Obviously, I’m comparing the guys doing the computer effects in Tron to the guys doing computer effects in Tron Legacy. Both films had practical effects, too, but they aren’t relevant to the conversation.
The thing is, other types of special effects do that too, people just notice them less, because they’re more used to them. Puppets are pretty obviously puppets. Miniatures tend to move like miniatures. Stop motion almost always moves like stop motion. Pre-cg composite shots looked like composite shots. Melting head prostheses tend to move like prostheses once you’re done being distracted by the fact they’re melting.
And that’s with the top-of-the-line, high end effects. People always seem to forget this, but for every Bladerunner-cityscape, so-perfect-it’s-real miniature shot, there were about 40 ‘very well done but obviously a model’ shots, and another 40 ‘wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-we-could-afford-better-but-dang-this-movie-is-fun’ shots. And even the best, highest end pre CG special effects movies tended to have one or two shots that didn’t quite work. The final ‘pulling out of the trench’ shot in Star Wars is noticably worse than the rest of sequence, and the extending mouth of the Xenomorph in Alien looks like, well, a moving bit in a fake alien. Yet those didn’t pull older audiences ‘out of the movie.’ Somehow.
So, short version, yes they notice it. It just doesn’t bother them. In exactly the same way that Yoda obviously being a Muppet (or Godzilla being obviously a guy in a suit) didn’t bother you.
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Of course, older audiences hadn’t had to deal with, say, Pauly Shore or Chris Tucker. Once you’ve gotten past those, nothing can ever hurt you again. They’re the Iornborn drowning ritual of cinema.
Stop-motion certainly has a place with things like Wallace & Gromit or Chicken Run. And they don’t have to be just for kids. If you have Netflix streaming check out the great Australian film Mary & Max, a wonderful stop-motion movie for adults (not porn or anything, but a mature PG-13).
But for me, one major **improvement **caused by CGI is it replacing stop-motion for things like Jurassic’s dinos. When they started shooting Jurassic Park they were going to use stop-motion dinosaurs, and I’ve seen a few test shots they did. And while certainly not bad looking, they still essentially looked like Gumby! Stop-motion’s complete lack of motion blur always gives it a constantly noticeable and definitively unreal strobing effect. I know Lucas introduced “Go-Motion” with RotJ, adding computer generated motion blur, but it didn’t really help. The Rancor still looked like King Kong.
For fanciful, cartoonish fair like the classic Rankin & Bass shows or artistic, highly stylized things like W&G stop-motion still fits. But it doesn’t work, and never really worked, in big, supposed-to-be-real, live action effects scenes.
No, they just transitioned into new work. CG animation is not dissimilar to stop motion in almost every way - it’s still posing and animating characters three-dimensionally, it’s just instead of linear frame-by-frame, it’s non-linear pose-to-pose, yet still with a lot of frame-by-frame tweaking to get it right. I’m sure the transition the animators made was painless.
Based on my experience, I disagree. The models used in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Star Wars look much more realistic than any modern sci-fi equivalent I’ve seen.
There’s a reason some directors still use models and the like, such as Christopher Nolan.
Sure. And I think the reason for that is because they are real. They’re made out of real material and behave according to real physics. It lends the puppet creatures a presence that CGI has had trouble matching.
Yeah, there are at least three different skill sets needed to produce CG animation: First, you need to create the software packages used for it all, which is basically a job for programmers with very little artistic ability involved. Then, you need to use those software packages to create the models of objects or creatures or whatever (a job analogous to making the physical models used in stop-motion), and then you’ve got the animators who pull the virtual puppet-strings and make those models move. The latter two of these are both basically entirely artistic endeavors, with no programming knowledge needed.
When I read this, my initial response was going to be:
There are actually people out there who think stop motion is better than CGI. But the next post beat me:
No it isn’t. It looks much more fake.
Real material behaving according to real physics can be a real drag. Witness Yoda’s ears in The Empire Strikes Back, when he’s strapped to Luke’s back. Real foam rubber. This was a terrible distraction from some top-notch design and puppeteering.
The CGI Yoda (even ten years ago) was a* vast* technical improvement, if you can overlook some of the limitations that were inherent in basing the design on something so familiar, and of course the questionable choices that were made regarding the use of its new-found range of motion.
Maybe it’s because of the circles I hang out in, but I don’t recall anyone complaining about Yoda’s ears. A better example would be the botched puppet in Episode 1, which shows there’s more to it than just having the raw materials, whether they be real or virtual.
Of course we didn’t complain about it, because we know it’s just a puppet - but it’s hard to watch without being distracted a bit.
Watch here from about 2:35 in. This is meant to be a scene with a lot of gravitas, and at the time it was very frustrating to try to keep the ears from wiggling at the tips in a ludicrous way, with transferred motion from moving the body of the puppet and the head.
If you’re really looking at it critically, the puppet Yoda doesn’t compare well with the CGI Yoda, when it comes to which one is most likely to challenge your suspension of disbelief. (Well, at least until he starts flipping out like a tiny green ninja, but that’s a script problem.) Especially when you consider that one of the constraints they had in animating him was that they had to reproduce some of the original limitations of the puppet Yoda (such as the relatively crude articulation of mouth movement for speech and the general sense of material) in order to have him be recognizably Yoda.
I tend to agree - this demonstrates pretty well that CGI is generally going to work better for character or creature realization, when you’ve got the best talent and resources to throw at either method.
I was born in 1974. I hate to think how many times I have seen the original trilogy. I lived and breathed Star Wars as a kid. I was the perfect age. I grew up with it. And I can tell you that not once have I stopped and thought “crikey, when Yoda is on Luke’s back his ears don’t half look fake”. I guess I just know how to enjoy a film or something.
