CGI Is Starting to Suck

I think both sentiments are saying the same thing two different ways. If the implementation is bad, then it sucks.

I agree 100%. There wasn't a lot of guts in the movie (aside from the people torn limb from limb). The film's structure and character development was really bizarre, a total "one from column A, two from column B" kind of script like they were just throwing in random bullet points:

• kids upset with parents' impending divorce? Check.
• reluctant hero who knows more than the scientists? Check.
• dinosaurs who are far more deadly and dangerous than the experts believe? Check.
• rich, arrogant people who think they're the smartest people in the room, only they live to find out they're terribly wrong? Check.
• random people killed in horrible ways? Check.
• unexpected help from other dinosaurs? Check.
• kids who get out of control and have to be rescued at inopportune moments? Check.
• unreliable computers and machines that don't work at just the wrong time? Check.
• a finale when everybody barely gets away (but without any explanation of the dinosaurs that are now loose, like about 5000 Pterodactyls)... Check.

I don't deny it made an ocean of money, but it's not nearly as thoughtful and evocative as the first film. Jurassic World got a 71% score from critics on the RottenTomatoes website; I'd give it a 60, myself -- not awful, not very good, but good.

 

My wife and I finally got around to watching this movie that you recommended and it was AMAZING! Being a huge fan of George Roy Hill's "Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid" and "The Sting", I'm really not sure how this one has escaped me for all these years? After watching it, I did a little web searching to find out more about it and was surprised to find out that George Roy Hill was a huge fan of flying himself and that he became a pilot. He supposedly even has a scene as a pilot (uncredited), in his later film "The World According To Garp", of which I'm also a fan of. George sure did make some great and hugely interesting films, in his lifetime.

 

Here's another short clip from a guy on the topic ... he sums up many of the points raised here.

 

good stuff here.

 

Indeed it is not the effects but the picture they are a part of. I could care less how ropey a SFX shot can look as long as the story is engaging. Think about how used we had gotten to poor rear projection in every car shot. Because there were actually established characters inside that car we were focused on them and not the obvious fakery of the car mockup and soft focused location footage.

 

I actually quite like “Jurassic World”, probably more than most here, and I’ve seen it several times now. But I fully acknowledge that relatively little practical effects are in it, and certainly nothing as impressive as the T-Rex built for the original “Jurassic Park”, or the Triceratops for that matter. I appreciate the practical work they did do, but it could have been much, much more.

The main practical dinosaur effect in “Jurassic World” is that Apatosaurus, for which they made the head and a bit of the neck. That’s the only substantial practical/physical dinosaur which shows a decent amount of the animal and hasn’t been re-touched with a bunch of CGI, and I’d argue that while the work is good, it’s probably not as impressive as the Triceratops from the 1993 film. Other little partial bits of dinosaurs are occasionally practical (a shot of the Indominus Rex snout/jaw when Chris Pratt is under the car), a couple of beak shots during the flying attack scenes. Disappointingly, while it appears a few of the stationary, “muzzled” shots of the Raptors were practical, they overlaid a TON of CGI over their faces to the point where it looks completely like CGI.

Again, I really like “Jurassic World”; I strangely enjoy it a lot more than I should. And I’m not making one of the back-handed compliment reviews. I haven’t re-watched something like this in theaters in eons. But it did not have nearly as many impressive practical dinosaur effects compared to the original “Jurassic Park.”

 

Bad VFX reportedly abound in the new Fantastic Four bomb:

“It seems at a certain point that with a release date to hit and only so much they could do without pushing the movie back, 20th Century Fox just threw up their hands and cobbled together what they had. The special effects are often lousy in ‘Fantastic Four,’ with poorly rendered CGI backdrops that make the fact that the actors are all standing on a soundstage all the more apparent, and this is particularly glaring during the climax.”

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplayl...mara-jamie-bell-and-michael-b-jordan-20150805

 

Thanks to CGI we'll get the Gumby & Pokey movie the world has been asking for, good and hard.

