Gravy Boat
Member
Jumanji 1995
Jumanji didn't even look good at the time.
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Examples of old movies with CGI that has aged well
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Jumanji didn't even look good at the time.
Soldiussnaku
Member
With respect, I disagree with this. Yes it can be considered ground breaking for its time, however in light of the thread purpose, it has aged badly, and whilst the screenshots you posted are impressive when looking at other films at the time the cgi taken as a whole has not aged well at all.
It looks ropey, the dragon does not look like it belongs in the scenes at all, completely understandable given the time the film was made, animation and composition wise the dragon and other effects look dated, the T. rex in JP1 looks far better. The so called magic of JP is how it it just doesn't use cgi by itself, but how well it implemented in the scene and how well it goes with other elements within said scence. I mean jesus, myself and others are shocked that they cgi'd the jeep in the T. rex attack scene and the film was made 23 years ago. I've watched the film many times, and I am gobsmacked at the cgi jeep fact.
Dragon heart can be considered a groundbreaking film in regards to cgi but the cgi has not aged well at all,tbf.
yeh i saw it again last night and i dont think any of the cgi aged well
ffejeromdiks
Banned
For Zodiac a lot of it was because Fincher wanted to capture the crime scenes exactly the way they actually looked back in 1968 San Francisco, which is clearly impossible to do in 2007.
But no, for the most part background CG like that is extremely cheap and easy to do nowadays, and you'd be surprised just how much it's used today, for the most part it's completely unobservable.
holygeesus
Banned
Using the same definition of 'old' as everyone else, I thought the CGI in Gladiator (2000) was pretty well done, such as the tigers and crowd-work. Re-animating Oliver Reed must have been tough too.
I also think Hollow Man did some great work - same year. The early transformation scene was pretty mind-blowing where his body disappears layer by layer.
Labyrinth featured some mind-blowing CGI for 1986 too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbNrkazI-AY
Jurassic Park is the GOAT though, and the fact it was just 6 years after the Labyrinth effort above, shows how advanced it really was.
I also think Hollow Man did some great work - same year. The early transformation scene was pretty mind-blowing where his body disappears layer by layer.
Labyrinth featured some mind-blowing CGI for 1986 too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbNrkazI-AY
Jurassic Park is the GOAT though, and the fact it was just 6 years after the Labyrinth effort above, shows how advanced it really was.
CyclopsRock
Member
People saying "Film X looked amazing for its time" are wholly missing the point of the thread.
Many of the shots where we follow the Japanese planes flying through the harbor in between the ships looked bad then and even worse now.
cant tell what im looking at here
Commander Jameson
Member
It's two guys from the movie Dune fighting with shield generators on. Not sure if these were CGI though or simply animated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYUolurihOQ
Doctor Strange trailer
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
They probably had to remove my mom's best friend and her husband from parts of it. They were on their little boat off of Mexico, saw the ship and got curious. All of the chase boats were on the other side. They were against the side of the ship before anyone even noticed them. When they got there they yelled "Are you guys in a club?" and the extras were shitting their pants trying to keep straight faces.
WOW! Even though JP had already been mentioned, I couldn't stress enough how good the CGI still looks after all these years. Even held up in the 3D Re-release in theaters.
But I had no idea the jeep was also CGI.
ILM you geniuses you.
TheRedSnifit
Member
They created a 3D wireframe environment and had a computer (with a pen) draw the scene onto animation paper. They then drew the characters on top of it.
So it's not what you'd conventionally think of when you say "computer-generated imagery," but they had more than "a bit of help" from the computer and the scene wouldn't have been possible otherwise. I say it counts.
Removing actors and wires and such is compositing which is different than cgi. Cgi is creating something that doesn't exist in the real world with computers. Compositing is the removal of what is already there.
RipperGrim
Member
The fact that the jeep in the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park was CGI is blowing my mind. I have watched that movie so many damn times and didn't even has a single suspicion or thought about the car not being real.
KoroEunectes
Member
Kinda crazy that the Rami Spider-man movies are now considered old.Obviously the razor bats in this shot from Spider-Man are CGI. But so is Spidey.
A lot of kids that are going to see the new Spider-man movie probably weren't even born yet when the first movie came out.
I feel old...
Broken Joystick
At least you can talk. Who are you?
In Zodiac(2007), the entire city is cgi. a coupe of the gun shot scenes are cgi as well. FIncher movies tend to use cgi pretty brilliantly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sZS8OVyVr4
I love this stuff. Gatsby did it really well too (though it's not old).
RipperGrim
Member
The lord of the Rings films still hold up pretty well, most famously gollum but man all the battle scenes are still on their own level, only recently has the Battle of the Bastards in game of thrones of all things has those battles been recaptured.
Just watch this scene Ride of the Rohirrim. The cgi is used for the big massive shots and anything close up is real practical effects with actors, of course there are closer shots of the cgi but man even those are blended in with practical effects and real people.
