What manner of death should be wished on people who complain about CGI effects in modern movies?

Forced to endure a 12-hour marathon of CGI-anchored movies.

The CGI shit was REALLY bad. CGI should be used in a bond flick to hide the wires, nothing more.

^^^^

this is all it took to set you off, dan???

Think of it as the straw that broke the camel's back.

I have NEVER watched a movie and thought "ugh, the CGI just RUINS this". EVER. Including the Spiderman movies.

You have no eyes.

btw sometimes CGI effects are really, really shitty and its not being retro-grouchy to wish that they'd just stuck to some old-fashioned shit that everyone knows how to do already instead of going for whizbang computeration

^^^^^otm

i voted for blunt force trauma because it is always correct to vote for blunt force trauma in any poll about anything

btw sometimes CGI effects are really, really shitty and its not being retro-grouchy to wish that they'd just stuck to some old-fashioned shit that everyone knows how to do already instead of going for whizbang computeration ppl could tell when they have really, really shitty cgi effects in their movies

I think old fashioned shit can be really endearing. Like the planes in Dr. Strangelove and how it's totally clear they aren't moving in any way.

Cf that photo with the miniature Ton-Tons on Hoth and people hanging out with the trap door open?

Bad CGI takes you out of the movie, period

Good CGI is like XMen 2 fuck yesssss

Puppet Yoda >>>> CGI Yoda

seriously

Flipping cyber-booger bouncing off the walls or something furry you can imagine touching. Get fucked.

You have no eyes.

No actually, I think I am just not a fickle douchebag.

btw sometimes CGI effects are really, really shitty and its not being retro-grouchy to wish that they'd just stuck to some old-fashioned shit that everyone knows how to do already instead of going for whizbang computeration

Yes, but oftentimes this only manifests itself because the rest of the movie sucks so hard that there's nothing else there to enjoy; I don't find this to be true of most of the movies where people complain about CGI.

Bad CGI takes you out of the movie, period

That's horseshit. Bad model effects have the exact same impact, ie however much you invest in your ability to identify something that isn't real.

The exploding heads in "Scanners" don't look real at all but that doesn't detract one bit from their impact; likewise Spidey swinging through New York.

haven't seen it in ages but the CGI in Jurassic Park was badass. most of the time it's used now because it's CHEAP AS HELL cf BABYLON5 or whatever.

i dunno, dude, there's something about a model ACTUALLY existing in the same physical space as the actors that makes it more integral to the scene

dan are you not conflating the argument against CGI in every instance and someone just saying "well the CGI in this particular movie wasn't well done"

When it's SHIA LEBOUF FLYING THRU THE JUNGLE WITH NEWFOUND MONKEY FRIENDS bad, i gets to complain

― Brotherhood of Stealing Shit to Sell to Trader Caravans (kingfish), Monday, December 1, 2008 12:56 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

T-minus 10 seconds till Morbs dips in here to make CGI Secretary Clinton joke.

Exploding head in Scanners looks way more real than Jar-Jar Binks shuckin and jivin on planet laptop, fwiw

the cheap-as-hell part is really what gets me: CGI is good in that it has made some otherwise costly movies cheaper. it's bad because there are definitely practical effects that would get better results but are waaaaay more $$$/time and are now left to the wayside.

I will almost always enjoy creative deployment of stagey, physical, "organic" effects more than run-of-the-mill CGI. I realize this is not really an option with something like a Bond film, but if you are making a Bond film, I think it's incumbent on you to either have truly awesome/credible CGI effects or construct your movie in a way that doesn't rely on them.

I don't think it should be too controversial to point out that there are a lot of times when CGI effects allow people to be a bit lazy about constructing movies and then just throw a bit of money at half-assing the effects they're shooting for. Maybe that's not what happens -- maybe they think it's going to turn out awesome and it just doesn't -- but that's always how it looks.

Also, anyone who is complaining about CGI who has anything at all positive to say about 60s/70s science fiction really needs to sit down and do a little bit of self-analysis here.

xp: J0rdan, my point is that I have yet to see a complain about CGI that I thought was valid, mostly because a) I accept CGI as an inescapable part of the toolkit that makes up the modern movie; and b) I can't think of an instance where something not looking "real" had a measurable impact on my enjoyment of a movie.

The disconnect between screenwriting / producing / directing is probably half the issue here -- getting locked into something that's been written into the script, but winding up in some sort of budgeting/administrative space where you have to say "okay, just throw together some CGI for that"

what the hell dan you are ignoring some pretty valid criticisms here

Dan are you kidding me? I have watched 60s/70s sci-fi with good effects and crappy, laughable effects; I have also watched modern movies with good CGI and crappy, laughable CGI. It's an inescapable part of the toolkit, sure, which means it's perfectly valid to discern between when the tool's used well and when it's used awfully -- same goes for inescapable elements like the writing or the acting or anything else!

When was Quantum of Solace so CGI-y?

i actually think CGI might be better deployed in cleaning up old films! like tighten up the effects just a bit (not addin shit) so they're even more seamless.

but c'mon, man, shia and cgi monkeys is terrible

No that was a real primate habitat place in Alabama.

