Pixels Are Driving Out Reality (vice.com) 304
An article on Motherboard today investigates the reasons why people didn't go "oh-my-god, that was awesome" looking at the CGI-based scenes in the recent movies such as Independence Day: Resurgence, Batman v Superman and X-Men: Apocalypse. Though the article acknowledges that this could be the result of some poor-acting, spotty storyline, or bad editing, it also underscores the possibility that this could be the aftermath of a "deeper mechanism that is draining all substance from our cinematic imaginary worlds?" The author of the article, Riccardo Manzotti to make his case stronger adds that the original Alien movie was able to impress us because what we saw was strongly linked to actual life. From the article: The humongous spaceship Nostromo -- a miniature model -- provoked awe and respect. When the creature erupted from Kane's abdomen -- a plaster model encased in fake blood and animal entrails -- people were horrified. The shock was registered on the faces of the actors, who, per Ridley Scott's direction, weren't told ahead of time that the moment would include a giant splatter of blood. "That's why their looks of disgust and horror are so real," producer and co-writer David Giler said. Manzotti further argues that some of the modern movies haven't left us awe-inspired because there is just too much CGI content. Compared to 430 computerized shots in the original Independence Day movie, for instance, the new one has 1,750 digitized shots. "People have been looking at pixels for much too long," the author argues, adding: Our imaginary world has been diluted and diluted to the point that, so to speak, there is no longer even a stain of real blood, love, and pain. Nowadays, when spectators see blood, they see pixels. [...] VR and augmented reality and the steady pace of CGI have pushed the process of substitution of reality to a higher level. At least, movies were once made using real stunts and real objects. Now, the actual world is no longer needed. The actual world, which is the good money, is no longer required. The virtual world, the bad money, is taking over. Yet, it lacks substance. The author makes several more compelling arguments, that are worth mulling.
Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:5, Funny)
I stopped feeling things when I was four. Thanks to Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, my perceptions were all made of ink.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, all the GCI overkill is boring as hell. Surprised it took someone this long to figure it out. My wife loves going to see new movies, but I have declined to sit through the GCI dickpissing contest they've all turned into and not been to the movies or bother much about watching new movies for over 5 years now.
I love watching older movies and TV shows with "real" special effects - models and stuff exploding for real, and real acting, heck Die Hard was on some random channel over the weekend, and I totall
Re: (Score:3)
It dependence on effects that's the problem.
2001 had amazing model based eye candy for it's day. Puts you to sleep now.
Re:Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:4, Insightful)
2001 was released in 1968. Years after the first man made orbit, after the first space walks.
The had pictures of earth from orbit.
The docking sequence was dazzling eye candy in 1968. You have to admit it could use an edit for brevity now.
Re: Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:2)
Heck no, I always wished it was longer. More models, more of J. Strauss. I think I'll go watch some Space1999 now...
Re: (Score:2)
For all of 2001's brilliant effects, I wish it had more plot. The part after disabling HAL doesn't make sense to me.
Re: Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:5, Interesting)
Could you imagine any 12 current actors trying to pull off 12 Angry Men?
Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino, Don Cheadle, Jonathan Pryce, Robert Downey Jr, Harvey Keitel, Vincent Cassel, Jack Nicholson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Sean Penn,
Aside from people who'd actually get cast in such a movie nowadays, like Steve Buscemi, Paul Giamatti, Christopher Walken, John Malkovich, Tom Hanks...
Still no shortage of great actors.
Re: (Score:3)
In New York, they could have women in juries. However, in 1954, it wasn't the case in all states.
Re:Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:5, Insightful)
This really is how absurd the argument is. By his reckoning The Lion King should have been awful since 0 frames of the film were real with real lions! Apparently UP had no room for a soul because it was all CG!
There are awful 80s and 90s movies that have no heart and no humanity and rely on shoddy gore squibs and bad miniatures. Every decade has had it's share of unwatchable films with large budgets. Waterworld had very little CGI and very little humanity and it was ridiculously expensive because it did it all for real on the ocean. By golly when that fish man jumps out of the water, that's a real person wearing prosthetics! And yet somehow nobody walked away from Waterworld with a sense of wonder about a guy with prosthetic gills.
