This isn't specifically directed at anyone on Horrorthon, but the topic does come up here, so I figured it's an appropriate place for this rant. I just finished watching the Coen brothers' True Grit (which had me bawling like a baby) and thought it was maybe the most perfect Western I've ever seen. While watching the end titles I saw a credit for the digital effects house Luma Pictures (whom I'd actually heard of because of their work on a couple of the Marvel superhero movies). I thought back over the movie and tried to guess what they'd done, and my guesses were correct (all the falling snow, and the extension of the Arkansas town in the top image above).
I'm so tired of reading and hearing people complain about CGI in movies, when (in my opinion) CGI is the best thing to happen to cinema since Technicolor, or maybe even sound. The complaints are universally based on a willfully ignorant point of view and a nonsensical argument.
Pre-digital special effects, almost without exception, look like special effects. They're nearly impossible to miss. The matte paintings of depression-era Chicago in The Sting; the model London rooftops in Murder by Decree; the tilted "out-the-window" backdrops in countless movies: they all look fake. You accept the fakeness; it's part of the "magic of movies."
But CGI changes all that. The four images above are the afforementioned True Grit (in which the long main street of the town is not a static image at all; it's glimpsed in the background of a dozen sweeping shots with people and horses moving in the foreground); Saving Private Ryan (where the Allied fleet off the coast of Normandy, including battleships and dirigibles, is made to match exactly to actual D-Day photographs); Quantum of Solace (which is filled with undetectable CGI like this bell-tower shootout in Siena) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (in which Cate Blanchett's head is attached to a real ballet dancer's body). All flawless, all undetectable, all expedient, showing you things you could never see without twenty times the budget (which is why something like Heaven's Gate was so expensive; Michael Cimino had to build the town of Casper, Wyoming circa 1890).
The only time people realize they're seeing CGI is when the image depicts something clearly impossible (like Asgard, or the starship Enterprise, or Iron Man flying around). Suddenly the audience realizes that it's got to be a trick, and they say, "Oh -- CGI." And then they complain about what they're seeing as if the CGI itself is to blame (rather than the creative decisions that went into determining what the shots would look like). Everyone starts bitching about how CGI intrinsically "looks fake," so why can't they do it the old way (where, as I've said, you can't possibly miss the effects shots; they stand out like a sore thumb even before anything happens in them because the film's been fed through an optical printer and has lost its first-generation crispness). It's bad logic and lazy thinking. If a little light came on next to the screen every time a digital effect was in use, people would realize how unbelievably great CGI is and would stop bitching. But this doesn't happen, so people stare at dozens and dozens of wonderful, difficult, artistic (and cost-saving!) CGI effects, not even realizing it, and then say they "hate" CGI. I wish people would wise up, that's all I'm saying. (I just had to vent.)
11 comments:
The people you're talking about sound so stupid I'm actually curious to read some of this. I'm reminded of your parents' dinner guest several New Year's Eves ago who, in a conversation about rude cell phone usage, suddenly fanned out to complain about people using their iPods in the park. "They can't unplug!" she said, as if listening to Iggy Pop and enjoying Sheep Meadow were mutually exclusive. In an instant the conversation went from "people on cell phones can be rude" to "I'm an old lady and I experience future shock daily!"
More to come...
It sounds to me like the people you're talking to just want to bitch about something, and you've hit on a new example of common-use sloppy thinking. I hear a lot of griping about CGI at work, and because I work in stop-motion I can't say none of the speakers "just want to bitch." But at least I know they can tell the difference between the deft work in True Grit etc. and CG character animation, which is what the CGI haters would probably say if they knew what they were talking about.
Bitching about CG just because you know something (like Asgard) can't be real -- that's stupid, because Asgard looked freaking fantastic (and much as I love model spaceships, so does most CG spaceship footage). But CG character animation is still easy to spot, so it's easy to target. It can still look freaking fantastic; I wasn't convinced by the simians in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but I found them to be great characters. I think haters like to act like they've cracked some code because they can tell is something is CGI, and in doing so I think they block themselves from some amazing entertainment.
