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Pixels Are Driving Out Reality (vice.com)
An article on Motherboard today investigates the reasons why people didn't go "oh-my-god, that was awesome" looking at the CGI-based scenes in the recent movies such as Independence Day: Resurgence, Batman v Superman and X-Men: Apocalypse. Though the article acknowledges that this could be the result of some poor-acting, spotty storyline, or bad editing, it also underscores the possibility that this could be the aftermath of a "deeper mechanism that is draining all substance from our cinematic imaginary worlds?" The author of the article, Riccardo Manzotti to make his case stronger adds that the original Alien movie was able to impress us because what we saw was strongly linked to actual life. From the article: The humongous spaceship Nostromo -- a miniature model -- provoked awe and respect. When the creature erupted from Kane's abdomen -- a plaster model encased in fake blood and animal entrails -- people were horrified. The shock was registered on the faces of the actors, who, per Ridley Scott's direction, weren't told ahead of time that the moment would include a giant splatter of blood. "That's why their looks of disgust and horror are so real," producer and co-writer David Giler said. Manzotti further argues that some of the modern movies haven't left us awe-inspired because there is just too much CGI content. Compared to 430 computerized shots in the original Independence Day movie, for instance, the new one has 1,750 digitized shots. "People have been looking at pixels for much too long," the author argues, adding: Our imaginary world has been diluted and diluted to the point that, so to speak, there is no longer even a stain of real blood, love, and pain. Nowadays, when spectators see blood, they see pixels. [...] VR and augmented reality and the steady pace of CGI have pushed the process of substitution of reality to a higher level. At least, movies were once made using real stunts and real objects. Now, the actual world is no longer needed. The actual world, which is the good money, is no longer required. The virtual world, the bad money, is taking over. Yet, it lacks substance. The author makes several more compelling arguments, that are worth mulling.
> Compared to 430 computerized shots in the original Independence Day movie, for instance, the new one has
> 1,750 digitized shots.
I don't have a fucking clue what a "computerized shot" is or how you add them up but I know that i'm not amazed by anything in movies any more. Not visually, anyway. Nobody is amazed by something they've seen before. Computer graphics are part of the language of movies now; you can't make a sci-fi movie without them, so the focus should be on the story, acting, pacing etc. A lot of movies use graphics the way a lot of movies use car chases - to replace any vaguely meaningful plot. Graphics aren't going to go away, but i'm not sure it's possible to read anything into how no-one really cares about them; it should be obvious.
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Maybe this will get us back to the idea that movies should portray a story instead of a bunch of action shots blowing things up and a line or two of dialog here and there.
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The first Alien movie... the one with Kane and the Nostromo... was directed by Ridley Scott, not James Cameron.
FFS, Slashdot. Why the head do you call yourself editors if you can't be bothered to, you know, edit. If you're going on posting this luddite, "Oh noes, substanceless technology is disconnecting us from reality." crap, at least get the basic facts upon which you're basing your argument correct.
Imagine all the people...
They purposefully limited the views of the creature itself to build mystery and suspense.. a technique that seems to have been lost on most contemporary directors.
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It's a simple recipe: have an opinion and then mine the past for confirmation of this opinion. If the amount of CGI in a film is inversely proportional to how much audiences like it, then Avatar should have been a failure and Waterworld should have swept the Oscars. You can make the exact opposite argument just as well by simply picking different films.
If the author wants to test this theory he needs to find a way to predict the success of the film based on his hypothesis before the fact, not after.
Remember when Jurassic Park came out, how impressed we all were with the dinosaurs?
Remember when T2 came out, how impressive the liquid metal man was?
The problem isn't that CGI is "bad". It's just a technique, that can be used well or poorly like anything else. It's mature enough now that you can use it a whole lot. But there's nothing intrinsic about it that makes it less impressive or less verisimilitudinous or less worthwhile to watch than other filmic techniques.
The real problem is that "lots of things moving at once look at the spectacle!" is no longer novel. We have scads of movies every year come out that show us that. So, when Jurassic Park had cool dinosaurs, it was *the* movie that had that. When Return of the Jedi had fighters flying all over the place in a massive space battle that upped the ante from the previous two Star Wars movies, it was fresh and cool and new.
Nowadays, that's just same old, same old. You can no longer impress by having lots of specatcle out there, because audiences have been there and seen that. it doesn't matter how you accomplish it -- CGI or otherwise. CGI only gets blamed because that's how people usually accomplish it nowadays. Maybe you can blame CGI because that's what made it cheap engouh to be overused so much. But it's not CGI itself.
Done well, it still entertains. Somebody else has already mentioned Mad Max. As another example, the speedster running through the exploding house scene from [i]X-Men: Apocalypse[/i] was a lot of fun, because there was more to it than just spectacle. The same movie at the end had lots of crap flying all over the places in a special effects spectacular, and it was kind of boring, because it was just gratuitous spectacle for the sake of spectacle, and that's old hat.
