Cgi

[Rageaholic]

I've been noticing the increase in CGI in movie trailers, particularly live action/adventure movies. Or what I like to call "big fucking movies" (Avatar, Clash of the Titans, Inception, and the like). It seems like a lot of people are sick of CGI taking over movies, missing the good old days when they did everything by hand. Now I normally roll my eyes at those people, but in this case, I think they may have a point.

Now I can't fault film producers for taking advantage of our ever growing technology. CGI is probably a lot safer, easier, and more flexible to use. And to it's credit, I've seen some very impressive CGI effects. And really, isn't it the story that matters, not the effects?

On the other hand, I can see exactly what critics of CGI and 3D technology are talking about. Maybe it's just me, but it appears that a lot of movies are overhyped because of their CGI or 3D effects. "Ooh look we just blew up a city! Watch this movie for more faux special effects!". It just comes across as so pretentious that when I see trailers, I don't think "OMG I GOTTA SEE THAT!!" all I can think is "Meh, it looks kind of cool".

As much as I hate to admit it, I think I do miss the "good old days" of movie making. Particularly action movies where fight scenes were a lot more fun and creative, sometimes even with slapstick added to the mix. One that sticks out for me is the "Long Kiss Goodnight". It had so much variety in it's action scenes. At times, it required a huge suspension of disbelief. Like one scene where Samual L Jackson is blown out of a building, flys back first into a tree (breaking the chair he was tied to), falls down, and then is able to pick up a knife to heave at the goon that was about to shoot him. It was unbelievable, contrived, and downright silly, but IT LOOKED REAL so I believed it. And even if it didn't, it was still a pretty creative action scene where you couldn't help but go "HELL YEAH!".

The problem with CGI action scenes is none of that fun is there. Sure, there are bigger explosions and stuff, but those actually get boring. They try to make them all Matrix like with excessive slow mo and unbelievable moves, but it just looks so fake and unbelievable, like I'm not even watching actual humans fight. As a result, I find that it lacks the suspense or thrill of 90s action movies. Instead, it just looks pretentious and overdone.

I don't know, I haven't watched modern day movies, and am judging by the trailers (and a few action scenes I have seen), but this is what I get from CGI.

[HYHYBT]

Battles especially annoy me; since they *can* put in huge armies, they do. Then all you see are swarms of people (or whatever) rather than focusing on a small enough number of them that you can actually tell who is who and what's going on.

[Andara Bledin]

CGI, in and of itself, isn't the problem. It's that it's still new enough that the shiny hasn't worn off to the point where movie-makers are focusing on the telling of the story as opposed to the shininess of the technology.

It's like a lot of the current crop of 3D movies. Too many of them are focusing on the "poke shit out at the audience" as opposed to making the 3D another part of the enhancement for suspension of disbelief. Avatar was an excellent use of 3D effects, using it to make the world seem fuller and give it more depth (literally and figuratively). Based on the trailer alone, the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is all about stupid gimmick 3D and is going to suck more for it.

As for the popularity of CGI, it's not going to go away for one particular reason: money.

^-.-^

[muses_nightmare]

I am so sick of 3D movies, most of the time they kind of make me dizzy, I just want to go in and watch a regular movie dammit!

I don't generally have a problem with CGI, but I think there are a lot of movies that do it badly or use too much of it, storyline be damned.

[ExRetailDrone]

Add me to the list of being sick of 3D, at least how Hollywood has mostly been using it. I agree with Andara that Avatar made excellent use of the 3D effects. The world popped and I could imagine that I was in it myself instead of being an outside onlooker. Unfortunately, a lot of the 3D movies that are out or upcoming have seemed to use it just because it's there rather than using it to add to or advance the story or world. Clash of the Titans is a great example of the latter. I went to see it in 3D thinking it could be really cool. I was horribly mistaken. It wasn't until after my husband and I spent the extra money on the 3D version that we found out the movie wasn't originally planned or made for 3D - the studio or whoever decided to add the 3D later. That made perfect sense since the 3D was barely there and didn't make sense in the least. What a ripoff!

CGI I don't mind as much. Maybe because it's been around longer and for the most part it seems that it's used decently well in contribution to the story and feel. I do agree about the action sequences being overrun with too-far-out-there CGI effects, though. But that's not something I run across all that often simply because I'm not a big fan of action movies to begin with so I don't usually go out of my way to see one. So the few that I have seen with the CGI sequences haven't bothered me as much as they might someone who loves action movies and watches them a lot.

[Rageaholic]

Battles especially annoy me; since they *can* put in huge armies, they do. Then all you see are swarms of people (or whatever) rather than focusing on a small enough number of them that you can actually tell who is who and what's going on.

That's exactly what gets me. There are so many movies that are trying to be the next Star Wars with these huge battles. They can be cool, but it's just so overdone that it gets boring, boring, BORING. Sometimes, I can't even tell the difference between movie clips and video game cutscenes.

