The problem is, you see, that CGs are a powerfull tool, and when you give that amount of power to a twit mayhem ensues.
Seems that some directors get drunk with that power and do completely unecessary and distracting crazy shots just because they can. I´m thinking, for example, about the Transformers movie, a CG wankfest of the highest order. Sure things look cool to the point of making you feel dizzy, but after that, whoa! what happened?, what´s going on? You get completely derailed of the “plot” (if the movie in question has anything resembling a plot, that´s it)
Are you talking to me?
I´ve spent, so far, over 100 hours working on a frigging juice drop splashing on a frigging juice puddle. I´ve seen the high speed footage the filmed of a real splash and it looks much beter than whatever I may manage to patch together (I´m a character animator, not a fluid dynamics boffin for goodness sake…)
I swear some directors are complete doofus; in the movie I worked recently the guy wanted a full CG shot of the camera spinning around the inside of a fridge Matrix style when the actor picked up a bottle. The guy was picking.a.bottle.out.of.the.fridge.
Not an evil bottle, not a key element of the story, nothing to do with the plot, no nothing at all. Luckly we talked him out of it. But geez… :smack:
It’s strange, for sure, but the same sort of thing could happen with other art forms - consider for example a painting thought to be the work of a very famous artist, then suspected to be a forgery, then vindicated - the perceived value changes at each stage.
And people like ‘handcrafted’ things - so it’s not all that unusual that things conspicuously done the hard, fallible way in the real world have their own kind of appeal. Artistic/aesthetic experiences have a scale of values that transcends what they tangibly are - a live performance has a different value to recorded music, regardless of the fidelity - this even extends to things that aren’t man-made; for example a genuine fossil is typically more valuable than a perfectly-made cast, even for really common specimens.
I think most people have the idea that you press a button on a computer and out comes a T-Rex running around… it´s not “handcrafted” on a physical sense, but good CG takes an enormous amount of work and skill.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent about 60 hours on adding CG meaty chunks to a shot that had a zoom-and-pan on it. Nightmarish shot. And if the movie had been made a few years ago, the original shot would’ve been accepted as is.
Good point, and I didn’t mean to understate the amount of work and skill that is required to produce good computer graphics (I’ve dabbled enough in the field to know that it isn’t simple), but there’s still a difference between this and a physically handcrafted item - if I’m carving a stone sculpture of a T Rex, and I mistakenly hack off a bit of material that was supposed to be one of the legs, I’m screwed, whereas if I omit something on a computer model, I can redo it until I’m happy - it still takes work and skill, but isn’t necessarily a complete start-over.
Also, once a computer model is complete, I can produce as many copies as I like with far less effort and difficulty than is necessary to produce a second stone sculpture.
I’m sick of seeing CGI scenes in ‘epic’ films of the battle from well above the ground and thousands of miniature fighters. I think scenes of this nature have very little visual impact and no visceral impact. They remind me of mid-'90s videogame cutscenes.
Some of the best SF I’ve seen recently was the recent Doctor Who story “Blink”, which had practically no effects whatsoever: the scary statues were either models, or made-up actors - there were a couple of shots that were probably CG, such as when the statues appeared on a cathedral and then vanished, but effectively there was nothing that couldn’t have been shot in 1972 - and yet the net effect was both enthralling and terrifying. I kept waiting for a cliched effects shot of a statue suddenly coming to life or a spring-loaded cat, but there was no actual movement shown: even the final “assault” of moving statues was done with still shots strobing under a flickering bulb. I only realised at the end that there were almost no fancy effects: it was all done with a fantastically creepy concept - the statues can only move when you’re not looking at them, but will get you if you blink or look away - and some top-notch writing, acting and characters. George Lucas, please take note.
That droid army invasion of Naboo in one of the newer three Star Wars movies is about the worst example of this I’ve seen. Of course some of the artificial look can be argued away (it’s alien grass, they’re droids, etc, that’s why it looks unnatural), but still, it just looks like a console game.
One of the pitfalls of rendered battle scenes is often that the warriors are too evenly-spaced as they cascade down the hill, or that they all use the same animation, so even though they’re not moving in sync, they all look like what they are - copies of each other.
