Why CG Sucks (Except It Doesn't)

[Jonno2009]

No clue in which thread to put this, and feel free to merge into whatever thread this fits in.

Maybe some of you have seen it already but i watched it tonight and i found it REALLY interesting! And it's true we hear ALOT of complaining about over reliance on CG nowadays but we never question the mastery behind it when we DON'T notice the CG.

Why CG Sucks (Except It Doesn't) - YouTube

[levcore]

Pretty solid video but i disagree with him on a lot of points. I can think of plenty of great movies with crappy FX where it does kind of matter and i don't think it's as clean cut as he suggests. I had to lol when to make his point about crappy CG he was showing lots of shots of CG creatures and monsters etc and when he starts talking about good CG he just shows stuff like compositing or basic background replacement stuff. Of course that stuff will be easier to do and probably be less noticeable than a CG creature. Plenty of movies have had great CG creatures but he neglected to show them.

Also using very typical outdated examples as The Mummy Returns and I Am Legend is a bit weak. The Mummy Returns is 14 years old, i can't believe are still banging the drum on that one. Some more recent examples would have been cool (i know he mentions The Avengers etc).

[Dreamliner330]

Excellent video and thoughts on modern CG:

Why CG Sucks (Except It Doesn't) - YouTube

[Leonidas King]

I saw it this morning. Really great video.

[Jonno2009]

hah i posted this video last night and no one commented on it for hours.

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=265452

[Dreamliner330]

Originally Posted by Jonno2009

hah i posted this video last night and no one commented on it for hours.

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=265452

[Falaskan]

I don't think it's sucks but it does sometimes. I especially don't like when the colour pallet has to be altered, imo, to help hide bad cgi. It makes the whole environment feel more sterile if you ask me. Battle of the Five Armies, and Jurassic World, for example. Realistic movement and even shading isn't good enough, when they decide to give the whole colour pallet a photoshopped look.

[blonde_devil]

I will have to watch that. With cg, it is like anything else - poor cg looks bad just like poor "real" effects do. But cg can look good - there are many cg effects that people don't even notice which shows cg is not bad, it is how it is used and how it is done that makes the difference. I think the little things are what people complain about the most - actors looking slightly off when they look at a cg character because all they had was a ball to look at and not a face, etc. I do think also cg can look a little too clean for lack of a better word - for example you see something floating through the air and it jumps out at you because it is just a little too perfect for the environment. Those things scream out cg to an audience no matter how good the effect really is. But again, that is all in the use and not the technology itself as you could adjust those things and make it work but studios tend to not want to spend the money. Isn't it shocking the number of visual effects companies that have gone out of business because studios want first rate effects for cheap and either you do it or someone else will? That's the real issue with cg - it is to the point that anyone with a computer can create these effects but because they do a cut-rate version of it, it looks bad and makes the industry look bad. But studios love that since it costs then far less.

[StingingVelvet]

Can you provide a link for those of us who disable Flash?

I don't think CGI sucks; I think it is massively, massively overused.

[Doctor Jack]

Originally Posted by StingingVelvet

I don't think CGI sucks; I think it is massively, massively overused.

It's become a crutch. Why waste time on a good script when you can throw cgi on the screen and people can shove their face with popcorn while pouring a giant drink down their gullet and be entertained? Jurassic World's success being the perfect example.

[GC Riot]

Originally Posted by Doctor Jack

It's become a crutch. Why waste time on a good script when you can throw cgi on the screen and people can shove their face with popcorn while pouring a giant drink down their gullet and be entertained? Jurassic World's success being the perfect example.

Agreed. This overkill really has to stop. There were some great examples of both good and bad uses in that video.

[spiderfan1985]

Originally Posted by Doctor Jack

It's become a crutch. Why waste time on a good script when you can throw cgi on the screen and people can shove their face with popcorn while pouring a giant drink down their gullet and be entertained? Jurassic World's success being the perfect example.

