Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes was highly praised for its CGI, color me shocked as I found it horrible. Just the opening scene alone, I never thought I was looking at a chimp. But it was universally praised as having amazing CGI:confused:
I’m not a CGI hater, I thought Inception and District 9 had amazing CGI work because it never pulled me out of the movie, which is my complaint about CGI which is that usually it kills the magic because it is so obviously looks like nothing in reality.
A big part of the magic of film to me is the reality of the film that it creates, and that gets broken by obnoxious CGI and from then on the magic is gone.
The no physical set, everything is CGI except the actors style of movie are almost unwatchable for me. They look like a bad videogame cut scene or something, I almost wish they could just go 100% CGI animation at that point.
Is this just something that doesn’t bother younger audiences? Are they used to it?
Maybe it’s just what we expect out of movies. I have heard people say things like “the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey still holds up today!” It all looks like a bunch of models to me but it doesn’t really detract from the movie for me.
A lot of praise you hear about how good CGI is in some movies comes from people who are praising the technical achievement of the CGI rendering rather than the quality of the verisimilitude.
IMHO, “Every hair was individually rendered and you can see each one move when the wind ripples across the ape’s back” is just so much “good job, imaging team!” and not nearly at the same level as “I actually believed Gollum was a character.”
When Star Wars came out, it was hailed as a giant leap in visual effects because of its use of computer-controlled photography. But today, the sloppy matte work of the (un-Special) original makes it almost painful to watch.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen my share of complaints about obviously bad CGI, that weren’t CGI at all. For instance, a lot of folks made that complaint about the wall-crawling scenes in the decade-old Spider-Man movie. Which, of course, were filmed by having the actor crawl across a “wall” that was laid flat on the floor, with no computers needed.
I’m 25 and I notice CGI all the time. It is painfully obvious if you know what to look for, and even the “best” CGI stands out like a sore thumb (e.g. Gollum).
But I am not the type to get “drawn into” a movie anyway, so noticing that something is obviously CGI doesn’t really detract from my movie experience, if the movie is good otherwise.
Bad CGI in a good movie doesn’t really bother me. Of course, bad CGI in a bad movie just makes everything worse, and good CGI can make a bad movie at least bearable.
I haven’t seen the BluRay release yet. Do you know if they finally fixed the sloppy matting around the post that holds the Millenium Falcon in the shot where the tractor beam pulls it into the Death Star? Throughout its various releases, I have always been astounded that that left that untouched.
I’ve heard this complaint about Hobbit feet in Jackson’s LOTR. (Practical prosthetics.)
Sloppy CGI pokes you in the eye, but the good stuff is invisible.
It all depends on whether you’re there to watch the movie or the CGI.
Special effects are unimportant. Story, plot, and character are. If you get those right, the effects don’t matter. If you get those wrong, all the effects in the world can’t turn it into a good movie.
I think Davey Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 looks amazing. He’s the pinacle of CGI characters, my wife and I always say. We could barely believe there is not one thing on him that is “real”, so to speak.
Of course, the sign of truly great special effects, no matter how they’re generated, is that it doesn’t occur to anyone walking out of the theater to say “Hey, those were some great special effects”. Consider the Lord of the Rings movies, for instance: If you ask most folks which special effects they liked, they’ll say things like the Balrog, or the Eye of Sauron. Almost nobody will mention the hobbits all being half the size of the humans, because that was done so well that the viewers just take it for granted.
checks Nope, still very noticeable. Damn it, George! You have time to composite in dogshit at Mos Eisley, but… arrgh.
ETA: **E-Sabbath[/n], I think the cognitive dissonance is coming more from the fact that it’s been ten years since Raimi’s Spider-Man was fresh. Some of us are getting ooooold.
I think **Jas09 **was merely shocked that Spiderman 1 is ten years old!
Check out this article which describes a lot of non-CGI movie scenes including how LOTR made big use of good ole-fashioned low-tech forced perspective.
To me early CGI suffered from the fact that it was photo-realistic but the physics were still off (amazing how well your brain can spot this). Spiderman is a perfect example of this. I just watched the end of Spiderman 2 on FXHD and even though the motion might now be mathematically right, it suffers from the much bigger problem that I think all CGI currently does. Namely, even though the math & pixel resolution may be perfect, all the scenes are so ridiculously ‘busy’ (i.e. extremely fast & packed with hundreds of characters & objects) that now, even though it’s on a slightly more conscience level, your brain again dismisses it as just great CGI because you know what you’re seeing cannot possibly be real. Especially when the camera’s POV flies around thru everything, it immediately takes me out of the movie because I know no real camera can do that!
Like any paradigm shifting tech, it follows a curve. It starts out sparingly, but once its accepted by audiences it gets done to death. I think (hope) we’re already on the downward trailing end of this curve, people are so saturated with CGI that without a good story & performances it can’t carry a film. Problem is now its almost always significantly cheaper than practical effects, so low-rate productions (that didn’t care much about script & direction in the first place) use it with abandon!
EeK! I never noticed that before! And why is the Pixar lamp guy peering out the top!
Honestly, I think older CGI looked less like CGI. And I think it’s because they took more care to make sure it didn’t look fake. Now they just think that audiences will accept that CGI is being used and don’t bother. The big thing I notice is a lack of realistic motion blur and an almost infinite depth of focus. The other is that CGI is often shinier than it should be. And the final bit is the extreme lack of imperfections–there’s no excuse for using the exact same texture throughout.
But let’s not forget one thing: we are heavily biased. Really good CGI is the stuff we don’t notice. And the more CGI you see, the more you catch on to the flaws. For me anyways, Gollum looked great in the first LotR movie until I saw the second one. And the Gollum in the second and third looked great until I watched them a second time.
(Though the best CGI, the kind that is often mixed in with practical effects, still holds up. I love how Jurassic Park still looks.)
BTW, did anyone else notice that the use of practical effects in LotR made it look older? It had a feel like it was made in the 70s. And did no one else notice that the hobbits kept changing size? Sometimes they looked three feet tall, other times as high as 4’6". My brain kept thinking they were at the taller end throughout and it felt weird when they were smaller.
Are you still watching movies from 1995? These are the kinds of complaints I heard from when Jumanji came out.
These days the worst CGI I see is poorly composited, so it doesn’t quite match the surrounding background properly, or the animation is too floaty. Otherwise it’s getting very difficult to spot.
However, digital movie cameras and digital post production also allow each shot to be “sweetened” to the point of overdoing it, which just draws attention to itself. Everything looks so perfect, it’s hyper-real. That is often what causes the accusation of bad CGI in shots where there is none.
Yeah. It’s like this xkcd come to life (although to be fair the ones quoted in the strip don’t really work for me - Home Alone seems like more than 20 years ago, to be honest). But for some reason Raimi’s Spider-Man seems much fresher in my mind. Maybe it’s the CGI… :dubious:
Yeah, that was the weird thing about LOTR and the Hobbits. They did such a good job with the practical effects that the body doubles and CGI parts looked wrong. There were a couple of moments when the body doubles in particular were very jarring, and I thought that the CGI parts at the bridge of Khazad-Dum were pretty poor, TBH.