Not entirely. Yeah, the original Kong wouldn’t fool anybody, but some of the effects in movies like 2001, some of the Star Trek ones and the first Terminator might. One of the advantages (to echo Mangetout) of conventional effects is the randomness that some times crops up in shots. Real life is random, and while you might not consciously pick up the randomness in a shot, on some level you do pick up on it. In a pure CGI shot, nothing’s there unless someone puts it there.
I find it ironic that Lucas, who was basically the guy who created the stuff, can’t use it for shit, while folks Joss Whedon have a good idea of how it should be used, but can’t afford to use it on the scale that Lucas can.
CGI versus stop-motion (for example) is like the difference between a Lucida calligraphy font and actual calligraphy. The computer will create something perfect, while you’ll see the brush strokes and imperfections on the calligraphy. To me, it’s the brush strokes and imperfections that turns sometimes into art.
Interestingly, even though Spielberg is a fervent supporter of digital effects work, especially as Jurassic Park was the turning point of their revolution, he has said he’s not going to use them very much for the new Indiana Jones movie. This is despite George Lucas breathing down his neck as Exec Producer.
He won’t avoid them entirely, digital compositing and matte paintings will inevitably be utilised, but I imagine he won’t be creating armies of digital enemies.
Actually you can avoid that with computer animation.
In my case I prefer “hand” animation instead of using parametric stuff, takes longer but yields a unique touch. At my former job we where much more involved in character animation and all the guys working there could easily identify who had animated what, everyone has a style, you know.
Every time I had to tutor some new guy about animation I insist on not doing things perfect, you need to know when to mess up your animation curves and go from an assembly line robot to a cat walking down a hallway.
Of course all that takes time and more often than not you end up with looped walk/run cycles with maybe a little random generated noise to give an idea of non uniformity, but that doesn´t quite works to get you through the uncanny valley.
Perhaps I should start the “Ask the CG guy” thread on MPSIMS…
In a testimony to computer processing and CGI advances over the past 10 years, in Medieval 2: Total War, when you break into a settlement or kill/capture the enemy general, there is a break in the action that zooms in on the scene and shows several seconds of close-up action, which looks like a mid-90’s cutscene, but it’s all rendered from the actual combat, with dozens of fighters in the exact position/actions they were in when the cutscene started!
I grew up on traditional effects and animation, and loving it (to the point of making my own animated movies, as a kid, using clay models and carefully built sets). It has its own feel and attractions.
CGI animation has its own attractions and faults, too. One of the attractions you begin to appreciate after you’ve done animation yourself is that CGI is a lot more forgiving. You can spend hours on an animated sequence and have it destroyed by a blown light bulb, or something falling over, or (as happened in King Kong) having some time-lapse thing happen during your animation that you don’t catch until you watch the rushes – and see a flower bloom in the middle of your dinosaur fight sequence.
Ray Harryhausen could take the time and mind-boggling effort to animate a seven-headed hydra with two tails holding a limp human corpse in Jason and the Argonauts and keep track of which direction each appendage was moving, and how fast it was doing it. It’s pretty fair to say that you average, or even above-average animator, couldn’t. And that’s the difference between an almost unique technique and a useful tool.
with CGI , animation has become a standard tool of filmmaking, rather than a rare novelty. It can be used by the not ultra-competant. Like the difference between a Draw Horse and Power Tools, or a Slide Rule and a hand calculator, CGi democratizes effects beyond animation and heavy live-action effects.
It can still be badly used, however, and easy to pick out as an obvious fake. I thought a lot of the work in A Sound of Thunder was awful, for instance.
Nevertheless, properly done CGI is great, and I wouldn’t go back. The first CGI dinosaur used in Jurassic Park was clearly done as a showpiece to wow fans of traditional animation – highly textured skin, with different parts moving in different direction at different speeds, compoasited flawlessly against a bright blue sky, is something difficult to impossible with traditional animation or rod puppets.
Trafditional abnimation has its charms. If it didn’t, Jackson wouldn’t have spent so much time re-creating the “spider pit” sequence for the recent re-release of the original King Kong, using period animation techniques. But it clearly looks like effects work of the period. I’ll take well-done CGI any day now.
I agree. If you’ve ever seen old naval war movies, properties of water do not scale realistically.
