I didn’t see this article make any mention of the most common criticism of this notion, which is that you’re comparing the films of the past which have stood the test of time and are widely considered among the greatest films ever made with just any old blockbuster film released today. The same thing comes up all the time with pop music. If you really want to do this analysis you should have some mechanism of selecting historical films randomly instead of just considering the masterpieces that you remember off the top of your head.
The author is not saying that modern movies are artistically worse than old movies. He's saying that CGI, despite decades of progress, seem _fake_ in a way that subtly destroys our sense of immersion:
"Consider Ridley Scott’s 1985 Legend, wherein Tim Curry’s onscreen presence as a horned devil is heavy, weighty—despite playing a fantastical devil, his clopping around in hooves comes across as ontologically solid. Your eyes are not deceived. And moreover, under the slathered makeup and prothestics, he is still acting—when his lip curls, that’s a real lip. Compare that to Steppenwolf, from the 2017 Justice League. After almost a quarter-century of “progress” in cinema he comes across as digital dust, a void where physicality should be. His superstrength is unthreatening, because deep in our occipital lobes we know Steppenwolf weighs nothing, impacts nothing. Therefore the entire movie has no stakes. Of course the bad guy will be defeated, he’s a hologram."
Yes, of course the article ignores the hundreds of old movies with terrible prosthetics and costumes. I think the author tries his best to compare similar things. For example, when he discusses the latest Dune with Lawrence of Arabia - both acclaimed movies. Specifically, he discusses how the desert scenes _look_ to our eyes:
"Lawrence of Arabia from 1962 looks so much more real than Dune, even when just comparing the shots of people in Bedouin costumes hanging out in a desert ... For instance, the shadows both characters cast to their right. In the 2021 Dune, it is a monochrome chunk, despite the billowing fabric around the character. In the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, the shadow of the fabric is actually see-through. It has dimensionality, thinness and thickness. Because it’s a real shadow. So despite both being filmed in similar locations, one scene unconsciously triggers more belief in the ontology of the fictional world—the directionality of the light, the blue above the dune—while the other comes across as an ersatz reality."
I felt this coming out of the latest Star Wars movies: the space battle scenes felt so... flat, despite being technically amazing. There's something to be said for actually shooting on location and using physical props.
I think that's a fair criticism for music where there is so much of it that the filtering of time makes a real difference to our perception of past music.
But cinema is a smaller world. Yes, there are plenty of independent films, but most audience attention has always been focused on the small number of tentpole films. And if you look at just those over time, everything the author says here still holds up.
Watch some of the top ten box office grossing films from 30, 20, 10 years ago, and today. The change in style, tone, and quality is enormous.
Pick any random comedy or drama from the 80s or 90s and it will have more realness, more sense of being there than movies made today for 10x the budget. This being despite the fact that the older films were shot literally on film and the grain is visible.
Digital color, an obsession with CGI, and a fixation on storytelling that plays well across an internation audience (which means violence, action, physical comedy, and simplistic morality tales) has made today's movies a shadow of what they used to be.
I watched Voyage of the Rock Aliens the other day which didn't stand the test of 1984, let alone the test of time. It's a great example of practical effects that can stand up to modern scrutiny... and those that can't. The flying V spaceship looks better than CGI in B-movies today, and the talking fire-hydrant robot had more character than BB-8 in the most recent Star Wars films.
But the sheet of plexiglass used as a "force field" was comically terrible, even for 1984
Agreed, but to be fair, the comparison is also with high profile "modern" movies.
"The Thing" to most people today is not "one of the greatest movies" but a horror classic and -- visual quality wise -- on par with "Phantom Menace" or "Jurassic Park", if not worse.
I think the criticism is valid: that the physicality of classic SFX is still mostly unmatched by CGI, and the eye and mind notice this.
I think that’s missing the point. Most movies are mostly forgotten, and the merits of the story and storytelling carry the movie as a thing.
If you pick a mediocre movie in 2019 and compare to a mediocre movie in 1959, the garbage storyline will be the thing you will turn the movie off for.
In my mind, the weakness with CGI overuse is it enables lazy/sloppy practices that don’t scale. Similar to in graphics work where Photoshop is abused to create impossible edits for expediency.
