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[Broken Joystick]

Thought this was a nice visual essay by Rocket Jump (Freddie Wong) on CG. There's always a lot of discussion about CG on this board (Fantastic Four seems to be the latest movie of discussion), and Freddie gives a nice argument for CG. Essentially it all comes down to time and money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24

 

[moggio]

You mean good use of CGI is good and bad use of CGI is bad?

No way!

 

[ElectricBlanketFire]

So good CGI is good and bad CGI is bad.

Got it.

EDIT: DAMMIT.

 

[Lord_Balkan]

CGI effectively ruined a lot of horror movies

 

[ckohler]

CG is just a medium. It can look great or terrible.

Great CG looks like this:

Terrible CG looks like this:

 

[Tertullian]

CG is just a medium. It can look great or terrible.

Great CG looks like this:

If this is what great CGI looks like, then you've got a great argument here against CGI.

 

[LumpOfCole]

If you cannot tell its CGI, that's when its good CGI.

 

[ckohler]

If this is what great CGI looks like, then you've got a great argument here against CGI.

What about that doesn't look real? If you told me that was animatronic, I'd believe you.

 

[Nachos]

What about that doesn't look real? If you told me that was animatronic, I'd believe you.

The cloth doesn't look great, and there's a glare that goes across the background and hits the leg of the soldier but doesn't change the lighting of the alien, even though it should be in the path.

 

[metalslimer]

I don't think anyone has ever argued that all cgi is bad

 

[DOWN]

David Fincher CGI is the best CGI

 

[gdt]

The cloth doesn't look great, and there's a glare that goes across the background and hits the leg of the soldier but doesn't change the lighting of the alien, even though it should be in the path.

We got a shadow inspector over here

Spoiler

I agree on the cloth, but it might be the low quality of the gif

 

[commedieu]

I'm sorry, but judging D9 from a gif?
And puffs of smoke in the bg aren't lighting. D9 was a good use of photoreal cg. but, hey.. everyone is an expert. So, try it again.. what was that.. WETA?

Yea, they always blow.

 

[Scorpion Soldier]

The cloth doesn't look great, and there's a glare that goes across the background and hits the leg of the soldier but doesn't change the lighting of the alien, even though it should be in the path.

To be fair the brightness of the GIF seems to be higher than the actual film itself, which is making it worse. It looks excellent in the film itself.

 

[Joyful]

i miss practical effects big time
like I recently rewatched The Thing and nothing today compares to that masterpiece. you simply cant beat real. monsters grotesque in their detail. maybe a bit cheesy at times due to stop motiony animation but those times are pretty rare.

also fuck cg blood/bullets in movies. two things used waaaay too much

 

[John Kowalski]

He makes a good point that bad CG only marrs movies when the other parts of the movie let us notice them by not being good enough on their own. I feel that this is a pit often fallen into by any sort of art that tries first and foremost to excel technically.

 

[gdt]

Avatar is 8 years old and the CG in that movie is still insane. Will Avatar's CG ever look shitty?

 

[Camoxide]

CG is just a medium. It can look great or terrible.

Great CG looks like this:

Terrible CG looks like this:

http://i.imgur.com/wKEAHp6.gif[IMG][/QUOTE]

To add: District 9 only had a budget of $30million and came out 6 years ago!

 

[plasmawave]

People think District 9 has bad CGI?

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net...8577089.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20091005224156

 

[kruis]

i miss practical effects big time
like I recently rewatched The Thing and nothing today compares to that masterpiece. you simply cant beat real. monsters grotesque in their detail. maybe a bit cheesy at times due to stop motiony animation but those times are pretty rare.

Just watch that Youtube clip.

 

[PantherLotus]

The funny thing about CG is that it has dramatically changed hollywood and most people can't tell most of the time.

 

[K.Sabot]

that wolverine claw clip is still embarrassing to watch

 

[excelsiorlef]

CGI effectively ruined a lot of horror movies

CG blood and gore are the fucking worst. Give me Tom Savini practical effects any day over a computer.

 

[commedieu]

i miss practical effects big time
like I recently rewatched The Thing and nothing today compares to that masterpiece. you simply cant beat real. monsters grotesque in their detail. maybe a bit cheesy at times due to stop motiony animation but those times are pretty rare.

also fuck cg blood/bullets in movies. two things used waaaay too much

I wish cg was just used to enhance practical animatronics/effects. Its real, and in camera. Fix its shortcomings with subtle cg fixes. Bad cg is just horrible and they'd be better off with bad practical effects, as it would cause film makers to create different movies. Not gigantic scale shit shows with horrible effects.

