Everyone knows that special effects in movies have made gigantic technological leaps in the past few decades, making many previously impossible images possible. My question is, with modern moviemaking technology, is ANY humanly comprehensible image impossible anymore? If so, name an example.
I think anything nowadays can be done on film. The real challenge is how believable can they can make it.
They havent been able to make virtual people so real that you wouldn’t know it. Not yet at least. The movie Final Fantasy did an impressive job tho.
No amount of special effects can make Joan Rivers attractive or Stallone thoughtful.
Events which cannot be accurately described come to mind. Most observers of the pika of a nuclear blast, for instance, don’t agree on its color.
The what of a nuclear blast? The only definition I can find for “pika” is “a small animal related to the rabbit.” However, I’m certain that a nuclear blast could be photographed or otherwise scientifically measured to provide an accurate description of its color. Likewise, I realize that special effects can’t yet simulate a perfect virtual human; however, you can just film a real human, so that’s not a problem. Perhaps I should rephrase the question to: Is there any visual image conceivable by the human imagination that cannot be duplicated on film by any currently known filmmaking technique?
Obviously not, because we are now able to create and control each individual micropixel into any colour we want, and now imagery is made up entirely of pixels.
So it’s just a matter of creating an image at the pixel level. Which, really, is what they do now. Sort of.
I think we’ve been able to do that for a long time, ever since paint/ink was invented. And tiny little paintbrushes. The difficult part is setting the billions and billions of dots to the right color.
As for the OP, I’ve heard some directors and special effects people quoted as saying we can create anything we can imagine. No specific cites, sorry. I certainly can’t think of any counter-examples, except the kind of thing mentioned in Jorge’s reply (which I think is a valid response, I think).
I once saw a show on TV about this. Some special effects technician was explaining that they still have a very tough time duplicating water in a realistic fashion. That’s why anyone who managed to sit through Titanic without losing their lunch might have noticed that in many scenes, the water looks odd.
As a side note: although this thread appears to be in the right place, it would also fit in quite well at Cafe Society.
Yeah Zaphod, some chaotic systems are hard to model realistically, this affects the realism of everything in the CG world from the texture of water to the texture of skin. There are also limits to modeling human form and motion, the best systems are still motion-capture from actors.
But CG is getting to the point where every pixel on a piece of film is under precise computer control. And we’re reaching the point where you can control things on the screen with absolute precision, my ex-GF runs a company that produces laser projectors that do video projection at way beyond HDTV rez, oh man you ought to see the picture. At this point, digital creation and digital output, you can control precisely what is being put on a screen down to the smallest detail.
To combine what Scr4, Zaphod, and Chas just said: Just because you can imagine it, you can’t necessarily duplicate it. Getting the right image in one’s mind is tough enough, but to put a representation of it in the medium of choice — that’s what separates the great artists from the ordinary.
To give one ancient example: For millenia, painters have been in total control of every pixel on the canvas. But there was something missing, and the realism grew by a great leap when the concept of perspective was introduced. Perspective was always an optical reality, but control of the pixels did not automatically give the artist an ability to use those pixels for maximum effect.
Answer: Human hair. No fooling.
Also, it is astonishing given the fact that computers are used in CGI (well duh) that everyday physics is not preservered. Especially annoying is that the movement of an object tossed/shot in an arc is ridiculous in movies. Can’t these guys plug Newtown’s equations into their code?
And don’t get me started on the fall of the banner at the end of Jurassic Park…
Nitpick: actually, Stallone does a pretty good job making himself thoughtful. I’ve seen interviews in which he was so well-spoken and intelligent I had to wonder if he was playing a role. He plays a lot of dumb louts when he acts, but he’s apparently a smart enough guy in person. I don’t mean to get in the way of a good joke, but I remember being particularly surprised by Sly’s eloquence.
On the OP, most things that require accuracy over many scales are not handled well in special effects. For big fireballs, you can get by fudging the small-scale stuff, but for things like people, you need large-scale effects as well as very small-scale calculations for hair, clothing textures, skin wrinkles, etc. The water example given by **Zaphod ** is another fine example because you have to model very fine scales to get the calculations right. If you use real water, surface tension effects appear on small models which wouldn’t appear in large models. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done right, just that it takes an enormous amount of computing power which may be judged unnecessary.
I’ve often thought about which cartoon movie would be most difficult to duplicate using modern computerized special effects so it looked real.
I came up with –
Dumbo.
I can’t imagine how difficult that would be to do.
I know a few people who work in movie SFX (including the poor sod who’s currently working round the clock finding ways to make Spiderman walk up walls convincingly).
