For this question, ignore “Avatar” – I realize that one did a lot of research into new technology.
Why are movie special effects budgets rising, considering that computer imaging gets cheaper each year? Back with the original Star Wars, filming the X-Wings at the Death Star scene required thousands of hours of manual work with physical models. Back in the original Die Hard movies, blowing up a building required actually blowing up a building (or at least setting a bunch of pyrotechnics) with all the safety issues that entailed. Nowadays, all that is computer generated much more easily. I thought one of the major advantages of computer imaging is that its far cheaper than traditional effects work. And yet, movie special effects budgets are going up, not down. Why? Why hasn’t computer imaging significantl reduced the cost of special effects?
Sure, every ten years or so, there’s a new groundbreaking special effects movie (Avatar, The Matrix, etc) that cost lots of money to develop new techniques. But then you should be able to re-use those new techniques in the next ten-twenty movies you make, so if you amortize the cost of developing the technique across all the movies you use it on, the average per-movie cost should be going way down.
So ignoring Avatar, and looking at more traditional special effects movies (say Spiderman 3, or Superman Returns, which each had some of the largest special effects budgets in history) – why aren’t those movies budges at least on par with, or even smaller in inflation adjusted dollars, than the original star wars?
Why? Back in my college computer graphics classes, I single-handlely created from scratch several cool CGI projects including a Terminator 2 style image morpher in just a couple weeks. Now, of course, my graphics were nowhere near as good as James Cameron’s. But using professional packages like Renderman or Light Wave make it even easier and the results look even better.
For instance, see this hoax UFO video. It was created by two amateurs on their home computer just for fun, but it looks damn good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up5jmbSjWkw
If two amateurs can do this in their spare time, why do movies need to spend $150 million on it? Can’t they get something that looks 95% as good with just a fraction of the cost?
I get that developing CGI (or any new technology) the first time is expensive. But the second time is much easier & cheaper, and 5 years later, that technology should be cheap enough to be embedded in a cell phone. Why hasn’t the same thing happened to computer graphics in movies?
No, it’s not quite at the same quality level as the latest hollywood blockbuster. But considering it was made by one guy on a home PC, in his spare time, with a budget of free, it’s pretty amazing.
If you took that guy and ten others like him, and paid them each $200,000 to work on your movie full-time for an entire year, you should be able to get some pretty impressive results for only $2 million. So why can’t the major studios do the same?
How do you know that special effects budgets are going up? (at least any faster than inflation)
When you see a total budget figure, that obviously includes many, many expenses - not the least of which is talent. Unfortunately studios like to keep the detailed budget information fairly private so it’s hard to definitively say “X movie spent more on special effects in 2009 than Y movie did in 1980”.
You mention the original Star Wars, which was produced on a shoe-string budget, and the actors were not paid that much. When it was successful, Lucas got significantly more money to make episodes 5 and 6.
Their budgets were:
$11M for Episode 4 in 1977 that adjusts to $39M today.
$18M for Episode 5 in 1980 that adjusts to $49M today.
$32.5M for Episode 6 in 1983 that adjusts to $70M today.
Now the recent CGI-intensive (and the CGI I must say was spectacular) District 9 cost only $30M to make in 2009. Way less than any of the Star Wars movies when inflation-adjusted. And one of the reasons they were able to make it for so cheap was because the relatively unknown actors were not paid exorbitant salaries.
So just because you hear they spent some huge amount on a movie, you can’t assume it’s because of the CGI.
As a side observation, one thing that cheap compute power had done is drive up the cost of supercomputers enormously. Why? Because it is now possible to do so much more, so it isn’t just a matter of doing the same stuff faster or cheaper, but entire new paradigms that could not be done at any cost are now within reach.
I suspect there some element to this in CGI. The ability to do a level of realism that was simply not possible for any money some years ago, now comes within reach. Just. A favourite older example is the fur on King Kong. Not only was it modelled hair by hair - whereas not all that long ago it was a whole slew of textures that sort looked OK. But the hairs were modelled as two cylinders, an outer transparent one, and a solid inner one. With the correct refraction of light on each one. Modern films model skin simialrly. (Even this is old stuff, but I just use it as example of advances.) So films use the technology because they can, and if something new comes in reach, but at an even greater premium in cost, it may still be used. And things ratchet up.
But, as observed, the technology is very swiftly available at lower cost to the other movies.
There are plenty of companies working on techniques and then trying to interest films in them. These are essentially tech companies with a limited market and a high risk product with a short shelf life that requires a lot of customization once a film is attached
This is not going to come cheap to the film. Maybe some of it will be deferred, but still.
Remember, the resolution and probably the color depth are much greater on film than on a PC. And the number of frames in an entire movie are great, and shots may need to be re-done.
Scheduling is tight on any movie. It is one thing to get bodies to a location for a shot or re-shot, it is another thing to schedule a re-rendering. How much capacity will you have for that, both in people and machine availability?
Tight scheduling with limited capacity costs in any industry.
I think a lot of it is just the sheer scale of the thing.
