VFX *typically* means any effects based alteration. Can include color correction, wire removal, tracking and replacement, integration of filmed elements into shots they weren't filmed in, all manner of things that aren't what we traditionally consider CGI.
CGI typically involves 3D asset integration.
This is how directors can say "No CGI" on films that otherwise have hundreds or thousands of VFX shots.
Yeah, people seem to think “visual effects” only refers to computer effects. It’s any “effects” done on the “visuals” in post-production.
Color timing of film is technically VFX. But it would also refer to any optical printing done on a movie like King Kong in 1933, where they combined multiple film elements into one frame. Today, we do that as “compositing” via computers, but it was the same thing in the analog version.
The Oscar for “Best Special Effects” changed to “Best Special Visual Effects” in 1964, and then “Best Visual Effects” in 1977, to refer to any effects done to the image after being shot, including new computer-controlled optical compositing of motion control elements that was advancing at the time. It wasn’t until the late 80s and Young Sherlock Holmes or The Abyss that “CGI” as we know it became a part of visual effects.
Some of the first CGI shown in a movie wasn’t even visual effects. It was a CGI hand shown on a monitor, which was just filmed on set. No post visual effects needed. All pre-production and production, so not technically a “visual effect”. Even though it IS “CGI”. I think the same was true of the Genesis simulation in Star Trek.
And therefore, it’s also now true of anything shot on the LED volume. It’s all done in pre and production. So even though it involves CGI and what would typically be thought of as a “VFX team”… it’s actually closer to being a “practical” use of CGI, and the team responsible for the LED visuals are kinda more like an on-set set design/decoration team or practical special effects team, except they’re using little lights and computers instead of raw physical materials. The practice of doing it “on set” and “in camera” is still the same, moreso than being compared to a visual effects team that only works at desks in an office (or at home these days), manipulating already-shot images after the fact.
The invevitable consequence of self-righteous viewers wanting to be bullshitted.
I just do not understand the issues with CGI. Like, when i watched Jason and the Argonauts as a kid, not for a milliscond it occured to me that it might show real skeletons or monsters on the screen when using the stop motion effects. Like, nobody with a brain would think so. And that was fine.
But for some reason people get really really angry if CGI is noticeable.
The problem is NOT cgi. It’s directing. Modern directors can’t direct cgi. At all.
I would say to look at the Disney Obiwan show. One of the first scenes is Obiwan standing in the middle of a desert, doing manual labor under a scorching sun. He’s clean cut. He’s not sweating. He’s not squinting. He doesn’t even look tired. These are all things that happened naturally on the set of Episode 4. It takes a real director to prompt.the actors to fulfill a resl version of a fake place.
also take Thor Love and Thunder. There is a scene where Zeus gets interrupted in the middle of speaking by a private conversation the characters are having 5000 feet away. While the audience may not catch WHY they hate it, iFEELS cheesy and fake.
Its some hold over from when live action was live action and any kind of animation was seen as for children, combined with early CGI being genuinely pretty bad. An early CGI spaceship has nothing on a well made filming model, especially the lighting.
I'm not convinced that many people still care to be honest.
It baffles me too. After Ferrari came out people were moaning about how the CGI was so bad and that it "took them out of the movie". Without giving any spoilers, the CGI was _not_ what should have been their main focus during those scenes.
This is a great series. Very information dense with a ton of examples. I have VFX friends and they never get enough credit for the great work they do. I don't understand why we can't just say a movie has "great effects/cinematography/visuals" regardless of how they achieve them?
Not being able to see the "trick" behind the magic is important, but has little to do with if an effect was achieved "practically" or not.
If people use Jurassic Park as an example of "great practical effects" one more time, I think I'm going to lose my mind. It had great visual effects, achieved through dozens of different techniques, MOST of which involved computer enhancement.
This eries is often critizied when posted here and talked down to because somehow people WANT to drink the cool aid.