 

Here's a recent round-up of bad VFX in 10 very expensive blockbuster Hollywood films. I think he could've added a lot more, and there are worse examples of bad CGI -- the boat and water in King Kong to me were by far the worst thing in the movie -- but at least it helps explain why VFX look bad and what artists look for in VFX that actually work well:



When I see bad VFX, I generally burst out laughing and say, "oh, god, I can't believe somebody approved this!" And you see bad or marginal CGI in a lot of fairly big projects. The $30 million pilot for Martin Scorsese's Vinyl had a big climactic scene where a building collapsed, and it totally looked like a video game to me. Could it have been better? I think maybe they tried to reach a little beyond their grasp in terms of what was achievable on a TV budget.

 

I think it's getting better all the time and I'm digging it!

 

CGI! it's here to stay like it or not...

 

interesting...Hmmm.

 

It always comes down to the budget. CGI technology allows for uber realistic renderings (just look at the stuff that;s routinely showcased at SIGGRAPH), but high quality takes (rendering) time which means it's expensive.

For a movie which uses CGI for every other shot, that means either extreme production costs or cutting corners to get something that's 'good enough for the budget". When you settle for good enough or even choose effects which cannot yet, even technically, be achieved realistically or convincingly, then you get awful looking CGI.

 

It's actually due far more often to time, not for budget reasons. I've worked on quite a few projects where what got shipped was maybe the 12th or 13th attempt at redoing a VFX shot, and it just wasn't any better because the movie had to be delivered on a certain date. Giving us even another $100,000 still wouldn't have made available the 3-4 days necessary to redo it yet again.

As the guy says in his commentary, some of the horrific effects we see were from ILM, and they pretty much have this stuff down as good or better than anybody in the world. My bet is that they just ran out of time, and what we got was a temp effect they were hoping to replace.

I worked on a famous TV series about 10 years ago where we had to send out an episode where the blue screen VFX never got in the network version of the show. The VFX house finally came through with the shots about 2 days late, so it did make the syndicated and home video versions. But bad things happen under stress and pressure.

 

Right, but if they're redoing an effect 12+ times, then that would suggest to me that the state of the art to do that particular effect isn't there yet, so they shouldn't have been attempting it in the first place. It's an example of using CGI where it should not be used (or perhaps a different VFX house might have done better). But then again, how many film producers actually know what is technically feasible to pull off and what isn't? I'm sure most of them think yeah, just CGI it, no worries...

 

I just want to know whose backside that is at the 00:18 mark...

 

Margot Robbie's (Suicide Squad).

 

That's the cinematic equivalent of music production's "We'll just fix it in the mix", isn't it?

 

"Recent" is kind of a stretch, none of the featured movies came out in even the last 10 years. Many of them are 10-15 years ago.

The video intro indicated we were going to see some recent and new movie clips, and many of the featured clips appearing from current trailers, then it goes in a completely different direction.

My first thought seeing this new video was, welcome to 10 years ago.

 

He didn't save it enough, it's still droning... a good ten to fifteen minutes too long.

None any more, not after three consecutive massive flops in a row...

This.

CGI is simply a tool, a means to an end, it's how people use it that matters... Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers still looks terrific nearly two decades later, whilst some movies look awful two weeks later, it's not what you have, it's how you use it.

 

isn't CGI just auto-tune for movies?

 

No.

 

I would generally agree that no, CGI isn't "auto tune for movies", but the analogy isn't 100% off. Anybody ever seen this one?:




The “Timothy Hines” version of “War of the Worlds”, set in the story’s original turn of the century timeframe, literally has doors inside buildings CGI’ed. It’s something to behold.

I would say movies of this ilk, stuff like some “Syfy Channel” movies, are kind of using CGI as an autotune-ish sort of crutch.

 

so it isn't used to fix things that aren't fixable in real life?

 

CGI can be used to correct mistakes, but it does a lot more than that. It's not just used for that purpose...