Actually, only a small section of the railing is CGI. In a lot of the filming the actor’s legs were clearly visible and clad in “bluescreen tights”. They removed his legs and healed the backgrounds in post.
Which brings up an interesting question. If bluescreen style work CGI or bluescreen when it’s done on a computer? Oh wait, they call that “digital compositing”.
What about the scenes from the Matrix where bluescreen (well, greenscreen in that case) work is used as a basis for CGI work (I.E. the bulletime effects work). As in there’s an authentic digital composite every X frames, but the frames between the reference frames are digitally manufactured and rendered. What’s that?
Incidentally, while I agree the bulletime effects didn’t look that bad… the straight CGI scenes in Matrix:Reloaded looked like utter utter crap. The physics were good (so to speak), but the textures were bad.
Here’s another vote for the annoyance at CGIs. They’re great at metallic/plastic surfaces, not so great at everything else. I think instead of going for photorealism, they should try emulating various art mediums, and make it more of a computer-aided matte painting or something.
Thanks for the link, Agrippina! I had thought of much the same thing: “caricatures,” as defined in the article rjung linked to, often work better for the viewer than attempts at “realism.” Homer Simpson works better than Snow White (although she’s still not bad), but any more-accurate character is likely to fail. I suspect the reason is that our brains are hard-wired to recognize humans, and we spend our whole lives practising and perfecting that skill. Homer is far enough off that we can accept him as representing a human, while a character much better than Snow White would be recognized as being human - but wrong.
As a side note, the motion capture mentioned in rjung’s link is just a high-tech version of rotoscoping. One of the best examples is the Betty Boop cartoon Snow White, featuring Cab Calloway.