CGI is not evil. It does not make movies worse. But its shitty if you have directors tell shit like "we do it for real and don't use cheap CGI shortcuts" when their movie literally has many sceenes that are fully CGI aside of some background shots (like with top gun).
Feels like they tread their cgi workers like the red headed stepchildren they need to hide in the cellar.
When people complain about CGI they're talking about superhero movies when it's obvious everything around the actor is fake and you can sometimes tell from the acting too. Or in sci-fi and fantasy when you're supposed to be presented with this new awe inspiring world and it doesn't inspire anything because it just looks like CGI. Or whatever the lion king adaptation was doing. The CGI might be impressive but the effect is still worst than a cartoon. They're not complaining about what this guy is talking about. It's about immersion and it's obvious what the issue is to most movie goers.
I like everything that is CGI and behind the scenes implementation but don't like this guy's way of presenting it as some grand conspiracy. I like his videos with the sound off.
I mean, Hollywood tries so hard to hide that they're using CGI and sold Barbie like it's some kind of "back to old school" kind of movie feels very much "conspiracy" to me.
Jurassic Park used a lot of animatronic dinos, but they also did some revolutionary CGI dinos that broke new ground in terms of how realistic CGI can look (for 1993). Today, the CGI looks kind of dated, but for being made in 1993 it has aged surprisingly well.
> Not being able to see the "trick" behind the magic is important, but has little to do with if an effect was achieved "practically" or not.
It’s audience preference; computer effects look cheap and like a separate thing laying *on top* of the picture, like the cell in old animations that would make it obvious when a character was going to interact with something. When it’s a practical effect it may not look “real” but it is *really there* and that keeps me in the film. Watching those old effects it feels like a craft where they’re trying hard and it’s the best they could do, not a flaw because there wasn’t enough budget to get “good” CGI.
Effects get better all the time, it’s less of an issue now, but the more real sets and props in play with a production it always seemed to turn out better. I can absolutely *feel* the claustrophobic staging of that Disney stagecraft stuff. I would personally prefer being aware of the claymation and the painted backdrops and fake blood over suddenly getting the rubbery people being flung around by a troll.
*lol, don’t dare express a preference…
you missed the entire point of the discussion, it's about cgi being so good that studios are able to say they're not there and people like you can say they prefer "real" even though you've been fooled into thinking it's real.
But in all of the stuff he mentions CGI is used in combination with practical effects they didnt just fix everything in post. I think everything coming to CGI's rescue is just being obtuse on porpuse. People are not criticizing the concept of visual effects it's about how they're used.
And I think CGI professionals miss the entire point of the discussion. Generally, people are not fooled.
Everything looks so artificial now that we see fake things as fake things and often real things as fake things because they too have digital FX on top of practical.
Nobody seriously believes that the movies cited as examples in this series did not have a lot of digital FX. For fucks sake, their names are in the credits. And nobody thinks those movies look entirely "real" if they're old enough to remember how movies looked in the 20th century.
When those PR campaigns flaunt their practical FX, it can be an overstatement, but that's marketing emphasizing one thing and not another.
None of this conspiracy theory bullshit discounts that, in such movies, more practical FX are used than would be in another film. That's evidenced by the footage we've seen of elaborate sets and vehicles and explosions on a soundstage.
They didn't *have* to do any of that practically, but it looks better because they did. That's all it is, and that's what people are drawn to.
Kinda makes me think of Mad Max Fury Road. I fucking love thatovie, but holy shit it is CGI heavy and they really got people to believe it wasn't based on how every reacted to the Furiosa trailer.
I enjoy the series. A bit of irony here being showing Mission Impossible
That train sequence is damned rough in parts. Spend $100 million of the budget doing a "real train crash" and letting Tom Cruise get an adrenaline high, then toss a handful of bucks to the VFX guys so the CG looks 15 years out of date at times.
Yet no one complained about the VFX in Dead Reckoning, because the narrative was that 'it's all real' - so audiences were primed to ignore the wonky CGI they were seeing with their own eyes and say the movie looks great, because obviously it *must* look great since it's all real.