When was Quantum of Solace so CGI-y?

yah rly

daniel craig is dead, didn't you know

Actually, I don't think I am. I am making the argument that a lot of people are lazily going "ugh, bad CGI" in the same manner that a lot of people lazily go "ugh, ProTools".

The "terrible" portion of Shia and the monkeys is the idea behind the scene in the first place, not the fact that CGI was used to create it; I put to you that there is actually no feasible way to include that scene in the 4th Indy movie and not have it be one of the most embarrassing moments of modern cinema (and I say that from the perspective of one of 6 ppl on Earth who will admit to liking "Crystal Skulls").

x-post -- There was the one moment with the water storage cave, I guess.

aka the scene where she should have turned to Bond and said "Tell me about your homeworld, James."

The second X-Men film is a good example of well-deployed CGI; some of Iron Man too. I won't yield to the romance of matte paintings and blue screens; special effects, like musicianly tools like Auto-tune, are neither good nor bad. What's troubling is how easily filmmakers rely on it as a kind of expensive caulking, used to patch up a gaping plot hole.

watching some of the behind the scenes bits on the lord of the rings dvds made it pretty clear that the line between "CGI" and "not CGI" is pretty fluid now anyway. it's not all just jar jar binks and making objects that aren't there on set.

oh man i liked shia v. the monkeys--it's a movie it's supposed to be ridiculous!!!

I hated all the CGI in Wall-E

The only bit of CGI in the bond movie i didn't like was the scaffolding and ropes scene. The freefall bit later on was enh, but otherwise passable.

which is why i said "use it to hide the wires," which i'm pretty sure is all they did with it on Dark Knight

o no way it's everywhere all the time

they corrected maggie gyllenhaal's posture in post

the cgi in bond was pretty good wtf

also, maggie gyllenhaal doesn't look like maggie gyllenhaal on film, so in secretary they just used jake and enlarged his head with blue-screen putty. xpost

so you're saying that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wasn't really there to be menaced with a knife?

I like the cgi in sci fi channel movies.

I like the CGI in Cube 2: Hypercube

I think I'd be cooler with CGI if they could find some way to make Shia swing into my bedroom.

I hope the people who were reacting to my hyperbole better understand my position and why I started this thread.

Jackson LOTR vs Bakshi LOTR innit

My nephews slept through all the Jackson efforts but were unable to sleep after watching the Bakshi one, fwiw.

Yep

Willow CGI is cool electric magic shit that you can't actually make irl that's another pass obv

That Willow sequence reminds me that the aging sequence in City Of Lost Children is really good.

There's a movie i havent thought about in a long time

I'm not a huge fan of it but it looks superior to most science fiction films and shows you don't have to have a massive Hollywood budget to achieve that quality.

Never forget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtxyfQtZlKQ

Oh, is the breath fake? I never noticed.

I saw Rogue One with my dad and he had no idea Tarkin was fake. Sometimes bad CG is only a problem if you're aware of it.

Did any of you guys see King Kong skull island, those guys were straight up taking the piss - early on there were a few shots with non-monstrous animals, like a cat or a seagull would be animated in the same defiantly sub-walking with dinosaurs way, it was like a message to the audience "we're going full roger rabbit with this one lads"

Good times

tangent: one of the absolute worst CGI trends is the appearance of unexpectedly vicious fluffy creatures in shit comedies

e.g. Ice Cube getting attacked by a rabid gopher or whatever

Oh Jesus yeah

I'd say Lord Of The Rings and Pacific Rim are about as good as I've seen this sort of stuff but that doesn't mean I love it or anything.

The Hobbit films and Jackson's King Kong have this really bad look of pieces of jelly tumbling around the screen.

― Robert Adam Gilmour

saw pacific rim in theaters, hated it. perhaps the cgi was good? i couldn't tell. everything was dark and rainy and moved so fast i couldn't keep track of it. now get off my lawn.

also it's two hours of big robots punching each other in the face I dunno that it's key failing is how real the big robots look

I am now going to meditate and learn to be at peace with people who enjoy two hour cartoon face-punch movies and believe they should be analysed in depth

"internet eh?"

any of you guys try to watch Gods of Egypt

― El Tomboto, Thursday, March 9, 2017 7:02 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im real curious about this cos it sounds like a totally insane fiasco on the level of the 80s Hercules movies.

Yeah it's, uh, pretty bad.