I just think about how Jaws, if made today, would have been the cg thrill ride studios wanted, but probably wouldn't be the film that Jaws was. I mean the shark didn't work so it fored them to be creative and work with it. That art, the art of coping/making it work isn't there with cg.

if you want that 1000 man battle, you can have a shitty to photo real version of it. Instantly. You don't have to reconsider it. You get better performances from talent too, with practical.

 

[Dcube]

Cool video. I like the point he makes where people bash on CG sometimes just to add to their hate of a bad movie. Hell, even to hate on a movie they've haven't seen but decided they want to hate it. Now lets break out some crappy GIFs under a microscope and decide which pixels look fake while they loop.

 

[Dicer]

CG is just a medium. It can look great or terrible.

Great CG looks like this:

What a horrible image from the movie, much better examples out there...


D9 and The Apes movies are excellent example of great CG, and yeah yeah Avatar and Davy Jones, we know...

 

[FloatingDivider]

I think CGI is great in the hands of filmmakers who can show restraint. In the hands of filmmakers that don't though it's the devils tool. The thing about practical effects and the related cost/feasability constraints meant the story had to be good and the effects added to the impact of the story. We've now reached a point where CGI is so cheap and easy to produce that it's easy to sideline the story for your crazy huge cgi spectacle shots, which results in something that might be visually stunning but is emotionally empty. I feel like the transformers franchise is a big example. Especially three, the ending is visually stunning, but I honestly couldn't give two fucks about it because it was just ridiculous spectacle shot after spectacle shot. I also think practical effects in general tend to age better than CGI does. I feel like what's good CGI now, will be tacky cheesy and bad in 5 - 10 years time. Having recently revisited LOTR which at release was a highlight of "good" cgi, ends up looking rather cheesy and cornbally at spots. Jurassic park/star wars(the non lucas edit) still look good.

 

[Rockandrollclown]

CGI isn't inherently bad, it makes some things possible that otherwise wouldn't be. However I still feel a mix of practical/cgi effects is typically going to be better than all cgi. Oh, and using it for stuff like blood is fucking stupid.

 

[Toa TAK]

Great video, and it always comes back to what I keep saying to others in that CGI is a great thing when used well.

Not the biggest Micheal Bay fan, but I'm still glad his work in the Transformers series got a mention there, I think it's pretty phenomenal. Same with Mad Max, as I don't think many people realize how much CG was in that movie.

But District 9 has bad CGI? No. NO. I cannot get behind this. Blomkamp's movies may have fallen since, but his eye for CG is still great even up to Chappie.

 

[Fevaweva]

David Fincher CGI is the best CGI

Even then, the CG in Benjamin Button is a bit weird in spots.

Bad CGI has never really bothered me...unless the film is a) effects heavy, as in, the effects are the main reason for watching or b) bad regardless of quality of the CGI.

 

[Geist-]

I feel as though CGI works better if the whole movie is made using cgi so that the visuals are unified.
When you have excessive CGI with live-action actors, the flaws in CGI stand out a lot more because you can compare it to the real thing.

 

[Jeevesmeister]

OP is a boring, handwavy steaming hot take without any real substance or critical thought behind it, clearly because the creator is a Youtuber who makes a bunch of CG crap on Youtube. He's a VFX'er coming from the perspective of someone trying to defend slash legitimize their profession and it shows. A lot of this is "no shit, Sherlock" long after this argument's been hashed out on the Internet to hell and back.

There are a lot of problems with CG - it limits actors ability to get into character, when its done poorly it seriously undercuts a film, its commonly used as a shortcut to cut costs, it relies upon a critical abuse of talent and labor, the list goes on and on. People have grown tired of seeing so much bad CG that sticks out like a sore thumb that they're now naturally resistant to it, and looking at the true "great" films of our time the CG is largely unnoticeable and is a background to what's going on on-screen.

Red Letter Media in their prequel reviews breaks it down a lot better, watching George Lucas and his team of people come together to make a trio of space opera epics in the original trilogy be reduced to a single cult of personality sitting with Starbucks in front of a greenscreen studio and watching actors dolled up in robes (that makes no sense within the Star Wars lore, but that's another subject for another time) try to put on a convincing performance to a giant wall of green - it was a shitton of over the top CG that the movie relied on as a crutch when everything else was falling apart, and it shows. The point is you simply cannot use CG VFX as a crutch to stand on.

Mad Max: Fury Road is heavy on CG, yes, but the film is constructed to maintain the viewer's focus and attention on the practical, the tangible, the real - and is paced and constructed in such a manner you don't take the time for your brain to pick out what's real and not real, for the vast majority of the film. That's why it's so effective - the CGI is a background element to enhance the overall picture, not be the picture itself.

TL;DR the OP's video is a depressing sham without substance and RedLetterMedia has done this hot take way better over the years.

