How CGI killed believability in movies!

[filmmusic 1,823]

A very interesting video that I happen to agree of course completely:

[Barnald 365]

Believability in movies? Who wants that? Give me dummies over real stuntmen any day of the week.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

He makes a lot of good points.

CGI on movies is too often rendered in such a way that everything looks so incredible sharp and in focus and "beautiful" that is subcontiously looks wrong somehow. The shots of the puppet Yoda and the CGI one is actually an excellent example.

[Bespin 8,480]

Who still go at theater watch movies?

That's so 1990s...

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

I only saw a handful of movies in the cinema in the 90's

Jurassic Park

Schindlers List

Lethal Weapon 3

The Last World: Jurassic Park

Goldeneye

The World Is Not Enough

Lethal Weapon 4

Braveheart

The Phantom Menace

Star Trek: Generations

Star Trek: First Contact

Star Trek: Insurrection

The Phantom Menace

[Romão 2,274]

King Kong is actually one of the worse offenders of what he is pointing out

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

It is. It looks mostly fake.

[Wycket 36]

I actually did a fan edit of Jackson's King Kong, and the first thing I did was turn the whole film black and white. It definitely helps make it seem a little more real, but there is definitely something wrong with these fully CGI scenes and environments. That will be why I continue to appreciate directors like JJ and Nolan who try their hardest to use CGI only when necessary. It definitely creates a more realistic experience that what most directors tend to do these days.

Hopefully the next generation of filmmakers are aware of these problems and will strive to resolve them in future films.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

While I agree with what is said in the video, I do wonder why the guy decided to call it the WETA effect, when really, it started with Lucas and the SW Prequels. He should have called it the ILM effect!

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Did TPM have all CGI backgrounds? For the none-space scenes?

[Koray Savas 2,251]

Also WETA does some of the best CGI out there.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Oh Lucas is to blame, naturally!

[Unlucky Bastard 7,782]

CGI makes movies more realistic and relatable.

[Gruesome Son of a Bitch 6,488]

We went from this:

to this:

My vintage Jabba the Hutt toy was more believable than this shit.

[crumbs 14,304]

He makes a good point. I actually think the more detail and the more texture they add to CGI, the less believable it's become.

The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park don't look better than the ones in Jurassic World, but they do fit into the frame better. I actually think The Lost World was a real benchmark of CGI dinosaurs. The Rex's in the nighttime shots look spectacular, and vastly better than the odd looking CGI version in Jurassic World.

CGI artists boast about how "believable and detailed" they've made their models now. Technically, I have no doubt they're radically more advanced, with entire skeletal and muscular structures mapped out in their models. However, this doesn't actually translate to more realistic animation, IMHO. There now appears to be too much going on, when the original films had fairly simplistic and "flatter" models.

[Gruesome Son of a Bitch 6,488]

There were numerous films in the 90s during CGI's puberty that blended the animation seamlessly (for the most part) with live action. For instance, Jurassic Park/The Lost World, Starship Troopers and TItanic. I feel like during this era, CGI was used to expand on environments and add in creatures/characters. You didn't really notice how it was all done in Titanic, you didn't question it and it was great. For all we knew, they just built the ship and filmed out at sea, then sunk it. That's not far from the truth. Now, it's like they're creating the entire movie on the computer and then adding the actors and it just ends up looking like crap. Plus, whatever is filmed for real gets filtered by the computer and looks like crap. The computers are ruining everything. I'm getting off this thing.

[Gnome in Plaid 219]

I'm not sure you can really set a hard-and-fast rule as to whether CGI works, believability-wise. I mean, there's incredible inconsistency even within movies. Look at the Hobbit films, for example. Riddles in the Dark and the Smaug death sequence were breath-taking, and in my opinion, perfectly executed. And then you have... the entire remainder of BOFA. The same goes for a lot of the prequels. One series that I think has balanced it really well is the Pirates of the Caribbean films - Davy Jones was incredible, and the Kraken sequences were awesome.

[Muad'Dib 1,801]

I think the problem is more related to how much CG we use today. Taking the first Jurassic Park as an example, they only had about 15 minutes of dinosaurs on-screen, and I believe only 5 minutes of that total was CG. So with only 5 minutes of animation and rendering, you can invest a lot more work into that to make it look as perfect as possible. Of course, some of the stuff looks dated, like the first Brachiosaurus and some of the closeups of the Raptors in the kitchen. But the T-Rex work is outstanding, in particular that incredible shot of her attacking the Gallimimus which is more impressive considering it's on broad daylight.

Now, technology has advanced a lot, and you also have lots and lots of companies competing between each other and also viewers demand more and more action, so I don't know if you could have 15 minutes of dinosaur action in a modern blockbuster movie. Certainly Jurassic World wasn't able -or interested- in doing that, and it practically has dinosaurs from beggining to end, and at least from the trailers we can tell they kept working on improving and modifying stuff practically to the last day. Having so much animation in a 2-hour live action movie ends up working against itself, as there's inevitably more stuff that's going to look really good but other stuff that's not gonna look so good, as probably they couldn't work on it as much.

For example, they kept changing the background of the first Mosasaurus scene. I kept thinking that must have been a waste of time and resources that could have been used in improving the Mosasaurus itself. Or the final fight, I keep having the feeling that that particular scene was worked on very very late on post-production -I've read somewhere that originally it had a lot of extras but they were removed. So this is another issue: changing stuff. In the early 90's there was no room for changing stuff as work progressed. Like traditional animation, the director had to be very clear about what he wanted and the animators had to be extremly precise in fulfilling that request. Considering it took about 12 hours to render one single frame, once it was done, there was no going back.