Still more...
The gripe we toss around a lot here at H-thon is that CG monsters tend not to be as effectively scary as their real-world counterparts; I've said it myself many times. But that's specific to the needs of our genre; scaring your audience is a delicate thing, and any tell that the danger isn't real can blow the whole mood.
Plus, we get to see a lahhhhhht of bad CG up in here.
Two random notes:
Since Jurassic Park was initially going to be animated with stop-motion or go-motion or whatever (puppets), they had a staff of animators on hand who did supply the movements after the CG switch was made. This would not last; CG character animation soon became all "key frame" animation, where the animator says what the character will be doing in specific moments and the computer fills in the intervening moves. This is all according to someone I spoke to at work, and his point was that CG character animation took a big step backwards that day.
I saw Tintin over the holidays and I wasn't very impressed. They got the spirit of it right, but there was too much exposition and the people looked weird. I was worried they'd look even weirder than they did and that I'd have some trouble watching the movie, but it wasn't like that. I've been telling people I'd give it a B or B+.
Reading that last one I'm not sure I was clear...the switch to key frame animation happened after Jurassic and some other movies were completed and released.
I think we basically totally agree, with one caveat: elementary keyframe animation can have the drawback you're talking about, but "real" keyframe animation uses curves and acceleration and interpolation, wherein you don't just "pin" the action to keyframes but create curved graphs across time of how the movement accelerates or decelerates in between keyframes. (I've done this myself with, in particular, the camera moves in my Cord animation, where the camera speeds up and slows down as it pans around, and its movement is always smooth, or the biplanes you liked in Expando Machine Part II, which gun the engines as they pitch upward even though there's only three keyframes). Also dynamics controls movement based on gravity, elasticity, inertia, friction, etc. so that even embers bounce of fiery collisions according to real physics. If anything it's traditional stop-motion animation that is confined to frame-by-frame movement so that all interpolation and acceleration has to be handled by the animator doing the math (or estimating). So basically I'm saying either that your friend is wrong or you misunderstood (not to put too fine a point on it). Stan Winston's go-motion dinosaurs, so far as I know, were completely scrapped in favor of Dennis Muren's full-motion dinosaurs.
Ironically I just watched "A Grand Day Out" the other night and I've decided it's my favorite Wallace & Gromit specifically because it's so crude that you can really see the craft and the joy and the humor of the animation.
To be clear: Jurassic Park is filled with Stan Winston dinosaurs, but they're not CGI -- they're physical objects. All the CGI dinosaurs are keyframed.
here's the Cord "camera move" I was talking about. This is the final shot in which the camera sweeps 270 degrees all the way around the cord (while zooming its focal length, speeding and slowing). It's only five keyframes as you can see, but the curves are smoother and cleaner than you could possibly get by manually moving a real camera (unless you're Nick Park and you've got an especially good computer-controlled camera, which basically puts us back in the same boat as my virtual Maya camera revolving around the model).
Note that the graph I've posted and linked to shows the move in all three dimensions as separate curves. This was a total bitch to animate, but, as I've said, just five keyframes. If I hadn't become proficient at manipulating 2D bezier curves in Adobe Illustrator I wouldn't have been able to do it (or, it would have been much, much harder).
Point being there were more traditional animation styles at work in Jurassic, later ditched. I don't know the specifics, but I've always found the animation in that movie to be better than a lot of it's successors.
Yes, the alternate production methods were scrapped; the animators thought they were going to be fired but they weren't.
Right, that sounds correct. I just had to jump to the defense of keyframes, which are the best thing since sliced bread!
You've both lost me somewhere in all the technical jargon, but I wanted to say that CGI is awesome as a whole. Can you imagine
LOTR or Harry Potter or Titanic without it? Perhaps those complainers are watching too many SyFy channel originals with monsters that look like they were developed in the 80's.
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