I can’t see the Youtube video from here, but I’m assuming it’s the one with the palm trees - there’s not a huge amount of stuff going on in it - a few trees, a bit of terrain, and a UFO or two.
Whereas in any CGI-rich movie, there are thousands and thousands of different things that need thinking about - essentially, all of the roles that exist in creating a physical set or location for a live action movie exist in the creation of a CGI feature - someone has to design and create the characters, props, costumes, scenery, lighting - as well as designing the way those things will work, the material they’re made of and its properties.
Scale that up to a movie with a few hundred characters in it, a hundred or so locations, each with thousands of items of scenery etc - some of it can be created procedurally, but I’m betting a lot of it gets quite intensive tweaking by hand to make sure everything works just right.
Then the action itself needs to be scripted at a level of detail that just would not be necessary with live actors, who understand and interpret instructions such as ‘in this scene, you walk down the stairs looking increasingly angry’ - for CGI characters, someone has to define what ‘walk’ means, someone has to define what anger looks like on the character’s face, in its stance and general demeanour, etc.
Again, some of that can be done procedurally, but then it needs lots of babysitting, tweaking etc.
In theory, it *should/i] get cheaper over time, as all the algorithmic and procedural stuff gets more refined, but at the moment, there’s still a lot of innovation happening and everyone wants the new stuff, which will always come at a premium
The costs of effects aren’t the effects themselves, it’s the people who do it. It used to be that the average effects-heavy movie had 250 effects shots in it, including special (on-set) effects. Now, that would be minimum, and most of the bigger films have 1500 - 2500 effects shots, in 4k or even 8k resolution (4k is 4096 pixels wide, whereas the average HD shot is 1920 pixels wide, and standard def video is 720 pixels wide).
Usually a big movie will start out with some R&D for some of the harder shots, such as those involving fur, or Massive crowd scenes, or virtual sets, which might take six months and forty people to get through, and by the time it gets to the end of post-production, perhaps 18 months later, it has rocketed to 500 effects artists and TDs and programmers and supervisors, working 16 hour days, on high end complicated shots, that take great talent and skill, and therefore command premium pay rates.
And then all that new technology will be adapted into off-the-shelf software, and made available to TV and commercials production studios, who can use it to create the effects seen in shows like Heroes or Warehouse 13, or even Law and Order or Desperate Housewives, as well as lower budget films; even a romantic comedy will have sky replacement or digital set extensions.
What’s happening is as GuanoLad says, almost every single shot uses digital VFX now, while before it was only rare shots that were scanned at all. So what’s happened is that the Digital VFX boys get a bigger percentage of the total budget than they used to.
Nowadays the attitude on set is “it doesn’t matter, fix it in post”, which results in tens of thousands of hours of roto, cgi and compositing work. However more VFX is almost always cheaper than a reshoot, skilled VFX artists are cheaper than a full film production crew and getting the actors back on set.
Most of the time reshoot is not possible at all because the actors are already on the next project.
This is one of the reasons I got out of compositing, I spent 3 percent of time doing creative work and 97 percent fixing the shit they shot on set.
How close are we to creating utterly believable CGI that only contains humans and conventional scenery? (Say, if we wanted to create a whole and authentic-looking movie featuring real actors who have died)
Not that close, Avatar was beautiful but the Na’vi looked pretty fake, thats state of the art in fully digital actors and they still look cartoony. They way light interacts with every object in a scene in the real world can’t be completely modeled in any reasonable render time, there’s too many interactions.
IMHO, it’s not the light that’s the problem, but the movement. CGI always looks animated. Motion-capture is getting pretty good, but the movement of pure CGI creatures looks fake.
Well good call, the movement is another big problem, but they are both issues needing a lot more research and compute power. In Avatar specifically I noticed the light on the Na’vi skin as being fake a lot more than the movement being fake.
After we saw it, I mentioned to my wife that I though the Na’vi skin looked fake (it looked much too shiny), and she said “well maybe that’s what it was supposed to look like.” So, it’s just possible that the Na’vi are part amphibian…
For one thing, movies with lots of fancy effects and big-name actors seem to have significantly higher budgets than movies without the effects but with equally big-name actors. You never hear anyone talking about the budget of a romantic comedy set in a present-day real-world city.
Labor is a huge cost, and it’s mostly unionized. This is why a lot of the busy work on effects and such are sent overseas.
If you look at how movies and TV shows are bugeted and how costs are assigned you get a greater understanding.
The cost of the actual effects goes down with more and more use, but licensing fees, labor and such goes up. If Joe Schmoe does a good job on one movie others want him for their movie and the demand (his salary) goes up.
A lot of special effects are truly a matter of artistic talent. The subleties of the effects are obvious when a non artistic person tries to duplicate an art project with someone who is artistically inclined
OK. And for comparison, “Superman Returns” cost $209 million, after tax breaks, and that doesn’t even include money paid out in “pay or play” contracts.
And Superman Returns didn’t even have any recognizable star (except for Kevin Spacey), so the talent costs were lower.
If the money didn’t go to special effects, then where DID it go?