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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."
Digital effects aren't bad.
Half-assed digital effects are bad
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the technology to display it) improves, what was once cutting edge and extremely lifelike or realistic feels completely outdated only a few years later.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.
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.
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?
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 ...
A return to normalcy would mean that Hollywood would stop assuming that all anyone ever wants to see on the big screen is yet another fucking sequel.
Fat fucking chance of that.
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
Actually, I watch a LOT of special features and commentaries on Blu Ray films. What a lot of directors have realized is 100% CGI looks unreal, and 100% practical isn't possible for some of the things they want to put in film.
So what they've started doing is filming much of the sequences with actors in green screens, but otherwise actually acting the scene as much as possible .. then they combine the CGI and practical to produce a much more realistic looking thing.
Mad Max took this to some crazy levels, and actually built the vehicles and raced them through the dessert. They did so much of it as real it's mind boggling .. it's not some guys on a sound stage.
There was a while when CG was starting to look completely fake, because they'd gone with Digital Stuntman or whatever it was, and entire segments were purely effects ... but it has definitely been a trend for the last bunch of years to go back to more old-school film making, and combining it with the digital. So they'll motion capture the actors actually doing the scene, they'll build as much as they can in practical, and then they'll fill in the environment around them.
It's definitely a trend, and it's definitely for the better ... movies like Dare Devil or some of the Spiderman stuff had started to get to the point of looking gimmicky and fake.
Having the actors really do a scene and integrating that with digital produces a MUCH better film, and directors have been realizing it. Which is good, because the audience also realize it.
I can definitely say (as a keen layman who watches the special features on movies), this has really been a trend by a lot of directors over the last bunch of years. And it really is contributing to better movies.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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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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?
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.
Aesthetics isn't simple as some technique being appealing or unappealing. The appeal of a technique depends on context. Chiaroscuro was the bee's knees in Baroque painting but it wouldn't work in a Cubist painting. Both kinds of painting have aesthetic appeal, but techniques that work in one don't necessarily work in the other.
Part of the aesthetic context is the audience and it's familiarity with the techniques being used. When perspective drawing came in painters vied to do the most elaborate depictions of converging lines; later perspective in itself wasn't as exciting to people. Perspective itself didn't necessarily go out of style, just ostentatiously poking the audience in the eyes with it.
I recently watched the Greedo-shot-first cut of Star Wars Ep IV, complete with Lucas's new effects grafted into the old movie. I concluded hate for this version isn't just about rewriting childhood memories. The new effects, while sophisticated in execution, were clumsily fit into the overall movie. Their look didn't go with the rest of it. The original movie was 100% film; the new cut switches jarringly between hyper-HD digital shots and grainy analog film shots. Thirty years ago the technology of the digital scenes would have enchanted us, but now we're used to the technology. The constant switching back and forth between digital and analog is almost like someone had grafted new color scenes onto an old black and white movie. When you watch an old B&W movie you forget there's no color because you're drawn into the story. Adding new color scenes would repeatedly draw your attention away from the story to the specific technology used for each scene.
The problem is the new technology per se, it's the artistically clumsy way it's been bolted onto this particularly movie.
I think we're at the point where we're no longer impressed by a scene just because of the computational resources it must have taken to render, and this makes many elaborate digital effects seem cheesy. I'm not entirely sure why; it may be an uncanny valley type effect, that the digital shots are so close to perfection that their subtle difference from real shots is more noticeable. Or it may be that the purely digital process for these effects encourages artistic sloppiness in a way that the older, more labor intensive techniques don't.
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I don't care that Star Wars doesn't feel real. I'd be more impressed if JJ Abrams made a Star Wars that feels like Star Wars and not some shallow copy.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
That was bad. But the summary is correct. The Hobbit river barrel scene is the worst CGI scene ever.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
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.
That whole movie was just one giant gimmick., from the shameless degree of fan service to the breakneck-speed plot (no time for dialogue, MORE ACTION!!) to the politically-correct casting of Wonder Woman and Token Black Guy.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
For me, the problem with the added original trilogy CGI effects were that they seemed to be added purposefully to draw our attention to them. Luke and company arrive as Mos Eisley. As they slow up, a big creature walks right in front of them - between them and the "camera" - obscuring our view of them. There is no reason story-wise for this obstruction. It's only there because Lucas decided he wanted us to say "Hey, look at that big creature. Lucas must be a genius for coming up with such a CGI creation." Instead, we wind up saying "Down in front! Get that thing out of our way so we can see the rest of the movie!!!"
