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Hollywood Turning Against Digital Effects (newyorker.com)
An anonymous reader writes: One of the easiest complaints to lob at a modern film is that the special effects look bad. It's been over two decades since Jurassic Park; the novelty is finally wearing off. The New Yorker puts it this way: "It's as if directors—especially the reboot generation—have finally become self-conscious about CGI; 2015 was the year they got embarrassed by the digital miracles of the movies." Both the new Star Wars film and Mad Max: Fury Road were lauded for their use of "practical effects" — not abandoning CGI entirely, but using it to embellish scenes, rather than creating them from whole cloth. "Movies are a faddish, self-quoting business. At one time, the stark lighting effects of the German Expressionists were the visual rage. Later, it was the helicopter shot or the zoom. Any new tool, once used promiscuously, becomes a cliché. As time goes by, a director rediscovers the tool, and what was once cliché becomes an homage to a distant and more cultured time. This is what has happened to the last, pre-digital wave of effects. They are now happily vintage." It also counts as marketing, when you consider that audiences are turned off by too much CGI: "Touting your movie's wood, concrete, and steel is an implicit promise of restraint. I didn't go totally wild, the filmmaker is telling the audience, not like Peter Jackson did in the Hobbit trilogy."
Artists turn away from aesthetically unappealing techniques. News at 11.
Digital effects aren't bad.
Half-assed digital effects are bad
Hopefully this means that the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is going to bring back the 80s-style turtle suits instead of using CGI ...
I would call a movie made by someone who hasn't done action movies since the computer age started, and a movie that was promising fan service due to the hated use of special effects previously a trend. Don't get me wrong, I think Mad Max was one of the best action movies I've seen in a long long time, and I hope to see more of it. They seem like outliers to me.
One nice thing about practical effects is, if done right, they age extremely well. The dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, the aliens from Aliens, even set pieces like the sinking Titanic built in a giant pool or a model White House blowing up in ID4 all look just as good now as they did when their respective movies first premiered. But look at movies even just 5-10 years old that relied heavily on green-screen and other similar technology: they look horrible. The difference in quality, clarity, and movement between live actors and digitally added characters or backgrounds can now be incredibly jarring, and as technology (both in terms of creating/processing digital effects and the technology to display it) improves, what was once cutting edge and extremely lifelike or realistic feels completely outdated only a few years later.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The authors have a point, but "Hollywood Turning Against Flashy Digital Effects You Can See From a Mile Off as Being Artificial" would be more accurate. The VFX industry will definitely not shrink, it will just shift focus a bit. There are some things we are only now getting the hang of, and which were simply not possible before. And these will be the shiny new toys of the next decade.
Consider the necromancy that Weta Digital pulled off with the likeness of the late Paul Walker for "Fast and Furious 7". For some of the shots in that movie, even the chaps on the VFX team could no longer tell what was real, and what was not. That sort of thing is going to be a considerable part of the future: it's VFX alright, but of the more subtle sort.
Think a new movie with Marilyn Monroe, or something like that. A totally normal, Woody-Allen-like movie, with zero visible special effects, and scenes that are implausible from a physics viewpoint. Not even any stunts. Ordinary human beings acting in some normal, run-of-the-mill story. Just with a totally convincing, resurrected Marilyn Monroe (or some other iconic star of the 1950ies) playing one of the roles, together with current stars.
But I fully agree that Gigantic Explosions in Space With Lots of Tentacles, Vol. XXVII, is no longer the hottest thing in movies. That is indeed getting a bit long in the tooth.
whenever there are new discoveries in astronomy they are shown in artists' renderings, even when there are real images(unexciting ones it is true compared to sci-fi movie derived fake versions)
i for one find it annoying and find those who engaging in that intellectually dishonest.