And even those smaller scale "Hero vs goons" battles fall into similar traps. Like the Matrix, you see this guy swinging on a pole and kicking 20 goons out of the way. I remember a similar action scene in an episode of heroes. It's just so unbelievable and makes it hard to buy that it's actual humans fighting each other.

CGI, in and of itself, isn't the problem. It's that it's still new enough that the shiny hasn't worn off to the point where movie-makers are focusing on the telling of the story as opposed to the shininess of the technology.

It's like a lot of the current crop of 3D movies. Too many of them are focusing on the "poke shit out at the audience" as opposed to making the 3D another part of the enhancement for suspension of disbelief. Avatar was an excellent use of 3D effects, using it to make the world seem fuller and give it more depth (literally and figuratively). Based on the trailer alone, the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is all about stupid gimmick 3D and is going to suck more for it.

As for the popularity of CGI, it's not going to go away for one particular reason: money.

^-.-^

That's exactly what it is. I do think CGI is pretty cool because it helped spawn Pixar. It's the way it's used that just turns me off. Like today, I saw a trailer for that "Number Four" movie. It didn't look any different from any other movie of that genre.

-Excessive slow motion.
-Things flying through the air at the screen.
-Those wierd close up shots slowed down to .001

I'm sure you get the idea. I'm not gonna denounce the movie because of it, but I'm not exactly eager to see it either. It just looks like another typical movie with over the top effects.

[Cheshire]

Real effects and costumes will always look better than CGI.

Jim Henson's movies are a perfect example of that.

The more CGI a movie has, the more ridiculous and over the top the action scenes are. It may make money off of the "average" movie goer, but it will always be forgotten once the next shiny movie comes out of Hollywood. Meanwhile, classics like Star Wars will be watched over and over again.

[Gravekeeper]

I've honestly come to loath CGI in recent years. Thing is it takes just as much work and care to make good CGI as it does to make good traditional effects. But Hollywood by and large hasn't caught on to that yet.

Special effects could for example have a 3 headed dragon romp around hamming it up in front of the camera for half an hour. But it would likely end up looking ridiculous as you'd lose your suspension of belief pretty quick and it wouldn't look believable tromping around in brought daylight in front of the camera.

Hollywood currently seems to think it can ignore that unspoken rule just because it has CGI now. If you throw out a 3 headed CGI dragon, and make it ham it up in front of the camera for half an hour it will likely look so god damn fake it wouldn't be funny.

Which is the problem. Traditional effects required a lot of care, camera angles, shots, etc to make them look truly believable. CGI also needs this, but few movies grasp this concept. Instead, they rub CGI's nutsack in your face for most of the movie. Making no attempt to hide it or even make it subtle to keep it within your suspension of disbelief. So the moment it appears its so blatant you just go "Ugh, more CGI".

Hollywood basically thinks that working to maintain the illusion to keep the audience from realizing our hero is fight a big rubber puppet is no longer required. Despite the fact it should still be trying to maintain the illusion now to keep us from realizing our hero is fighting a pingpong ball on a stick in front of a green screen.

Both methods require the same care, attention, time and money. But Hollywood has been treated CGI like a free ticket to throw whatever crazy shit it wants on screen, often blatantly and at length, without applying the same care and attention.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

I'd buy that 'Hollywood' has 'lost it's way' with the advent of CGI if the attached complaints didn't also apply to movies before cgi came about. All styles, techniques and tools can and are abused, they always were. Go back a decade or so, if that, and cinema is rife with poorly executed practical effects that are just ridiculous. My personal favorite example is muzzle flash. Most movies without cgi either do nothing, which irks me because there's something missing that should be there, or use small flash or smoke pyrotechnics which in no way resemble or behave like actual muzzle flash.

And while most people slam the Star Wars prequels for 'bad cgi' there is at least one area where they kicked the pants off of the original's practical effects: space battles.

Where before the spacecraft moved awkwardly, showing only a few at a time and the weapon fire and explosions felt airy, in the prequels everything moved with a believable weight, with a decent compromise between focusing on the characters at hand and depicting the enormity of the conflict around them. But most importantly the weapons had a thunderous and heavy feeling that the original series and for that matter the small arms in the prequels lacked utterly. I just never bought that these weapons were really firing or that the people they hit would actually be hurt except for the space battles in the prequels.

It may just be me but the things that make cgi and practical effects bad are more or less exactly the same and I just don't see a greater preponderance of it with cgi unless you include something in cg that could not ever be achieved with practical effects, IMO an entirely different matter. Ultimately some people forgive the flaws of practical effects, some people forgive the flaws of cgi, in which case it's not a case of good or bad, better or worse so much as it is a matter of taste and therefore no basis on which to judge quality.

[Gravekeeper]

And while most people slam the Star Wars prequels for 'bad cgi' there is at least one area where they kicked the pants off of the original's practical effects: space battles.

That's an area where we expect to see it though and the entire shot is CGI. The problem isn't CGI by itself so much as its CGI integrated with a real shot with real actors. When you have something to contrast and compare it too you'll immediately spot it if its not really well done.