I also think Phil Tippett was a vital part in making the dinosaurs believable. It if wasn't for his stop-motion tests before the actual CG animation took place, we wouldn't have had the perfection of the muscles and weight of the dinosaurs that we have in the final movie, which is also part of the problem contemporary animation has: a lot of times they don't get the *weight* of the characters right, or at least in a way it's believable. I used an example of the trolls in The Hobbit before, where they motion-captured the actors and they seem to have coppied directly that capture into the final film. When one of the trolls falls to the ground, it's embarassing how it's so fucking light.

When the T-Rex stomps out of her pen in the first JP movie, you can feel the weight of the creature with every step, the muscle work is beyond beautiful. But again, that particular shots lasts about 10 seconds. As I said, you can spend so much time and work in perfecting an it if you're doing only about 10 seconds, but when it's full on continued minutes, it's much more difficult.

Just what I think and what I've gathered from asking some people in the business. Sorry for the long post.

[A24 4,326]

Who still go at theater watch movies?

That's so 1990s...

That's '80s even.

[Unlucky Bastard 7,782]

Movies in cinemas need to get with the times and have more in-theatre smartphone interactivity. Most people are on their phones in the cinema anyway, so why not capitalise on that?

[A24 4,326]

To sit next to someone who has more interest in his phone than the movie that is playing is quite annoying, even at home. How can you connect with a mood when you don't pay attention?

[Unlucky Bastard 7,782]

Well obviously movies are too boring to compete with social media and text messaging.

[A24 4,326]

They follow the story while reading messages. Nolan was right. The audience just want story.

[Unlucky Bastard 7,782]

Modern kids have been conditioned to multitask almost everything in their daily lives. They can follow multiple things at once.

[A24 4,326]

They can follow the story while reading and answering messages but that's about it.

[Unlucky Bastard 7,782]

Watching a Paranormal Activity movie in a cinema full of tweens is a surreal experience.

Much of the cinema is lit up by the glow of about a hundred phone screens, until the synthesised rumble appears, which signals that the demon is about to do something scary.

When this happens, the phone screens all temporarily switch off, the demon kills someone on screen, teenage girls in the audience shriek like idiots, they all laugh in relief, and then the phone screens switch back on. They're probably #tweeting about the big scare they got. #ParanormalActivity

[Balto's Claws 2]

I agree with this video. I'd also second the opinion from Michael, where Jurassic Park in its few scenes with dinosaurs made a larger impact on the audience than the newer Jurassic World simply by the way they were presented. I'm sure CGI isn't the sole reason for movies failing, but it certainly doesn't make anything more believable, like you actually might find yourself in the scene and could plausably be there.

[Gruesome Son of a Bitch 6,488]

Practical effects gave us E.T., Yoda and all those Jim Henson creatures. CGI gave us The Rock as a giant scorpion. Computers are evil.

[Matt C 452]

For example, they kept changing the background of the first Mosasaurus scene. I kept thinking that must have been a waste of time and resources that could have been used in improving the Mosasaurus itself. Or the final fight, I keep having the feeling that that particular scene was worked on very very late on post-production -I've read somewhere that originally it had a lot of extras but they were removed. So this is another issue: changing stuff. In the early 90's there was no room for changing stuff as work progressed. Like traditional animation, the director had to be very clear about what he wanted and the animators had to be extremly precise in fulfilling that request. Considering it took about 12 hours to render one single frame, once it was done, there was no going back.

I actually thought that scene in JW was exceptionally well-rendered, partly due to the nighttime setting, where you can see the weight and heft of the I-Rex and the original T-rex fighting. The daylight scenes with the dinosaurs, like the Raptor Squad, were more problematic though.

[filmmusic 1,823]

A relevant to our discussion video:

[Naïve Old Fart 9,507]

Practical effects gave us E.T., Yoda and all those Jim Henson creatures. CGI gave us The Rock as a giant scorpion. Computers are evil.

They also gave us Mark Gatis as an...I don't quite know what.

We went from this:

to this:

My vintage Jabba the Hutt toy was more believable than this shit.

It does look bad, but, to be fair, ILM had the un-enviable task of trying to make CGIs look 20 years old!

To sit next to someone who has more interest in his phone than the movie that is playing is quite annoying, even at home. How can you connect with a mood when you don't pay attention?

Quite right! If people can't cease from texting, or checking something on their cellular, for just 2 hours, then there is something wrong with them.

I always tell all my friends "do not even try to contact me on Christmas Day when "Doctor Who" is on, because I just won't answer".

If an IMAX screen that is 20 feet high, and 50 fucking feet accross, and that has a sound system that would put Pink Floyd to shame, is not enough to engage someone, then they really shouldn't bother going to the cinema at all!

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

A relevant to our discussion video:

I would point out that he uses a lot of high caliber effects in recent films to illustrate that CGI looks realistic. Unless you've got the eye for it, you'll probably not notice the flaws in those shots which give them away as facsimile.

Not until better effects supplant the current status quo. Then you'll look back on the examples in the video and go "Geez those look fake!"

If he made this in 1993 he could use the famous Brontosaurus scene that captivated audiences in Jurassic Park as evidence that CGI could look so realistic you don't even realize it's CG.

To quote a review: "Jurassic Park is a breakthrough in technology, with state-of-the-art special effects that look real enough to touch"

Second, I don't think any one is arguing with anything else he says in the video. CGI is overused ≠ CGI can't look subtle and realistic.