I though "peak CGI" had to be Transformers 4. That movie was sooo bad, but if you really like explosions, I guess that's who liked it.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
When they replaced tracer rounds with 'laser' beams in world war 2 flicks, I knew the party was over. CGI is short for chintzy...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I just watched a recent Antonio Banderas flick called Automata. It is kind of a slow paced more realistic version of i-robot. What was striking about it was that they used robots. Not hollywood robots. I think they were actua lhuman shaped robots. That is to say extremely limited robots and not actually capable of their alleged uses. They shuffle a bit. Are very clunky. In a few places they are not clunky so I think some deft CGI or men-in-robot suits was spliced in.
Anyhow what I'm getting to is this. it's well done. You aren't really bothered by the clunky robots because the actors and clever cinematogrpahy all make you believe they are the highly capable robots they represent. For example, their hands actually can't hold anything but the actors work around that in ways that you don't notice, for example holding their hands in a caring way while slyly holding the object so it doesn'f fall out.
The story is slow paced and while there are moments of action and suspense it's mostly a space for the actors to work. The fact that in a very low budget movie they can bring alive these machines to you says a lot. It is cerebral sci fi, and probably more like what Asimov was writing about.
Anyhow I was really shocked they would dare to make this in the age of CGI and hollywood animatronics. but they did and it's a good movie (if you have the patience for slow paced things.)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
JJ Abrams might have said that, but have a look at this Star Wars breakdown reel and then tell me how many 'practical' fx where used. https://vimeo.com/151719063 ..I know it's fashionable to say this - but it's just a gimmick.
As long as it looks better than the semi crash seen in the 2nd Matrix. What a suspension of disbelief breaking pile of rubbish that was.
Silence is a state of mime.
As I happen to be someone who loves to tool around with CG artwork, you would think that I'd have no problems with it. If you think that, you would be wrong.
Unless the entire movie is CG from opening to credits, CG should always be used sparingly, like one could use a spicy sauce or pepper; enough to get the job done and enhance the flavor, but no more. Seriously - a little here and there to show things that would otherwise be impossible or prohibitively expensive to show is great if it's done right. If you just go for an all-out CG-gasm (*cough*Transformers*cough*), then expect to have your movie panned, or at least forgotten within a couple of days by the viewer.
I say this for two reasons:
1) The Uncanny Valley awaits, eager to trap any producer that over-does the CG in a live film (or goes crazy for 'realism' in it). Most folks just don't want to be revolted by the stuff unless the CG itself is central to the story (you know, movies about androids and stuff).
2) A good movie is not just the suspension of disbelief. Acting quality, Storyline, Plots, Chemistry, and more all factor into a great movie. Most of the best movies of all time contain no CG at all, and some even have no special effects... because the acting, story, and flow of the movie produce an inherent quantity of awesome. CG is not going to make up for any shortcomings in any of it.
Sure, some movies are going to need more of it than others. SciFi, Fantasy, and even horror flicks will demand a lot of eye-candy to help the flow. That said, CG should be secondary to the story, not the brain-whoring centerpiece of it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
People just don't realise how many practical effects were in The Phantom Menace, for example.
Shit-tons of practical effects. More practical effects than in the entire original trilogy combined.
Then slapped a whole bunch of CG-"retouching" on top until everything looks like a 3dCg model.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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instead of just listening to your computer play music - the thrill of human achievement and accomplishment. When you're watching real people to real stunts, its exciting and fun. When you're watching someone's drawing of a stunt, it's boring.
Remember when image morphing was cool? (Like Animorphs or those cheesy effects from automan (I think)).
And then remember when it was horrible?
CGI technology and video game rendering have merged to the point that large sections of CGI-heavy films have the rhythm and look of a video game. This may be pleasing to those weaned on video games as their visual storytelling medium, but to those brought up on physical visual effects, it's distracting.
