they could care less about the physics. Cars accelerating through the air AFTER the initial force has been completely applied. HELLO! This is still Earth! Tornadoes throwing things around haphazardly. Then, then, for example the cow just stops in mid-air so you can get a good look at it. Then takes off again like it has a warp drive. The all the shit in the air magically lands on the road in front of the pickup, left, right, left, right, left.(Twister). On and on the BS physics continues. It doesn't matter which movie.
Once they find a way to "impress" us with their lack of physics or other cheap stunts they have to put it in every movie. They can't do it and then think of something better. e.g. get rid of the "RAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH" in every frickin' movie. Every movie has an CG actor that says it(the Hulk, the Mummy, Transformers, Pirates of the C., on and on and on...you can think back to almost every movie and hear it, think about it.) Enough. Now that you've read this you will get pissed every time you hear the "RAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH" in a movie. I know my f'ing speakers work, they have surround sound, that's why I bought them, you don't have to test them with this overused tripe.
That's what people generally do. They blame the director for focusing on effects rather than story and acting.
In any case, the best special effects are the ones you don't notice because they're so natural.
FX does ruin movies.
You like the original Star Wars movies, right? FX did not ruin them. Right.
Now jump forward in time. Lucas has thrown dewbacks and new aliens and fucking Greedo shoots first. The movies are much shittier now than they used to be. all thanks to FX (and George Lucas's never-ending desire to shit on my childhood and make bank while doing so)
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
While the term "special effects" may technically include CGI, the proper term for this is "visual effects".
Special effects cover "real" effects done in front of the camera, while visual effects are everything added afterwards.
This is the best Daft Punk music video ever.
It's a little late to be just figuring out that movies that rely too much on CG are a huge yawn. "The Matrix" was interesting, because it had an interesting story, but subsequent movies were just characters jumping from one fast-moving object to another fast-moving object.
In a similar category are all the martial arts films where characters defy the laws of physics with every move. (-_-)zzzZZZ.
Proverbs 21:19
Avatar broke all kinds of records. To me, the story was a complete re-hash, dull and predictable. But, even if you liked the story, you have to admit, the effects had a lot to do with the movie's success.
BTW: I do not buy the Hollywood cliche that all stories have already been told, and that all you can do is put a spin on old stories.
Fern Gully with Smurfs
To be fair, Avatar was more like Fern Gully with Smurfs and violence.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Good actors will turn down work, because they don't want their name associated with some piece of crap.
I'm not sure about that, you know. I've seen an awful lot of crappy films with proper actors in. Either most actors have incredibly poor taste, or they're just really not fussy about what they appear in.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Jaws without the shark would be what exactly?
A better film. The bits at the end where you actually see the shark are rubbish compared to the rest of the film.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yeah, you're completely right, nobody cares, and if any of them did start turning down money, it'd probably just be the first step of them going out of business. It was, like I said, ridiculous. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
OH NOES!!! George Lucas added a couple Dewbacks to Star Wars! DEWBACKS!!! Seriously. The special editions came out 14 years ago. There are guys who are raped in prison who get over the trauma faster. Stop acting all butt-hurt and move on already.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Fern Gully with Smurfs
To be fair, Avatar was more like Fern Gully with Smurfs and violence.
So, more like this Smurfs Unicef spot?
Oh, and translated, the tagline reads "Don't let war affect the lives of children."
The spot was created in collaboration with the family of Smurf's creator Peyo.
I did 3D years ago now, back when it was emerging, in a small shop.
Yes, just like any other business, companies don't want their name associated with shoddy products that hurt their image and chance for future work. Or their principles disallow them to produce work for clients that promote products they deem harmful to their core business, such as children.
However, as someone else points out below, you have to have the luxury of cash flow, and not be desperate to keep the doors open.
Then there's also a sensitive issue, if the quality of your animation or effects far surpasses the quality of the set, then the set designer/company looks bad. If the quality of your animation lighting makes the DP's lighting look shoddy, then the DP will be upset with you. If the quality of your 3D performer is better then the actor... If the... Etcetera...
Most frequently however, you haven't the slightest idea what the quality of the final product will be. I always laugh when interviewers ask actors in a blockbuster movie if they knew it was going to be great when they signed on. Of course they say yes to promote the movie. But all they had at the time was a script treatment! Not even a script. They had NO idea whatsoever, all the decisions that would be made in the intervening months.
Well guess what? Effects houses know even less when they sign on.
As an addendum to the above: cheap, quality effects give the production and the director a great degree of freedom, but freedom is not automatically better. Many people work better under limitations, it forces them to be more creative to get around obstacles. If there are few obstacles to get around besides "shot X will cost $100k, shot Y and Z will cost $100k together, which do you want?" then that creativity might never get developed or expressed.
I wouldn't go near Miranda. Just sayin'. Not even for a whole box of Fruity Oaty Bars.
E8B8B
Or it's hard to judge how good a film will turn out to be when all you have to go on is a script meaning that actors will sign up to films that they will later regret.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
[Look at Jaws. Think of the opening scene, when you never even see the shark as the woman is being torn apart. How often that movie is positively compared to Hitchcock. Yet that's not the movie Spielberg set out to make! Jaws front and center the whole time literally chewing up the scenery.]
That reminds me of polar space bears and a certain cave on Hoth :(
("Oh noes, my ice planet is melting; curse you, galactical warming!")
metrix007 is pissed about this http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1888084&cid=34462614 where he blundered on hosts files. metrix007 got played. He played himself badly due to his skimming.
metrix007 is pissed about this http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1888084&cid=34462614 where he blundered on hosts files. metrix007 got played. He played himself, badly, due to his skimming.
metrix007 is pissed about this http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1888084&cid=34462614 where he blundered on hosts files. metrix007 got played. He played himself, and badly, due to his skimming.
I thought my point was clearly not a binary statement of cheap-n-easy special effects vs no special effects at all, yet also not that subtle either. I guess I was wrong.
The enemies of Democracy are
Thanks, I'm glad you got my point and that it made some sense without ending up still sounding like unwarranted blaming of professionals. :)
But really, is there anything that can be done except for the movie-going public to spontaneously and for no apparent reason stop going to see movies that are little more than vehicles for special effects?
Is it even possible when I have to admit that I'll sometimes enjoy a movie that is utter garbage except for beautiful special effects? Are there alternatives that aren't worse?
The enemies of Democracy are