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Bad CGI - truly bad or just think it is?

Ziz

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Ok, after scanning through Mollo's two threads below where he rants about bad CG ruining movies, I had to start this thread.

Now, this is a more theoretical and internal question, something you'll have to think about how to answer. If you think you can prove your point in one sentence, you're not thinking hard enough.

A lot of people are quick to bash CG claiming that "it will never be as good as models and matte paintings". However, CG is still evolving - both the technology and the people - no matter how much a studio or director likes to claim otherwise. They're usually just saying that theirs is the best because they're trying to sell their product.

Considering that what's regarded as "photorealistic CG" - starting with T2 and Jurassic Park at the beginning of the 90's - is less than 20 years old and still growing, are people's complaints about "so much bad CGI" truly justified, or are modern audiences just more aware of the fact that it's being used in the first place, so they're looking for it harder instead of just sitting back and enjoying the movie?

So, put on your thinking caps and support your position - be it for or against - with logic and common sense. Lists of "good CGI in these films" and "bad CGI in those films" isn't enough...explain WHY the CGI is good in this film and bad in that one. "Because you can see that it's CG" isn't enough - HOW can you tell it's CG? What tipped you off? Hint - the fact that it's a of creature that doesn't exist in the real world doesn't count. Talk about the quality of the image, not the content.

Once some other people post their perspectives, I'll come back and throw mine in. I don't want to taint the discussion up front.
 

Ziz

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I guess it's easier to just jump on other people's bandwagons and not think about it, huh? :-?
 

reave

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There's great CGI, horrible CGI and everything in between. What's bad is when directors/studios rely on CGI to carry a movie. I look forward to the day when perfect CGI meets a perfect story.
 

ReverendBeastly

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There's bad CGI just like there were (and sometimes still are) bad cartoons, bad matte paintings, bad compositing jobs and bad stop-motion animation. And there's great CGI just like there were great effects in the past. It's just the amount of time and talent spent that makes the difference.
 

Ziz

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Their existence one way or the other isn't the question.

Where's the line? How do you define "good" vs. "OK" vs. "bad"?
 

reave

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Well, truly good CGI isn't even really noticed, and is as close to real looking as possible. Bad CGI just looks fake. There are of course people that will deride CGI all day no matter what, but there will always be someone to complain about everything.
 

Ziz

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Again, like what...gimme an example. What's considered "good" CG and what isn't? Name a film, a scene, hell...a single shot. It's easy to throw generalities around. I'm looking for someone who's willing to put their opinion on the line.

See, I have this old habit I can't seem to break...maybe you've heard of it...it's called...

THINKING...

I know it's not very popular anymore, but it can still work to your advantage if you know how to do it properly. And it seems lately that more and more people don't want to take the chance.
 

reave

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First of all, simmer down. If you want to discuss this intelligently and politely, I'm all for it. No need to be a smartass and question if people are thinking... just because they can't read your mind. I think just about everyone in here is willing to put their opinion out there, but the site has been slow lately, so don't expect everyone to come rushing to your topic. That said....

Twister has awful CGI. Transformers mostly has great CGI.

In the case of twister, it's bad enough to take me out of the movie. If they had done it with real world effects and some trick editing, I would think it would have been more believable. Alternately, if they reworked the CGI now, I'm sure it could be made to work better.

With Transformers, when the robots were walking around, I could believe that they were there. Contrast that with Jar-Jar, Watto and several other Star Wars CGI characters, that were extremely close to believable, but not quite there. Obviously it's easier to sell a mechanical CGI character, than a "flesh and blood" CGI character.
 

ReverendBeastly

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Alright, lessee...

BAD CGI: The scene in the first Harry Potter flick with the troll in the bathroom. It was fucking atrocious and it didn't cut AT ALL with the shots of the practical troll in the same scene. Can also say this about the first wolf chase in the recent Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe flick.

MIDDLE OF THE ROAD CGI: The Golden Compass. While not really able to be qualified as "bad", per se, I definitely never felt that the human character were interacting with what were supposed to be their souls or whatever. The animation and rendering itself wasn't bad, but the connection just want there.

GOOD CGI: King Kong in King Kong. Nearly all of the film, I really felt that there was a real giant ape interacting with Naomi Watts and I was able to totally stay with it. That was a good time.
 

reave

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I'll agree with all of those, and with the bad Harry Potter CGI, I'll add that big monster dude (sorry, bad with names) in the most recent potter flick.
 