Best article I've read on an "everything old is new again" technique making a comeback and why, The Return of Deep Focus? (AKA Shallow Depth Of Field is not the only way...). Personally I love both Hitchcock and Kurosawa's use of Deep Focus (the article gives examples of the former) but of course once it became the "mark of cheap video recording" it fell out of vogue. Now it's making a comeback, much like practical effects are. - HEX
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I am infinitely more impressed by someone performing a stunt, once, for real, after a thousand takes, by chance, with the help of cleverly-chosen camera angles, than anything that CGI can produce. Fuck, Jackie Chan movies and the like basically give you a broken-bone count in the outtakes over the credits.
Why movies haven't lauded "No special effects or post-production - everything you see was captured on video in real-time" for the last 20 years, I can't fathom.
When everything is fake, anything is possible, and it becomes boring and unreal.
I'm still waiting for the Bond-like remake that features no weapons, no CGI, no stupendous car-stunts (unless someone really did them - with safety gear etc. is fair enough, but you have to have really done them).
If I see one one "car goes up ramp and jumps something" piece of shit, I swear I'll just stop bothering to watch movies at all.
Here's a short youtube showing the effects in Automata. The robots were a combination of real robots and puppeteers. The puppeteers were in green suits and removed by standard green screen subtraction. In breif moments where their arms move in a complex way the arms were CGI added to the puppet robot chasis without arms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I thought that using CGI would be less expensive overall. Between material/storage costs, labor costs, available physical/practical vs. computer modeling/rendering skillsets, desired visual style and/or realism, time, and other considerations, are we at a sort of intermediate point before either practical or CGI becomes a clearly better choice?
What matters are story and character.
The story must be engaging and the audience must empathize with the characters, or even "100% realistic" CGI is a dead waste of time and money. There are dozens of classic science-fiction movies all the way back to the 1930s whose special effects are, by today's standards, primitive, but the stories still grip the mind and heart.
In fact, one of my personal all-time favorites had NO special effects, unless you count makeup. But the story and characters within "Creation of the Humanoids" will be with me to the end of my life. Now THAT is entertainment.
IMO, Hollywood needs to spend more money on writers and less on CGI.
I'm all for this, really. It's easy to pick on the Star Wars prequels for egregious use of digital effects (and justified, in my opinion) but it wasn't just that. The technique was genuinely being overused in the industry, and I'm really glad to see a return to practical effects.
That said, I have to wonder if at least part of the motivation for the return of practical effects is that the cost of digital tools and render time has gotten so low that pretty much anyone can do it. You've all seen web series and demo reels and short films and even fake newsreels that contain remarkable digital effects done for cheap. They're not wholly the domain of Hollywood and their big bucks anymore. A return to practical effects and their perhaps greater production costs may be yet another way to differentiate big budget productions from kitchen table projects.
On the other hand, I'm so sick of the overuse of digital effects that I'll *take* that. As someone in this discussion wisely said, when everything is fake, anything is possible, and it becomes boring. That's exactly the thing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yeah, did you see Ant-Man? They scanned Michael Douglas in and created a younger version. Completely CGI, but I didnt even know until I watched the special features behind the scenes. Great movie, BTW.
But it was not the main fault with the Hobbit movies
I view CGI as make-up.
It is supposed to enhance, rather than cover, a scene.
You can make great use of special effects to enhance a scene in very subtle ways.
Even simple edits like a basic gamma shift, or add some blue over dark areas to make them less bleak and boring, simple highlights go a long way.
Getting RID of Lens Flare as well. Holy hell Lens Flare is the worst. The only way it makes sense is if the piece itself has someone recording from a camera and you see its point-of-view.
Of course, just like make-up, people can abuse the hell out of it.
You can easily take a males face, the manliest face you have seen, and make it look like a beautiful woman, just with pure make-up work alone.
It might be neat, but it gets boring fast and over-use of it just ruins a movie.
It's kinda like some animation that tries to splice 3D animation with 2D drawn animation. MOST people get that horribly wrong and it looks so out of place. Very few have managed to mix 2D and 3D animation well. (Futurama is what would be considered middle ground when it comes to the 3D effects in it, they look decent-ish, but still stick out as different from most scenes)
CGI is also good for covering up some minor mistakes, or wires for holding stuff up, and other scene construction stuff like that.
