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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the technology to display it) improves, what was once cutting edge and extremely lifelike or realistic feels completely outdated only a few years later.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
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?
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
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!
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