Haters is a bit of hyperbole, I just prefer practical effects for most purposes. I think my biggest annoyance right now is the goddamn CGI blood spurts, it looks so fake and ridiculous and its all for nothing as blood packs and squibs are not expensive!
Right now it seems rather than find a couch to use on the set, film makers would rather have the actors squat in mid air and add a CGI couch in post.:rolleyes:
Ok BUT what movies or uses of CGI have impressed you?
I think the biggest one for me is John Carter, it made very heavy use of CGI but it was all very well done and tasteful. There were no show off impossible shots for the most part, no ragdoll errors, everything was well integrated and put together. Nothing stuck out as out of place or goofy, nothing took me out of the movie rolling my eyes at it. I thought it should be studied by everyone in the film industry as the way to do CGI right.
Jurassic Park. It was twenty years ago, and it still looks damn near perfect. You could release that today (with different hairstyles, maybe) and get no complaints.
Firefly, too, has great-looking CGI. The fact that they use it mostly for exterior shots of the ship in space makes that a lot easier, though.
I don’t mind when it’s done well, and when I’m not “aware” that it’s CGI (that is, it doesn’t take me away from the movie.) On related note, we’ve been watching some Ray Harryhausen stuff – 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and the like – which is wonderful.
Contact had the space ship built entirely in CGI, and I didn’t notice at all until I saw the special features. At least, I don’t think it was just compositing.
I agree about Jurassic Park. And I also thought the first Chronicles of Narnia film did a good job most of the time with the animals (Aslan heavily excepted. He only looked good in that scene where they used a model.)
The reason that Jurassic Park has held up so well is that the overwhelming majority of it is, in fact, practical. Even most of the T-Rex scenes were done with animatronics that must have cost at least as much as CGI, but if done well (as they obviously were) they will stand the test of time.
This is the kind of CGI that I appreciate. Another example would be the winter snow in Driving Miss Daisy, nobody would even give it a second thought.
Conversely, the tendency for Sci-Fi movies to always go to the mecha-lots-of-pokey-parts-and-oh-don’t-forget-slimey just makes me yawn. It’s been done and done and done, come up with something original, please?
I’m not a hater, but I love Davey Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. He’s amazingly well done.
They were concerned about his eyes, so the actor had makeup around his actual eyes in case they had to use them, but they CGI’ed his eyes the whole time, too, which is amazing.
CGI is usually a let down when it is used to replicate things we have seen in real life (like the planes in Pearl Harbor or the tiger in a preview I just saw - I’ve forgotten the title since there’s no way I’ll go see it.)
I don’t really know what a 30th Century spaceship looks like so I can be convinced that a CGI rendering is accurate.
The hero effects from The Avengers are a good example of CGI used right. Something like the Hulk running and jumping and moving quickly just couldn’t be done very well with practical effects. Fast and complex movements are CGI’s strength, and that’s what they should be used for.
Along those same lines, here’s an interesting look at the VFX from **Brokeback Mountain**. Stick with it, they start showing how the shots were put together at about 1:20.
The tiger doesn’t look too bad in crappy YouTube quality, but I’m not sure it’ll pass on the big screen. Since a large part of the story is about the guy and the tiger interacting on the life boat, if I don’t believe the tiger, I don’t know if I’ll be able to invest in the story. Fifteen out of 16 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are favorable at this writing.
Note an interesting thing around 1:08 in the clip. Some of the fish appear outside the frame of the video in an attempt to approximate the 3D effect.
CGI is a disappointment when the CGI effects are the whole point of the movie (see Avatar). “Oooh, look at the pretty graphics that we spent a fortune on!”
District 9 had CGI so well done that the aliens actually seemed like real things you could walk up to and shake hands with. My mind was blown when I looked it up on IMDB later and found out that “Christopher”, the main alien, didn’t even have a motion-capture actor; the entire thing was created in the computer.
That scene blew me away along with the 8 minute nonstop battle scene, they added a lot of the action later in post, but damn… It is one of my favourite movies for many reasons but the CGI is great.
In the movie Excalibur, Lancelot wakes up with a sword thrust through his hip. It looks so real, at least that is how I remember it on VHS. It’s before CGI, but I have never figured out how they did that scene, short of shoving a sword surgically into an actor’s hip! Which is completely insane, or maybe I lack imagination
