How CGI has Revolutionized Cinema

[Terry Olaes]

TechRadar has an article that details the history of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and it’s transformation of the movie industry. It’s a decent, albeit short, look into the past and helps the reader appreciate how far we’ve come since Westworld.

The level of complexity involved here is closer to an engineering project than a standard artistic one, but it's wasted if the artistic side falls flat. Pixar is a great demonstration of the two working side by side. When Toy Story came out, the relatively primitive state of 3D graphics didn't allow for the complex effects we're now used to seeing – cloth effects, convincing human animation and photorealistic backgrounds, for example.

 

[morkboy_wonder]

What, no mention of lawnmower man? I used to watch that loads as a kid. Decided to watch it again the other day and realised it blows.

 

[cold-cell]

In my opinion CGI is used too often and done poorly. The art of matte painting, in-camera effects, and stop-motion/miniatures is becoming a lost art. CGI too often sticks out like a sore thumb overlayed onto live action, it looks glossy, lacks weight, and they rarely get the lighting right. Just look at Transformers or Spiderman. Unless your hero character is supposed to look computer generated it becomes completely distracting and detracts from the storytelling.

 

[Silverghost]

Some don't even try hard anymore. I still think the T-rex chasing the jeep scene in Jurassic Park looks better than a lot of the stuff we see today, and that scene is 16 years old.

 

[Dreknaught]

They didn't mention "The Last Starfighter" either. I literally watched that one right off the tape as a kid.

Good times.

 

[Terry Olaes]

Mmm, I loved The Last Starfighter. I watched it the other day and realized that I should leave some of my favorite childhood movies there. Watching them now reveals how poor some of them were. lol

 

[Lamont]

In my opinion CGI is used too often and done poorly. The art of matte painting, in-camera effects, and stop-motion/miniatures is becoming a lost art.

Matte painting is still used a lot in films today. Miniatures are still used, a lot of horror/sci-fi movies still use practical effects (wires, puppets, people in costumes etc). Robotic limbs/creatures are still used. People still paint masks, creatures, body parts and wounds. Stop motion is used as an animation form. To get smooth stop motion would take WAY too much time and you will know it's stop motion.

Two-Face in the latest Batman could not have gone the puppet route, or the practical effect route because of the range of emotions he had to do. CG is the only way for that character.

A show like Battlestar Galactica can't afford to render out a photo-realistic space battle shot on such a tight deadline (and things change). Stop motion is still used in some Asian movies. I watched Batman (Keaton) and you can see all the miniature sets/props they used. The problem with miniatures is that some elements (water, fire, sparks, smoke) still look small.

 

[Xee]

Without Massive, the battle scenes of Middle Earth would have been near-impossible to create. An apocryphal tale recalls how Massive's AI was so sharp that when confronted with thousands of baying orcs, the armies of Middle Earth quite sensibly turned tail and ran away in terror.

I lol'd.

 

[stop!theradio]

In my opinion CGI is used too often and done poorly. The art of matte painting, in-camera effects, and stop-motion/miniatures is becoming a lost art. CGI too often sticks out like a sore thumb overlayed onto live action, it looks glossy, lacks weight, and they rarely get the lighting right. Just look at Transformers or Spiderman. Unless your hero character is supposed to look computer generated it becomes completely distracting and detracts from the storytelling.

Spider Man - yes, I hear you on that. But Transformers? That movie looks absolutely AMAZING.

 

[michael.pa2]

Mmm, I loved The Last Starfighter. I watched it the other day and realized that I should leave some of my favorite childhood movies there. Watching them now reveals how poor some of them were. lol

I still like The Last Starfighter,true,the effects aren't up to today's standards but the characters and humor still hold up.Tron is a different story,back then the it was effects that drew me to it,but watching it now I can't get past the acting,it's so stilted and wooden.CGI can solve a lot of problems,but bad acting and poor screenwriting aren't among them.

 

[Joe Average]

And the most amazing statistic of all?

That even with non-real action sequences, non-real explosions, non-real tidal waves wiping out half of continents, planetwide destruction, and all the various calamities they can come up with, in today's world of CGI production, doing it the fake way oft times costs 3-5x more cash than doing it the real way.

Go figure...

Making a model of Earth and blowing it up with some bright pyro effects on a green screen: ~$750,000

Making a model of Earth and blowing it up with some bright "halo" pyro effects on a computer screen: ~$2.5 million

I found those numbers once in Cinescape magazine based on two movies done at roughly the same time (can't recall the movie names now) but both had scenes where Earth itself basically got wiped out by some disaster. Doing it "the fake way" has now come full circle and costs a lot more than good old Plaster-of-Paris and some elbow grease coupled with a few ounces of pyrotechnics... ain't that something.

 

[hughJ]

Some don't even try hard anymore. I still think the T-rex chasing the jeep scene in Jurassic Park looks better than a lot of the stuff we see today, and that scene is 16 years old.

I think it's because in Jurassic Park they used CG as little as possible. If a tree trunk gets crushed somewhere, branches move, dust flying up, etc it looks real because it probably *is* real. The fact that the CG dinosaur is interacting with objects that are clearly physically in the same space as the actor really sells the whole shot. These days not only are the surrounding objects CG, but so is everything else and sometimes even the actor too.

CG has gotten a lot cheaper to do compared to 15-20 years ago. As it becomes more and more economical, the more we see practical effects shots being offloaded to CG in much the same manner that we've seen a shift to photoshop instead of being concerned about actually taking a good photo to start with.

 

[phide]

Two-Face in the latest Batman could not have gone the puppet route, or the practical effect route because of the range of emotions he had to do. CG is the only way for that character.