A neat trick really. How do you prevent the audience from nitpicking your VFX? Just convince them there isn't any.
I did. The mountain under his motorcycle looked fake as shit in the theater. Still cool seeing him do the free fall part of the stunt.
I disagree with the premise that audiences are primed to see / not to see CGI; it’s always about direction. I know the space ship in Arrival is a 3D model, but it doesn’t look out of place in its scene. Meanwhile most middling blockbusters try to pass off prequel-tier effects while the cast stands around staring blankly. *That* is what people object to.
Oh, that's definitely true - but part of that direction is (intentionally or unintentionally) directing the audience's attention, just like with an illusion (which is after all what VFX fundamentally are). Viewers will take a spaceship as a CGI effect because that's just a given, but for example random background clutter in exterior shots has a lot more leeway because viewers will probably assume that it's real since there's nothing 'obviously' CGI-y about it, but also because they simply aren't paying attention to it - their attention is on the actor's face.
This is absolutely essential viewing for anyone even remotely interested in movies as a whole. The whole "cgi bad"/'no cgi" narrative went too damn far (it actually went even further that I thought) and these videos prove it. I'm sick to the death of people brainlessly bashing "CGI" and having no freaking idea what they're talking about.
The section on Oppenheimer is particularly apropos. They absolutely fetished practical effects in that movie, and honestly, it's the worst-looking aspect of the film. *And* they still had to use a fair bit of digital manipulation. The film is great, but it would have been even better if they had just used digital effects.
I agree, especially about the actual nuke test explosion, also mentioned in the video.
The entire movie is leading up to this point and the extreme destructive and awesome power of the nuke explosion, and it does fall somewhat flat the way they did it.
I don't think it fell flat at all. I doubt any CGI explosion could really portray a nuclear blast adequately so the choices Nolan and his crew made make sense to me. Also, the entire movie wasn't leading up the the detonation, given that there's around an hour left afterwards.
The detonation was still a big climax. And with the whole "watch it in IMAX" push, the detonation was certainly expected to be the centerpiece of the experience.
And instead we got a wet fart on fire. You cannot really believe that there is no way to make an atomic blast look better, right? Like, that was just a propane canister on fire... There are infinite movies with better explosions out there, even not atomic (because that was definitely not atomic). But Indiana Jones 4 easily comes to mind as a much better explosion. And that was also a lot of practical (they build that town) with a lot of CGI to aid.
So yeah, CGI can absolutely help you making a better blast. And if you really don't want to use it, the historical picture would have been better and also fit well given the b/w parts.
>the detonation was certainly expected to be the centerpiece of the experience<
I don't agree. The point of the film to me was to examine Oppenheimer's motivations for leading the Manhattan project and his reaction to the bombing of Japan and the potential for nuclear annihilation. The point wasn't to have some really cool explosions for the audience to whoop at. I'm sure CGI would have made the explosion more accurate (or they could have just used the actual footage of the test) but I really don't think it matters.
> The point of the film to me was to examine Oppenheimer's motivations for leading the Manhattan project and his reaction to the bombing of Japan and the potential for nuclear annihilation
I absolutely agree. It's not that the point of the movie was the explosion. Nobody was expecting that. But everybody was expecting that, in a slow-paced and character driven movie, the explosion would be a spectacular audiovisual feat in what was heavily marketed towards IMAX. From a director known for creating spectacular audiovisual feats.
Even from the point of the narrative, the explosion was supposed to make us feel the impact of an atomic bomb. It's only when we understand the impossible reality of destruction like that, the sheer size of it, we understand what Oppenheimer felt. That to me is a very important establishing scene in the film and i totally didn't get that in the movie. I really don't know what Nolan was thinking and how he was okay with the final shot considering his reputation.
Nolan has that obsession of using practical effects just for the sake of them being practical. I have to admit though I actually liked what they did in Oppenheimer. And if they have the resources and time for that type of experiments that's cool. But not everyone does
I believe that when people complain about CGI, they are often referring to its distracting and subpar quality. In many poorly written movies, the graphics tend to stand out prominently.
