BAck in the 90s (maybe 80s?), when CGI first started being widely used, I really had a bug up my ass about it. I couldn’t stand it. When it showed up in things I was a fan of, I cringed. When it was relied on heavily by other shows, I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the series.
Take Babylon 5, for instance. Lots of people have informed me that it is a fantastic show, full of great characters, fascinating ideas, and subtle nuances. I couldn’t get past the cheesy CGI of their space scenes.
I had become accustommed to the minute detail available in models used by early Star Trek and Star Wars.
Recently, though, CGI seems to have become the means of choice for representing fantastic things. Take the horrible movie The Day After Tomorrow. The scenes of the weather phenomenae were, for the most part, AMAZING.
Still, I have yet to see a good CGI of human faces.
Anyways, what are your impressions? Or, just discuss any aspect of CGI that strikes your fancy.
I too am yet to see convincing CGI of human faces… But I recently saw a clip for a documentary about Hitler in which hitler was CGI, but cunningly they made the camera seem old and as if it was filmed 60 years ago, so it really does look like Hitler.
The idea, obviously, is to film situations which hitler was involved in where he wasn’t actually filmed.
I have always been fascinated with CGI. I loved the early stuff by the creators of Toy Story (I forget their name).
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had fantastic CGI of human faces in individual frames–sometimes it was hard to remember that it was an animated movie–but some of the movements were a little off. Plus, it was a truly terrible movie, IMO.
However, in order to get that level of detail, they had to throw the physics engine out the window and do everything in an ad hoc fashion. The path of a beam of light was determined entirely by hand in there, whereas in, say, Shrek, the animators would set up some basic rules for reflection and just let everything run.
The reason why they had to do that is because human skin is a very, very complex surface (compared to the relatively flat surfaces that are generally used), so the processing time for physics goes up a whole bunch, and floating point error becomes significant. Don’t expect a resolution to this one any time soon.
When you consider the time, the technology, and the budget they had to work with, the Babylon 5 crew turned out some incredible work, IMO.
The current most interesting open problem that I know of is level-of-detail simplification based on distance. To whit, at two feet away, you need a whole shitload of polygons to make a realistic lamp. At ten feet away, you don’t need quite that many, but you still need a fair amount. At thirty feet away, you can probably get away with ten. Right now, there are no good ways to automatically do that sort of simplification, but there’s a lot of interest in doing it. It wouldn’t make much difference to a big budget movie where the schedule is flexible, but for a television series with a limited budget and a set schedule, it could make a huge difference.
Ok, see, I didn´t have this problem at all. While I agree with you that it was a terrible movie, I found myself sitting in the theater with the nagging feeling that I was watching RealDolls act out some creepy Gaia fantasy.
I kept expecting the porn music to start and hairy rednecks to pop out of the wings and start some hardcore mannequin action. YMMV.
As impressive as the technology is, to me there is always a certain intangible quality lacking in CGI characters. Facial expressions seem, for lack of a better word, generic. When a good actor is engaged in a scene, very subtle things happen in close-up. In the best moments there is a communication with the audience which is difficult to define (or recreate with technology), it’s almost as if you have a window into their thought process. When live actors work a scene, there are also unplanned things that happen which can lend authenticity to a character. Maybe this is more of a concern in “serious” work, but I think it is also a factor in the quality of action oriented genres.
I am becoming really bugged by the amount of CGI in films. Models, even when I know they’re models, tend to look real to me, while CGI, in general, tends to look like animation. Unless specifically called for, animation/live action mix is too jarring to the immersive process. There are very few exceptions, the only two of which I can think of are Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings. (I must admit, though, that despite not liking the scene overall, I was impressed with Neo’s CGI form in the “Burly Brawl” in The Matrix Reloaded.)
The problem is (and I came to this conclusion after watching Rodriquez’s budget filmmaking short in one of the Spy Kids) that CGI is cheaper, in general, than models or matte paintings. It’s also easier to control and you don’t have to worry about “real life”. I mean, which is easier, a CGI Jabba or a large mechanically creature that takes several people to operate? So I’ve come really respect films that go out of their way to look real by not using CGI… films such as Kill Bill and (ironically) Team America: World Police.