My family has a tradition of watching Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” every holiday season. It’s quaint how you can see the painted backgrounds and stages… the opening scenes feature cardboard bricks and cheesy props. The point of the article is that this era of filming is bland and will look cheesy in the future because of the reliance on tools. You can already see it today - compare the Sony Spider-Man movies to the last iteration - the age is apparent.
An easy litmus test to show its not the test of time is to plot the number of exceptional quality films made per year.
In any form of art, there have always been pieces motivated by artistic drive (i.e. a work of art like seven samurai or loan's run) and pieces motivated by profit (i.e. a product like all of the capeshit movies or the transformer movies). What we're seeing in film and other similar industries is a cabal of gatekeepers who don't fund things unless it fits the mold of proven, profit driven products. Remove the Larry Finks of the world from power, and you remove the powerwhore gatekeepers that have no concept of beauty.
You make an interesting point - the article is not comparing apples to apples - but I think that the issue is different. It's not that CGI looks fake. The latest Dune is impressive in every sense and I don't think the CGI looks fake.
I think the toughest thing about VFX facing a director is the temptation to abuse it. They have to remember the effects are there to tell the story. They should resist to making everything spectacular/shiny/tridimensional/hectic where not everything needs to be. Compare the dark Los Angeles of Blade Runner with the lower levels of Coruscant.
And yes. Darkseid is a ridiculous villain, with a lazy design and even lazier lines. No amount of CGI could save it. Not even if he were blue and lived in a Roger Dean album cover.
I think the other thing that is missing from this conversation is the bar of entry has lowered so much with modern CGI. Look at a YouTube channel like Dust[0], which has literally hundreds of sci-fi short films using CGI to tell stories. Sure, they aren't 2022 blockbuster level, but they are 2010 TV level. There is simply no way practical effects would be able to scale the way that CGI has.
Even selecting randomly wouldn't be good enough: there are much more movies made nowdays. But if you look at only movies rated 8+ on IMDB, it's the same amount.
I think this criticism undoes itself. The thesis is that CGI visual effects are not convincing, not "weighty", implausible, unconvincing. But there's no mention of CGI being pervasively used outside of blockbusters! I'm not enough of a film buff to say for certain, but I'd guess it's a majority of non-indie releases. It goes unnoticed because it's seamless and convincing. It's enormously helpful to avoid an expensive location shoot or reshoot, fix an error, add setting, integrate actors and stunt doubles, all kinds of things. This article doesn't even know to complain about it because it's so dang good.
For an example off the top of my head, I know Wolf of Wall Street had a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP2sJqoZD7g You can search youtube for the title of any movie and "cgi" or "visual effects" to turn up tons of examples. David Fincher's movies have some great examples.
And to hop on my bar stool and opine, I think CGI is going to lead to a revolution in filmmaking over the next decade or two as it continues to get better and cheaper. There's ubiquitous criticisms that movies the last couple decades have been so expensive that studios only put money into blockbusters, or meddle in the creators' vision, or only fund simple action movies that are easily translated, etc. When low-budget indie films get access to this stuff they're going to to have the ability to make all kinds of movies rather than just contemporary character studies with limited sets and props. (Digital distribution will help, too.) CGI will be a landmark revitalizing force for movies, much bigger and stranger and better than the New Hollywood movement in the 70s.
I truly hope there is a shift back to practical FX and 2d animation.
Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie.
There is something about actors acting in the same set you see, with the actual monsters you see, and the fog and lighting and everything else being real. And shooting on film just looks better to me.
Hand drawn 2d animation looks so much better too. I much prefer its soft and imperfect look to the HD perfection of modern computerized animation. 3d animation while great in some movies, I feel is an overused default animation style today.
I feel like we reached the perfect balance between visual art, technology and original stories back in the 80s, and have been steadily implementing cost/time saving optimizations ever since.
I think so much of what made The Thing great is what they couldn't show because of their limitations, not because of their great special effects. It's a thing that the great digital effect artists have realized and integrated into their movies.
When you look at movies like The Arrival, which is not considered a great special effects film because they're understated and get out of the way of the story, the effects artists plop a digital ship into the middle of a field and leave it there. Understated digital effects, in conjunction with practical effects, are often the most effective and least appreciated.
Villeneuve has a tendency to direct movies that do this well (and I apologize for being a bit of a fan boy), and I hope that more movies take this direction.