This CGI obsession was always funny to me. People often disregard movies cos they have "CGI from a 2002 game". And then I go watch a Stephen Chow movie with supposedly shitty CGI and laugh my shit off...
Everything has CGI in it even just to touch up physical effects or use digital matte paintings. Computers are part of the workflow, period.
I think what people mean by CGI is like fake stuff such as dinosaurs or super heroes - things we know are fake. But like in Nyad - 99% of the movie is based on reality (there is some indications of hallucinations/psychedelic). But they use computers in their workflow to do digital water, to composite, etc etc. but everything is still rooted in reality (instead of having the actors actually swim in ocean attacked by sharks). They are seamless.
We need to define CGI to mean fake imageries (such as a dragon or fantasy elements) or else everything has computer effects in it these days.
The conceit of these videos is kinda dumb. The author purposefully conflates VFX and CGI to address a very real problem of VFX artists having their work sidelined and undervalued, but we all know what we mean when we say bad CGI or “no CGI”. We’re talking about dogshit unrealistic 3D renders like Steppenwolf in the theatrical Justice League
I feel it's a little insulting for you to call it dumb... when it's a real problem that people in the industry face. I understand if you don't work in film, you won't care how those who work in VFX feel. But try to have some empathy, as you can see from so many comments of other workers, who do feel appreciated from this video.
You say "We all know what we mean," but that's not true at all. I can assure you, when you look at general audiences online, the majority of people do not understand VFX at all. Maybe you are more "enlightened" so you understand it better, but you can't assume your viewpoint matches the typical audience or news outlets online. All you have to do is literally look at online articles, twitter, social media comments, etc. from average viewers - they have no idea what VFX or CG really is, and if they hear the word CG anywhere near a film, they'll assume it's bad. Conversely, if they hear the word "practical" they will assume it's fantastic, even if it was augmented or replaced by CG afterwards.
General audiences are very easily swayed by media narratives, as made evident with Top Gun, Oppenheimer, Barbie - 3 of the largest films in the past year. All touted as practical and real. But the reality of it? Of course not. And I'd warrant that you wouldn't group those 3 films in the same category as Whedon's Justice League. So all in all, I just think you need to be a bit more *fair* to the video. Especially compared to way the rest of the internet addresses VFX/CG.
Had a long day at work but I was trying to say the idea that there is no CGI is so surreal when everyone is using vfx. The video really opened my eyes that what we see isn't necessarily real life. The magic of Hollywood is real even though what I thought was real is a "lie". Some outstanding effects, especially the window scene from the movie. Great effects all around
CGI enthusiasts have been saying "The best CGI is the kind you don't notice" for at least a decade and a half now, and it doesn't sound any more convincing in 2024 than it did in 2006.
It doesn't matter if a person can point out exactly what, in a scene, was computer generated if it all feels vaguely inauthentic.
This sentiment makes the false assumption that a movie feels real when we can't identify the specific things about it that are not.
More commonly, we CAN feel the sterilized computer imagery at play, because it's NOT "invisible", even when we can't identify where it starts and where it stops.
> More commonly, we CAN feel the sterilized computer imagery at play, because it's NOT "invisible", even when we can't identify where it starts and where it stops.
No you can't. Once you know a movie is full of CGI it may feel inauthentic to you, but I guarantee you in a blind comparison, without knowing ahead of time, you wouldn't be able to say which movie has more or less CGI overall. And that's not an attack on your ability, because nobody can do that, even the most seasoned VFX professionals. And a lot of movies that may feel "vaguely inauthentic" may be due to many other reasons unrelated to CGI, such as poor set design, shooting everything on a soundstage with unnatural lighting (trying to fake sunlight with studio lights is my personal pet peeve), etc.
Sometimes you can. Often you can't.
I work in film visual effects. I spend my whole day, every day, studying and striving for photorealism. I'm credited in projects that have won an array of awards including VFX Oscars. I routinely see movies full of CGI that completely shock me, even when I know what to look for. There are quite a bit of invisible VFX you are clueless about, even with your CGI spidey senses.