CGI just needs a good practical reality for it to be based on. (including rotoscoping or motion capture in films that use it)
Without it, it just feels weird.
I just remembered some awful cartoon animation. Scales off where characters had stupidly long legs, or done impossible rotations of body parts.
VR and animation world just lack that limitation that the real world has: physics.
This is why it's taken so long to make a World of Warcraft movie. They spent the last decade genetically altering babies to make them into very fast growing orcs so they wouldn't have to rely on CGI. Similar work was done with dogs, lizards and birds to create the fauna.
My only issue is the excessive use of 3D specific scenes.. If a movie is being shot for multiple formats, it's a waste of time for us NON-3D viewers to watch something that was really cool in 3D on the flat screen. I bet a good 15 minutes of a multi format feature can be eliminated to the cutting room floor for us folk that watch in two dimensions..
I'm a fan of special effects, but don't burden the story just because you can wow somebody with make believe cinematography.
And have the action scenes serve the script, not the other way around.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
There are many stories of film crews waiting around all day for that perfect sunset glow. Much easier to hire one guy to fix it in post.
The parent might have mentioned that the Dogme 95 movement was way ahead of the game here and that although I would love to see an Avengers sequel directed by Lars van Trier it ain't never gonna happen.
Shooting on location is very expensive and prone to unexpected costs while CGI effects are well understood- any overruns would be due to poor management.
love is just extroverted narcissism
That said, I happened to be watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade pretty recently (made before Jurassic Park, but after Aliens), and the scene where the tank falls over the cliff and explodes is pretty cringe worthy...
I find that usually the biggest problem with CG isn't the CG itself, it's the fact that it removes actors from the scene. It's much more difficult to convincingly act when you're stuck in a green room talking to a character that doesn't exist yet, or sitting on a chair strapped to some kind of steampunk-esque machine that captures your every muscle twitch.
We've been making significant progress in that area, giving actors more surrogates to act with, going back and reintroducing real scenery in the foreground, etc. I think that's key, because in the end if the acting is poor then the film will suffer greatly.
if you are shooting Die Hard 97, and you have to use real explosives and drive real cars out the back of cargo planes and onto parking ramps 5000 feet below, you run out of lookalike stand-ins for the stunts real fast.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You can see a stark difference in all movies that use CGI, and that ruins the movie because the difference is so jarring. A perfect recent example is the bear fight in The Revenant. It looks like a scene from a Far Cry game, the motion blur is so strong, the animation is obvious, and the edges are so well defined that you feel like you're watching someone play a videogame on the same screen.
Overuse of CGI and unrealistic camera movements are turning live-action movies into live-action cartoons. There's a difference in your brain thinking you are seeing something real vs. seeing an impression of something real.
I guess this further emphasizes the great merit in filming The Revenant, that cost greatly cause Gonzalez Iñarritu and Lubezki insisted in using no artificial lighting.
Ant-Man was gorgeous. :)
With CGI FX or traditional ones, one make superb, very good, good, passable, bad and hideous movies. With CGI FX one can achieve things impossible, or impossibly expensive, to achieve with traditional FX. CGI FX are here to stay, and to completely replace traditional approaches in most cases.
I dabbled in a bit of acting at younger ages and have some close friends still heavily involved in theater. Movies that rely heavily on CG take away the emotion and reaction of not only the actors but also the environment. When filmed in front of a green screen, it becomes much more difficult to get lost in the character. For me, it is similar to running on a treadmill.. I lose motivation to continue going because no matter how hard I run, I still am not going anywhere.
I'm glad movies have taken a step back from the ledge and become a bit more practical with the effects. You can never replace the impact of an actor well immersed in the character.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Think about the underlying issue here. As the effects now have the ability to replace actors/actresses, it is no surprise Hollywood is freaking out about the technology. Making movies is hard. Making good movies is harder. But people on the screen contribute very little to the final image if the appropriate level of effort is applied. And that effort can be bought for way less than the 10's of millions top acting brings.
