CGI special effects or practical special effect.

[toddly6666]

Originally Posted by Bluyoda

How many threads are there about this nonsense already?

Please show me how to do Davy Jones or the skeletons, etc... in The Curse of the Black Pearl as practical guys.

Please show me how to do Coruscant, Geonosis, Kamino, Mustafar, General Grievous, Yoda fighting, Poggle the Lesser, Watto, Sebulba, Hulk, Iron Man, The Mummy, the monster from Super 8, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, etc......practically.

It's the combination that makes it look great.
Also, you have to know how to design VFX sequences, how to direct them, have talented people doing them, and enough money and time do execute them.

Look at Pacific Rim!
It looks out of this world amazing! I can't wait to see this, and they could NEVER do anything like that practically.

I have just finished re-watching SW Ep. I and II with the crew commentaries, and I compared the practical creatures with the CG creatures side by side very carefully (E.g.:The Nemoidians vs. Poggle the Lesser), and they while they both look great, the CGI creatures are just much more expressive (lip sync....).

I think the main problem often is that the action is too fast, and we don't get to see the creatures, characters clearly.
I went through many scenes in slow motion (Ep. I+II), and discovered a lot of detail I had never seen before.

CG is here to stay, and it's only getting better.
People just need to use it appropriately.

My 2 cents.

Cheers

People dressed up in costumes, animatronics, old school practical special effects, real sets, painted backgrounds, etc. are a billion times better than all of the examples you listed above. Sci-fi/fantasy flicks from the 1970s-1980s not only look better than most sci-fi/fantasy flicks from the 1990s-2010s but are more memorable. The 1990s-2010 sci-fi/fantasy flicks suffer from quick datedness, sort of like the early ones from 1950s-1960s. The CGI in The Mummy, Star Wars prequels have seriously dated special effects where they look awful now. Movies like Jurrassic Park and Iron Man are good because they are overall good films with balance of everything. If you get a movie with CGI overkill (Star Wars prequels), you'll end up with a quickly dated film, and especially when everything else about the movie sucks as well. Regarding monster movies, there has not been one "holy shit, that's a scary intimidating" CGI monster. Jurrasic Park may be the last one because Spielberg used a mixture of animatronics and CGI. But if a monster is totally CGI, as awesomely animated as it may be, it still looks not real nor threatening as someone dressed in an Alien costume.

You are right that CG needs to be used appropriately. Most of the time, it's not. The last best recent example of perfect harmony of old school effects and new school effects were The Lord of the Rings movies.