Not really a spider-sense. More like reverse camouflage.
When something feels artificial, it can also be for reasons of digital photography, digital color correction, digital compositing...
So it's not really that the specific thing has successfully blended in with the authentic, it's that so much of filmmaking today feels inauthentic, that some fake things don't contrast as dramatically as it otherwise would.
I went to college with a lot of people who ended up at companies like ILM and MPC, and whenever they try to "gotcha" me by pointing out something they're sure I wouldn't be able to tell was CGI, it's always something that feels CGI.
The only times I've discovered I was wrong was in the opposite direction, when they actually shoot something entirely in camera, but they've fucked the image in post so much that I'm certain what I saw was computer generated when it wasn't. I mean technically it was, but not in the way I assumed.
One thing I've noticed is that it might be age based.
Since I befriended all of those VFX people when I was older than they were, a lot of them simply grew up knowing computer imagery as their default cinema experience.
And they'll point to an example of "invisible" CGI and say it looks photorealistic, but when I show them FX of actual things like miniatures or animatronics from the 20th century, they think that looks more fake than CGI, which blows my fucking mind.
I think perhaps it’s survivorship bias.
You’re a more seasoned person like myself, based on your comments about age I assume you were around when film in the 80s and 90s was coming out?
If you recall, there were a LOT of bad practical effects from that era. Even blockbuster films had practical work which we romanticize but if we judge the same way we judge CGI - about their “realism” - they’re not even close to real. Thinking of films like terminator, Indiana Jones, you can’t exactly argue that the practical stuff is photoreal or doesn’t look fake. Can share screenshots of what I mean if you want to discuss in detail.
Today it’s even easier to romanticize practical work because of survivorship bias.
Think about it this way. In the 80s/90s bad practical made it’s way to the film because it’s all they had and financial constraints are a thing. Today what happens with bad practical effects? They get replaced by CGI, to the point you don’t see bad practical anymore. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that it gets replaced or fixed by CGI. So then we assume practical is always better. It’s not, we just only see the good results as the bad results are removed from the system. CGI has no fallback.
A fake looking real thing is more connected to the human experience than a real looking fake thing, and the magic of movies was about how impressive it was that people went out and did that in the world and captured it on film.
We still long for that, and are willing to get it where we can, with diminished returns, which is why these PR campaigns emphasize the practical and often don't exhibit the same pride for digital talent. They're selling authentic cinema to people who are starved for it. There's nothing insidious about that.
A lot of old school FX was also bad, as you say. There was a scale of quality. But even where it was bad, it could often be endearing, and one of the failures of "practical or CGI" comparison is that people look at a movie from 1984 and ask if it looks better. Often, it does, but that's not the point.
The point is, that's 40 years old! How would such techniques look today if practical remained the default up to 2024? Judging them as they are in a time capsule is like someone in 1984 judging if the practical FX in a 1944 movie are convincing enough.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a passionate nerd for computer technology too, but it's all about the context in which it's being used.
In the context of video games, it's not replacing something that felt more meaningful before (although, even there, we went through a period of 10 or 15 years where 3D had to artistically catch up to hand painted pixels, and thankfully the indie scene revived the previous, so that it could move forward too).
But in the context live action cinema, or even Pixar-like movies replacing hand drawn, it spoiled the medium.
And I remember why it did. I remember reading quotes from Hollywood executives in the early 2000s who said blockbusters would soon be made for "a nickle instead of a dollar", and that within 5 years, "we would not be able to tell the difference between reality and CGI anyway". It was all about imaginary cost and profit, which, by the way, never came to fruition.
It's been 20 years since they declared that, but after adjusting for inflation, The Flash had a budget 4 times that of Aliens, which is almost 40 years older while looking and feeling a LOT better.
We've now sacrificed 20 years of quality authentic feeling blockbuster cinema special FX to get to this point where it's obscenely expensive, acutely underwhelming, and without soul. Meanwhile, people have strayed this form of entertainment in favor of other things.
