Making Everything Too Darn Pretty
“Hey, CGI is great at making dinosaurs, explosions and exploding dinosaurs look awesome. Let’s use it to make everything look awesome!”
I can understand the line of thinking, but things usually go wrong once filmmakers start to apply too much CG spackle to a movie’s background elements. Movies like Avatar and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull have these super bright, crisp, colorful, detailed virtual sets — which ultimately make everything look fake.
I think some filmmakers think making movie backgrounds look like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon will help cover any cartoonishness in the CG effects and characters. That everything will come together as a cohesive Crayola-colored whole and be convincing.
James Cameron’s favorite crayon is purple.
It doesn’t really work though. Would Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs have looked more convincing if that movie took place in the primary colored plastic jungle of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Hell no. Environments that look like something that might actually exist in the real world lend an extra air of believability to CG effects. For instance, I found District 9′s aliens far more believable than Avatar’s, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that District 9 took place in a realistic looking slum, while Avatar took place in a purple and pink acid trip.
Showing Off With Big Crowd Scenes
You know the type of scenes I’m talking about — the two armies line up and the virtual camera soars across an endless field of soldiers/orcs/Jar Jar Binkses. It always looks unconvincing because the effects artists don’t have the time to detail every single figure in the horde — they just hit copy-and-paste until the field is full, and it’s obvious. Until you come up with some crazy computer program or algorithm that can actually make big crowds look convincing, please stop trying to impress us with them. It’s just not working.
Bouncing Back and Forth Between Practical and CG Effects
Superhero movies are particularly bad for this — one moment Spiderman is an actual guy in an actual costume who looks solid and believable, next he’s a rubbery CGI creation ping-ponging around the walls. The constant back-and-forth, often multiple times per minute during action scenes, just makes the CGI stick out like a sore thumb.
I say if more than 50% of your action scene is going to be done using CGI, just do the whole scene in CGI. Switching back to real people and practical effects for some shots may save a little money, but it comes at the expense of believability and cohesion. If your special effects budget is running low just cut that scene from earlier in the movie with the CG spider on the lady’s arm.
Focusing on those Dead Dead Eyes
CG effects have come a long way, but dammit, they still can’t quite do eyes. I know you want to showcase Andy Serkis’ acting, but dammit, those slow zooms into the dewy eyes of Gollum/King Kong/Caesar the chimp are always a bad idea.
Nope, not working.
Seriously, stop it.
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Jurassic Park still looks better than most CGI fests out there. That’s what happens when you use CGI only when there are no other options.
It’s kind of sad that Spielberg himself apparently has no idea why Jurassic Park still works based what he’s done recently with stuff like Crystal Skull and TinTin.
Seriously. 20 YEARS OLD and the effects still work. Alongside it, T2′s liquid effects look outdated and crappy (at least the film is well written) and yet the dinos in JP look more believable than almost anything since, including the 2 sequels.
Let’s hear it for Stan Winston
Here here!
I agree with all these points in general, but with two caveats: I thought Gollum’s eyes worked (maybe just because he already looked pretty weird), and the hypercolor CG bonanza was the entire point of Avatar. It didn’t look realistic or lifelike, but it did look very sharp and detailed and alien (which is appropriate, no?). I would imagine/hope that Cameron himself didn’t expect the movie’s story and world to be taken seriously enough that viewers being “distracted” could be a problem.
Pretty sure that Avatar patted itself on the back heavily for what a realistic and believable world they’ve created, in the computer. Just watch behind the scenes or making offs, how proud everyone is of their “realistic” animal and plant designs and making Pandora seem like a real planet when really it’s just an unbelievable fairy tale world.
*buries head in computer-generated sand*
The first point about making cameras do what cameras can’t do is one of the things I love so much about Breaking Bad – they do things with the cameras that no one has ever done before.
Eh, most of Breaking Bad is still done with real cameras — at least up until the point I’ve watched (maybe they start selling meth on Pandora in Season 3). It’s creatively shot, but it’s not like they’re computer generating all the sets and having the camera spin around wildly all the time. When they do break out the CGI it’s usually to make a specific point/joke.
@ Nate: I could be wrong, but I think that’s what he meant. They use actual cameras but are very creative how they use them. See the episode “Fly” for a good example.
I’m all for creative use of actual cameras — I just don’t like when they just computer generate the whole damn scene and the virtual “camera” is made to do things a real camera obviously couldn’t do.
Yeah, that’s what I meant – it’s done with exceptional photography, no CGI. If there has been any CGI (beyond the end of the fourth season finale), I haven’t caught it.