Ziz

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Ok, now that we have some other thoughts here....

Comparisons of image quality - while relevant - are only fair if you're comparing films that came out within a year or two of each other. Beyond that, technology changes too fast to make a fair comparison. Compare a computer game from today to one from 10 years ago. The characters are blocky on the older one, they're not as animated and their interaction with the environment is limited. Same concept with film CG - they were limited by the technology available at that time.

As far as what I think is the "line" of good vs bad isn't so much image quality but animation...specifically, gravity. I think a lot of CG animators need to watch high-speed photography, study the timing and interaction of objects of different mass, weight and consistency to learn how they interact. Too many times, I've been pulled out of the believability of a fight scene or creature attack because it feels like the destruction - any reaction to any given action, for that matter - happens just a fraction of a second too soon compared to the object that caused it.

The troll scene in Harry Potter looked fine as far as the image is concerned, but you didn't feel like he was in the space because you didn't always feel the weight of the creature...the way it moved, the way it interacted with the environment and the characters.

To me, that's what makes something believable or not. In sci-fi/fantasy, you're looking at something that your logical mind knows doesn't exist...it's part of the suspension of disbelief required for SF in the first place, so the mind will let image quality pass if the physics are right. It's something that most people can't articulate but they sense it on an instinctive level, and that affects whether they enjoyed it or not.
 

ReverendBeastly

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Ziz said:
The troll scene in Harry Potter looked fine as far as the image is concerned, but you didn't feel like he was in the space because you didn't always feel the weight of the creature...the way it moved, the way it interacted with the environment and the characters.
Eh, no. You are right, the way it moved was not convincing, but the quality of the image is also not good. It looks like a fucking cartoon, there was no texture to the thing. It looked smooth. Cut to the practical troll later in the scene, who had nicely lined flesh, it just doesn't work.
 

reave

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ReverendBeastly said:
Eh, no. You are right, the way it moved was not convincing, but the quality of the image is also not good. It looks like a fucking cartoon, there was no texture to the thing. It looked smooth. Cut to the practical troll later in the scene, who had nicely lined flesh, it just doesn't work.

I completely agree. I bought practically everything else in all of the HP movies, but that was some cartoony crap.
 

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I'd say that a core factor is (to use an old term) "willing suspension of disbelief", and the challenges caused when audiences, from one generation to the next, expect something to look more and more believable than was previously feasible. The biggest "problem" is this: We all know that what we're watching is fake from the get-go.
 

Type12point

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(Note: I haven't yet read the other threads on CGI, so I apologize if I repeat something.)

I'm kinda sick of hearing the "bad CGI" complaint. Not that it doesn't have any validity--it certainly does--but, as someone noted before, there are ALL SORT of bad effects. Stop motion and matte panting somehow have more integrity than computer images? If Army Of Darkness had been done with CGI, would it really be all that different a film?

The only complaint about CGI I really, really agree with is that it encourages producers and directors to consider the easy route and the cheap gag instead of focusing on building up tension, establishing tone, etc. I'm not just talking about making Yoda a buzz saw, but horror movies that show the monster is full light close up just because they can. We kinda live in the exact opposite age of what Steven Spielberg went through with the shark in Jaws. NOBODY has trouble with the shark anymore. So nobody has to think up something better.

Ultimately, what CGI has really given the world is YET ANOTHER TYPE of bad movie. Like Van Helsing. But even Van Helsing's isn't all that far removed from stuff thirty years earlier, like Clash Of The Titans or The Black Hole, two movies made entirely in old fashioned techniques by experts with decades of experience, who still gave us pretty trashy effects and didn't exactly "wow" us with story. The difference seems to be that there's no such thing as a 'B' picture anymore.
 

Akitsu

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To me, bad CG is when you are totally reliant on it for an effect, with no physical effects to add a sense of realism to it. Jar Jar Binks is a great example. Hyperkinetic, bumbling, and completely out of place.

A lot of the problems with CG come down to the animation. Take Starship Troopers. The bugs work... even though the majority of their scenes are CG, they do have occasional physical effects whenever possible. Dead bugs were real, when someone gets stabbed in the chest by a leg, it's a practical effect, and yet they moved and behaved like real creatures... which sells the CG.