... that anyone with a computer can do CGI.
Hollywood's competitive advantage is in the concentration of skills, the reputations - and the sets, and the stars. Hollywood has thousands of acres of real estate devoted to "looking like somewhere else".
The technology you can find anywhere, the skills and reputations increasingly so. For Hollywood to embrace technology that makes big-name stars and expensive scenery increasingly redundant - would be to invite their own extinction.
Hollywood loves to spin a story POSITIVE.
Reason CGI is going away is because it has gotten TOO EXPENSIVE compared to physical SFX.
If everyone knows it's physical, then physics takes over and errors are OK. if it's CGI, it has to be perfect--by the creators and audiences.
This is just spin to justify lower production costs. Just look at every 200+mil pixar movie and the latest results....
Ant-Man was gorgeous. :)
Ant-Man is one of those few films that couldn't be done right without tons of high-quality CGI.
If this trend away from using CGI also means Hollywood has more budget left for higher quality scriptwriting, then I'm all for it.
It might be better to say that particular directors are better at striking a balance between traditional and modern filmmaking. They know what bits look best filmed for real and which bits should be done later in a computer. J J Abrams can afford to build an external millenium falcon set (used about 4 times in the movie) but he still digitally sticks in the surroundings every time they run up and down the ramp.
Heh. I noticed as soon it was on the screen. It wasn't *terrible*, but it wasn't that good, either. To be fair, I don't think anyone I was with noticed.
Its possible the reason it jumped out at me is that I do rendering work. Once you start working with textures and seeing how they come out it really sensitizes you to what is fake. There are rendered images that when I first saw them years ago I couldn't tell the difference from a photograph. Now I can glance at them and -- while appreciating that they look very nice -- see that they are clearly rendered.
CGI has come a long way, that's for sure. But I think we are still a long way off from rendering flawless images. Even physical based renders (which, on paper, sounds great because it is using accurate physics rather than a biased render engine) have fundamental flaws. To use a trivial example, edges are perfect -- it doesn't matter how perfect the engine is, you are still limited by your 3d mesh. Similarly, if your render engine can perfectly represent a substance indistinguishable from physical reality it will look too good, too clean.
Its the same thing as working with physical models: its fairly easy to make something *perfect* but quite another to make it seem *real*. One of the biggest give aways in a movie with models is that things are too clean and too precise. It takes effort to dirty them up in believable ways.
If you have a good story, everything else falls in to place.
I remember talking to people about The Matrix. They went on at length about the special effects. The story (if any) was incidental. I concluded it had no story at all.
The opposite extreme from my recent experience would be something like the old British spy show The Sandbaggers. Most of it is people talking on the phone and arguing in offices. And it's utterly spellbinding...
...laura
As noted by a lot of the other posters, it depends on whether the CGI is done well or not. There are two examples that particularly stand out for me:
1. I saw a breakdown of the Tyrannosaurus Rex attack sequence from the original "Jurassic Park", which captioned which shots used CGI and which used animatronics, and I really wouldn't have been able to tell without the captions.
2. In a recent documentary about ILM, there was part of an interview with the director of "Iron Man", Jon Favreau. He said that he'd been very emphatic about using physical effects wherever possible, but that there was one scene which was a close-up of the suit, and he wanted to be very specific about how the studio lights reflected off it as the camera &/or the suit moved. They iterated on the shot a whole bunch of times, and in the end, the shot was also rendered digitally, and even he really couldn't tell which was which any more. And this is someone who obviously lived & breathed the imagery of that film for months.
On the other end of ILM's CGI scale, there's the end of "The Mummy Returns"...
Nitpick: a physically based renderer would of course also be free to use physically correct lens models. Which remove any "perfect edges" you might have had with a pinhole camera.