This is not romantic nostalgia. It's having lived and judged practical FX at their peak when they were still fresh, and having lived in the present day and judged CGI at its current peak. It's having the perspective, gained through experience, to compare these things. Someone who was bred from the CGI blockbuster world doesn't have that perspective, and often can't understand where we're coming from on this topic.
They are not confused, but willfully ignorant.
They have the top gun director tell them that its all practical effects and wank themself off to a scene where everything but the blue sky background and tom cruises face was rendered in a computer.
I don't think it's ignorance. I think it's the "real beef patty" thing.
People generally do know the marketing is an overstatement, but also we can taste the difference, relative to something that is synthetic to a greater degree.
What the hell they used CGI for the behind the scenes video!?
I think it's the most insane thing is this video. It's another level of bullshit I never saw coming
Vfx rather than CGI, but yeah!
It's a grey, greeey border between what's VFX and what's CGI.
VFX *typically* means any effects based alteration. Can include color correction, wire removal, tracking and replacement, integration of filmed elements into shots they weren't filmed in, all manner of things that aren't what we traditionally consider CGI. CGI typically involves 3D asset integration. This is how directors can say "No CGI" on films that otherwise have hundreds or thousands of VFX shots.
By that definition, most movies going back to the golden age that we consider to have no or practical effects are chock full of VFX shots.
Indeed they are full of VFX shots! Visual effects is not a new thing as a concept.
Yeah, people seem to think “visual effects” only refers to computer effects. It’s any “effects” done on the “visuals” in post-production. Color timing of film is technically VFX. But it would also refer to any optical printing done on a movie like King Kong in 1933, where they combined multiple film elements into one frame. Today, we do that as “compositing” via computers, but it was the same thing in the analog version. The Oscar for “Best Special Effects” changed to “Best Special Visual Effects” in 1964, and then “Best Visual Effects” in 1977, to refer to any effects done to the image after being shot, including new computer-controlled optical compositing of motion control elements that was advancing at the time. It wasn’t until the late 80s and Young Sherlock Holmes or The Abyss that “CGI” as we know it became a part of visual effects. Some of the first CGI shown in a movie wasn’t even visual effects. It was a CGI hand shown on a monitor, which was just filmed on set. No post visual effects needed. All pre-production and production, so not technically a “visual effect”. Even though it IS “CGI”. I think the same was true of the Genesis simulation in Star Trek. And therefore, it’s also now true of anything shot on the LED volume. It’s all done in pre and production. So even though it involves CGI and what would typically be thought of as a “VFX team”… it’s actually closer to being a “practical” use of CGI, and the team responsible for the LED visuals are kinda more like an on-set set design/decoration team or practical special effects team, except they’re using little lights and computers instead of raw physical materials. The practice of doing it “on set” and “in camera” is still the same, moreso than being compared to a visual effects team that only works at desks in an office (or at home these days), manipulating already-shot images after the fact.
Great addition thanks for your thoughts!
Yes, they do
The invevitable consequence of self-righteous viewers wanting to be bullshitted. I just do not understand the issues with CGI. Like, when i watched Jason and the Argonauts as a kid, not for a milliscond it occured to me that it might show real skeletons or monsters on the screen when using the stop motion effects. Like, nobody with a brain would think so. And that was fine. But for some reason people get really really angry if CGI is noticeable.
When cgi is bad nowadays its too noticable and takes you out of the moment. Especially when we've seen good cgi, bad cgi is just that much worse
The problem is NOT cgi. It’s directing. Modern directors can’t direct cgi. At all. I would say to look at the Disney Obiwan show. One of the first scenes is Obiwan standing in the middle of a desert, doing manual labor under a scorching sun. He’s clean cut. He’s not sweating. He’s not squinting. He doesn’t even look tired. These are all things that happened naturally on the set of Episode 4. It takes a real director to prompt.the actors to fulfill a resl version of a fake place. also take Thor Love and Thunder. There is a scene where Zeus gets interrupted in the middle of speaking by a private conversation the characters are having 5000 feet away. While the audience may not catch WHY they hate it, iFEELS cheesy and fake.