I enjoyed the Marvel films, but at times they looked a bit like digital vomit on screen and became hard to follow. I couldn't even finish Aquaman, TBH, as it was just over the top with the amount of digital noise. Though, Justice League attempted to do better than this, the Darkside fight was a bit nauseating =(
Again, though, I think the Villeneuve films will stand the test of time, where as the blockbuster comic films will go the way of films like Predator. I enjoyed it at the time, but it doesn't really hold up.
I don't think shooting on film is particularly necessary; it's possible to match that look pretty convincingly. Though attention to why the film look appeals to us is always valuable.
Practical effects are probably getting easier, thanks to various 3D printing techniques, the expansion of low-cost microcontrollers, the low costs of servos, and the proliferation of small cameras and lens adaptations for rostrum/running shots.
But saving money isn't the main reason we don't have practical effects. Saving time is the main reason we don't have practical effects.
You have to remember that 2D animation has been around for over a hundred years and a lot of the bad old stuff has been filtered out by history.
I think 3D animation is just starting to hit its stride. The Netflix series Arcane is really beautiful, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was incredible, and I was even blown away by Hotel Transylvania 4, which I was ready to write-off as corny kids dreck, but the manic slap-stick stuff they did in it is outrageously good. This isn't even getting into the epic-budget Pixar stuff...
Also if Ghibili is your bar I'd say 99% of 2D animation isn't even on par.
Well, compare the number of films that Ghibli puts out compared to Marvel. Marvel pumps movies out at a furious pace in comparison; I'm not sure you even could sustain a Marvel-style tempo while remotely keeping up the same quality as Ghibli.
The Mandalorian filming approach is an interesting new hybrid of the CGI use & shooting with them live in a 360 screens. This gives interesting lighting also allowing more use of practical fx.
Notably, The Mandalorian used puppetry for all the aliens. Using CGI for backgrounds but practical effects for stuff the cast actually interacts with seemed to work really well.
The Volume is an impressive feat of cinema technology, but once you notice how the camera never goes long, everything is clearly shot within a small soundstage area. The new Star Wars series The Book of Boba Fett suffers from this limitation more than its predecessor.
I think a lot of what people are complaining about is that the third act of a lot of big movies is just "...and then they all have a big fight". I've never heard anybody complain about the extensive VFX in The Wolf of Wall Street[1].
One of the most damning comparisons to me are the orcs in the LOTR movies vs. the ones in the Hobbit movies, the former being practical make-up and the latter being almost entirely CGI. It's night and day, the LOTR orcs are a million times more believable and look like real organic living things, whereas the Hobbit movies end up looking like sterile video game cutscenes at times
I think a large chunk of the problem is that we've been concentrating on improving the rendering, which is clearly now phenomenal, and seemingly totally ignoring the animation, which is still abysmal.
CGI characters still move too smoothly. It's all spline curves and jelly physics. CGI is instantly recognisably unreal due to the overly fluid motions and it seems remarkable to me how little progress has been made on this.
Animated characters still look animated, except they dive straight into the uncanny valley because of the incredible rendering. I guess mo-cap only gets you so far before you have to smooth out the noise of the motion signal.
Anyone with actual knowledge of CGI got anything to say about this? It seems weird that everything else moved on while this got neglected.
An interesting thing I've noticed recently is that CGI both opens up possibilities and closes them down, and it's in the closing that it becomes painful. As the author points out, in older practical effects movies, you knew that you wouldn't get many big macro shots of a lot of things happening at once. In Alien, you weren't going to see the alien walking around in natural light with camera angles all around it, because it would quickly become obvious that it's someone in a suit or an animatronic. In CGI you get the opposite scenario: you'll see big believable macro shots of fleets of spaceships, but when a human actor is interacting with a CGI actor, you know that they aren't going to believably inhabit the same small space: e.g. hugs, kisses, punches, etc., are probably not going to happen, or, if they do, will involve some predictable trickery. For example if a menacing CGI robot strides threateningly towards a human actor, you know they won't believably grab the actor and go face to face, not without some cunning cuts. This is especially apparent in television shows with lower budgets. The space scenes in Battlestar Galactica were consistently incredible, but I was never once convinced by the non-human Cylons when they were in the same room as humans. I watch newer CGI movies with an eye towards how artists are addressing these issues.
As a big BSG fan, I have to disagree with the last part of your comment. The reboot’s GGI Cylons were much more menacing than the original’s actors clunking around in robot suits. (But it was still awesome to see the occasional old-school Cylon in the reboot. They did a great job calling back to the original show when appropriate.)