And at least in the movie industry, there are entire teams that take care of the "too perfect" look. With "Fast and Furious 7" being an obvious example: the Weta crew are pretty good at that sort of thing.
One of my favourite applications of CGI is in the Les Miserables movie. You'll struggle to spot it, but the actors sing with clip on microphones, so that the performance can be captured in one take, with long, medium and close cameras and microphones. Visible microphones were then airbrushed out. (This, at least, is what the Sound on Sound article on it said.) The trouble with CGi is that, what is the state of the art 10 years ago is within reach of a hobbyist today. But non-CGI special effects that take great effort still take great effort.
John_Chalisque
So, how long until Hollywood turns away from Shakycam? I can't wait.
It's fun re-reading the questions and my answers on Slashdot back in 2002.
Back then somebody asked how to get into the field -- I said it was a bad idea (and it was at the time!) -- and perhaps that's true again. I left the biz a couple of years ago.
That said, as people note about Mad Max: Fury Road just about every shot of complex films is a VFX shot. Mad Max had insanely complex, aggressive, and unique practical effects, but there were still 2,000 VFX shots -- and there had to be!
When I started in VFX back on movies like Terminator 2 I told my friends that the one of the big points of VFX was safety. You can support stunt people with heavy cables, and remove them in post -- or replace the heads of stunt people with the lead actors so that they won't be in danger. This is still true, and will always be true.
One of the most interesting films nominated for VFX this year (not mentioned in the article) was the spectacular Ex Machina. Hundreds of beautiful VFX shots, that were a vital part of the story. Among the things that makes that movie special is that the VFX team was integral to the design of the film -- the budget was so small, that they had to work together with the director, set designer, etc to come up with a way to tell the story beautifully and inexpensively. The VFX budget was only $1.5M, probably 2% of the VFX budget for Avengers: Age of Ultron (not nominated!) The VFX Oscar winner a couple of years ago, Gravity was similar in that respect, the VFX team helped plan, and then shoot, every shot -- and then shooting the movie was incredibly quick. Perhaps this will happen more in the future of VFX, I hope so -- as it allows the VFX team to participate more intimately in the filmmaking.
Another thing that's not mentioned in the article is that a lot of filmmaking is about cost. VFX is these days often a heck of a lot cheaper than practical effects. Not just the cost of building things, but the time it takes to shoot them (a typical movie these days costs on the order of $300K/day)
CG VFX are not dying, not by any means. They may get to be more seamless (I hope so!) and more about telling the story and less about flashy hoo-haw. Every significant budget movie has a huge VFX component, and that's just not going to change.
Again, reading my questions and answers from my relative youth were interesting -- and foreshadow a lot of what happened in the last 14 years. One of the questions, though, was curiously wrong. I had thought that patents would rip through the industry, as it did to early effects work back in the 60's and 70's, but that didn't happen. What did happen was the studios have found ways to convince foreign (mostly) governments to finance VFX work in those countries, this has pretty much wiped out a huge portion of VFX in the US.
A bit of sadness is that my old company Hammerhead Productions that I started (and discussed in the article) is closing down after 21 years...but most of the questions and answers bring a smile. Thanks Slashdot!
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
so your whole premise makes no sense.
At best, you might have a point that digital effects are being used in a more sophisticated and realistic manner, since you apparently didn’t notice that both Mad Max Fury Road and Star Wars The Force Awakens have a ton of CGI.
Also, both of those movies are sequels to movies that were released before CGI and the art direction is done in such a way as to provide continuity. And yet in both cases, they still used a ton of CGI. So that goes against your point as well. If Hollywood was turning away from digital effects, why are so many digital effects used in movies that are made to look like their 1980’s prequels?
Meh. Claiming that you do more practical effects over CGI in your new movie is just a marketing ploy to counter the "anti-CGI" voices.
The blockbusters of today contain more CGI than ever - it is just that most of it is good enough that people can't see that it is.