This is the case in the prequels as well. In Episode 2, R2D2 and C3PO approach the droid factory and C3PO nears the edge. He's clearly Anthony Daniels wearing the suit. R2 bumps him over the edge and he manages to grab hold of a flying droid who plucks him up and shakes him loose. Now, he's clearly a fully CGI creation. There's a discontinuity between the two that jars you out of the story. (Not like there's much story to get jarred out of but that just means that keeping the audience immersed is much more important.) The scene could have been written to keep Anthony Daniels or a physical "stunt-C3PO" in it, but Lucas was so enamored with CGI that he just figured he'd use it for entire scenes to replace what the actors couldn't do. It came off looking like the movie was part-video game and not like the characters were actually still in the scenes.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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?
I think that's an oversimplification. Yes, trends, and the audience getting used to and tired of them, are a quite real phenomenon. But let's not simultaneously pretend that the concept of "realism" in movies is a purely objective phenomenon. Sometimes an effect can be purely and objectively bad. Should we go back to, for example, the special effects of 1960s Star Trek, would that be an improvement?
Let's pick an example of bad use of CG. The scene of Anakin feeding Padme a slice of pear wasn't per se bad because it's CGI, it's bad because they did a lousy job with it. And it's bad of the CG director to think that it was sufficient. And it's bad of the film director for getting so obsessed with using a single technology for special effects that they'd rather put in a badly done CG effect than go buy a freaking pear.
The original trilogy had tons of lousy special effects that would have looked much better if done using modern techniques. Not all scenes, there were plenty of good special effects in the trilogy - but there were some that were patently just bad. Abjectly, transparently fake - all issues of trends aside. The fact that CGI is often misused today doesn't change this. Good special effects mean using the correct tool for the process and not getting obsessed with using only whatever happens to be the current trend. A good director is one who can tell that a miniature is going to look fake in scene X, a puppet is going to look fake in scene Y, and a CG pear is going to look fake in scene Z, and adjust appropriately.
What the hells goin on in the engine room? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose?
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.
The software people who make those cutting edge packages still seem to have no clue about physics. You can't get away with animation-style non-physics in a photorealistic world with real physics. Arms don't swing right, cognizant, so to speak, of motor acceleration vs. their mass, with gravity tugging on everything.
And body flesh/fat rippling, again, they need better programmers instead of animators. If you look at it, and it looks fake, create a better virtal model with mass and stretch parameters to mathematically undergird the surface mesh distortions. Which themselves should have a skinlike physics.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You're assuming that movie studios invest hundreds of millions of dollars because they're collectively dumb. They aren't. Studios fund sequels, franchises, and certain actors and directors because they more reliably attract audiences than films that don't have these properties.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
The OP should have picked up on this, but the effects being discussed are VISUAL effects, not SPECIAL effects.
The industry terms are "visual effects" for digital (or old-school optical) effects carried out in post, and "special effects" for physical effects made in front of the camera.
It might sound pedantic, but most people have no problem with special effects, ie REAL effects carried out in-camera. It's the digitally created effects (greenscreen comps, CG monsters and environments etc) that people see as fake.
Disclaimer - I work in the visual effects industry (and certainly not in the special effects industry). We were the people waving the green cards at the last Oscars, as opposed to the people who blow real stuff up on set.
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.
I think what often goes wrong is that the story no longer persuades you to take part. A good story should invite you in, in some way, by making you identify with the characters, or by being plausible or otherwise. When the effects become the main act and the actual story is sidelined, or if the acting or the instruction is poorly executed, it no longer engages people. I haven't seen all the Star Wars - far from it - but I did see the latest. I enjoyed much of the scenery, but the story was a bit weak - the Evil Guys come up with a pretty hare-brained scheme and the Good Ones come up with an equally hare-brained plan? It just doesn't engage my mental capacities, modest as they are. But what annoyed me - which always annoys me - is the overuse of "shock and awe effects": the rumbling, thunderous sub-bass for everything to make it seem convincing, for example, and the inappropriate use of sounds (like the famous Lancaster bomber sound in space in one early episode, or the sound of running water under water - how would that work?). If a story is good enough to make a movie that costs hundreds of millions, it ought to be good enough to stand on its own merits.
And that is the thing with Star Wars in many ways: the first ones persuaded you to take part; you really wanted the good ones to win and all that, and you were willing to forgive the sometimes strange disconnects, like when the Emperor had this incredible, magical power, but on the other hand, Darth Vader could just grab him and throw him down a shaft and he could do nothing about it. This latest one - I really didn't care who won, whether it was the supersized Gollum or the hapless good ones.