What sets this decade apart isn't CG it's the fact that we are currently living it. When you look at all of the films of the 80s you can pick out 3-4 really amazing ones that represent a film every 2-3 years and say "Look how great the 80s were!" But if you're in year 6 of a decade you're statistically not living in the year where a great film was released. Every decade is great in retrospect because you only need a handful of examples to represent a decade while you need a new movie every weekend to watch. If you watch 30 movies a year in all likelihood the one you watch this weekend will not be one you would cite as the greatness of the '10s.
But just looking back I would say Guardians of the Galaxy was great and CG intensive, Inception was great and CG intensive, The Lego Movie and Inside Out were both great and entirely CG, Big Hero 6 was great and all CG, TED was funny and CG, Both planet of the apes films were very good and CG led characters (Compare the new planet of the apes to the horrible Tim Burton CGI free one!), I liked Men in Black 3, didn't think it was any worse than the original, The Wolf of Wallstreet was packed with CG and very good.
It's easy to find good movies in 2010-2016 but you need a year or two to forget how many shitty movies you also watched. You only remember the great Disney movies you watched as a kid. You forgot for the most part "The Cat from Outerspace".
Re:Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:5, Informative)
But it is true that using actual physical special effects can create some unique film events. My favorite is the scene in ET where Elliot reveals ET to his older brother. The actor playing the brother was not actually informed of how ET was going to be revealed, so the shock you see on his face is very real. If ET was just a digitally-created image edited into the footage in post-production, it's probable you wouldn't get quite the same response, particularly from child actors.
To some extent that was also my observation watching The Force Awakens. The first scene from A New Hope, with the Rebel space ship being attacked by the vaster Star Destroyer still works really well, but the space scenes in the new film, and indeed in the Prequels, just don't have the same feel. The shadows being cast on the craft seem more real, because, well, they are. I also recently rewatched Star Trek The Motion Picture, and the way refurbished Enterprise was revealed was pretty breathtaking in a way that the reboots weren't. The Enterprise seems more cartoonish in the reboots, and less like a physical object.
Re:Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:4, Interesting)
But it is true that using actual physical special effects can create some unique film events. My favorite is the scene in ET where Elliot reveals ET to his older brother. The actor playing the brother was not actually informed of how ET was going to be revealed, so the shock you see on his face is very real. If ET was just a digitally-created image edited into the footage in post-production, it's probable you wouldn't get quite the same response, particularly from child actors.
Further to that topic, CGI lets you create camera moves which are not possible in real life, in the sense that even if there was a fantasy/sci-fi/action/whatever thing going on, there's nowhere that you could physically place a camera which would get that shot. It violates the logic of the universe, which breaks the illusion for many people. In a film like Inception it can work but only because it's set in a surreal dreamscape, so you buy that it could work in that universe. But in a film like The A-Team it just looks ridiculous.
I loved the shakycam space battle scenes from the remake of Battlestar Galactica.
Re: (Score:2)
Further to that topic, CGI lets you create camera moves which are not possible in real life, in the sense that even if there was a fantasy/sci-fi/action/whatever thing going on, there's nowhere that you could physically place a camera which would get that shot. It violates the logic of the universe, which breaks the illusion for many people. In a film like Inception it can work but only because it's set in a surreal dreamscape, so you buy that it could work in that universe. But in a film like The A-Team it just looks ridiculous.
I loved the shakycam space battle scenes from the remake of Battlestar Galactica.
Which speaks to thte massive over use CGITO tell the truth - we are over inundated with it, and I for one find it boring, some sort of replacement for plot and character development.
Re:Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, I'm not saying that non-physical shots shouldn't be done, merely that CGI enables them to be overdone. The Matrix is a case in point: the Wachowskis were careful to use impossible shots sparingly, and only use them inside the Matrix; scenes set in the "real world" were much more conservative.
There is a story that Richard Donner put up a banner in the production office for Superman which had one word on it: "verisimilitude". That's what's missing from a lot of modern effects-heavy films.
That was a great shot from Soy Cuba. I'm also reminded of the opening of A Touch of Evil.
Re:Man, animation must _really_ be evil then. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's going to take a little longer for directors to properly learn how to use the tools of their trade. Remember that ubiquitous CGI, or "the ability to create anything on screen that you want to" is a fairly new thing. And like any new tool, it tends to get overused at first, because everyone is excited about new and shiny things.