Man, I miss BSG. Every sci-fi show featuring androids since then owes it a huge debt. (Raised By Wolves on HBO jumps to mind as a current example.)
What weird take. For one thing, maybe an alien world like Arrakis shouldn't look identical to the deserts on this world. For another, lots of movies pre CGI looked terrible, so the idea that the past was some kind of practical utopia is idiotic. People need to stop mistaking personal taste for objective fact.
My favorite example of this is the fact that in the film "Knives Out", the looming oil painting of Harlan (the murdered patriarch) was actually just a green square all throughout filming - the oil painting itself was digitally comped in during post.
Is Knives Out still a good movie? Yes. Would it have been possibly, perceptibly better if the actors had a real eyeline to work with on that painting, or the camera work was done with the cinematographer being able to see the real painting through the lens? Maybe.
After reading all that, I can't help but feel that when movies first came out, there were plenty of people complaining about how live theatre plays were obviously better and everything is getting worse.
The article even admits that CG is a lot better today than it was a while back.
Yes, they make mistakes and things could be better. But that's because nobody is perfect and everyone is making it up as they go along. When nobody has done it before, it's impossible to copy them.
Personally, I love today's movie and their CG, especially when I can't even tell it was CG. It used to be incredibly obvious that it was CG. And it used to be incredibly obvious that puppets were puppets. Everything gets better as people do it more.
I don't think we need a shift back to practical FX or 2d animation in general. Only for those situations CGI can't handle yet.
What we need is good stories and unambitious effects that support those stories.
The author touched on several key problems:
* Color Grading:
> Notice the color differences. Every movie now takes place as if it were in The Matrix, appearing in deep greens or blues or in gray shades, like the complex colors of the world have been bleached out.
* Shadows:
> In the 2021 Dune, it is a monochrome chunk, despite the billowing fabric around the character. In the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, the shadow of the fabric is actually see-through. It has dimensionality, thinness and thickness. Because it’s a real shadow.
* Over-ambition:
> how could the same filmmaker go from making a movie as good as The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 to a movie as bad as The Hobbit in 2012? It’s not budgetary. The Fellowship cost 93 million to make, while The Hobbit cost 180 million.
Jurassic Park (1993) was so good and stands the test of time because the primitive CGI was hidden by night-time darkness. The filmmakers knew what was achievable and believable relative to the technology of the time.
If in 2022 you make a movie with flat colors, fake shadows, and 3D characters (like Maz Kanata in Star Wars) who need to interact in scenes with human characters, then yeah: it's going to be bad.
Modern movies fail because they're too ambitious. The battle of the five armies in The Hobbit was too ambitious: our technology can't make it look as good as live action yet.
The answer is to make movies we can make with a mix of practical + CGI, and wait for the technology to catch up. And to fix the damn color grading. Songs used to sound good. Movies used to look good.
You don't get better by waiting until you can be better, you get better by doing your best, falling short and discovering how to overcome your shortfalls.
You don't get a budget to 'try to build the battle of five armies perfectly and only then will you get to put it in a movie'.
Overambition is frankly BAKED into the movie industry and has from the beginning.
So yes, cutting edge effects will fall short, they have since the beginning of film. But the techniques are always getting better. When golum was introduced in the LoTR he was not perfect but you can see the improvement just within that series from movie to movie, he's always looking better... 'touch' interaction between cgi human actor also improves quite a bit but still lacks, the wrestle that frodo and golum have at the cracks has .. cracks.
Color grading has nothing to do with CGI. That's a production choice not a technical limitation. DPs and directors have been favoring a limited or neutral color palette for the last two decades. Like any fashion, this will change.
CGI is to movies as autotune is to music or makeup is to beauty. When you have a solid base, and merely use these things to clean up a few rough edges, it works wonderfully. When you destroy any sense of realism or humanity under an entirely synthetic facade... yeah, nobody's buying it, it destroys the emersion, and it all looks / sounds the same after awhile.
The examples in this article are surprising because I don't think they look very good.
While the CGI in the Star Wars example isn't amazing, it's no worse than the Ewok that has fabric folds showing on its costume.
In the second example, the devil is too human looking so all I see is a person in makeup (good makeup) where Steppenwolf looks completely alien.