[lordlundar]

I think Joseph Michael Straczynski had the best approach. You only use effects sparsely and when they're necessary, so that when you do them, it has a bigger impact.

Actually, now that I think about it, that was his approach to any techniques he used in his shows, whether it's EFX, camera tricks or narrative devices. I can't really think of one particular trick that had an impact that he used more than a handful of times in Babylon 5. (yes, I'm a B5 junkie. But there was so much of that show that was done right that I haven't really seen since.)

It's not the CGI itself that's the issue, but the saturation of it that's the problem. When Max Payne introduced "bullet time" which was refined in film in The Matrix (yes, that 'rotate around a character in slow motion' was originated in a video game), suddenly EVERYTHING had to have it to the point that sections of scripts were being inserted just to accommodate it being put in. The result was for every additional time it was used, it lost more of it's punch to the point where it became a yawn fest.

The steady cam was first used in the Disney live action version of The Three Musketeers (1993) for the sword fights and had an incredible visual effect. So much so that every movie since that wanted a closeup used it instead of a standard camera on a stand. Now while the steady cam works great for fast motion scenes with a lot of shifting angles, it's not so good for relatively still shots that were better done with conventional techniques, but the camera was the new toy that had to be in EVERY motion picture. It took 5 years before producers finally realized that just because the tech was there didn't mean it had to be used everywhere.

What I'm saying (in my rambling way that everyone here should be used to by now...) is that every time Hollywood gets a new toy to play with, they will put it everywhere, especially in places it shouldn't be in, just to justify it's use. Eventually it will peter out when the new toy comes out and be put in where it can do the most good. The reason why CGI is taking so long is because it's a full range of techniques that's still relatively in it's infancy in film and new techniques are being developed every day.

[Gravekeeper]

It's not the CGI itself that's the issue, but the saturation of it that's the problem.

3 headed dragon, hamming it up on screen for half an hour. >.>

The steady cam was first used in the Disney live action version of The Three Musketeers (1993)

That reminds me, fuck shaky cam. I am so sick of shaky cam. If I wanted that effect I'd shake the TV myself, thanks.

[Andara Bledin]

Real effects and costumes will always look better than CGI.

I find this and the rest of the post particularly amusing since your avatar comes from a 3D CGI-fest of a movie.

Which is the problem. Traditional effects required a lot of care, camera angles, shots, etc to make them look truly believable. CGI also needs this, but few movies grasp this concept.

Once again, not the tool but the wielders who are the problem.

All styles, techniques and tools can and are abused, they always were. Go back a decade or so, if that, and cinema is rife with poorly executed practical effects that are just ridiculous.

For excellent examples, check out the first few years of both talkies and color pictures. What we see as nothing special today was special at one time, and during that time it was used as just as much a gimmick as CGI and 3D are right now.

3 headed dragon, hamming it up on screen for half an hour. >.>

A bad idea is a bad idea no matter how it's actualized.

And even then, it would probably still make money at the box office. In 3D, no less. >_<

That reminds me, fuck shaky cam. I am so sick of shaky cam. If I wanted that effect I'd shake the TV myself, thanks.

Totally and completely with you there. Fuck the fucking shaky cam.

^-.-^

[lordlundar]

3 headed dragon, hamming it up on screen for half an hour. >.>

For some odd reason, I keep thinking about Dragonheart when I read that. That said, the CGI dragon hamming it up was actually really well done. Though I do think Connery involved in the voice work really sold it.

That reminds me, fuck shaky cam. I am so sick of shaky cam. If I wanted that effect I'd shake the TV myself, thanks.

Agreed. It's a perfect example of the new "toy" that producers have to have everywhere. Odd part is it's not exactly new, just mostly used in Sci-fi movies and TV. (ship gets hit, ship shakes. No, they don't cause the entire sound stage to shake.) It's more of a case of "we have an excuse to use it all the damn time to make it 'gritty' and 'real' (dear god I'm so sick of those terms, but that's another rant) so let's do so!" I think the kickoff for that in mainstream was Blair Witch Project and it hasn't gone away since.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

For some odd reason, I keep thinking about Dragonheart when I read that. That said, the CGI dragon hamming it up was actually really well done. Though I do think Connery involved in the voice work really sold it.

Quoted For Truth

Agreed. It's a perfect example of the new "toy" that producers have to have everywhere. Odd part is it's not exactly new, just mostly used in Sci-fi movies and TV. (ship gets hit, ship shakes. No, they don't cause the entire sound stage to shake.) It's more of a case of "we have an excuse to use it all the damn time to make it 'gritty' and 'real' (dear god I'm so sick of those terms, but that's another rant) so let's do so!" I think the kickoff for that in mainstream was Blair Witch Project and it hasn't gone away since.

Speaking of Blair Witch, screw shaky cam, to hell with fucking POV. Every POV movie I've ever seen was ~90 minutes of horribly utilized gimmick and nothing else.