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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.
I stopped feeling things when I was four. Thanks to Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, my perceptions were all made of ink.
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> 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.
Mad Max is an example of CGI used right. Almost all of the stunts and scenes involved real actors and practical effects while computer imagery was used to put everything together and fill in backgrounds.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Adam Sandler is a crime against Humanity.
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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Go watch 2001, a Space Odyssey again. It was done with miniatures and painted glass mattes. It still feels a lot more real than a lot of modern movies.
Play it cool, play it cool, 50-50 fire and ice.
"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. "
Out of those three I only saw Batman v Superman. The problem was that it just wasn't good. Yes we are past the point where CGI alone will make us happy. Take a look at Captain America Civil war for example. It was chocked full of special effects but it also had some kind of story and frankly a sense of humor.
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People fail to learn the Stargate lesson. Stargate being the first movie IMHO, that had significant CGI effects, was fragged down by a lackluster story line. It had beautiful imagery but that doesn't carry a movie. Conversely take Forest Gump where the CGI was so good that you didn't even know it was there and took its rightful place as a tool to tell a story, not the star of the film.
While the point is valid, the 3 movies listed were hot garbage for reasons completely divorced from their special effects.
Though ... there could be a correlation. CGI effects are cheap, plentiful and ultimately disposable. Didn't like a shot? Just tweak a few setting and re-render. Try it 10 more times. Did an actor screw up? Just fix it in post.
Conversely, something like Mad Max: Fury Road, Alien, or Nightmare Before Christmas all require meticulous planning, careful coordination and the utmost dedication to each and every take. Things are literally blowing up, there's tangible blood splashing across the actors faces, and every scene in a stop-motion movie is hours and hours of tiny movements that can't be easily reshot.
So, I don't think it's the CGI itself causing this problem, but rather the environment it fosters.
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I have a moderate fear of heights. I nonetheless flew in an ultralight aircraft once, in which there is no cockpit or other physical separation between you and several hundred or thousand feet from the ground. I recommend it - the purity of that form of flight is really something.
During this flight, I discovered an interesting phenomenon: up to a certain point, the distance between me and the ground was causing me quite a bit of unease. As we climbed higher, that unease went away. My working hypothesis was that my brain, evolved for life close to the ground, was able to comprehend distances of a few hundred feet, but after that it became unable to and everything became pretty abstract at that point.
Same thing with movies and CGI: once you leave the scale that represents actual human reality, you lose the emotional connection. Seeing ONE building fall down, or a chestburster popping out of ONE guy's chest is comprehensible. It's relatable. Your brain can connect to that. When entire cities are blown up or the world ends for the umpteenth time on film, it's just pure spectacle. It's not a relatable experience, and you'll never be able to emotionally connect to it in the same way.
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.
The secret sauce is noise.
Here is a picture of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
Top: Real
Bottom: CG
They have both the SAME number of pixels, which means it must be the colors which are different.
Peter Jackson (used to) deeply understands using miniatures and bigatures to convey the "warmth" and "depth" with unique texturing and realistic lighting.
George Lucas on the other does not understanding anything about noise. Notice how the bottom textures look all bland. Everything looks fake and plastic. The word "Sterile" comes to mind.
It isn't about less, but more. Namely adding noise so objects look more realistic.
That's a silent film (1924) by Harold Lloyd. Funny as hell and a fantastic 20 minute chase scene at the end of the movie that still holds my attention especially when you consider he's doing his own stunts and it is as real as it can be 92 years ago.
Why? Because you know damn well it isn't CGI. You don't even notice it is a silent movie. It's available on Youtube. If you don't want to watch the whole thing starting at 56:00.
Lloyd has to stop his girl from marrying the villain so he's trying to get to the ceremony to stop it.
I'd cite Avatar as another example. Not great writing but good use of CGI in a movie that is filmed almost entirely in a CGI world. But it's not easy, it demands an extra effort from the actors (VERY noticably lacking in films like the Phantom Menace), and Cameron employed some innovative techniques to make the camera movements believable, as it things were filmed using a camera on a dolly or boom in a real world.