Finally, the dune example gives a feeling of being truly out in the desert, where the Lawrence of Arabia looks like they're filming in a yard and the colors look oversaturated compared to what I've seen in real life deserts.
Nowadays All movies are, to some degree, cg’d. Color grading (the final stage of the post-production process) is entirely digital, and things are being done with digital color grading which would have been un-dreamable in analog days.
Also, let’s not forget that lots of vfx address minor things like (from experience) removing an umbrella that the directors daughter accidentally left on set.
Finally, practical fx frequently require a digital helping hand. Like removing visible wires from fly by wire scenes.
Yes but it's clear that the article is not talking about this. It's talking about things like The Hobbit compared to LOTR. The latter is a classic, the former has aged terribly, in a big part due to awful CGI
So much of this is just how _much_ work had to be done to get practical effects to work, and how practical and CGI are often good for different things. For an insane example of this checkout this video of how they did the ship landing in the original Dune movie (of which step 1 was "rent a stadium").
Also, I think there's a very selective bias against CGI where when it looks _real_ we just assume it's real and don't notice so we're only criticizing the portion where it failed to live up to reality.
I think there's a lost magic to practical SFX, but nostalgia aside, the single most important flaw I see in CGI that still remains unfixed to this day is...
... bad lights/contrast.
In almost every CGI scene, barring honorable exceptions, you see the CGI portions are fake because the lights are all bad. The comparison shot in the article between Steppenwolf and Tim Curry's Darkness from "Legend" is telling: while Darkness is shrouded in, well, shadows with sharp contrast, it looks as if Steppenwolf is brightly and uniformly lit.
Things that lack contrast and are uniformly lit are less visually interesting, especially when they don't match the environment. I notice this flaw in everything: Jurassic Park's dinosaurs, Star Wars ships, monsters in Lord of the Rings, mostly every modern creature effect. I know CGI artists must know this, so I wonder... why is it so difficult to fix?
(The honorable exceptions are mostly due to showing the CGI creature more sparingly, or where the light conditions by coincidence really match the creature).
Lighting in general seems to be underappreciated, even without CGI.
I'm reminded of Fifty Shades Freed, which starts with a wedding scene that's lit with green. Green lighting is basically nonexistent in nature, so when you see it, it's not an accident - someone had to mess with it, and it's usually to indicate something is wrong/unnatural. You can really see the care put into films like The Matrix with how they use green lighting, which is in stark contrast with films like Fifty Shades Freed which use it mindlessly.
But when the author says
> Every movie now takes place as if it were in The Matrix, appearing in deep greens or blues or in gray shades, like the complex colors of the world have been bleached out.
I don't think he really gets it. Sure, unnecessary color grading is easier than ever to accomplish, but intentional use of lighting to help tell the story is probably going over his head.
[+] [-] tshaddox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhauser23|4 years ago|reply
"Consider Ridley Scott’s 1985 Legend, wherein Tim Curry’s onscreen presence as a horned devil is heavy, weighty—despite playing a fantastical devil, his clopping around in hooves comes across as ontologically solid. Your eyes are not deceived. And moreover, under the slathered makeup and prothestics, he is still acting—when his lip curls, that’s a real lip. Compare that to Steppenwolf, from the 2017 Justice League. After almost a quarter-century of “progress” in cinema he comes across as digital dust, a void where physicality should be. His superstrength is unthreatening, because deep in our occipital lobes we know Steppenwolf weighs nothing, impacts nothing. Therefore the entire movie has no stakes. Of course the bad guy will be defeated, he’s a hologram."
Yes, of course the article ignores the hundreds of old movies with terrible prosthetics and costumes. I think the author tries his best to compare similar things. For example, when he discusses the latest Dune with Lawrence of Arabia - both acclaimed movies. Specifically, he discusses how the desert scenes _look_ to our eyes:
"Lawrence of Arabia from 1962 looks so much more real than Dune, even when just comparing the shots of people in Bedouin costumes hanging out in a desert ... For instance, the shadows both characters cast to their right. In the 2021 Dune, it is a monochrome chunk, despite the billowing fabric around the character. In the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, the shadow of the fabric is actually see-through. It has dimensionality, thinness and thickness. Because it’s a real shadow. So despite both being filmed in similar locations, one scene unconsciously triggers more belief in the ontology of the fictional world—the directionality of the light, the blue above the dune—while the other comes across as an ersatz reality."