Buckbeak in Harry Potter was another great example. The animators STUDIED the movements of the creatures that made up the Hippogriff, and worked them into the CG performance. Even though there's not a practical effect to help sell him, he works because of all the nuance to the performance.

Then we have bad CG. Like say, any SciFi Channel movie. The monsters/dinosaurs/etc always lurch around like a child animated it. There's never a practical effect to back up the CG. Even gunfire at that point is a CG effect, as it saves money. Too bad that they never bother with decent gunfire sound, or realistic damage from said weaponry to back up it's believability.

When it comes to matte paintings, sure they work... and if possible you want a matte painter to do the textures for a CG background plate if you really want to sell something to the public. They know the subtle interactions of light and shadow that a computer could only dream of replicating in some cases.

At the end of the day, CG is a great TOOL... but like all tools it can be used to great effect or to poor effect. If it's the only tool you use on a production, such as with the Star Wars Prequels, or Sky Captain, you have to be prepared to have people look at it with a critical eye. If it's used in tandem with traditional effects work, it can be quite effective.

Transformers is a perfect example of a movie doing things right. A lot of the effects you would think are CG in the movie are in fact practical effects, which helps blur the line between what's real and what isn't.
 

reave

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Akitsu said:
Transformers is a perfect example of a movie doing things right. A lot of the effects you would think are CG in the movie are in fact practical effects, which helps blur the line between what's real and what isn't.

I completely agree with this as well. If there is one thing I respect Bay for, it's his use of practical effects whenever it is possible (and sometimes even when it's seemingly impossible).

And as far as the assumption that people who diss "bad CGI" all think that matte paintings and puppets are better, that's just silly. There are plenty of special effects in older movies that have not aged well, and weren't all that good at the time that they came out.

The standards for special effects were much lower then, and you could get away with the Rancor in ROTJ, even though you can see a matte line, and the monster is obviously a model. Given that same scene today, someone could invest the time and money necessary to make the Rancor appear to be a living, breathing creature, or they could end up with something 10 times worse than what they came up with in '83
 

Ziz

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Exactly. What makes most CG "good" or "bad" isn't the fact that it's CG, it's the talent (and in some cases time and budget) of the people doing it. There are horrible model, makeup, puppet and matte painting FX just as there are horrible CG FX. To borrow a line from Riker on Star Trek:TNG, "If you drop a hammer on your foot, it's hardly useful to get mad at the hammer."

That's what a lot of people don't understand, or just don't want to take the time to understand, about CG - its quality from one film to the next has little to do with the technology. More often than not, it's because of a common computer malfunction known as PEBKAC.








Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
 

Mollo

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There are some great Artists and there are some that are not so good. It is usually in the eye of the beholder that makes these distinctions. The same rule applies with CGI.

What is good or bad CGI applies to what is good or bad in almost everything. It is a very personal view.

The final result of a film should be one man's vision, that of the director, so if the reliance on CGI is too great and of poor quality there is only one person to blame.
Committee pictures are always inferior to one directors vision.

What has happened since 2001 is that most on set problems are not deemed so because they can all be fixed in the computer later. This fact is numbing the creative act of shooting a picture and castrating the directors on set opportunities.

My personal opinion is that real artists with knowledge of light and shade, draftsmanship, artistic talent and computer prowess produce the best CGI effects but because of the overwhelming use of this technique in so many releases, it inevitably produces computer animators that do not meet those essential standards (as the resulting CGI so plainly shows).

Some very personal views

Good CGI - Paul Verhoven's Starship Troopers, Galaxy Quest, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypto, Lord Of The Rings Trilogy

Bad CGI - Minority Report, Day Of The Dead (2008), Thirteen Days, Matrix Reloaded, Die Another Day, Flyboys, 10,000 BC, Indy 4.

I have noticed as we approach the end of the decade that the process of practical film making has become almost secondary to what the on-set computer animators require. I have personally seen a very famous and experienced director looking at a monitor in the camera trailer in utter confusion trying to work out with a young computer boffin what will be live action and what will be produced later in CGI.
 

lewis886

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Type12point said:
(Note: I haven't yet read the other threads on CGI, so I apologize if I repeat something.) The difference seems to be that there's no such thing as a 'B' picture anymore.

lol i disagree with that last statement type12point.... i think there are plenty of B pictures... there is plenty of stuff with low budgets, subpar costumes, sets, special effects (including cgi) etc... you just have to know where to look ;)
 
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