Getting creatures right isn't easy either. Again Avatar did a decent job, but look at the more recent Star Wars movies, even the latest state-of-the-art production, and compare the creatures to the puppets from the original movies. The CGI looks plastic and faky in comparison.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The best part of a Jackie Chan flick is the credit sequence out takes. In them you get to see how they filmed jackie chan jumping off a bridge onto a moving overcraft, how he lept between two buildings and nailed the fire escape, or how they made it look like he sledded off a cliff and grabbed a helicopter landing rail.
answers: He sledded off a cliff and grabbed a helicopter landing rail. No nets. He jumped off the building. No nets. he jumped off the bridge onto the hovercraft. he broke his leg. So they re-shot it with him doing it again this time in a cast that had been painted to look like the tennis shoe he was supposed to be wearing.
Seriously, when you know the guy is doing an insane stunt in a cast, one doesn't really need more and more and more to make it exciting. Watching Iron man plummet from the vacuum of space just isn't very thrilling compared to any dumb stunt jackie pulls off. I really dont' even mind he wears a safety wire when they are spinning him around at the end of ladder on a flying helicopter. it somehow doesn't ruin it for me. :-)
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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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Oh, yes the Portal colour scheme. That annoyed the crap out of me, too.
Having said that, to be fair, there are only so many ways you can adjust Namibia to look like country Australia minus all the plants. Do an image search for "Coober Pedy" or "Mallee" some time and you'll see what I mean.
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You could shoot 1984 with a piece of clear glass....
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This is just like the way people whined that color film had ruined the medium, and the ones before them who whined about talkies and yearned for the days of silent films.
I started at the NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory in 1981 and left Pixar in 2000. These days I produce or am on screen once in a while.
While I was at NYIT they weren't story oriented, and thus all you see of them is demos. Pixar, on the other hand, always put story first. We knew that we could not make a film stand up on effects alone.
Today, a good 3D animation house can make absolutely any scene they like. And thus there isn't anything special about doing so. It's there if it needs to be there to tell the story, and not otherwise.
Bruce Perens.
I liked the cracked.com take on it which was written when the trailers for Jurassic World and the new Terminator movie came out. It pointed out six big mistakes that many CG-heavy movies make, and many times it's not just the effects shots that are to blame for why it looks unrealistic. Summarized:
6) Lack of visual restraint where you can make objects move in unrealistic ways when everything else in the movie obeys the laws of physics.
5) Color grading nightmares. Jurassic World had this dreary blue/grey sheen over every shot, digital or not. It made the whole movie look poor.
4) CGI was originally used as a last resort. Entire scenes weren't created CG, you had, say, close-ups of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park using animatronics, and that gave CG artists a baseline to match when lighting their digital creatures.
3) Most films forget a camera needs to exist. In wholly-digital shots, many directors feel the need to zip the virtual camera around in ways we couldn't possibly move -- and again, it just adds to sense of unrealism. I liked the Misty Mountains bridges/etc sequence from the first Jackson Hobbit movie as an example.
2) Uncanny Valley -- this can be triggered by miniatures as well. We also knew when CG didn't look quite right, so Jurassic Park did the smart thing by hiding most of it in the rain and dark. Some of the daytime outdoor scenes look terrible by today's standards, while the T-Rex rain attack still holds up.
1) I'm not sure the author really made his point well here, but it was something about how big effects sequences should have a build-up (first two Jurassic Park movies) and awe.
After a horrific indoor studio accident involving a real helicopter crashing to the ground and killing two actors,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_accident That sounds like what you are talking about, but it was outdoors, and 3 dead (two children). Not an exact match, but close.
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location location location. If you want a built-up ruin, there's that beach resort Hitler had built to house workers on holiday that wasn't occupied for what, forty years? Most of it's still empty. You could basically walk in and shoot a movie in there. If you don't fancy a trip to Germany, there's wilderness locations everywhere. Seven miles up the road from me there's an abandoned railway station, and right next to that there's a spot where it's so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat. The 2006 Shane Meadows movie "This Is England", set in 1983, was filmed in Lenton, Nottingham, among other places - with no set dressing and no CGI. I know this because I saw them filming it. All they did was put up a windbreak and a video camera, that was it. You don't even have to be in the place your movie is set in. All of the outside scenes in Doctor Who which were *apparently* set in London were in fact filmed in and around Cardiff.
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