The same thing happened in the videogame industry. Unreal was one of the first shooters with colored lighting. End result: the environments looked like a radioactive clown puked all over them. The artists were so giddy to show off *colored lights* as a feature that they couldn't stop themselves from painting the environment in bright, vibrant, primary hues.
Fast-forward a decade. Programmable pixel shaders are a thing. Ooh, we can do *bloom effects*. Woohoo - crank up the bloom to 11! Let's live in a dream world! Or maybe motion blur, or film grain. Or depth of field. None of which really make for good gameplay, and in many cases, simply distract or annoy the player.
Rinse and repeat for each new technology that comes along.
These days, the best videogame artists have learned that a light touch on these effects are often better than slapping you in the face with them. I'm really hopeful Hollywood directors eventually learn the same thing.
Re: (Score:2)
I stopped feeling things when I was four. Thanks to Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, my perceptions were all made of ink.
There's a good analogy here. Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera, and even John K cartoons were funny in a way that Seth MacFarlane is not.
Re: (Score:2)
I thought he meant Seth Green, Dr Evil's ginger offspring.
Re: (Score:3)
If you will allow me to go off on a tangent - I wonder if people will eventually get tired of all these special effects and animations that are realer than reality. I haven't watched movies for years, really, other than idly sitting in on whatever was on the telly when I felt to wasted to do something meaningful. I watched factual programmes for a while, but even they are now full of irrelevant and unrealistic effects that I can only presume were gratifying for the team to produce - they certainly do nothin
Compared to 430 computerized shots in the original (Score:5, Insightful)
> Compared to 430 computerized shots in the original Independence Day movie, for instance, the new one has
> 1,750 digitized shots.
I don't have a fucking clue what a "computerized shot" is or how you add them up but I know that i'm not amazed by anything in movies any more. Not visually, anyway. Nobody is amazed by something they've seen before. Computer graphics are part of the language of movies now; you can't make a sci-fi movie without them, so the focus should be on the story, acting, pacing etc. A lot of movies use graphics the way a lot of movies use car chases - to replace any vaguely meaningful plot. Graphics aren't going to go away, but i'm not sure it's possible to read anything into how no-one really cares about them; it should be obvious.
Re: (Score:2)
I could make a sci-fi movie without having to resort to computer generated visual effects.
It's not all flying saucers and shit.
1984 being right in there with a movie you could shoot with one camera and no computer to be seen.
Re: (Score:3)
You could shoot 1984 with a piece of clear glass....
Re: (Score:3)
location location location. If you want a built-up ruin, there's that beach resort Hitler had built to house workers on holiday that wasn't occupied for what, forty years? Most of it's still empty. You could basically walk in and shoot a movie in there. If you don't fancy a trip to Germany, there's wilderness locations everywhere. Seven miles up the road from me there's an abandoned railway station, and right next to that there's a spot where it's so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat. The 2006 Shane Mea
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt it. Some people just hate everything.
Re: (Score:3)
After a horrific indoor studio accident involving a real helicopter crashing to the ground and killing two actors,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_accident That sounds like what you are talking about, but it was outdoors, and 3 dead (two children). Not an exact match, but close.
Pixels SUCKED. (Score:4, Insightful)
A Good Thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe this will get us back to the idea that movies should portray a story instead of a bunch of action shots blowing things up and a line or two of dialog here and there.
Well, that should put Michael Bay out work then, and good thing too [penny-arcade.com]
Re:A Good Thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
It really doesn't help that any time you criticize the story, you are so often met with the following classic comment: "Oh, shut up, it's just a movie. I enjoyed it."
No, that movie had a shit story which was riddled with plot holes, both of which you failed to become aware of because the filmmakers were shaking rattles and dangling shiny things in front of you.
Obligatory Harry Plinkett review and filmmaking 101 class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
A good blockbuster action flick doesn't need a great story
The quality of a story is not a binary thing. A story is not either great or shit. Action movies indeed do not need a great, thought-provoking story, but if the story is inconsistent or full of plot holes it is shit and should be allowed to be called out as such.
People get their panties in a bunch when you dare call movies they liked shit and start attacking you for being a killjoy and start throwing all kinds of straw men at you. Instead, they should just accept that they like shitty low-quality things fro
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that the second part of that (fictitious) reply was not very constructive. It is something I would think as such but generally utter in a paraphrased manner.
