Bill Harris posted this on his blog and I’d been wondering what was going on, so this was quite interesting:
My own personal feeling on the latest tv buzz was when I saw previews for She-Hulk, the CGI looked lazy and way too fake.
This is just a longer take on this, correct?
Not cheap = Good + Fart
I’d argue cgi looks better than it ever has. Could you have imagined, 15 years ago, that a television series could have dragons and monsters and space battles as good as anything on the silver screen? Come on.
Yes, television has less of a vfx budget than film, but that doesn’t mean you have half the time and money so you only get half the quality. If a television crew can lock their ideas in early, and shoot something competent, and it’s done by a studio used to making film assets, there’s no reason you won’t have as good effects as any movie. In film, they can dick around with their ideas so much, you can spend 80% of your time reblocking the same shot over and over, and then rush like mad to just get the last thing on the plate to render. But no one will ever know you spent 80 percent more money than a similar shot on a tv show, other than the producer and the poor crew. In my experience tv producers understand they can’t reblock an idea fourteen times, and so they won’t let the director give infinite notes. In film this is not true.
Agreed.
And one reason people don’t realize this is because they don’t even realize they’re looking at CG. For instance, anyone explaining CG who opens the discussion by highlighting fakey hippos and tigers probably doesn’t even understand how CG is used. Fury Road, for instance. That movie is loaded with CG, just not the kind people think of when they assume CG is just for making fake hippos and tigers. : /
CG is also used to composite shots, edit out equipment necessary to get the shot, color the final result, add tears if actors can’t manage, gussy up an establishing shot, add landmarks to suggest locations, and so forth. Furthermore, the CG you see in a trailer might not be the CG in the final product. And further furthermore, sometimes CG is bad not by virtue of anything technical, but because the director has no concept of how to implement it into his movie. The latest Monster Hunter movie had some pretty decent CG, but you’d never know from the way it was haphazardly edited together with footage of hapless actors flailing around without any meaningful reference points.
But on the whole, I feel CG looks better than ever and it’s an important part of most (?) moviemaking. Not just stuff with fake tigers and hippos.
-Tom
I mean, how many people realize that a season of Ted Lasso has more CG than many sci-fi movies they’ve seen?
My biggest disappointment is that it’s a rare CG action scene that feels exciting anymore. Sometimes they pull one off – Shang Chi’s, for instance – but CG fights in general have gotten so good that if they don’t put something innovative or with a real feel of character stakes in, they’re just dull.
Exhibit 1 lol
Nowadays?
I actually LIKE the cg vfx shown in the She-Hulk series promo. I’m amazed at the fidelity even smaller TV shows can achieve. If anything, VFX people need to unionize and be paid better to be appreciated better instead of the constant boom bust cycle the studios follow. Critical acclaim but no monetary reward due to creative movie account and then they go tits up. Young new staff for the meat grinder begins anew like the games industry.
Making cg vfx integrate with its environment and making it look, sound and feel NOT WEIGHTLESS always takes more time effort and money though.
Never watched the series. someone was joking earlier about the brilliant deer in Walking Dead so I had to look it up. Maybe after so many seasons they just turned some of their cgi over to interns hehe.
So that series isn’t current anymore?
Idk, I just meant all cgi look like cartoons to me.
Give me 80s special effects all day lol. Not that they were any more believable, they were just physically real.
Real sets and animatronic robots :)
Live guns on sets! Setting people on actual fire! The good old days!
CGI is better than it ever has been by definition. How directors use it, though, is very much up for argument.
That’s just action scenes in general, though. If they are exciting, they aren’t exciting because they have effects, they’re exciting because they are well-made scenes. Which is why Fury Road is a masterpiece and the average car chase movie is, well, an average car chase movie. The average director is average, not George Miller.
The age of “this movie is cool just because it has CGI action scenes” is long, long gone. Arguably it only lasted from T2/Jurassic Park to The Phantom Menace. (And of course, T2 and Jurassic Park are also well-made movies, whereas the Phantom Menace …)
That video is great. It explains that the belief that CG has gotten bad is basically representation bias: you notice bad CG when you see it, and thus project that onto movies and how CG is used as a whole.
But CG is in everything now. And as viewers we just don’t notice the tons of excellent CG because…good CG in a non sci-fi or non action film isn’t something we look for or expect. And imagine how much safer shoots and sets are because they don’t have to have two, say, airplanes or helicopters actually flying close enough to one another to fit into the shot.
Yep, I think part of the problem is that CGI today, at its top end, is fantastic. The issue comes when shows or movies cheap out on CGI. It become very noticeable due to what we know is possible. The bar is so much higher these days because we know just how good it can be.
And just because this thread had me thinking about the CG while watching a goofy action movie called Interceptor, bad CG isn’t always an issue:
The deer from that Walking Dead scene linked upthread, for instance. I’m assuming the deer is meant to evoke a contrast to the zombies. It’s alone, serene, pastoral, carefully grazing; the zombies are clustered into a ravening pack, hungry, mostly insensate. It’s a fundamental element of the scene. As such, if they’re going to cheap-ass it, they’re going to undercut what the scene is doing. That’s lame. Does that scene in Walking Dead have bad CG? Absolutely. Does it matter? I would say ‘yes’.
But I don’t feel that way about quick obligatory shots edited into a movie that’s instead focusing on actors. Does Interceptor have bad CG? Absolutely. Does it matter? Not a whit.
-Tom
Excellent articles and thoughts posted. I don’t want to watch the Fury Road comparison video because then I’ll think about how amazing the CG integration is and I’ll never just “watch it”. It’s like when I saw how some Star Wars effects were done and from then on my brain wouldn’t just let me watch it. It had to focus on the effects and what the people in the background did to make the scene come together.