I felt this coming out of the latest Star Wars movies: the space battle scenes felt so... flat, despite being technically amazing. There's something to be said for actually shooting on location and using physical props.
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
But cinema is a smaller world. Yes, there are plenty of independent films, but most audience attention has always been focused on the small number of tentpole films. And if you look at just those over time, everything the author says here still holds up.
Watch some of the top ten box office grossing films from 30, 20, 10 years ago, and today. The change in style, tone, and quality is enormous.
Pick any random comedy or drama from the 80s or 90s and it will have more realness, more sense of being there than movies made today for 10x the budget. This being despite the fact that the older films were shot literally on film and the grain is visible.
Digital color, an obsession with CGI, and a fixation on storytelling that plays well across an internation audience (which means violence, action, physical comedy, and simplistic morality tales) has made today's movies a shadow of what they used to be.
[+] [-] duped|4 years ago|reply
But the sheet of plexiglass used as a "force field" was comically terrible, even for 1984
[+] [-] the_af|4 years ago|reply
"The Thing" to most people today is not "one of the greatest movies" but a horror classic and -- visual quality wise -- on par with "Phantom Menace" or "Jurassic Park", if not worse.
I think the criticism is valid: that the physicality of classic SFX is still mostly unmatched by CGI, and the eye and mind notice this.
[+] [-] ballenf|4 years ago|reply
Would the past be over-represented? My hunch is yes, but I think it's a fair metric.
[+] [-] Spooky23|4 years ago|reply
If you pick a mediocre movie in 2019 and compare to a mediocre movie in 1959, the garbage storyline will be the thing you will turn the movie off for.
In my mind, the weakness with CGI overuse is it enables lazy/sloppy practices that don’t scale. Similar to in graphics work where Photoshop is abused to create impossible edits for expediency.
My family has a tradition of watching Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” every holiday season. It’s quaint how you can see the painted backgrounds and stages… the opening scenes feature cardboard bricks and cheesy props. The point of the article is that this era of filming is bland and will look cheesy in the future because of the reliance on tools. You can already see it today - compare the Sony Spider-Man movies to the last iteration - the age is apparent.
[+] [-] iratewizard|4 years ago|reply
In any form of art, there have always been pieces motivated by artistic drive (i.e. a work of art like seven samurai or loan's run) and pieces motivated by profit (i.e. a product like all of the capeshit movies or the transformer movies). What we're seeing in film and other similar industries is a cabal of gatekeepers who don't fund things unless it fits the mold of proven, profit driven products. Remove the Larry Finks of the world from power, and you remove the powerwhore gatekeepers that have no concept of beauty.
[+] [-] rbanffy|4 years ago|reply
I think the toughest thing about VFX facing a director is the temptation to abuse it. They have to remember the effects are there to tell the story. They should resist to making everything spectacular/shiny/tridimensional/hectic where not everything needs to be. Compare the dark Los Angeles of Blade Runner with the lower levels of Coruscant.
And yes. Darkseid is a ridiculous villain, with a lazy design and even lazier lines. No amount of CGI could save it. Not even if he were blue and lived in a Roger Dean album cover.
[+] [-] enkid|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/watchdust
[+] [-] xiphias2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrec|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlob|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pushcx|4 years ago|reply
For an example off the top of my head, I know Wolf of Wall Street had a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP2sJqoZD7g You can search youtube for the title of any movie and "cgi" or "visual effects" to turn up tons of examples. David Fincher's movies have some great examples.
And to hop on my bar stool and opine, I think CGI is going to lead to a revolution in filmmaking over the next decade or two as it continues to get better and cheaper. There's ubiquitous criticisms that movies the last couple decades have been so expensive that studios only put money into blockbusters, or meddle in the creators' vision, or only fund simple action movies that are easily translated, etc. When low-budget indie films get access to this stuff they're going to to have the ability to make all kinds of movies rather than just contemporary character studies with limited sets and props. (Digital distribution will help, too.) CGI will be a landmark revitalizing force for movies, much bigger and stranger and better than the New Hollywood movement in the 70s.
[+] [-] krnlpnc|4 years ago|reply
Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie.
There is something about actors acting in the same set you see, with the actual monsters you see, and the fog and lighting and everything else being real. And shooting on film just looks better to me.