The blend is done so perfectly well that it's actually quite unbelievable that the same people were behind the Hobbit films. It's like they took everything they learned from the original trilogy and threw it out.
Just watch this scene Ride of the Rohirrim. The cgi is used for the big massive shots and anything close up is real practical effects with actors, of course there are closer shots of the cgi but man even those are blended in with practical effects and real people.
The blend is done so perfectly well that it's actually quite unbelievable that the same people were behind the Hobbit films. It's like they took everything they learned from the original trilogy and threw it out.
While LOTR does hold up pretty well, it had it's missteps too. The cave troll looked great in some shots, and downright terrible in other shots, and let us not forgot the CGI Legolas while he's on top of it. Holy shit, that looked bad in the theater!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyevhryWKHk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyevhryWKHk
RipperGrim
Member
I should have mentioned that the first one in the trilogy had the weakest cgi and a lot of the scenes didn't hold up too well and it's a good thing it relied a lot on practical. I will say though that after the cave troll scene it was Gandalf vs the Balrog and that again used the method of long shots cgi and close shots "real" and it works very well in keeping it re watchable.
Lotr also made good use of miniatures. The one they build for Minas Tirith is super impressive
crisdecuba
Member
That shot was PRACTICAL.
BattleMonkey
Member
But people think the CGI is the robot itself, when it's a practical puppet. Removal of puppeteer, strings, background stuff has all been done before for practical effects too, the tools to do so have just gotten more advanced
Thug Waffle
Member
Starship Troopers: The Thread
JimmyRustler
Gold Member
Jurassic Park was the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the thread title. Glad to see it is first post.
The T-Rex night scene is just surreal.
The T-Rex night scene is just surreal.
Mighty Chin
Banned
BigaturesLotr also made good use of miniatures. The one they build for Minas Tirith is super impressive
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
The hyperbole is getting out of hand..
There are plenty of logical explanations for why modern CG effects don't always excite as much as they did in certain past films, but those reasons are much more related to how the technology was used back then vs how it's often (mis)used today.
Also, people forget there were only about 4 minutes of CG effects shots in the original JP. That's roughly 6000 frames, and most of those frames predominantly consisted of real footage so the amount of actual pixels that needed to be rendered was overall quite small.
But because JP had such an explosive impact on the film industry, it wasn't long before everybody wanted CG effects in their movie, and each movie had to have more complex CG and more of it. So within a couple of years the actual workload must have grown by a factor of thousands or more - and that's a conservative estimate!
Beyond the fact that such a rate far exceeded Moore's Law or any other technical and technological growth metric, there's also the human factor that needs to be accounted for. It takes many years to train an expert, and with demand far outstripping supply there's no doubt quality was going to suffer in the short term.
Here are two good articles relevant to this thread:
http://www.businessinsider.com/jurassic-park-how-cgi-was-used-2014-11
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-expensive-films-end-up-with-crappy-special-effects/
The use of cgi and miniatures was phenomenal.
Also some full sized models for corpses etc.
GabeTheGrouch76
Member
In fairness, Foodfight! was actually started back in the early 2000s, and it had to be restarted from scratch after the original animation files were reportedly stolen. The movie was in development hell for quite a while, and had surprisingly somehow managed to escape.
And speaking of which, there exists a trailer of the film with the original animation (reportedly from 2002), and it actually looks halfway respectable compared to the final film that came out a decade later.
Speaking of Air Force One, the shots of the plane (which are CG) are still pretty good IMO. At least during the shots of it in flight against the nighttime setting. Sadly, this isn't the case towards the end of the movie when it's placed in the morning sky, the plane become a painfully conspicuous CG model, like it looks like it was ripped out of a videogame.
DonMigs85
Member
Still small compared to a human-scaled Minas Tirith
eso76
Member
Yep:
By a certain "Pixar Computer Animation Group"
That's just before Jobs bought them.
A bit off topic from the main discussion but I think the practical effects T-Rex in Jurassic Park might be the greatest practical effects accomplishment in movie history. The damn thing was so convincing.
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!
Member
Posting movies from 2006 as "old" CGI makes me feel old.
Machine
Member
10 years is "old" for CGI but 50 years is "too soon" for spoilers. What a world we live in.
Fallout-NL
Member
I remember some film scholar making the same argument for T2 once: works so well because of the (not natural) nature of the T1000.
Dictator93
Member
I love this stuff. Gatsby did it really well too (though it's not old).
It actually really took me out of the movie as I could see it the entire time :/
Too saturated colour pallette as well.
i wonder if a lot of studios still use miniatures.
I mean i know a few do, but any notable examples?
CyclopsRock
Member
Those aren't accurate definitions at all.
Is it really "dated" or just ugly?
RipperGrim
Member
Christopher Nolan is pretty famous for it now, he really likes to use practicals when ever possible, I'm pretty sure all of his latest major releases have used miniatures in some way.
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