Fortunately, the rest of that movie was still available to ruin your evening.
I take exception to the “billion dollar pixel feast” comment in the OP. Quite a lot of CGI is there to do things that can’t be done, even with a zillion bucks. Do you really think Spider-Man’s web slinging could be done with a guy and a rope and a bunch of buildings, cheaply? Or that the Transformers crew could really build real cars that turn into giant robots?
CGI may or may not be expensive. Are we talking a single guy with a Mac, color-correcting negatives by the hour, or a team of compositors and animators doing crazy stuff like a Pixar movie for 18 months? That’s quite a range of expense, and it’s all CGI.
I agree with the OP, re: bad or unneeded CGI. There’s a good and bad place for anything, and there’s good or crappy work to be found in any business. The best CGI is when you don’t notice that it’s CGI.
Re: lions. I haven’t seen that film, but it is very difficult to animate animals well. Also, the lions keep eating the poor guy who tries to put a motion-capture suit on them.
I have this movie and I’m watching it right now to try to figure out what scene you’re talking about. Do you mean the red Ford Ranger driven by Lukas Haas’s character? It looks real to me, but maybe they just did a really good job.
It is toward the end. I think it when Truelove’s old junior high school friend in driving him back to his Harry Dean Stanton. Maybe it is a van. I am pretty sure it is white.
OK, I see what you mean. It’s a red Ford Ranger, and there’s one shot where the camera just zooms down this long expanse of road and rapidly brings the truck to the forefront. Yes, it’s CGI, I guess. The other shots showing the Ranger, though, are quite real.
Agreed. It looked so much like a video game (not just the graphics, but the composition too), I expected to see it go jerky as the frame rate dropped from all those polygons on screen.
Pretty much the entirety of Final Fantasy, the Spirits Within.
As someone that works for a living doing VFXs, I can tell you that we also hate unecessary CGI, wed rather concentrate on the scenes were its actually needed than to be sidetracked by some fit of fancy from the director.
In the last movie I worked on the director wanted a shot of the protagonist picking up a bottle from inside the fridge, he wanted a bullet time shot of the camera circling around the bottle inside the fridge… we are talking about doing a fridge and it`s entire contents on CG, motion tracking, probably, at least, the hand and arm of the guy in CG and tracked too, match lighting and scene reflections, etc, etc… At least one month and half of work for a poor CG vict… ejem, artist.
And we are talking about a dude picking a bloodt bottle of the fridge, he may just as well ask us to do a full CG shot of the guy scratching his arse.
Thank goodness the VFX director talked the guy out of doing that shot.
In the recent Beat Takeshi version of Zatoichi (about a blind wandering samurai), much of the spraying blood was CGI that stood out immediately and obviously as a CGI effect. It seemed so unnecessary since swordplay films have done similar and less jarring effects with very cheap and simple props. They could have slashed half of Tokyo using the old way for what just one of those CGI effects probably cost. Maybe they splurged on the wardrobe and had a really expensive dry cleaner?
Granted, this was a samurai movie that ended with a tap-dancing musical review, so who’s to say what’s unnecessary or unrealistic?
I am in complete agreement with you, and in fact you have mentioned one example that I happen to know a lot about. I’m good friends with the guy who works at Sony Imageworks who was the lead character animator for the first Spider-man movie. He explained to me at great length what that challenge was like, and I know a lot about the research he did, the test shots they made of real gymnasts performing certain moves (sometimes aided by hoists, harnessess and pulleys) and even a test shot he made of himself trying to climb a chain link fence! He has lectured at a few VFX conferences including one here in London, and he gave me the videotape he had been using for his presentations, showing lots of the test shots and reference shots involved, as well as some shots that were in the movie at various stages of their completion.
As he explained it, the basic problem is this: people want Spider-man to do things that no real person could do, but at the same time they want the movement to look ‘natural’ and ‘real’. Unfortunately for animators everywhere, people are instinctively very good at detecting what looks ‘real’ and ‘natural’ and what doesn’t, thanks to a gazillion years of evolutionary hard-wiring. So his job was to achieve the best possible balance or compromise between making Spidey do things that only a super-hero could do, and at the same time trying to make them border on realistic or ‘natural’, so that the audience would accept them, and so that the suspension of disbelief wasn’t completely annihilated every time Spidey swung his way across the city.
So I do agree with you about good, creative and sometimes necessary use of CGI to achieve shots and tell stories that can’t be achieved / told in any other way.
My OP is about those times when film-makers pursue the CGI option and you look at the end result and you think that either it just wasn’t necessary at all, or it could have been done in an easier way that would have worked just as well, if not better.
The most recent version of The Island of Dr. Moreau.
The movie was filmed in a “real” jungle setting and all of the creatures were done by make-up artist Stan Winston and Marlon Brando’s dwarf sidekick was a real guy with make-up. So all very realistic looking.
Then out of nowhere they throw in a poorly rendered CGI scene with a tiger-man creature bounding through the jungle. Looked awful and completely pulled you out of the film.
As I related in another thread, I once visited a guy who did TV FX work several years ago. He complained that some annoying percentage of the effects shots he did were to cover up mistakes by the film crew, like leaving a ladder on the set, which he’d carefully paint out. Not quite what you’re looking for, but it fits the spirit at least.
In Flightplan, an abysmal film by any standards, the scenes of the jet sitting at the gate were digital, and the shots of workers hosing it down with anti-ice stuff looked about as realistic as jawas hosing down a sandcrawler. Embarrassing. A prop or even matte would have been significantly better.
Good choice TLDRIDKJKOLFTW. But actually, with that movie, who cares about specific scenes or about CGI or anything else?? A blank screen would have been significantly better than the whole movie.
Back to my OP, the 2004 Van Helsing movie looked like it had all the money in the world spent on CGI characters and visual effects, and while some of it was actually quite good, a lot was pointless. There was an early scene where the hero was fighting someone, I think it was ‘Mr Hyde’, and Hyde was mostly rendered as an exaggerated, over-sized CGI character. It looked awful, but that’s not the point of this thread. Quite honestly, if they’d just cast a large-ish, mean-looking actor, with appropriate make-up, the entire scene would have been better and also a lot more satisfying. As it was, it was just High Jackman pretending to fight an obviously cartoon character. Suspension of disbelief… whoosh! Gone!
I honestly think people complain about CGI way to much. I bet you could show someone a video of a real life bridge collapsing and people would say OH! i see the CGI!
That’s exactly my feeling about David Fincher’s fetish for having the camera pass through walls, locks, people’s DNA, etc. The only time it ever in any way seemed appropriate was in the first X-Men movie. And, of course, that was Bryan Singer pretending to be David Fincher.