Hand drawn 2d animation looks so much better too. I much prefer its soft and imperfect look to the HD perfection of modern computerized animation. 3d animation while great in some movies, I feel is an overused default animation style today.
I feel like we reached the perfect balance between visual art, technology and original stories back in the 80s, and have been steadily implementing cost/time saving optimizations ever since.
[+] [-] UnpossibleJim|4 years ago|reply
When you look at movies like The Arrival, which is not considered a great special effects film because they're understated and get out of the way of the story, the effects artists plop a digital ship into the middle of a field and leave it there. Understated digital effects, in conjunction with practical effects, are often the most effective and least appreciated.
Villeneuve has a tendency to direct movies that do this well (and I apologize for being a bit of a fan boy), and I hope that more movies take this direction.
I enjoyed the Marvel films, but at times they looked a bit like digital vomit on screen and became hard to follow. I couldn't even finish Aquaman, TBH, as it was just over the top with the amount of digital noise. Though, Justice League attempted to do better than this, the Darkside fight was a bit nauseating =(
Again, though, I think the Villeneuve films will stand the test of time, where as the blockbuster comic films will go the way of films like Predator. I enjoyed it at the time, but it doesn't really hold up.
[+] [-] unfocussed_mike|4 years ago|reply
Practical effects are probably getting easier, thanks to various 3D printing techniques, the expansion of low-cost microcontrollers, the low costs of servos, and the proliferation of small cameras and lens adaptations for rostrum/running shots.
But saving money isn't the main reason we don't have practical effects. Saving time is the main reason we don't have practical effects.
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|4 years ago|reply
I think 3D animation is just starting to hit its stride. The Netflix series Arcane is really beautiful, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was incredible, and I was even blown away by Hotel Transylvania 4, which I was ready to write-off as corny kids dreck, but the manic slap-stick stuff they did in it is outrageously good. This isn't even getting into the epic-budget Pixar stuff...
Also if Ghibili is your bar I'd say 99% of 2D animation isn't even on par.
[+] [-] tshaddox|4 years ago|reply
You chose three films that are widely considered to be among the greatest films of all time in their genre.
[+] [-] roywiggins|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Studio_Ghibli_works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Unive...
[+] [-] corysama|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dv_dt|4 years ago|reply
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-il...
[+] [-] giaour|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itisit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taftster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeboy|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfRVAH9yU
[+] [-] cheeseomlit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shimfish|4 years ago|reply
CGI characters still move too smoothly. It's all spline curves and jelly physics. CGI is instantly recognisably unreal due to the overly fluid motions and it seems remarkable to me how little progress has been made on this.
Animated characters still look animated, except they dive straight into the uncanny valley because of the incredible rendering. I guess mo-cap only gets you so far before you have to smooth out the noise of the motion signal.
Anyone with actual knowledge of CGI got anything to say about this? It seems weird that everything else moved on while this got neglected.
[+] [-] sleepybrett|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lemmsjid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munchler|4 years ago|reply
Man, I miss BSG. Every sci-fi show featuring androids since then owes it a huge debt. (Raised By Wolves on HBO jumps to mind as a current example.)
[+] [-] tqi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qrohlf|4 years ago|reply
Is Knives Out still a good movie? Yes. Would it have been possibly, perceptibly better if the actors had a real eyeline to work with on that painting, or the camera work was done with the cinematographer being able to see the real painting through the lens? Maybe.
[+] [-] Someone1234|4 years ago|reply
CGI is actually everywhere and often goes unnoticed, unless it is bad. I point to set-extensions as a perfect example of invisible CGI done well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47IIj-hws7g
[+] [-] wccrawford|4 years ago|reply
The article even admits that CG is a lot better today than it was a while back.
Yes, they make mistakes and things could be better. But that's because nobody is perfect and everyone is making it up as they go along. When nobody has done it before, it's impossible to copy them.
Personally, I love today's movie and their CG, especially when I can't even tell it was CG. It used to be incredibly obvious that it was CG. And it used to be incredibly obvious that puppets were puppets. Everything gets better as people do it more.
[+] [-] newsbinator|4 years ago|reply
What we need is good stories and unambitious effects that support those stories.
The author touched on several key problems:
* Color Grading:
> Notice the color differences. Every movie now takes place as if it were in The Matrix, appearing in deep greens or blues or in gray shades, like the complex colors of the world have been bleached out.
