CGI Is Starting to Suck

Wow - that 1997 Jabba really is awful!

It didn't seem that bad to me in 1997, but I was younger and dumber then!

 

yes. back then Jonathan was around 51 and Bill is near 65 today!

 

unless they have endless pockets it has to happen...

 

Is it me or color timming looks more natural and not so pinkish on the original 1997?

 

And it was re-tweaked for the 2011 BD release, if memory serves me well.

 

No, they re-tweaked it for the 2004 Blu-ray release that I worked on. We also matched Jabba's color in the 1977 Star Wars so that he looked more-or-less exactly the same as the guy in the costume from the 1983 film.

 

What do you mean with "We also matched Jabba's color in the 1977 Star Wars so that he looked more-or-less exactly the same as the guy in the costume from the 1983 film". Jabba is mentioned on the original 1977 version of Star Wars but he doesn't show up.
I think on one of the extras of the 2011 BD release of Star Wars a new tweak of the CGI Jabba is mentioned next to the already tweaked 2004 DVD version but I'm talking from memory and I never bothered to compared both.

 

The CGI Jabba the Hut is in the version of the 1977 film that I color-timed for Mr. Lucas in February-March of 2004 for Blu-ray and theatrical re-release. And the live-action version of Jedi had the "guy-in-a-Muppet-suit" version of Jabba. There were quite a few conversations about the CGI version and it was redone several times while I was there at ILM.



The yellow eyes were a whole thing, and (although you have to look closely for them) there are little tiny hairs all over Jabba's body, too.

 

Gravity is 95%+ CGI, though. Basically only the shots of the actors' faces were converted. Everything from the space suits to the ship ship interiors were CGI, natively rendered in stereo.

If you watch the making-of, you'll see that most of the filming was Sandra Bullock sitting on a bicycle seat against a green screen, or in a diving rig.

But I agree with your larger point that many modern conversions by the likes of Stereo D are very good -- Fury Road, Valerian, The Walk, Terminator Genisys, etc.

 

I wouldn't say 95%, but I would bet of all the shots in the film -- and it's a short film, only about 90 minutes -- at least 75% of them have some form of CGI in them, and a good percentage of them are mostly CGI. There were several debates at the ASC as to whether DP Chivo Lubezki should get any kind of award, because so much of the movie was synthetic... but they ultimately decided that if he supervised the lighting in post, it's still "directing the photography," and he got a lot of acclaim for it.

 

would they fix that shot at the end for the BD release, or do they never do that?

 

I watched ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, forgetting this was the film in which Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey. If Plummer was digitally painted into scenes previously shot with Spacey (rather than re-shot), I sure didn't notice it. The only thing that looked off was the very brief oil tanker scene, which was a bit cartoon-ish despite a rainstorm presumably designed to help hide the artifice.

 

One of my favorite CGI films (for production) is The Haunting (1999). The visual effects (ILM), and sound (Skywalker) more than holds up today.
I haven't read through the whole thread yet, but I sincerely hope ILM isn't going downhill.

 

They definitely did a lot of reshoots - not sure if 100% of the Plummer footage is from reshoots, though...

 

Sounds like a blurred line between photography and animation.

 

Yes, I know the CGI Jabba was redone for the 2004 DVD release,but as I said before I think but I'm not sure (I don't have the DVD's anymore) that the CGI Jabba was, if not redone from scratch, newly tweaked for the Blu ray from 2011. I'm gonna have a look at the BD and see if it looks definetely different from the one on the picture.

 

It wasn’t redone for the Blu-ray. It’s the same Jabba from the DVD release.

 

I had a look at the 2011 BD release and the CGI Jabba looks exactely as the one on the picture so I was mistaken. My apologies for the mistake. I'd like to know where I got this idea.

 

There was a lot of discussion about how Jabba looked, and I'll say this: the creature looked pretty crappy on the 1997 re-release (the first time Lucas extensively revised the movie), and they did a better job in 2004 but it's still not great. I'm with the crowd that said, "go ahead and release the director's version, but also release the original untouched theatrical version."

On the other hand: this is the first time the color for Jabba was a lot closer between Episode 4 and Episode 6.

Exactly. When something has to be reconstructed to that degree, how much of the original material remains? Is all that trouble really worth it? When does it become a cartoon?

With CGI creatures, you can make a good argument that you're just watching a photorealistic cartoon. I can take some of this to a point, but as with the recent Ready Player One, it got kind of exhausting and weird after awhile. You reach the stage where the movie isn't about human beings any more, and -- at least for me -- I think there's an emotional distance that happens where you don't give a crap about the characters.

 

Plummer wasn't hired until after Kevin Spacey was fired, so technically all of the Plummer footage was reshoots done in 9 days:

Christopher Plummer Reveals How He Shot 'All the Money in the World' in Just 9 Days

I can only speak from my own experience, but on some of the major films I've worked on, there were cases where they ran out of time on certain effects but then later fixed them for the home video release. I know that happened with Spy Kids 2, Chronicles of Narnia, and a bunch of others. As long as the director doesn't go hugely over budget (and schedule), I think the studio would allow them another 7-10 days to fix the shots they ran out of time on for the theatrical release. I would hope this would especially happen for stuff that's outrageously bad -- like the Mark Ruffalo shots in Avengers: Infinity War.

 

I liked Black Panther (a lot more than I thought I would), but the "3D CGI Environments" in the film looked very fake and plasticky to me, enough to take me out of the story. Here's a before-and-after showing how those effects were done:



Too much "Uncanny Valley" for me, where it just starts looking too weird and unbelievable.

 

Haven't seen the film, just the video you linked to, which does look artificial. I think part of the problem is lighting, contrast and sharpness. Because the actors were shot in a studio under perfect lighting conditions, the picture has high fidelity in contrast, color and resolution. If the same actors were shot outside on location, they would look different due to natural lighting conditions and other factors affecting a location shoot (contrast, detail, etc).

So, because the actors were shot under perfect indoor conditions, they matched the backgrounds to the same standard, which IMO, gives it that fake, synthetic look. Also, in some of the shots, the water looked very 'ghosty' and not like real water.

 

I have been told by somebody involved that a lot of the "jungle" sequences were shot on sound stages and not on location, and there was a ton of work involved in trying to not let them look too fake. It's funny: nobody complained throughout all those Tarzan movies of the past, but there's a much higher standard today at creating worlds like this in movies.

 

In addition, and for me, there are way too many waterfalls, coming from too many different directions. That in itself seems unrealistic (though one could argue anything is possible in a fantasy setting).

 

That reminds me of how fake the Arctic sets in Ice Station Zebra looked. I thought Lost Horizon's snowy mountain plane crash scene was more realistic though it was shot 30 years prior. I still enjoy Ice Station Zebra in spite of it.