I don’t get why people fetishize practical effects and the absence of CGI. The issue is always when VFX is shoddy and obvious, but there are tons of invisible CGI in modern movies, and it’s often banal stuff like blood or cars in the background.
CGI is its own form of artistry and creating great CGI is absolutely a craft.
I don’t fetishize them and I don’t have animosity against people who use CGI responsibly.
My problems come with a sacrifice of art and a sacrifice of the workers.
Let’s start with the workers. Technical jobs in filmmaking have always been kind of shitty, working long hours and usually not getting a whole lot of credit with very little job security. And you don’t have to go back that far to see a lot of techs getting themselves hurt because there weren’t as good of safety standards for them. So it’s not like it’s a new thing. But a lot of studios have been treating CG as a miracle cure ever since it was first used, and it’s created a real problem for the people actually making these movies. A lot of the CG is rushed and its creators underpaid for the work being asked of them. And this leads into the point about art because while CG can look great or it can look shit, when you rush it, the chances of it looking terrible are far greater. That’s true for practical effects as well, yes, but people seem to accept that practical effects will take time while they’re pushing CG studios to produce faster and faster with ever-worsening results.
But then let’s really talk about the art of it. There’s a lot of art that going into CG, and I think that’s wonderful. There are things it can do that almost nothing else can. It has been used to great effect for decades now! CG isn’t an inherently bad thing. But there are also things it doesn’t do as well. And one of the problems I have with CG-heavy films isn’t really that they use CG but that they use it when it isn’t the best tool for the job. Or they rush it or cheap out on it as talked about in the previous paragraph. There are different types of directors and some prefer tightly controlled sets while others let things come up naturally and then find ways to incorporate that. Practical effects, they’re never fully controllable. They’re not made in a sterile environment. They create a little unpredictability. They make a little chaos. And that chaos can bring a lot of personality to things. It’s usually really small, but it’s there. The best CG also has personality, sure, and I’m not certain how to describe it, but it’s different. Because in CG, every frame is hand-crafted like you’re doing animation. And I love animation, but if you’re doing something in live action anyway, I feel you should lean in to your medium and use its strengths. And one of the strengths of live-action is that there are things, physical things, and if you take all that away, I mean, come on. My feeling on a lot of the films that are basically done entirely on digital sets and almost entirely CG except for maybe an actor’s face here and there, and sometimes not even then, it’s, why not just stop living the lie and make it fully animated?
So, yeah, summary, for me, I don’t like the culture around CG at the moment which has become notoriously harsh, and I miss the personality that practical effects bring to some things as well as disliking the feeling of hegemony in a lot of films when it comes to their effects. It’s not an inherent dislike of CG, it’s disliking how it’s being misused.
Practical effects age better. Compare The TRex in Jurassic Park vs any of the effects George Lucas added to Star Wars. Even with 5 more years of computer advancement the TRex looks great today and the special editions look like bantha dung.
Jurassic Park’s T-Rex also used CGI. This video explains a little. www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4UuQxjFpfUGood CGI is wonderful as are good practical effects. A great team working together from the start so results look believable is key. Bad CGI often comes from not preparing scenes ahead of time to include it.
A perfect example of this is in Terminator 1, the brief shot of Arnold in the mirror of the hotel. It’s so obviously inconsistent with the animatronics that, had they just spent more time on Arnold’s makeup they would have nailed it.
I know for a fact practical effects were up to par in 1984.
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