In the original Superman, even though I was just a youngster and “into” comics, I was annoyed by the scene where Supes nabs the suction-cup guy on the skyscraper. It was cool and all, but it was really obvious that Supes’ cape wasn’t “hanging” the right way. It was, in fact, hanging as if he was standing normally on the window and the camera was tilted ninety degrees.
They had the tech to do it “right”, but didn’t, for whatever reason.
The opposite extreme was the movie, I think the title was House on Haunted Hill or some such. The plot was a psychiatrist takes his clients to a supposedly-haunted house as some form of therapy… or something.
It had piles of heavily-CG’d effects; faces in the glass, animated furniture, all sorts of spooks.
But it wasn’t the least bit frightening. It was almost a ghost action movie, instead of a “horror” flick.
You got to this before I found returned to this thread. The problem is that audiences get used to a certain level of effects, and then it becomes commonplace. It’s only when new technology comes in and produces images better than their expectations that they go “Wow!” again, saying that this is indistinguishable from reality… until the cycle starts again.
When the first movies were being displayed people ducked out of the way of the train “coming right at them”. A few years later that would be thought naive.
When Windsor McCay first exhibited his cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur (with himself interacting with it in real life, on stage) people thought it was a real mechanical construction – cartoons were so new that they had no mental “yardstick” to compare it against. Today, it’s obviously a cartoon – and one in which the whole image “shimmers” (McCay and his assistants drew everything in each frame – they hadn’t come up with the idea of transparent “cels” yet with a fixed background.)
Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed footage from the not-yet-released 1925 version of The Lost World and showed it to reporters in New York, giving an ambiguous explanation and implying that these were the real thing. The reporters were impressed, and believed. Doyle had to clue them in. When you look at that footage today, it’s hard to believe – some of it looks incredibly amateurish. Even the best of Willis O’Brien’s work (and some is excellent) is obviously special-effects work to modern eyes.
About 1933’s King Kong I have heard mixed results – some reports claimed that people fainted in the aisles, while others had people laughing at the effects.
The cycle continues – Jurassic Park’s work is extremely good, and I’m sure there are many scenes where I have been fooled by an unexpected CGI element I wasn’t expecting. But some scenes – like the velociraptors stalking the kids in the kitchen – have started to look wrong. The lighting on the dinosaurs isn’t quite right, and in some of the CGI scenes (not the mechanical scenes, of course) they seem to “glow” with an inner light.
I expect that there will be a lot more of this in the future. Things that squeak by us today because we aren’t as visually sophisticated as we will be just a few years down the line will, those few years later, not look right. We may not even know exactly why, but the truth will be our increasing visual sophistication. So we incrementally approach perfection, with details of lighting, blurring, motion, and animation being improved bit by bit. (A thought occurs to me – the CGI artists who produce this stuff view a lot more of this stuff and look at it more critically than ordinary viewers. By their lights, virtually everything that goes out must be in some way unsatisfactory. Theyt don’t have the same appreciation of their work that the audience does, because they know too much about it. It’s like Mark Twain’s describing in Life on the Mississippi about how being a river boat pilot ruined the scenery of a river for him.)
It took me a while to figure out that there was something wrong with this picture. It just didnt seem right. It turns out it is actually a composite of 5 different faces (from some band). HAve a look now at http://www.jamestheband.com/
The human eye is a difficult beast to fool at the best of times and although everything in that picture is technically accurate and while there is nothing that would point to it being faked it still has that quality of unrealness.The proportions are all correct and the tones are right and I challenge anyone to point out a detail that would of its own give it away (apart from the ridiculous hairstyle )
This is the best example I can think of but the eye is attuned to pick up things like for example the argument about flowing hair in movies. I remember being utterly unconvinced at the characterisations of hair blowing in the wind in “Shrek” + “thatspacemovieicantremeberthenameofbutmightbefinalfantasy” despite the animators assertations that this was almost indistinguisable from reality.
SFX , whilst light years away from the crudeness of such epics as Superman or even older films , still have some way to go to fooling us.
Moving through or running thick viscous materials like mud.