Okay. I have a problem with this kind of view. I think we need to remember that true movie fans are not that big a percentage of the population in general. A lot of filmgoers are just people who want an air conditioned escape from their workaday lives every so often and on weekends with their kids. They don't go to the movies to have some "message" crammed down their throats, they just want to have a good time before going back to work on Monday. I totally feel these people too because I am one of them. Yes I am a movie fan, but I am also an average guy with an average job that takes up eight hours of my day five days a week and sometimes when I'm off I just wanna watch some stuff blow up real good. It's great stress relief. I don't go to have some filmmaker give me a diatribe about how they think the world should be. It really comes across as hypocritical a lot of the time because these people are making statements about things they have no earthly clue about and passing it off as "truth". And they have more money than many of us will ever have in our lives so… All this to say that that whole little dig at people going to the movies you just made I find rather insensitive. Jurassic World was successful because it gave the average filmgoer, read not fan, what they wanted. A two hour fun ride with the kids or significant other. Take your pick. CGI or no I have no problem with it. If I'm entertained that is what I came for in the first place and I am happy. Please respect that ninety-nine percent of the people on this little blue ball are not artsy highbrow film fanatics.

[spectre08]

Originally Posted by Doctor Jack

It's become a crutch. Why waste time on a good script when you can throw cgi on the screen and people can shove their face with popcorn while pouring a giant drink down their gullet and be entertained? Jurassic World's success being the perfect example.

VFX has ALWAYS been this way, it's not a problem unique or original to CGI by any means at all.

One upon a time people were wowed and placated by giant oil paintings and elaborate sets, some were by "epic" sweeping shots of grand landscapes, after that it was big models and fancy models that exploded.

I truly don't believe there ever was a time when movie goers were more or less discerning than they are now. We tend to just fixate on the great movies of the past, because all the bad movies have fallen away with time, or become campy cult movies.

In 1939 Gone With The Wind was a masterpiece and people flocked to it. But you know what else they flocked to? Son of Frankenstein, the big-budget third installment of a horror series based on pop fiction, crammed full of the best visual effects of the time. Lots of people stuffed their face with popcorn and soda pop during that too.

[jamesdevil]

Thats a good video and he did a really good job with some examples of stuff I didn't realize like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo where it is subtle but extremely important. Like most things, it is all about a balance.

[spiderfan1985]

Originally Posted by spectre08

VFX has ALWAYS been this way, it's not a problem unique or original to CGI by any means at all.

One upon a time people were wowed and placated by giant oil paintings and elaborate sets, some were by "epic" sweeping shots of grand landscapes, after that it was big models and fancy models that exploded.

I truly don't believe there ever was a time when movie goers were more or less discerning than they are now. We tend to just fixate on the great movies of the past, because all the bad movies have fallen away with time, or become campy cult movies.

In 1939 Gone With The Wind was a masterpiece and people flocked to it. But you know what else they flocked to? Son of Frankenstein, the big-budget third installment of a horror series based on pop fiction, crammed full of the best visual effects of the time. Lots of people stuffed their face with popcorn and soda pop during that too.

Exactly. I didn't even think of that the first time. People then and people now aren't much different on that. On the one side, the smaller side, you have the "discerning" film fans and on the other you have the average Joes and Janes who just want a quickie escape with the family after working all week to provide for said family. I empathize totally with them. Escapism is what movies do best. I love the escapism of movies. That you can literally go to another world for a couple of hours, give or take, and then return to the plain existence of the 9 to 5 worker. I see the art in these films regardless. However, entertainment, be it movies or any other form, is a business. The people who make them possible work too. Hard at that. It isn't as glamorous as some think. I like the guy who played Tin Man, I believe anyway, in Wizard of Oz what he had to say about making the film when people said years later he must have had a lot of fun making it. His response was "like hell it was fun, it was not fun, it was a lot of hard work."

[MechaGodzilla]

Originally Posted by spectre08

VFX has ALWAYS been this way, it's not a problem unique or original to CGI by any means at all.

One upon a time people were wowed and placated by giant oil paintings and elaborate sets, some were by "epic" sweeping shots of grand landscapes, after that it was big models and fancy models that exploded.

I truly don't believe there ever was a time when movie goers were more or less discerning than they are now. We tend to just fixate on the great movies of the past, because all the bad movies have fallen away with time, or become campy cult movies.

In 1939 Gone With The Wind was a masterpiece and people flocked to it. But you know what else they flocked to? Son of Frankenstein, the big-budget third installment of a horror series based on pop fiction, crammed full of the best visual effects of the time. Lots of people stuffed their face with popcorn and soda pop during that too.