Do note however that in this hypothetical (but common) situation, the first real aggression comes from the "oh, shut up"-part. People feel personally insulted when you criticize something they like, in this case (the quality of) a movie. Even though I would not be insulting them personally, they would experience it as such and proceed to attack
Re: (Score:2)
Why? What makes you think that action scenes have taken the place of the script? The person responsible for the one has nothing to do with the other.
There's no reason at all to believe that cutting back on digital camera work will make the script any better.
A well made miniature is still better (Score:4, Informative)
Go watch 2001, a Space Odyssey again. It was done with miniatures and painted glass mattes. It still feels a lot more real than a lot of modern movies.
Re: (Score:2)
No. 2001 was one of the first 'eye candy' movies. It suffered from it. Can you stay awake through the space docking sequence?
'Forbidden Planet' was an old movie with about the right amount of special effects (and a beautiful pair of tits!)
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen 2001 about seven times and I've never fallen asleep. A lot of Kubrick's work is like that, more contemplative and more willing to let a shot linger without trying to punch it up with dramatic sound tracks or explanatory dialogue.
Re: (Score:2)
shit taste plebeian detected
the docking sequence is awesome
Re: (Score:3)
No. 2001 was one of the first 'eye candy' movies. It suffered from it. Can you stay awake through the space docking sequence?
There were quite a few movies in the era that moved much more slowly than movies now do. I somewhat prefer the long takes of yesteryear to the current "cut every 1.5s" trend.
'Forbidden Planet' was an old movie with about the right amount of special effects (and a beautiful pair of tits!)
Maybe I got distracted by the tits! I was very young when I first saw it, and I found the Creature of the ID to be absolutely amazing. Watched it again yesterday, and the ID monster leaves a LOT to be desired. The practical effects and the matte paintings are still fantastic, but the lasers and the ID creature during the fight used low
Re: (Score:2)
or the city scenes in Bladerunner.
According to the included documentaries in the SE box set, only one camera was used, with up to 16 overlaid exposures per frame.
Re: (Score:2)
There were awful miniatures and there were awful matte paintings. Today there is awful CG.
For every 2001 there was a 2000 and 2 buck rogers from the 30th centuries with shoddy miniature work. Today for every rushed CG shot in a film there were 3,000 you didn't even realize were CG because they were perfect.
Every time someone whines about the quality of a CG shot I remind them of what things used to look like:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_grTE... [blogspot.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Trumbull is a master was special effects, and nowhere is this seen better than 2001. After all these years, it still remains the most accurate portrayal of space ever made. The only jarring part, and this can't be pinned on Trumbull, is the scenes on the Moon where no one shows any indication they're walking on the Moon itself. But the docking scenes and the various scenes in and around Discovery are still breathtaking.
Re: (Score:2)
Go watch 2001, a Space Odyssey again. It was done with miniatures and painted glass mattes. It still feels a lot more real than a lot of modern movies.
Gerry Anderson. Not only actual models but actual pyrotechnics! Theres nothing like stuff actually catching fire and exploding!
Of course, these days, in Hollywood there would be some major insurance and litigation issues to cover so use of real pyrotechnics in movie making has to be a thing of the past in North America.
It's the story stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
"An article on Motherboard today investigates the reasons why people didn't go "oh-my-god, that was awesome" looking at the CGI-based scenes in the recent movies such as Independence Day: Resurgence, Batman v Superman and X-Men: Apocalypse. "
Out of those three I only saw Batman v Superman. The problem was that it just wasn't good. Yes we are past the point where CGI alone will make us happy. Take a look at Captain America Civil war for example. It was chocked full of special effects but it also had some kind of story and frankly a sense of humor.
Re: (Score:3)
Though the article acknowledges that this could be the result of some poor-acting, spotty storyline, or bad editing
They acknowledge the fact that the films just aren't very good. But then they go looking for other things to blame the suck on.
Re:It's the story stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
I blame piracy.
Re: (Score:3)
Out of all of those I just saw *the worst of the lot*. Seriously Batman vs Superman was just garbage. The rest of those however were a visual treat as well as a good story that stood up on their own.
But then that's no surprise. Man of Steel and the Watchmen were okay, but the rest of Zack Snyder's movies can only be described as woeful.
Re: (Score:3)
As a counterpoint, the story of Mad Max was by no means great or compelling. Heck, the main character spends the first quarter of of the film grunting through a steel mask/gag. That didn't stop the movie from being nominated for ten Oscars and winning six, including best picture.