Some of the worst CGI I've seen. I think the bullets in Pootie Tang were more believable

I wonder how many Music Promos have cgi -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ttGgIQpAUc

gods of egypt is so bad than even i haven't worked out a theory why it isn't

(unlike the hobbit, which i can tidily prove to you is not bad and the jelly-stuff is meant to be like that and etc)

(not that i'm going to)

Gods of Egypt has the makings of a cult classic and I will be proven right by history.

darragh and wins touched on it, but my take is that cgi is another tool in your cinematic toolbox and you need some level of parity between the film's tone and the computer generated effects. jurassic park has fantastic things in a setting that's not quite realistic so the combination of practical and computer effects worked reasonably well. starship troopers is pretty bonkers from the get-go so crazy-ass space bugs don't break the tone for a moment

on the other hand i can imagine spielberg thinking "oh, i'll prime the audience for ALIENS in the last act of indiana jones 4 by throwing a fake-ass prairie dog in at the beginning and then some monkeys midway through"

as bad as the batman/superman movie was, the funniest shit is that all of the ridiculous animated characters are easier to buy than the shots where henry cavill's facial movements are weird because they removed a mustache he had during reshoots in post-production

uh, I meant to say justice league i think. they're both pretty bad though

Trying to recall when I crossed the threshold from gritting my teeth through pretty much every deployment of CGI to feeling like they'd done a fairly admirable job of ironing out most of the kinks.

The other day I watched Zhang Yimou’s remake of blood simple on MUBI, some lovely cgi shots in that I thought

the thing that disappoints me most about the cgi revolution is that it happened at a point where practical effects teams were creating some genuinely astonishing work, building on like 75 years of painstakingly-acquired expertise, and the rush to embrace computer generation not only slowed or stopped altogetger further development but it also created a decade-long dead zone where cg tech hadn't yet worked out how to do a lot of stuff that practical effects-makers nailed a long time before

where would we be now if stan winston or rob bottin or whoever had kept on being handed huge budgets and encouraged to go nuts instead of 75% of that money getting ploughed into rendering stations

(stan winston would still be dead today obv but u get my point i hope)

honestly we should probably break it down in 2019 because over 90% of movies have some sort of computer generated imagery and it's seldom the night sky or fog or w/e that we're complaining about. characters that are fully generated can still be sketchy, especially ones not based on motion capture, but overall there's a ton of work done that's practically invisible

I saw the new Blade Runner over the holidays and thought the effects were lovely with the pointed exception of [redacted name of CG-rendered actor]. De-aging seems to have been largely resolved but knitting a character together from whole cloth still has a very long way to go.

I thought that one was fine? And only the face was generated, they had an actor right there with motion capture tracking on their face

bizarro gazzara- you're massively on the money there. I didn't really like Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy but the aliens in that were pretty impressive and got me wondering about possibilities.

I still cant stand the way it looks in most films. And even if you cant tell when it's there it can still be detrimental, I think using it for backgrounds so often does spoil the sense of space even if you cant tell where the seams are. Oftentimes a new film just doesn't look very real but you don't know why.

watched the LOTR films for the first time over christmas and a lot of the cgi looks shit and dated

some of it looked bad at the time honestly, other stuff looked fantastic. i think abt how much it helped (and was planned for) that CGI of that era would ultimately be printed to 35mm, massaging it into the image more

I seem to recall the CG and general visual artistry worsening across the three films. I love those big CG battle shots in the prologue of the first film.

i think dr c is right in that its great-to-patchy but not in any pattern.

overall willow looks better-and is better- noe

You think it should have more floaty cameras and sexual violence?

LOTR CGI is generally fine, primarily because of the mix of CGI and old-fashioned trickery

even Gollum is mostly good still, imo

I do think by the third one there's some sloppy stuff creeping in

that's probably the worst part of the graphics in some films -- there's this expectation that it's a given and that it can be done in a certain timeframe with a very proscribed budget and you end up with underpaid and overworked animators cranking product out in order to meet a deadline. or studios think that the director/cinematographer doesn't need to be deeply involved in the animation so you get another type of tonal mismatch

yeah CGI for any huge movie is bid out piecemeal to multiple studios, who have a strong incentive to underbid to get work, and thus then have their staff working overtime to get shots done, and then some asshole decides that Expensive Reshoots are required and so on and so on

the way it's contracted out to a bunch of vendors like that kind of floors me

still can't believe how shitty the incredible hulk looked in thor: ragnarok, a movie that cost $180 million and that people liked and recommended

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/a41905a88e2dacc6746b754b4f6af4cef04b6895/c=421-0-2092-1257/local/-/media/2017/10/30/USATODAY/USATODAY/636449735557748089-ThorRagnarok5974d7a2aceff.jpg?width=540&height=405&fit=crop

You think it should have more floaty cameras and sexual violence?

― gray say nah to me (wins), Friday, 18 January 2019 18:46 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whats the 'it' in this latest dig then

some nerd stuff on star wars scenes with people doing stand-in work had this tidbit:

Digital really blurred the lines, because you could put a late photographed insert into a shot from principal photography, as is the case with this Anakin hand added to a shot in order to match an edit. pic.twitter.com/NNINx2WSsX

— Pablo Hidalgo (@pablohidalgo) January 20, 2019

xp... the film willow

cgi is awesome, idk what all y'all are complaining about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OocVcZodzII

Okay, admit it, Call Of The Wild is grounds for making cgi illegal in live action films.

xpost I can't believe I've never seen Mortal Kombat Annihilation. The wide shots looked pretty great and thick matte lines made me really nostalgic.