They miss the point all together when they use special effects now a days. THey’re called “special effects” for a reason, meaning that when used, they are supposed to be memorable, and if overused, they are just boring. Like the Star Wars prequels, for example, how many times do we have to see ships landing or taking off? Who gave a shit at the beginning of Sith when there was a huge battle in space where it looked like a clusterfuck of a pianting by an elephant holding a brush with his long nose.
Inception was the best example of using special effects for their actual purpose. Each scene that used CGI was awe inspiring, and then the hallway scenes were all practical and blew your mind. It’s no longer special if overused.
I thought that space battle was one of the better parts of Sith. It impressed me. Though I’ve always been a big fan of giant clusterfuck space battles. I guess this whole thing is a matter of perspective though. I usually know when a movie’s going to be nothing but a lightshow, and so I appreciate a good one when I see it, rather than being disappointed that things didn’t look real or whatever. I guess maybe the point here is that it sucks that those kinds of movies exist in the first place, and it’s sad that those movies so often make huge amounts of money… but bad movies would still be plentiful and profitable without the lightshow ones.
The thing about unnecessary cg in the Star Wars prequels that pissed me off the most was that all the stormtroopers were cg when they didn’t have to be. There is no good reason in the world why but every time you see a stormtrooper in Ep II and III it looks like utter shit. They even (poorly) photoshopped in the face of the actor on a cg body when he needed to say stuff with his helmet off.
@JJ
What makes the space battle in Ep. III so bad is that there’s no involvement for the viewer at all and the fact that it’s just one giant, confusing, overloaded CGI effect doesn’t help that. It’s just a big battle and we don’t know who or why or what is going on at all. We’re basically supposed to be impressed/excited just because a lot of stuff is going on. It’d be like Return of the Jedi starting in the middle of the final battle without any of the buildup, planning, increasing of tension. You wouldn’t care cause it’s just stuff happening.
And like he said, the Prequels simply overuse CGI to a massive degree because they do almost everything with it. Everything’s a green screen set and every action scene is crammed full of things happening that becomes hard to care about anything because you can tell they’re just trying to show off with how much they can do without ever stopping to ask themselves if it makes sense or makes things more interesting.
I certainly agree with xlarti about the CG stormtroopers looking lousy, and a lot of the other creature designs being ridiculously overdone — the Geonosians, for example. But I guess I’ll just have to say different strokes for different folks as far as the space battle goes. I’m pretty sure the opening text crawl provided at least some context for that battle, and if you’ve seen Episode 2, you know (or can quickly figure out) which ships belong to which side. But then again, like I said, I’m biased; I love big space battles. In fact I even own a computer game called Gratuitous Space Battles, so obviously I’m not averse to those.
Dagnabbit! I can remember when “Special Effects” was tying onions on your belt! The ladies loved it…..I can’t remember how many ankles I got to see…
In addition to the general awfulness of the entire movie, one of the things that I really hated about The Crystal Skull was the entire, overly GC’d forest chase scene. None of it looked real, and it was probably all done in stationary vehicles in front of a green screen. But the fact that they had obviously gone in and put GC dirt tails flying off the tires of Indy’s jeep was particularly insulting to me. It looked completely fake and they might as well have drawn in “speed lines” like a first grader drawing a jet flying.
Also, it seems every movie Sylvester Stallone makes now has to include all CGI blood. Which is something that technology has not advanced far enough to accurately capture. Or, maybe I’m wrong, and the phyics for CG blood are amazing, but it’s old blood packs that look completely fake. I don’t know. Luckily, I’ve never seen anyone get shot in real life. I just know that it looked like the blood effects in the Expendables was done with MS Paint.
Yeah, the jungle chase was my least favorite part of Crystal Skull too — largely because Indy has a long history of *really great* elaborate vehicle-based action scenes. It’s kind of amazing that the guy who made Raiders of the Lost Ark could look at that jungle chase scene and think “yeah, this is good enough”.
It’s simply because of the sad fact that it’s no longer the same guy. It’s an older, softer, comfortable franchise custodian rather than a FILMMAKER directing Indiana Jones.
Spielberg may occasionally be able to get the old mojo up for personal projects, but he can’t sustain it, and he brings none of it to the studio chum anymore. I mean, he got way more out of Last Crusade, Minority Report, and Munich than anyone with his sort of comfort level should be expected to, so sometimes it does work.
I have to add that Sin City used nearly all CGI (they had 3 sets I think, and used some cars) and did it wonderfully/beautifullly. However, this has become one of the exceptions.
expanding on the article’s first point, I hate it when they create CGI animals/creatures that react to things the way a human would. The cgi spiders always move the way a human would, the cgi rats and mice always have some sort of human-influenced personalty, etc. See the giant centipedes in King Kong as a great example.
The Matrix Reloaded’s fight scene with all the agent Smith’s is a really good example of the “bouncing back and forth of CG and real actors”. The entire color temperature changes. Really bothers me.