 

[Spinluck]

CGI is a fantastic filmmaking tool (besides it killing puppetry/animatronics, and is slowly eating its way into other formerly practical things).

I think more than anything, that too much of it can be ugly. Especially in situations where you can point it out (it kills any sort of tension and immersion), and it seems unnecessary and just inflates the budget. Of course good art direction, lighting, composition, animation/mocap work, and just good direction in general can change this. I like it when a director knows how to balance it out and doesn't just differ to it because they have a fuckton of money to spend, and rather save time not staging and setting up stunts and what not. I like to use Spider-Man 3 as a good example because up until that time I believe it was the most expensive movie ever made (correct me if I'm wrong), just didn't seem necessary in some cases. Avengers movies too, a bunch of disposable CG canon fodder clone bots just doesn't deliver tension in scenes that try to create it. All these movies are guilty of it, but these are just off the top of my head.

Side note: it also seems like the artist are still treated like crap and still don't get the recognition they deserve. Anyone know the average salary for a CG artist in Hollywood?

 

[BrokenIcarus]

Wow, Gravity was basicly all CG? That movie was gorgeous!

 

[Fuchsdh]

This is probably one of the better articles on the subject, which is surprising because a lot of the responses from the effects companies and people in the industry have been really poor.

A lot of what people are reacting to are never actually the CG special effects themselves, but things like poor direction or production and the weaknesses of the story and characters. The effects can't save anything else in a film these days.

To me the biggest issue with CG misuse is when it is used to destroy reality in ways that people aren't accepting of. Having Legolas do ridiculous gravity-defying stunts and hopping across falling rocks is always going to look fake as hell because that could never happen in the "real world". Whereas I'm not going to be bothered by the alka-seltzer beam out effect in Star Trek because it's not trying to replicate something bound by conventional rules.

 

[Garlador]

Ooh, can we turn this into a "Good CG/Bad CG" thread?

Good CG:

Bad CG:

 

[maniac-kun]

What Benjamin Bottom was CG? I thought it was makeup.

 

[Spinluck]

that wolverine claw clip is still embarrassing to watch

Oh god, lol.

 

[Fuchsdh]

Ooh, can we turn this into a "Good CG/Bad CG" thread?

Good CG:


Bad CG:

I dunno why they didn't just leave the de-aged CG solely for CLU. They could have just kept him in shadow and stuff for the prequel scenes, and it would have worked fine. But then they had two or three really bad frontal shots with him talking that broke the illusion completely.

 

[Lucumo]

CGI is cancer to anime.

 

[MMarston]

David Fincher CGI is the best CGI

.

 

[commedieu]

I dunno why they didn't just leave the de-aged CG solely for CLU. They could have just kept him in shadow and stuff for the prequel scenes, and it would have worked fine. But then they had two or three really bad frontal shots with him talking that broke the illusion completely.

"mop mop mop mop"

Man, so bad. The second it talked, it ruined it all.

 

[injurai]

Bad CG:

I read that this was intentional, but seeing as the rest of tron just had normal looking people it kind of throws that argument out the window. It is indeed trash cg.

 

[Garlador]

What Benjamin Bottom was CG? I thought it was makeup.

It was CG...
... But it won "best make-up" at the Oscars anyway. Beating out Hellboy 2... which was actual make-up and not CG.

I didn't like that year at the Oscars.

 

[Apath]

CGI is cancer to anime.

I don't know, the mech scenes in Knights of Sidonia look pretty amazing.

 

[kruis]

Really, the main reason why people complainabout CGI in modern movies is not because it's inherently bad, but because many internet critics are movie snobs and complaining about stuff makes 'em feel a cut above the general public. Criticism is the safest position to take in any discussion. The complainers are usualy blind as bat when it comes to invisible CGI effects. They only complain about the CGI in big budget SF/Fantasy/Super hero movies where it's blatantly obvious that those monsters/spaceships/superheroes/etc up on the screen were made in the computer.

 

[maniac-kun]

It was CG...
... But it won "best make-up" at the Oscars anyway. Beating out Hellboy 2... which was actual make-up and not CG.

I didn't like that year at the Oscars.

That actualy dosnt make sense

 

[IISANDERII]

To add: District 9 only had a budget of $30million and came out 6 years ago!

Wow, I wonder how they did it. I loved the ship hanging over Jberg and the old news footage, made it feel authentic.

 

[RS4-]

Shit CGI: everything in The Hobbit movies.

 

[injurai]

I don't know, the mech scenes in Knights of Sidonia look pretty amazing.

Eh... not a fan. I was also annoyed by it's use in Yamato. The only good examples of CGI is when 2D layers are broken out in a 3D diorama basically virtualizing cell slides. Which has a great effect when panning within an environment.