I’ve dabbled a bit with 3DS Max and other 3d programs. Generally, when a CGI model looks unrealistic, it is because of one or more of the following:
-lack of detail in the models or its textures
-interacts “weird” with live actors or the rest of the non CGI scene
-lighting mis-matches
-weird or unnatural physics
-overuse of effects like “motion blur”, “lens flare”, or “light bloom” (the glow around bright objects)
-underuse or lack of processing intensive effects like “depth of field” (bluring of objects not in the cameras focal range), atmospheric haze effects, light scattering (the effect of light bouncing off other objects in the room)
-bad “particle effects” (smoke, fire, debris)
I think there is also a tendency for directors to do the following when they have CGI:
-add too much to the scene. More does not mean better.
-make things too crazy. Subtlety is sometimes a good thing.
The best effects are the ones that you don’t know how they did it. I would have sworn the Bravia ads were done with CGI particle effects, not 100,000 real superballs. I also recall a jump scene in Gone in 60 Seconds that I would have no idea was CGI if I didn’t see the making of.
One of the things that bugs me about CGI animation is that so often, the human figure is poorly animated.
I think it’s great that computer graphics, memory, and power have increased so much that we can scan an actor’s face onto a CGI human. But without knowledge of the underlying musculature, it’s impossible to show realistic facial expressions, so the figure ends up looking unreal, dead.
Also, I’ve seen animation of humans that shows no comprehension of weight and leverage. A character hopped up onto an exam table and pivoted on their bottom while pulling their feet up and over and leaning back on their arms. Whoever animated it had no feel for the muscle effort necessary, how the body balances itself out, or how the muscles work with one another. It looked like a robot doing it.
On a video game my brother was playing, something about how the characters moved bugged me until I figured out what was going on - their shoulders were frozen. However the objects were created (what, at the wireframe stage?), no one had considered that shoulder joints, including the collarbones, are actually quite mobile, and that they move independently of each other. Instead, the characters looked like they had a yard long 2x4 stapled to their upper back.
I know classical animators work on concepts like stretch, bounce, hesitation, and the idea that while the core begins to move, other parts take time to catch up with the core. It would be nice to see the computer animators pick up on that.
They’ve been working on it. John Lasseter’s early efforts (WAYyyyyy pre-Toy Story) are all about classic Disneyesque “squash and Stretch”. One of his efforts show an earthworm crawling, and it is all about nothing but the way a mass starts to move and parts catch up, just as you say.
Not all computer animators are created equal, though. Some of them getr tghis stuff beautifully, and some are still figuring out the nuts-and-bolts of it.
Except, why is it that models/stop motion is the “hard” way and CGI is the “easy” way? I think perhaps the most impressive CGI effect ever is Gollum from The Two Towers, and it would have been far easier to redesign the character and put a midget in a latex suit of some sort. In that case, it was MUCH harder to do with CGI, but ended up being totally worth it.
And in fact, some of the very best CGI-heavy movies (Lord of the Rings, for instance) do a lot of their stuff with very detailed hand-built models. CGI is a tool that does some things well. Model making and stunts are a tool that do other things well. Neither one is better than the other. And CGI is still in its infancy.
I guess there’s a difference between saying “it was a pleasure to see a movie with lots of models and stunt work, because so many movies lately have been overusing CGI” versus “it was a pleasure to see a movie with lots of models and stunt work, because models and stunt work are human and good and CGI is evil and soulless and a cop out and also it always sucks”.
For example I find that the best Horror effects are the practical ones and not CGI monsters, gore etc.
I mean look at Carpernters remake of The Thing. All practical effects and almost all worked exceedingly well. When the actors have something they need to interact with you get better reactions also spur of the moment improvisations based on what is actually there.
CGI, I think, is a great tool for not only fixes, but in creating living Matt paintings, backgrounds, and in creating some impossible things which look pausible.
Golum for example would not have worked with mere makeup. The Dinos in Jurassic park work better than stop motion minatures and a cheaper than mechnized versions.
Stunts have a better look and feel when there is an actual person involved, CGI can enhance the stunt by making it look more dangerous.
I think there is a place and time when to use the tools and the one skill many directors/producers haven’t honed enough is when to use it and when not to use it.