Re: (Score:2)
No Mad Max film has won best picture at the Oscars, though Fury Road was nominated for it.
Hey you Pixels, get off my lawn (Score:2)
Stargate Lesson (Score:3)
Re:Stargate Lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been writing software for the visual effects industry since 1992, and software I've written was used extensively in both Stargate and Forrest Gump (among hundreds of others). Having gotten into digital film post production since the beginning, I've always had a keen eye for visual effects, especially the "invisible effects" that my software was used heavily for. I would go to movies with friends and occasionally exclaim "wow, did you SEE that?" when clearly they didn't think anything "special" had happened. I once overheard a lady complain during Forrest Gump that it was a shame they made that poor actor with no legs run around and stuff for most of the movie on fake legs - he must have been very uncomfortable. I'd routinely watch a movie twice in row - the first time to check out the effects and the second time to actually "watch the movie".
As the quality of visual effects has increased, especially their exponential use in invisible effects, it is quite a bit more difficult to "see" effects in most movies these days. I still keep an eye out for bad composites (matte edges, grade matching, DoF/angle matching, grain matching, etc) and unrealistic CG, but I'm always really happy at the end of many films where I forgot to look for effects at all and just get sucked into the movie. Sometimes I'll just say "that movie SUCKED. But the visual effects were AWESOME!". It's been fascinating to watch (and be involved with) the evolution of visual effects over the past 25 years.
Re:Stargate Lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I'll just say "that movie SUCKED. But the visual effects were AWESOME!".
This is the reason that for the Academy Awards each category, save Best Picture, is voted on only by the members in that category. A movie can absolutely suck but have great music or amazing editing. The people who work in a field know for what to look when they watch and know good work when it happens.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
if you can find it, the ACM SIGGRAPH's "Story of Computer Graphics" (http://www.siggraph.org/movie/) from 2000 credits 1982's "Tron" as being the first film with significant computer graphics. There is a lot of discussion from people who worked on the CGI about how they did it.
However, to a man, they all said that they walked out of the theater saying, "Meh." They realized that the effects can't make the movie, there has to be something more.
bullshit about nothing (Score:2)
lots of movies come out and the reason people like them has nothing to do with how much is life-like and everything to do with how it's presented.
this article is bullshit about nothing.
Yes but no. (Score:3)
While the point is valid, the 3 movies listed were hot garbage for reasons completely divorced from their special effects.
Though ... there could be a correlation. CGI effects are cheap, plentiful and ultimately disposable. Didn't like a shot? Just tweak a few setting and re-render. Try it 10 more times. Did an actor screw up? Just fix it in post.
Conversely, something like Mad Max: Fury Road, Alien, or Nightmare Before Christmas all require meticulous planning, careful coordination and the utmost dedication to each and every take. Things are literally blowing up, there's tangible blood splashing across the actors faces, and every scene in a stop-motion movie is hours and hours of tiny movements that can't be easily reshot.
So, I don't think it's the CGI itself causing this problem, but rather the environment it fosters.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Though ... there could be a correlation. CGI effects are cheap, plentiful and ultimately disposable. Didn't like a shot? Just tweak a few setting and re-render. Try it 10 more times. Did an actor screw up? Just fix it in post.
Conversely, something like Mad Max: Fury Road, Alien, or Nightmare Before Christmas all require meticulous planning, careful coordination and the utmost dedication to each and every take. Things are literally blowing up, there's tangible blood splashing across the actors faces, and every scene in a stop-motion movie is hours and hours of tiny movements that can't be easily reshot.
I've heard Ben Browder (Farscape) claim the exact opposite of what you're saying (I think it was in this video [youtube.com] ). Basically he said (paraphrasing):
- CG is very expensive
- consequently the whole dialog is heavily scripted in advance, to the point where the actors come in, stand in their assigned spots (to match the CG), do a few takes to say their lines, and leave
- this kills any improvisation, and gives actors little room to put more into the performance
- so the end result looks very slick, but is lacking "s
Re: Yes but no. (Score:2)
Re:Yes but no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please stop with this meme. When we talk about CGI we are talking about complete computer remakes of entire scenes for no reason, often even rendering the main cast themselves.
Mad Max stood out against this. Every scene had some CGI but that was window dressing to the core components of the action scenes which were shot in a way that is basically unique in modern cinema.