The development of image scanning and computer graphics facilities that can achieve movie resolution (level of detail) has made it possible to create virtually any image, to animate it, and to integrate that image with the filmed image in virtually any way desired. However, there are still things that are very hard to achieve, mostly to do with replicating natural physics accurately. Water, fire, fog and similar phenomena remain difficult to represent well, and the same goes for animal motion and the physics of weight transference (e.g. a spring being released). All of these can be rendered up to a point, but true optical realism remains some way off. We can apply a kind of visual ‘turing test’ to this issue: given a particular representation on screen, can the observer tell whether it was filmed with a camera in the usual way or created usual SFX?
In some cases, the answer is ‘No’. Solid physical shapes can now be rendered with total optical and physical realism. In Jurassic Park, during the scene where the T.Rex is hassling the kids in their jeep, there is no way to distinguish the actual jeep (which was physically present in front of the camera) from its CGI replica (which was needed for some shots).
In some cases, the answer is ‘Yes’. As Final Fantasy demonstrated, the SFX guys can create very, very realistic ‘people’ these days… but one can still tell them apart from real actors (although some actors are so lifeless they make it harder!). Most animal motion, such as walking or swimming or leaping, can be rendered very well in CGI but still not quite well enough to be indistinguishable from a filmed animal.
Will the steady progress of the SFX industry eventually achieve total photo realism, so that everything the SFX guys churn out passes the ‘special effects turing test’? That remains to be seen.
I bet they can’t have virtual actors of, say, Marilyn Monroe or Humphrey Bogart. At least not convincingly without using re-edited footage.
Um, I’m with you on the “human hair” thing, but the banner you mention was filmed practically (on set or elsewhere), and then composited. I remember seeing footage of the shot with no dinosaur, just the banner. Of course, they could have just been testing the way the banner looked by itself, but it looked as though it wasn’t CG.
I have yet to see a realistic depiction of fire in CG. In fact, in FF and Shrek, the fire elements (flickers, not explosions) were often composited from actual film clips of fire. Take a look at “Lawnmower Man” for an early (and hideously laughable) attempt at CG fire (and motion capture, another stumbling block of CG).
George Lucas and ILM began to solve a few of these problems with the money Lucas threw at Episode I, but they’ve still got a long way to go.
Dag nabbit, I can’t find my " American Cinematographer" Issue where they discuss The Perfect Storm, but I do remember a side article in that issue that addressed the folks- possibly at ILM- who designed software that FINALLY allowed for realistic water EFX. It was a big breakthrough, natural elements have always been rough to portray.
Side note: In “Titanic” the shots done under the water of the bathyspheres, where you see both at once, were done with models in a set filled with smoke, not water. One shoots off-speed, and motes of dust lifted into the air look a LOT like sediment suspended in water. Great gag.
Cartooniverse
As our expectations of reality increase in movies it becomes harder and harder for the audience to suspend disbelief. The tagline to Superman in 1978 was “You will believe a man can fly.” The audience then was impressed with the special effects but the matte process shots look terrible to us now. The movies that suspend our disbelief now will be laughably unrealistic in ten or twenty years.
To answer the original question, nothing is impossible. But this is really nothing new. Special effects have been able to achieve almost anything for a long time now.
The real question is time and money. Given unlimited budgets and schedules, today’s special effects technicians can do just about anything, but so could special effects technicians of days gone by. The difference is that CGI has speeded up the process and turned it more into a factory/assembly line kind of thing.
But CGI has also created its own set of problems, which have been discussed by previous posters in this thread: water, fire, the physics of an object in a trajectory. The fact that these things are done badly, however, does not mean they cannot be done. One simple option, too seldom used today, would be to use other techniques than CGI: like filming real water and then compositing miniature models with it.
As for the lower standards of older special effects, that has a lot to do with expectations. When a shot is produced and delivered by an effects facility, it’s up to the producer and/or director to either accept it or send it back to be redone. In the case of older films like SUPERMAN, decision were made that audiences would accept certain images, even if they weren’t perfect. But the technology was certainly there to make them perfect, if the studio had been willing to spend tons more money redoing every single image over and over and over again.
Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of style. A shot may not be technically perfect, but it may be right for the film. Many of today’s CGI images are impressive, but not necessarily aesthetically satisfying. If the overall film is good, and the images are cut together right, then relatively inferior technical work may pass audience expectations.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
There is no such thing as a “perfect” movie. Even the most realistic effects require an immense amount of suspension of disbelief on out part. We understand film by accepting certain cinematic conventions (that way things look through a lens, the contruction of cinematic space, the structure of cinematic time)…ones that change but will never “perfectly” represent our world. CG can do amazing things wtihin these conventions, but film will always require interpretation and suspension of disbelief.