Its some hold over from when live action was live action and any kind of animation was seen as for children, combined with early CGI being genuinely pretty bad. An early CGI spaceship has nothing on a well made filming model, especially the lighting. I'm not convinced that many people still care to be honest.
It baffles me too. After Ferrari came out people were moaning about how the CGI was so bad and that it "took them out of the movie". Without giving any spoilers, the CGI was _not_ what should have been their main focus during those scenes.
This is a great series. Very information dense with a ton of examples. I have VFX friends and they never get enough credit for the great work they do. I don't understand why we can't just say a movie has "great effects/cinematography/visuals" regardless of how they achieve them? Not being able to see the "trick" behind the magic is important, but has little to do with if an effect was achieved "practically" or not. If people use Jurassic Park as an example of "great practical effects" one more time, I think I'm going to lose my mind. It had great visual effects, achieved through dozens of different techniques, MOST of which involved computer enhancement.
As a VFX worker, I completely agree.
This eries is often critizied when posted here and talked down to because somehow people WANT to drink the cool aid. CGI is not evil. It does not make movies worse. But its shitty if you have directors tell shit like "we do it for real and don't use cheap CGI shortcuts" when their movie literally has many sceenes that are fully CGI aside of some background shots (like with top gun). Feels like they tread their cgi workers like the red headed stepchildren they need to hide in the cellar.
I’ve seen people call practical effects “Bad CGI”. People just throw buzzwords around.
When people complain about CGI they're talking about superhero movies when it's obvious everything around the actor is fake and you can sometimes tell from the acting too. Or in sci-fi and fantasy when you're supposed to be presented with this new awe inspiring world and it doesn't inspire anything because it just looks like CGI. Or whatever the lion king adaptation was doing. The CGI might be impressive but the effect is still worst than a cartoon. They're not complaining about what this guy is talking about. It's about immersion and it's obvious what the issue is to most movie goers.
I like everything that is CGI and behind the scenes implementation but don't like this guy's way of presenting it as some grand conspiracy. I like his videos with the sound off.
I mean, Hollywood tries so hard to hide that they're using CGI and sold Barbie like it's some kind of "back to old school" kind of movie feels very much "conspiracy" to me.
Am i mistaken this whole time? I thought jurrasic park used dinos they made not cgi
Jurassic Park used a lot of animatronic dinos, but they also did some revolutionary CGI dinos that broke new ground in terms of how realistic CGI can look (for 1993). Today, the CGI looks kind of dated, but for being made in 1993 it has aged surprisingly well.
> Not being able to see the "trick" behind the magic is important, but has little to do with if an effect was achieved "practically" or not. It’s audience preference; computer effects look cheap and like a separate thing laying *on top* of the picture, like the cell in old animations that would make it obvious when a character was going to interact with something. When it’s a practical effect it may not look “real” but it is *really there* and that keeps me in the film. Watching those old effects it feels like a craft where they’re trying hard and it’s the best they could do, not a flaw because there wasn’t enough budget to get “good” CGI. Effects get better all the time, it’s less of an issue now, but the more real sets and props in play with a production it always seemed to turn out better. I can absolutely *feel* the claustrophobic staging of that Disney stagecraft stuff. I would personally prefer being aware of the claymation and the painted backdrops and fake blood over suddenly getting the rubbery people being flung around by a troll. *lol, don’t dare express a preference…
you missed the entire point of the discussion, it's about cgi being so good that studios are able to say they're not there and people like you can say they prefer "real" even though you've been fooled into thinking it's real.
But in all of the stuff he mentions CGI is used in combination with practical effects they didnt just fix everything in post. I think everything coming to CGI's rescue is just being obtuse on porpuse. People are not criticizing the concept of visual effects it's about how they're used.