It's more than the CGI although its a HUGE part of it. It's the pace of the film, the story the over acting. I too watch older movies because it's all really happening, they haven't sped it up, they haven't added shaking camera tactics to make it seem more crazy. It's just the actors performing. Still love Jackie Chan movies for this reason.
Sometimes I'll just say "that movie SUCKED. But the visual effects were AWESOME!".
This is the reason that for the Academy Awards each category, save Best Picture, is voted on only by the members in that category. A movie can absolutely suck but have great music or amazing editing. The people who work in a field know for what to look when they watch and know good work when it happens.
This really is how absurd the argument is. By his reckoning The Lion King should have been awful since 0 frames of the film were real with real lions! Apparently UP had no room for a soul because it was all CG!
There are awful 80s and 90s movies that have no heart and no humanity and rely on shoddy gore squibs and bad miniatures. Every decade has had it's share of unwatchable films with large budgets. Waterworld had very little CGI and very little humanity and it was ridiculously expensive because it did it all for real on the ocean. By golly when that fish man jumps out of the water, that's a real person wearing prosthetics! And yet somehow nobody walked away from Waterworld with a sense of wonder about a guy with prosthetic gills.
What sets this decade apart isn't CG it's the fact that we are currently living it. When you look at all of the films of the 80s you can pick out 3-4 really amazing ones that represent a film every 2-3 years and say "Look how great the 80s were!" But if you're in year 6 of a decade you're statistically not living in the year where a great film was released. Every decade is great in retrospect because you only need a handful of examples to represent a decade while you need a new movie every weekend to watch. If you watch 30 movies a year in all likelihood the one you watch this weekend will not be one you would cite as the greatness of the '10s.
But just looking back I would say Guardians of the Galaxy was great and CG intensive, Inception was great and CG intensive, The Lego Movie and Inside Out were both great and entirely CG, Big Hero 6 was great and all CG, TED was funny and CG, Both planet of the apes films were very good and CG led characters (Compare the new planet of the apes to the horrible Tim Burton CGI free one!), I liked Men in Black 3, didn't think it was any worse than the original, The Wolf of Wallstreet was packed with CG and very good.
It's easy to find good movies in 2010-2016 but you need a year or two to forget how many shitty movies you also watched. You only remember the great Disney movies you watched as a kid. You forgot for the most part "The Cat from Outerspace".
Please stop with this meme. When we talk about CGI we are talking about complete computer remakes of entire scenes for no reason, often even rendering the main cast themselves.
Mad Max stood out against this. Every scene had some CGI but that was window dressing to the core components of the action scenes which were shot in a way that is basically unique in modern cinema.
2001 was released in 1968. Years after the first man made orbit, after the first space walks.
The had pictures of earth from orbit.
The docking sequence was dazzling eye candy in 1968. You have to admit it could use an edit for brevity now.
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I loved Mad Max, but it's in the same blue and orange palette hollywood is obsessed with. Mad Max scenes were shot in full [Namibian desert] daylight, so it looked brighter, but undeniably blue and orange. Read here: http://priceonomics.com/why-ev...
more to do with China. Movies have to be watered down until they translate across cultural boundaries. That plus there was a golden age in the 70s and 80s when directors like Ridley Scott were given carte blanc to make whatever they wanted. A few high profile bombs and some focus groups later and everything was crap.
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Exactly. And to take it a step further, it's harder for the entire crew to get fully invested in a film that's all green screen.
"Pretend there's a giant dragon or something," will simply never create the atmosphere of the giant animatronic Rex from Jurassic Park.
Lazy atmosphere begets lazy writing, lazy acting, lazy production.
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Then you better see it again.
I think it's going to take a little longer for directors to properly learn how to use the tools of their trade. Remember that ubiquitous CGI, or "the ability to create anything on screen that you want to" is a fairly new thing. And like any new tool, it tends to get overused at first, because everyone is excited about new and shiny things.
The same thing happened in the videogame industry. Unreal was one of the first shooters with colored lighting. End result: the environments looked like a radioactive clown puked all over them. The artists were so giddy to show off *colored lights* as a feature that they couldn't stop themselves from painting the environment in bright, vibrant, primary hues.
Fast-forward a decade. Programmable pixel shaders are a thing. Ooh, we can do *bloom effects*. Woohoo - crank up the bloom to 11! Let's live in a dream world! Or maybe motion blur, or film grain. Or depth of field. None of which really make for good gameplay, and in many cases, simply distract or annoy the player.
Rinse and repeat for each new technology that comes along.
These days, the best videogame artists have learned that a light touch on these effects are often better than slapping you in the face with them. I'm really hopeful Hollywood directors eventually learn the same thing.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.