Re: (Score:3)
So they drove through a giant fire tornado?
Yes they drove. In the vehicles that were built for the shoot. That is exactly what I was saying. Every other movie would have just animated the cars and the people on it from the ground up.
No one is in denial about the use of CGI. You're just completely missing the point of both what is being said about Mad Max and the entire discussion here at hand.
Re: (Score:3)
Which goes to the point: it's not the abundance of CGI that's the problem, it's the lack of practical effects. Practical effects help bring the actors into the movie, which in turn helps bring the audience in.
The actors reacting appropriately to the effects is quite important (as any B-movie knows: if you can't afford the effect, just focus on the reaction and skip the shot). It's really hard for even good actors to react appropriately to something they can't see.
Re: Yes but no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. And to take it a step further, it's harder for the entire crew to get fully invested in a film that's all green screen.
"Pretend there's a giant dragon or something," will simply never create the atmosphere of the giant animatronic Rex from Jurassic Park.
Lazy atmosphere begets lazy writing, lazy acting, lazy production.
no, ID:R really did suck (Score:2)
SPOILER ALERT: they beat the aliens again with impossible technological crossover and obscene luck. Really, it was ID4 again only this time they fixed the tidal influence issue (and made a major plot point out of it yet STILL managed to fuck it up), stretched the suspension of disbelief thing WAY too far by trying to have us believe that surviving aliens built a twenty mile wide, five high structure out in the middle of the desert and in twenty years NOBODY spotted it... there's so much wrong with the movie
Scale Matters (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a moderate fear of heights. I nonetheless flew in an ultralight aircraft once, in which there is no cockpit or other physical separation between you and several hundred or thousand feet from the ground. I recommend it - the purity of that form of flight is really something.
During this flight, I discovered an interesting phenomenon: up to a certain point, the distance between me and the ground was causing me quite a bit of unease. As we climbed higher, that unease went away. My working hypothesis was that my brain, evolved for life close to the ground, was able to comprehend distances of a few hundred feet, but after that it became unable to and everything became pretty abstract at that point.
Same thing with movies and CGI: once you leave the scale that represents actual human reality, you lose the emotional connection. Seeing ONE building fall down, or a chestburster popping out of ONE guy's chest is comprehensible. It's relatable. Your brain can connect to that. When entire cities are blown up or the world ends for the umpteenth time on film, it's just pure spectacle. It's not a relatable experience, and you'll never be able to emotionally connect to it in the same way.
Ridley Scott (Score:5, Insightful)
The first Alien movie... the one with Kane and the Nostromo... was directed by Ridley Scott, not James Cameron.
FFS, Slashdot. Why the head do you call yourself editors if you can't be bothered to, you know, edit. If you're going on posting this luddite, "Oh noes, substanceless technology is disconnecting us from reality." crap, at least get the basic facts upon which you're basing your argument correct.
Less is More (Score:4, Insightful)
Pet peeve (Score:2)
It's all pixels. Anything you watch on any pixel-based display will be pixels.
If you mean CGI, say CGI.
Re: (Score:2)
Confirmation bias at its finest (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a simple recipe: have an opinion and then mine the past for confirmation of this opinion. If the amount of CGI in a film is inversely proportional to how much audiences like it, then Avatar should have been a failure and Waterworld should have swept the Oscars. You can make the exact opposite argument just as well by simply picking different films.
If the author wants to test this theory he needs to find a way to predict the success of the film based on his hypothesis before the fact, not after.
It's not CGI, it's familiarity (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember when Jurassic Park came out, how impressed we all were with the dinosaurs?
Remember when T2 came out, how impressive the liquid metal man was?
The problem isn't that CGI is "bad". It's just a technique, that can be used well or poorly like anything else. It's mature enough now that you can use it a whole lot. But there's nothing intrinsic about it that makes it less impressive or less verisimilitudinous or less worthwhile to watch than other filmic techniques.
The real problem is that "lots of things moving at once look at the spectacle!" is no longer novel. We have scads of movies every year come out that show us that. So, when Jurassic Park had cool dinosaurs, it was *the* movie that had that. When Return of the Jedi had fighters flying all over the place in a massive space battle that upped the ante from the previous two Star Wars movies, it was fresh and cool and new.