My conclusion? Keep your styles seperate: CGI, for the most part, is not a special effect; it’s a type of animation and as such does not belong in a live-action film.
Most curent CGI is pretty obvious in movies. It’s because, as with most special effects, the bigger movies keep pushing the boundaries insead of just improving what already exists, so they are always showing us scenes that still aren’t quite at the realistic level it one day will be.
If you watch Jurassic Park now, you can see a lot of the flaws with the CGI that existed at the time (but most of us were dazzled by how real it did look so much that we couldn’t see them) but if you watch Jurassic Park III now, those flaws are pretty much gone, and the CGI is for the most part close to flawless. They’d learned how to improve already existing techniques.
The same can be said about CGI humans. We are not at a point where we can make a convincing CG human, but then we will never reach that level if people don’t try, by pushing the boundaries.
Now, for some people, me included, the idea of using a CGI human as a photoreal star of a scene is a bad idea. We have humans already so there is no need. But instead we can use them as stunt doubles or for extreme effects sequences, such as in the Star Wars prequels or in The Hulk. And then we can also use them as proto-humans, like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. In my opinion, that’s where it should stay forever more, even if they do get to be perfectly real at some point soon.
Of course, nobody is going to listen to that petty rule, and will stick in CG people everywhere they can, so we will be oversaturated by such things. As we do now with every new visual effect that develops. Ah well.
Anyway, my point is, the reason that CG is unconvincing at times is because we’re always pushing boundaries and the images you see in the biggest blockbuster effects-driven movies are still in the midst of everyone learning the ropes of it.
I would wager that there are scenes that incorporate CGI and you didn’t even realize it. Computers will be used in more and more movies as CGI becomes cheaper and more realistic to use. Honestly, I don’t think they could have done half as good a job on the Spider-Man movies without CGI technology. The Babylon 5 series would not have been possible without CGI technology (even scenes inside the space station used CGI). Computers are even used to alter the way a movie looks during post-production. In “O Brother Where Art Thou” they used computers to alter the colors on many of the outdoor scenes.
While listening to the commentary of Bourne Identity, I was amazed at what the director pointed out as being CGI.
Remember the scene where the sniper is shooting Bourne, and Bourne arms a shotgun? Well, the birds that fly away when startled by Jason’s gunshot were all computer generated.
Then there’s the scene where Jason is on the train looking out the window. The passing wall was also CG.
Then at the very end of the movie, during the court house sequence, the entire read of the court room (chairs and all) were also CG.
I would have never guessed that though flawlessly executed moments were CG.
That’s a two-edged sword. People will also often assume that an effect was CG when it wasn’t (especially if the effect didn’t work quite right). Remember all the folks complaining about the wall-crawling in the first Spider-Man? The way you do wall-crawling is to put the “wall” on the floor of your set and film the actor actually crawling on it. But people didn’t like something about how it looked, so they complained about the bad computer work.
I’m at variance with most here – for the most part, I’ve really liked the way CGI scenes have contributed to SF movies, and I’ve disliked the tacky models dangling on strings or the plastic goop on people’s faces that generally constitute non-CGI ways of handling SF imagery and themes. And don’t forget all the uses to which under-illumination and fog and rain have been put to obscure the tacky sets and so forth ::cough::Blade Runner::cough::.
I’m glad CGI has come so far, I hope to see it come farther. There hasn’t been a CGI character than can match the human face for expressiveness, but that may well happen soon. In the meantime, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow demonstrated that live action and CGI can make one hell of a movie together. I got no problem with that.
I thought the telescopic extension/retraction of Ock’s arms had always been part of his gimmick, right up there with the flasher raincoat, bowl haircut, and Roy Orbison glasses.
True… and good. But I suspect that the ones that we don’t notice are the ones that conform to the matte painting rules: not over several seconds in the shot and not the main focus of attention.
