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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."
Agreed. I encourage folks to check out Rocket Jump's video Why CG Sucks (Except it Doesn't). If you don't, here's the short version: we don't notice the good digital effects because they're so good or so subtle. We usually only notice the bad stuff.
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
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.
The realistic and scary tornado in Wizard of Oz was basically a rolled up carpet twisted around.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.