Nowadays, that's just same old, same old. You can no longer impress by having lots of specatcle out there, because audiences have been there and seen that. it doesn't matter how you accomplish it -- CGI or otherwise. CGI only gets blamed because that's how people usually accomplish it nowadays. Maybe you can blame CGI because that's what made it cheap engouh to be overused so much. But it's not CGI itself.
Done well, it still entertains. Somebody else has already mentioned Mad Max. As another example, the speedster running through the exploding house scene from [i]X-Men: Apocalypse[/i] was a lot of fun, because there was more to it than just spectacle. The same movie at the end had lots of crap flying all over the places in a special effects spectacular, and it was kind of boring, because it was just gratuitous spectacle for the sake of spectacle, and that's old hat.
The word you are looking for is NOISE (Score:5, Interesting)
The secret sauce is noise.
Here is a picture of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace [wikimedia.org]
Top: Real
Bottom: CG
They have both the SAME number of pixels, which means it must be the colors which are different.
Peter Jackson (used to) deeply understands using miniatures and bigatures to convey the "warmth" and "depth" with unique texturing and realistic lighting.
George Lucas on the other does not understanding anything about noise. Notice how the bottom textures look all bland. Everything looks fake and plastic. The word "Sterile" comes to mind.
It isn't about less, but more. Namely adding noise so objects look more realistic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He wasn't responsible for the special effects in the original Star Wars though.
* http://www.starwars.com/news/t... [starwars.com]
* http://www.wired.com/2013/02/s... [wired.com]
I'm not going to RTFA (Score:2)
If the summary is even remotely close to what this and is suggesting, then it appears he really thinks that an overabundance of CGI is what makes people indifferent to films, and not the complete dearth of decent storytelling, character development, acting, and direction. I cannot RTFA...if I do I'll spend every 3 sentence griping to myself about what a useless idiot the author is, and how the article is pure tripe...
This would not be good for my mood or my evening. I'll pass.
Sort of like 3D (Score:2)
This reminds me of why 3D has never really impressed me that much, because it is used as the end all be all, instead of something to enhance a story that is good on its' own right. The CGI in the battle sequences of the Lord of the Rings movies is very impressive and was just used as an aid to a critical part of the story rather than for the wow effect. With the ability to animate effects and the entire world of literature to draw on, why is it Hollywood seems to just reboot the same lame crap over and over
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Lloyd's work is extraordinary, still some of the most breathtaking stunts ever filmed.
I also think of Metropolis, with all its ingenious use of mirrors, camera angles, forced perspective and all the tricks of the day. Lang was a genius (as well as being one of the first directors for whom the epithets "tyrant" or "dictator" could be ascribed), and some of the shots, even in this age of over the top special effects, still seem very impressive. Again, it's because you have to ask yourself "How did he do that?
Jackie Chan (Score:2)
See also Jackie Chan, the inheritor of Harold Lloyd's mantle.
Safety Last (Score:2)
Standard old-fart rant about new media (Score:2)
The whole article reeks of "fake effects were so much realer in my day". While his underlying point about ongoing desensitisation in society is valid, the focus on "pixels" as the new bad guy is merely echoing the same old complaints about new-fangled technology that we've heard since Plato.
At the time, when spectators saw red stuff, they saw blood.
No, they saw fake blood, as stated a couple sentences earlier. Imagine how much more genuine the actors' expressions would've been with REAL blood! But that isn't used because it has a few notable drawbacks, so a realist
Less to do with CGI (Score:4, Insightful)
Avatar is calling says "WUT ?" (Score:2)
The new independence is bad and unengaging because it is bad and unengaging and a sequel to a movie that wasn't that great.
It has nothing to do with CGI vs Practical effects.
The perspective of a 3D animation professional (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just like the way people whined that color film had ruined the medium, and the ones before them who whined about talkies and yearned for the days of silent films.
I started at the NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory in 1981 and left Pixar in 2000. These days I produce or am on screen once in a while.
While I was at NYIT they weren't story oriented, and thus all you see of them is demos. Pixar, on the other hand, always put story first. We knew that we could not make a film stand up on effects alone.
Today, a good 3D animation house can make absolutely any scene they like. And thus there isn't anything special about doing so. It's there if it needs to be there to tell the story, and not otherwise.