Regarding not noticing effects, one video that blew me away was this one regarding ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’. I saw it a couple of days after seeing the film in the cinema and I was quite aware that not for a second did I even contemplate that it was CGI. TO be honest, I didn’t stop to think how it was done at all, it just looked natural.
A counter example also from Star Wars would be the amazing looking Jabba puppet in ROTJ, and the HIDEOUS CGI Jabba who premiered in the special edition of ANH and which looked so bad they replaced it for the 2004 DVD release with a better CGI model that still looks inferior to the puppet, ditto for the CGI Jabba and another CGI hutt in TPM.
The makeup and performance of Mayhew as Chewbacca has stood out as impressive to me more and more over the years as well.(there are many excellent alien characters in the cantina and Jabba’s palace as well).
Almost every film has effects like that these days, the undetectable subtle fixes and replacements. I’ve had to do those kinds myself, and they are quite challenging, but are often helped by usually being things that are in the corners and far background.
I can imagine. I really enjoy the YouTube clips/DVD extras where they show the small and/or subtle things that are done. I always find those much more interesting.
It’s hard for me to understand how someone could say this.
One theory I have about why PotA looks so much worse than District 9 to me is this: the PotA CGI involves facial expressions and movements of naked roughly human shaped bodies, and my brain is more primed to find things “off” in this context.
But that’s just a guess.
Another theory is that I only saw it on a TV screen. Maybe it looks better in the theater.
I think that at it’s current level CGI is kind of like a sledgehammer. It’s fine for big jobs, things that would be far too difficult and time consuming to do with a normal hammer (practical and traditional effects), if not downright impossible. But when you start trying to do small jobs with a sledgehammer you end up with a lot of smashed and damaged things.
As I said in the pet peeves thread basic effects like blood and mussel-flashes should not be done with CGI. They simply can’t compete with the traditional effects equivalent. Similarly many things can’t be reliably done with CG. When I went to see The Hunger Games all I could think during scenes with a crowd or fire was how fake and awful everything looked.
As far as arguments about the look of older effects like models and stop-motion I agree partially with both sides. No these effects usually don’t look very real, but yes they are sometimes better than CGI. The simple fact that they have one foot in reality lends them a distinct advantage in certain circumstances, but CGI is closing the gap fast. Certain models like the spaceships of 2001 look fantastic, far better than any CGI up to this point, because they are in fact real. Other things like boats and airplanes look simply horrendous in model form.
Same thing goes for puppets, really good puppetry is timeless, Jabba the Hutt still looks fantastic, The Thing still looks creepy, and they always will. I love the look and fell and stop motion, and I’m sad it’s a dying art form, but even I will admit that CGI tends to be more consistent at this point. However nothing can replace high quality sets, good makeup, and extensive wardrobes. No amount of CGI at any level of quality will ever be able to compete in those departments. Unfortunately many filmmakers try to make it work, and it always leaves much to be desired.
In the end CGI is nothing more than a tool in the Filmmakers tool box. They should use it where it’s needed, or where it’s strengths and weaknesses can be used to their advantage. But it’s not a tool for every occasion, nor should it be used that way.
That’s the only place I’ve never noticed matt lines!
To answer the OP “Do younger audiences not notice CGI or something?” my mother doesn’t understand effects, or CGI, and never has. She can’t watch Star Trek or anything of that ilk because she freaks out at the idea of aliens, spaceships etc etc. And this was before she developed Dementia!
That’s the point, more or less. Hell, I’m just a few years older than you, and likewise embarrassed about how many times I’ve seen the original trilogy - I noticed the effects and their occasional flaws because I was obsessed with SFX, but it didn’t get in the way of the movie.
But this is in answer to folks like the OP, who claim that CGI “usually kills the magic because it is so obviously looks like nothing in reality,” while somehow glossing over the fact that it’s usually actually much more realistic-looking than any practical alternatives available. “I never thought I was looking at a chimp.” Well, duh. You probably didn’t think you were looking at a chimp when it was Roddy McDowell under a lot of prosthetic make-up, either - but the illusion is a damn sight stronger with CGI.
It’s ironic that it’s asked “Do younger audiences not notice CGI or something?” because the fact is that most audiences don’t notice the bulk of the CGI elements they see in a movie - the ones that stand out are the ones that are generally necessarily unreal.
Of course there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance when you’re looking at something like a house elf interacting with a real live boy. But it is bananas to suggest that it’s better to avoid falling into the uncanny valley altogether, by managing a character like this with elaborate animatronic puppets which would require you to build an entire set around them to accommodate its operators. This just creates a different kind of unreality.
The unreality you grew up with isn’t superior to the new flavour - especially when it comes to science fiction and fantasy effects. The best effects aesthetics have never really closely modelled reality. When you think of the best matte paintings from the last century of film-making, it’s not the most realistic ones that worked the best.
Why is “I had no idea it wasn’t real” a requirement for CG work, when it wasn’t for other types of effects? Why is it harder for some people to exercise their suspension of disbelief for CGI than it was for effects which were generally less realistic? It doesn’t really make much sense.
And yet the muppet they used for Episode 1 is nothing at all like the Empire Strikes Back Yoda. The Episode 1 muppet IS a Muppet; there’s something about the way the mouth and hand move that make it clear it’s just a puppet. But Yoda in ESB had life. The mouth is more natural, and the actions, while stiff, look like those of a living being.
Maybe it’s because I’ve watched ESB so many times, or because I watched it when I was young. I kind of think those are insufficient explanations when I’m looking at both videos right now and one looks far more fake than the other.
Yoda in ESB was Yoda. CGI worked better than puppetry in the prequels only because somewhere, maybe with Jim Henson, that magic from 30 years ago was lost.