And by the way, Jurassic Park did not contain that much CGI. The proportion of CGI in that movie relative to practical effects was minuscule.
The allure of the movies (extending to other formats like television and online media) is that they offer the consumer a temporary reprieve from the dullness of their own life. It's about bringing a story to life and convincingly so. The moment the media stops convincing the consumer, it's lost it's lustre.
As many have noted, it's not about the CGI per se. It's about bad CGI breaking the immersion that the consumer is seeking in the media. Even when a practical effect is a little primitive, it's very obviously still real, so there's a little more leniency from the audience (but that too can only go so far).
Age of Ultron is a classic example of bad CGI losing the audience before the story even had a chance to get out of the gate. That intro scene hurt my head.
Personally I believe that digital effects are one of the most important tools to come into the hands of film-makers in decades if not since the development of color film. Chances are they are used in places you'd have never guessed. Not just in action blockbusters but in comedies, suspense thrillers and even court room dramas in ways that you'd never imagine. Want to add a set piece or prop in post? No problem. In the old days prior to digital effects and cg that would usually mean either reshooting or very creative editing with what footage you had. This question is a good one for discussion but really cg effects are not on their way out and most certainly not cg characters even those composited next to real life actors (until they're able to make robots that can pass themselves off as human beings during action sequences or as background extras. Then I suppose we'll see a question on slashdot like: Are Real Life Extras In Film Really Needed? Hopefully people at that time will come running to their defense). Digital effects are just another tool in the hands of the artist. They are indeed very powerful and it has been demonstrated that one can most certainly make a film entirely composed of cg and still draw tears from us (try the movie Up on for size in that department). They are another brush in the hands of the artist and would an artist discard a brush they use so often in ways most aren't even aware? That's kind of like saying we should replace human actors with cg ones because people are generally smelly, difficult to work with, have egos, take time off, have health issues and sometimes get themselves into a fix of some sort. People love seeing the human drama play out in front of them on a screen in every way imaginable with characters they like and characters that they don't like and all sorts of great devices for the story telling medium. Sometimes those devices are cg effects and they embellish the final frame in ways that we aren't even aware whether it's a set or prop addition, adjusting the lighting, changing a performance subtly or adding a splash of color foreground to a black and white background as in Pleasantville. Sometimes bold. Sometimes subtle. Most of the time undetectable because it isn't always about making the perfect explosion or a melting liquid metal robot from the future. In the end its about drawing people to see movies and giving them a great show. Its about the art form and the vision of making that movie and bringing it from the minds of the people who make it to the screen. One of the things people like to see on the screen is people. If we don't see people you can be darn sure that it will be something that by way of anthropomorphism we can be fooled into conceiving as one. A talking teddy bear. A talking robot that cries. Fish live life and talk like people. Cars that actually have a life of their own too. Heck if Tom Hanks can imbue an inert basketball (a basketball whose performance was entirely without cg) with life and fool us into believing it to be his best friend, then its not a far leap of faith to take with a talking fish bowl or any other household appliance. Leave that feat to cg artists and the most important element: the voice performers. The cg characters themselves are a masterful work but they need that spark of human life to give them just that. Cg just makes all of that more palpable and it is an art form all its own. But we're talking about cg being a replacement for traditional effects and even whole sets and locations. Certainly that is determines by the persistence of vision of the crew and cast and the budget. I'd say that the best of both worlds is the way that things will go and we'll likely see more and more of it. After all, they've been doing it for years on the set of shows like Star Trek Voyager, Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. The movie Tron was the first feature film to mix cg animation and live action footage. It reminds me of how everyone was in a huff that real musicians would be replaced by the advent of MIDI and drum machines. Here we are fo
Oh sure, I tout my wood and all *I* get is a restraining order...
Are you kidding? The CGI Paul Walker looked completely obvious and the only reason it even looked halfway OK is because Cody Walker already looks a lot like Paul, so they only needed to slightly modify his face.