Re: (Score:3)
Mad Max is an example of CGI used right. Almost all of the stunts and scenes involved real actors and practical effects while computer imagery was used to put everything together and fill in backgrounds.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Compare The Hobbit to Max Max (Score:4, Insightful)
I loved Mad Max, but it's in the same blue and orange palette hollywood is obsessed with. Mad Max scenes were shot in full [Namibian desert] daylight, so it looked brighter, but undeniably blue and orange. Read here: http://priceonomics.com/why-ev... [priceonomics.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, yes the Portal colour scheme. That annoyed the crap out of me, too.
Having said that, to be fair, there are only so many ways you can adjust Namibia to look like country Australia minus all the plants. Do an image search for "Coober Pedy" or "Mallee" some time and you'll see what I mean.
Re: (Score:2)
Do an image search for "Coober Pedy"
I'm half afraid to. Should I set the browser on safe search?
Re:Compare The Hobbit to Max Max (Score:4, Informative)
I liked the cracked.com take on it [cracked.com] which was written when the trailers for Jurassic World and the new Terminator movie came out. It pointed out six big mistakes that many CG-heavy movies make, and many times it's not just the effects shots that are to blame for why it looks unrealistic. Summarized:
6) Lack of visual restraint where you can make objects move in unrealistic ways when everything else in the movie obeys the laws of physics.
5) Color grading nightmares. Jurassic World had this dreary blue/grey sheen over every shot, digital or not. It made the whole movie look poor.
4) CGI was originally used as a last resort. Entire scenes weren't created CG, you had, say, close-ups of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park using animatronics, and that gave CG artists a baseline to match when lighting their digital creatures.
3) Most films forget a camera needs to exist. In wholly-digital shots, many directors feel the need to zip the virtual camera around in ways we couldn't possibly move -- and again, it just adds to sense of unrealism. I liked the Misty Mountains bridges/etc sequence from the first Jackson Hobbit movie as an example.
2) Uncanny Valley -- this can be triggered by miniatures as well. We also knew when CG didn't look quite right, so Jurassic Park did the smart thing by hiding most of it in the rain and dark. Some of the daytime outdoor scenes look terrible by today's standards, while the T-Rex rain attack still holds up.
1) I'm not sure the author really made his point well here, but it was something about how big effects sequences should have a build-up (first two Jurassic Park movies) and awe.
Re: (Score:3)
Getting creatures right isn't easy either. Again Avatar did a decent job, but look at the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Compare The Hobbit to Max Max (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As a side note, really wish they had made areal Halo movie.
I think they should make fewer movies of video games (or, if you must, do something like the upcoming Assassin's Creed and set a new story in the same universe). Movies are too short to get across the amount of story that you can fit into a video game.
A better alternative would be the epic TV genre which is all the rage at the moment. Imagine the Halo trilogy told over three seasons, 13 episodes each.
Compare anything to Jackie Chan (Score:5, Interesting)
The best part of a Jackie Chan flick is the credit sequence out takes. In them you get to see how they filmed jackie chan jumping off a bridge onto a moving overcraft, how he lept between two buildings and nailed the fire escape, or how they made it look like he sledded off a cliff and grabbed a helicopter landing rail.
answers: He sledded off a cliff and grabbed a helicopter landing rail. No nets. He jumped off the building. No nets. he jumped off the bridge onto the hovercraft. he broke his leg. So they re-shot it with him doing it again this time in a cast that had been painted to look like the tennis shoe he was supposed to be wearing.
Seriously, when you know the guy is doing an insane stunt in a cast, one doesn't really need more and more and more to make it exciting. Watching Iron man plummet from the vacuum of space just isn't very thrilling compared to any dumb stunt jackie pulls off. I really dont' even mind he wears a safety wire when they are spinning him around at the end of ladder on a flying helicopter. it somehow doesn't ruin it for me. :-)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That may be part of it too. I compare the space battle for Star Wars Episode IV with Episode III, and you can see the problem. The final Death Star battle scene sequence feels a lot like a WWII air battle (I'm sure that was intentional). There are quite a few fighters, but not huge numbers, and the shots aren't filled with wall to wall laser blasts, explosions and other visual noise. Compare that to the opening battle of Episode III, and it's like watching a film directed by someone with ADD. And the reason
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"A large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium."
Creativity comes not from the ability to do absolutely anything you want, but from the restrictions put on the process of what you are creating.