I have a poor but workable knowledge of Lightwave[sup]TM[/sup]. There are scripting languages built in that can do advanced mathematical calculations. I have one I downloaded that fires the attitude thrusters on a Babylon 5 Star Fury appropriate to its motion. So the animators just turn the model left x degrees in x seconds, the script fires the jets accordingly when it renders.
There are also many “plugins” that handle things like cyclic motion like wheels turning or someone pedaling a bike. When a car moves for example its wheels will rotate at a speed appropriate to the circumference of the wheel.
Well here you’re touching on a core issue. There are basically two approaches to CG, either you suspend disbelief or you go for total realism. You can have a film where disbelief is suspended and all the CG effects are consistent within that fictitious world (i.e. Shreck, Antz, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, etc). Or you can scrupulously make everything appear as realistic as possible. A good example of this is “Gladiator” which most people don’t recognize as a major CG film. I am sure that the vast bulk of the audience never knew the film had even one CG sequence in it. But I was not convinced (being a pro in this field) because the long shots had no atmospheric perspective (distant objects appear hazy compared to near objects). They did the best they could to distract you from the flaws (i.e. animated flock of birds to draw your attention from the background) but I still saw it. This is an old problem that goes back to matte painting in the 50s and 60s, it’s darn hard to get that atmospheric effect.
In practical terms, time and money are separate issues. As people who work in special effects and they’ll tell you, no matter how much money they are given, you can only speed the process up so much. For example, if you’re building some kind of live-action effect, you can hire more people, but only so many can be working on the thing at one time before they start bumping elbows and interfering with each other.
It constantly surprises me that, when I first saw Jurassic Park, I was utterly convinced by the believability of the dinosaurs. They were amazing! Except for minor instances where the physics weren’t quite right in leaping and running, I classed them as unbeatable.
Except now I look at them, not even a full decade after being created, and I see every single flaw - and there are heaps - in every single CG shot (and the animatronics show themselves up too). Things like bad lighting, crappy physics, no interaction with the environment…
And it’s not because they were badly done, it’s because todays attempts at similar types of effects are just so much better. The dinosaurs in JP3 are so good, because it’s an art that’s been perfected. Whereas the original JP was a showcase of groundbreaking effects work - i.e. a work in progress.
One of the things I love about ILM is that every movie they do they break new ground. But one of the things that disappoints me most about groundbreaking effects is that they aren’t perfected, and become dated very rapidly.
This is the classic problem in CG. The state of the art project is always the NEXT project. There’s an old saying in the computer biz, there are two types of systems, experimental, and obsolete. The experimental systems are the stuff being cooked up in a lab somewhere, and it is obsolete by the time it ships. So by the time you see something on the big screen, it is already 2 years behind the state of the art.
But I think you misjudge ILM. I know some of the ILM guys, they have exactly the opposite problem from what you describe. They perfect things TOO much, in precisely the wrong way. The best example was JarJar Binks. The ILM boys went on and on about how they spent months perfecting the physics of flapping ears and cloth. They spent months staring at JarJar on a screen, and they were so entranced by their flopping ears, they lost sight of one fundamental fact: the character was so annoying, everyone hated it. Virtual actors have the same problem as real actors, if you over-rehearse, your performance stinks.
Anyway, if you want to talk bad physics, I instantly think of the biggest shot in “Pearl Harbor,” the bomb hitting a battleship from a bomb-following camera view. I’ve only seen it on TV once or twice, but it has the most obvious physics flaw I’ve ever seen. The bomb makes a turn in midair and goes straight down, rather than falling in a proper parabolic arc. Stupid.
Wellll… though the acting is ILM animation, the character is really a product of George Lucas and Ahmed Best - apparently Ahmed is just an annoying person, a real attention-seeker.
I have no illusions that ILM are still the leaders in the field, either. Even though they are masters of the craft, Digital Domain, to name just one, and even WETA are up there with them, and indeed surpass them in many ways too.
I would love to be an effects supervisor - just be there and say 'No! Don’t do it that way, do it this way!" Sometimes minor tweaks can turn failure into success.