Well said. It's silly to act like these movies that mostly rely on special effects and fun factor while maybe not being stellar artistic achievements or featuring the greatest writing and acting ever are a new thing in any way. Those movies have always been around, it's just in the old days they were made with puppets, stop motion, men in suits, miniatures, etc. I'm a fan of Godzilla and other Japanese giant monster movies, so trust me, I know. And you know what, they never prevented the more serious and artful efforts, the films that we now look back on as classics, from getting made.

[Nada]

Great article here too:

http://twitchfilm.com/2015/08/destro...t-cgi-lie.html

Bless Tom Cruise for clambering up the outside of an escaping cargo plane in the breathless opening minutes of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. Bless him, too, for taking to the internet a week or two ago to assure us that Yes, It's True, I Was Outside That Plane.

In the twenty-ish years since the first Mission: Impossible - wherein Cruise definitely did not clamber up the outside of an escaping bullet train, as the impressionistic digital chatter of his flapping white dress shirt convincingly assured us - we'd be forgiven for thinking that anything that looks nuts on a cinema screen was probably too nuts to have been shot for real. Once in a while, it's nice to have our illusions shattered, especially if those illusions are about illusions themselves.

Rogue Nation is one of two blockbusters this summer whose audience interest is being enhanced by an informal secondary marketing campaign along the lines of No Really, We Shot This. The first was Mad Max: Fury Road, where the Doof's guitar really did spit fire, and many a fine motor vehicle really did flip end over end in the Namibian desert.

Mad Max and Rogue Nation also presage the big No Really, We Shot This movie of 2015, JJ Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which takes place in a galaxy far, far away and yet has had its fan credibility pre-emptively bolstered by assurances along the lines of "we built literally everything and it all absolutely works*, no really, the prequels sucked cuz CGI."

(*citation needed)

It's all basically horseshit. The fact that a bunch of props, droids, and aliens were developed practically for The Force Awakens has as much to do with the total matrix of its production approach as the fact that a bunch of CGI techniques were piloted for The Phantom Menace.

The Phantom Menace was also one of the biggest practical effects movies of all time, using models and miniatures on a scale that was a powers-of-ten dwarfing of the original Star Wars; and guess what, there will be CGI in pretty much every single shot of The Force Awakens, too, just like there isn't one shot in Fury Road that hasn't been substantially digitally manipulated. This is the way we make movies now.

What's changed, and what interests me about it, is that the way we sell movies now seems to have finally arced back away from visual effects, after a long, elliptical orbit where the "cinema of attractions" was effects-driven for the better part of fifty years.

As recently as a decade ago, the fact that Gollum was giving such an identifiably interesting performance and was a special effect to boot was novel enough to be an equal fascination upon both of those lines; no one, though, wasted any column inches on consideration on Avengers 2's Ultron as a visual effect, in which category he was certainly a much better one than Gollum.

No, thankfully, we've arrived at the point where each element of these fantastical films can be considered sui generis, which in Ultron's case was simply: did we give a shit about him as a character? How was Spader's performance working? How was the writing? The sorts of things these filmmaking tools, theoretically, were always striving towards: not a visual invisibility, but a conceptual one.

This marks a major turning point.

I'm reading a great book right now by Julie Turnock called Plastic Reality, which looks at how the aesthetic of photorealism was developed for visual effects (with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as its primary examples). It was the first source that pointed out to me that photorealism is no more the "default" for how special effects can operate than it's the default for how, say, paintings are required to look; it's just a choice so overwhelmingly popular in the past four decades of cinema that it's essentially written the rulebook for how we, as viewers, interpret the images we see.

"Realistic" in special effects, in other words, is an achievement we only award if what we are looking at seems to be something that a camera might actually have photographed, even if that premise itself is utterly preposterous. Let's leave aside the fact that X-Wing fighters don't exist and could therefore never, ever be filmed; even more earthbound examples apply. No camera ever survived a 300-foot freefall with an active explosive, a la Pearl Harbour, and yet with the right amount of camera shake and lens flare we'll say that the shot looks "realistic."