And it worked. The Dark Knight is one of those rare films where there are few glaring issues with any of the CG shots. Unlike, say, Deep Blue Sea

 

[Cerulean]

For a second there I thought the thread title read "How CGI has Revolutionized China."

 

[TechieSooner]

Some don't even try hard anymore. I still think the T-rex chasing the jeep scene in Jurassic Park looks better than a lot of the stuff we see today, and that scene is 16 years old.

Exactly.

King Kong was well done, IMO. If the ape is running around, his fur actually moves the right direction.


Big budget movies can pull it off.

 

[michael.pa2]

And it worked. The Dark Knight is one of those rare films where there are few glaring issues with any of the CG shots. Unlike, say, Deep Blue Sea

One of the great examples of how CGI can't replace good moviemaking.They hyped that movie as the next Jaws.Mechanical shark and all,Jaws was one of the best movies ever made.Deep Blue Sea should have been deep sixed before it was ever made.

 

[falconman]

Im surprised Lord of the Rings wasnt mentioned. It was pretty revolutionary back in the late 90's when it was filmed.

For a time, gollum was the most complex CGI character created on a computer

 

[falconman]

Exactly.

King Kong was well done, IMO. If the ape is running around, his fur actually moves the right direction.


Big budget movies can pull it off.

I agree. The hardest thing about CGI is that it is HARD to do well.
$ can make that happen.

 

[Arcygenical]

CG helped movies, because we no longer need plots... Just super awesome special effects!

Woo.

 

[BallerX]

That last Indiana Jones flick was a massacre. I mean wtf? Why not run an actual jeep over a jump through some bushes? They took a ride through uncanny valley for sure on that one. I suspect we will see more of this in the future with some of the big named titles that are coming out. G.I. JOE, really? Iron Man was decent in that respect and I believe that was one of the main fears of the director.

 

[Axiomatic]

Yet your average artist making these ground breaking visuals makes far less than a middle manager.

 

[phide]

That last Indiana Jones flick was a massacre. I mean wtf? Why not run an actual jeep over a jump through some bushes?

The physics on that shot were so fantastically wrong. It nearly made me weep

 

[TechieSooner]

That last Indiana Jones flick was a massacre. I mean wtf? Why not run an actual jeep over a jump through some bushes? They took a ride through uncanny valley for sure on that one. I suspect we will see more of this in the future with some of the big named titles that are coming out. G.I. JOE, really? Iron Man was decent in that respect and I believe that was one of the main fears of the director.

What scene was that? I thought the whole movie was pretty stupid actually (Holy Grail, Ark of Covenant, A rock, and then aliens??? )

Im surprised Lord of the Rings wasnt mentioned. It was pretty revolutionary back in the late 90's when it was filmed.

For a time, gollum was the most complex CGI character created on a computer

Gollum wasn't 100% CGI though. It was actually a person doing each of the movements, his skin was just replaced.
But I do know what you're saying. LOTR used lots of mini-models though, that's why I didn't bring it up. The Hellms Deep model was astounding, the detail.

Back in the 1970s people. Remember the ground breaking Sci-Fi known as Star Wars? It's a little bit cheesy nowadays, but that was revolutionary back then.

CG helped movies, because we no longer need plots... Just super awesome special effects!

A combo of both is what sells. Just about any superhero movie shows that. Compared to something like 10000 BC which sucked in the storyline but was awesome graphically... I'd watch Dark Knight any day.

 

[Technoob]

The physics on that shot were so fantastically wrong. It nearly made me weep

Yeah, we need non CG "realism" like the bus in Speed somehow jumping over a large gap with no incline or ramp. Because all special effects prior to CG were totally realistic....

 

[E.E.L. Ambiense]

I tend to agree with many on here that visual effects are used too often, and special effects aren't used enough in current film-making.

 

[Mav451]

Back in the 1970s people. Remember the ground breaking Sci-Fi known as Star Wars? It's a little bit cheesy nowadays, but that was revolutionary back then.

I don't think I'm the only one, but I appreciate the special effects MUCH more in the classics than the Ep1-3 nonsense. It just seemed so incredibly fake and nonsensical with the new movies.

 

[Joe Average]

True special effects would have/could have allowed Lucas to film parts 1, 2, and 3 in the series and make 'em look like 4, 5, and 6 instead of everything being so ridiculously out of context/sequence with the effects.

Now that would have truly been special...

My Wife has never seen Star Wars, Empire, or Return, but she did see The Phantom Menace once in the past. I've told her I have no intention of purchasing the series ever because I'm just unhappy with what Lucas did to his masterpiece by ruining it the way he did. Sorry, I consider myself a diehard fan, I was in line on May 20, 1977 when Star Wars was released - 10 days out from my 10th birthday - and was a serious fan for years, doing all the fan club stuff - Bantha Tracks, the newsletter - all the Kenner toys, etc.

But I told her perhaps we'll grab 'em from the library sometime and if we do, we'll watch them in the proper sequence: 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3.

 

[E.E.L. Ambiense]

I don't think I'm the only one, but I appreciate the special effects MUCH more in the classics than the Ep1-3 nonsense. It just seemed so incredibly fake and nonsensical with the new movies.

Absolutely. The special effects work that ILM did 30 years ago still looks really good. Miniature work....good miniature work...is becoming more and more rare these days. I don't think there was any special effects in the prequel trilogy at all, TBH! It was all visual effects work, lol.

 

[phide]

Yeah, we need non CG "realism" like the bus in Speed somehow jumping over a large gap with no incline or ramp. Because all special effects prior to CG were totally realistic....

Perhaps you need to see the shot he and I were referring to before commenting. You flew completely over the point, unfortunately.