* Shadows:
> In the 2021 Dune, it is a monochrome chunk, despite the billowing fabric around the character. In the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, the shadow of the fabric is actually see-through. It has dimensionality, thinness and thickness. Because it’s a real shadow.
* Over-ambition:
> how could the same filmmaker go from making a movie as good as The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 to a movie as bad as The Hobbit in 2012? It’s not budgetary. The Fellowship cost 93 million to make, while The Hobbit cost 180 million.
Jurassic Park (1993) was so good and stands the test of time because the primitive CGI was hidden by night-time darkness. The filmmakers knew what was achievable and believable relative to the technology of the time.
If in 2022 you make a movie with flat colors, fake shadows, and 3D characters (like Maz Kanata in Star Wars) who need to interact in scenes with human characters, then yeah: it's going to be bad.
Modern movies fail because they're too ambitious. The battle of the five armies in The Hobbit was too ambitious: our technology can't make it look as good as live action yet.
The answer is to make movies we can make with a mix of practical + CGI, and wait for the technology to catch up. And to fix the damn color grading. Songs used to sound good. Movies used to look good.
[+] [-] sleepybrett|4 years ago|reply
You don't get a budget to 'try to build the battle of five armies perfectly and only then will you get to put it in a movie'.
Overambition is frankly BAKED into the movie industry and has from the beginning.
So yes, cutting edge effects will fall short, they have since the beginning of film. But the techniques are always getting better. When golum was introduced in the LoTR he was not perfect but you can see the improvement just within that series from movie to movie, he's always looking better... 'touch' interaction between cgi human actor also improves quite a bit but still lacks, the wrestle that frodo and golum have at the cracks has .. cracks.
[+] [-] greedo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewclunn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandallBrown|4 years ago|reply
While the CGI in the Star Wars example isn't amazing, it's no worse than the Ewok that has fabric folds showing on its costume.
In the second example, the devil is too human looking so all I see is a person in makeup (good makeup) where Steppenwolf looks completely alien.
Finally, the dune example gives a feeling of being truly out in the desert, where the Lawrence of Arabia looks like they're filming in a yard and the colors look oversaturated compared to what I've seen in real life deserts.
[+] [-] DoctorNick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daub|4 years ago|reply
Also, let’s not forget that lots of vfx address minor things like (from experience) removing an umbrella that the directors daughter accidentally left on set.
Finally, practical fx frequently require a digital helping hand. Like removing visible wires from fly by wire scenes.
[+] [-] laputan_machine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|4 years ago|reply
It's not defending all CGI, just arguing that we only notice it when it's bad. It's basically a toupée fallacy
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/OHPkdMGI6D4?t=568
Also, I think there's a very selective bias against CGI where when it looks _real_ we just assume it's real and don't notice so we're only criticizing the portion where it failed to live up to reality.
[+] [-] the_af|4 years ago|reply
... bad lights/contrast.
In almost every CGI scene, barring honorable exceptions, you see the CGI portions are fake because the lights are all bad. The comparison shot in the article between Steppenwolf and Tim Curry's Darkness from "Legend" is telling: while Darkness is shrouded in, well, shadows with sharp contrast, it looks as if Steppenwolf is brightly and uniformly lit.
Things that lack contrast and are uniformly lit are less visually interesting, especially when they don't match the environment. I notice this flaw in everything: Jurassic Park's dinosaurs, Star Wars ships, monsters in Lord of the Rings, mostly every modern creature effect. I know CGI artists must know this, so I wonder... why is it so difficult to fix?
(The honorable exceptions are mostly due to showing the CGI creature more sparingly, or where the light conditions by coincidence really match the creature).
[+] [-] saltminer|4 years ago|reply
I'm reminded of Fifty Shades Freed, which starts with a wedding scene that's lit with green. Green lighting is basically nonexistent in nature, so when you see it, it's not an accident - someone had to mess with it, and it's usually to indicate something is wrong/unnatural. You can really see the care put into films like The Matrix with how they use green lighting, which is in stark contrast with films like Fifty Shades Freed which use it mindlessly.
But when the author says
> Every movie now takes place as if it were in The Matrix, appearing in deep greens or blues or in gray shades, like the complex colors of the world have been bleached out.
I don't think he really gets it. Sure, unnecessary color grading is easier than ever to accomplish, but intentional use of lighting to help tell the story is probably going over his head.