But Turnock also argues that the effects of Star Wars and CE3K were simultaneously designed to be "realistic" while also being intentionally "spectacular," a value-add for the audience who would pay to see a movie whose visuals were eye-poppingly supernatural while still remaining, completely paradoxically, realistic.

This model was still in effect as recently as Avatar but may have finally bled itself dry over the course of this decade. Is it fair to say we no longer notice visual effects, unless they're bad? Has the spectacular finally been reduced to a normal, unspectacular part of any moviegoing experience?

This is what I find so funny about films like Rogue Nation and Mad Max who go so far out of their way to market themselves on the "reality" of their content, even if the claims are patently false. There's something charming about the fact that we finally hit the top of the scale on improbable visuals and had to come back down to probable ones. No, Ultron ain't interesting... but dangling a moviestar on the outside of a cargo plane? That's just crazy enough to work.

[Geoff D]

For me the complaint that modern 'popcorn' movies have too much spectacle and not enough character compared to the olden days is largely baseless because 'event' movies have been that way for decades, there's just more of those movies in general these days.

However, I still think there's something to be said for the overuse of CG as an effects tool. CG itself doesn't suck because some of the most amazing VFX I've ever ever seen is digital. What sucks is the overweening reliance on it.

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by spiderfan1985

Okay. I have a problem with this kind of view. I think we need to remember that true movie fans are not that big a percentage of the population in general. A lot of filmgoers are just people who want an air conditioned escape from their workaday lives every so often and on weekends with their kids. They don't go to the movies to have some "message" crammed down their throats, they just want to have a good time before going back to work on Monday. I totally feel these people too because I am one of them.

I think the issue is that when a film is dominated by effects of any kind: real or CGI, so much energy is spent on the effects that frequently the script and sometimes the performances suffer as a result. Without getting into arguments, I think the Star Wars PT is an example of that although based on some of the comic-book and other movies that have been released in the last few years, the Star Wars prequels are looking better and better.

It's not a matter of having a message crammed down one's throat - films can be very entertaining AND have something to say or have brilliant craftsmanship. I realize they make a lot of money, but how many empty comic book movies do we need that each cover exactly the same ground? We're training audiences to seek out the dumb. Average audiences used to go see movies like those made by the likes of Stanley Kramer - intelligent, adult films that had something to say. Just because a film raises issues doesn't mean it's cramming ideas down your throat. This fear of ideas is part and parcel of the anti-intellectualism that has become part of the American psyche.

But I agree with the authors of the video that CGI has become a scapegoat and that much CGI is outstandingly superb. CGI is like plastic surgery: you only notice the bad ones. As the video demonstrates, there are plenty of non-fantasy films that use plenty of CGI, but because it's not recognized as a film that would use CGI, no one notices and no one complains about it.

I remember even as a little kid in the 50s and 60s and loving horror and fantasy films but always thinking that the special effects were lame because that was the state of the art in that day and because budgets for those kinds of films were small. But the best of those films, like the 1933 King Kong, found ways to get around the limitations of the stop motion animation of the time. (One of the defects in King Kong, fingerprints on his fur, was perceived by audiences as wind blowing his fur around.)

Even though the film was loved, a lot of the scenes in the 1978 "Superman, the Movie" had special effects that were obvious and I'm referring to how it was perceived when it was released. And of course until good CGI, the special effects in any TV show that used them were incredibly awful.

It was Star Wars and Close Encounters that started to give us remarkably believable special effects.

CGI is bad when it permits characters to disobey the laws of physics (although when a character is shot several times and still pursues the bad guy, or when a body smashes against a car's windshield and the characters inside don't even blink and don't hit the brakes, that's disobeying the laws of physics or human instinct as well) or when the characters look like video game characters. But in most films (at least the ones I choose to see), I think the CGI is quite amazing and much of it can only be perceived because you know it's the only way they could have accomplished it.

[sandman slim]

The thing that really bothers me with cgi is when they use it for simple things and don't need to. Like someone gets shot and they cue up that horribly fake looking cgi bloodstain. Takes me right out of the scene, every time. Is it really that difficult to have the actor change shirts for a second take? They probably spend more money paying for render time than the price of a few extra shirts, squibs, and a bottle of stage blood.