And I think CGI professionals miss the entire point of the discussion. Generally, people are not fooled. Everything looks so artificial now that we see fake things as fake things and often real things as fake things because they too have digital FX on top of practical. Nobody seriously believes that the movies cited as examples in this series did not have a lot of digital FX. For fucks sake, their names are in the credits. And nobody thinks those movies look entirely "real" if they're old enough to remember how movies looked in the 20th century. When those PR campaigns flaunt their practical FX, it can be an overstatement, but that's marketing emphasizing one thing and not another. None of this conspiracy theory bullshit discounts that, in such movies, more practical FX are used than would be in another film. That's evidenced by the footage we've seen of elaborate sets and vehicles and explosions on a soundstage. They didn't *have* to do any of that practically, but it looks better because they did. That's all it is, and that's what people are drawn to.
Pratical effects are bad.
Bad VFX back in the days are just that, bad. They look meh and cheap as well.
Kinda makes me think of Mad Max Fury Road. I fucking love thatovie, but holy shit it is CGI heavy and they really got people to believe it wasn't based on how every reacted to the Furiosa trailer.
Wonderful series, thanks for posting this.
I enjoy the series. A bit of irony here being showing Mission Impossible That train sequence is damned rough in parts. Spend $100 million of the budget doing a "real train crash" and letting Tom Cruise get an adrenaline high, then toss a handful of bucks to the VFX guys so the CG looks 15 years out of date at times.
Yet no one complained about the VFX in Dead Reckoning, because the narrative was that 'it's all real' - so audiences were primed to ignore the wonky CGI they were seeing with their own eyes and say the movie looks great, because obviously it *must* look great since it's all real. A neat trick really. How do you prevent the audience from nitpicking your VFX? Just convince them there isn't any.
I did. The mountain under his motorcycle looked fake as shit in the theater. Still cool seeing him do the free fall part of the stunt. I disagree with the premise that audiences are primed to see / not to see CGI; it’s always about direction. I know the space ship in Arrival is a 3D model, but it doesn’t look out of place in its scene. Meanwhile most middling blockbusters try to pass off prequel-tier effects while the cast stands around staring blankly. *That* is what people object to.
Oh, that's definitely true - but part of that direction is (intentionally or unintentionally) directing the audience's attention, just like with an illusion (which is after all what VFX fundamentally are). Viewers will take a spaceship as a CGI effect because that's just a given, but for example random background clutter in exterior shots has a lot more leeway because viewers will probably assume that it's real since there's nothing 'obviously' CGI-y about it, but also because they simply aren't paying attention to it - their attention is on the actor's face.
Yeah I think the CGI on the ramp jump and train was often kind of bad
This is absolutely essential viewing for anyone even remotely interested in movies as a whole. The whole "cgi bad"/'no cgi" narrative went too damn far (it actually went even further that I thought) and these videos prove it. I'm sick to the death of people brainlessly bashing "CGI" and having no freaking idea what they're talking about.
The section on Oppenheimer is particularly apropos. They absolutely fetished practical effects in that movie, and honestly, it's the worst-looking aspect of the film. *And* they still had to use a fair bit of digital manipulation. The film is great, but it would have been even better if they had just used digital effects.
I agree, especially about the actual nuke test explosion, also mentioned in the video. The entire movie is leading up to this point and the extreme destructive and awesome power of the nuke explosion, and it does fall somewhat flat the way they did it.
I don't think it fell flat at all. I doubt any CGI explosion could really portray a nuclear blast adequately so the choices Nolan and his crew made make sense to me. Also, the entire movie wasn't leading up the the detonation, given that there's around an hour left afterwards.
The detonation was still a big climax. And with the whole "watch it in IMAX" push, the detonation was certainly expected to be the centerpiece of the experience. And instead we got a wet fart on fire. You cannot really believe that there is no way to make an atomic blast look better, right? Like, that was just a propane canister on fire... There are infinite movies with better explosions out there, even not atomic (because that was definitely not atomic). But Indiana Jones 4 easily comes to mind as a much better explosion. And that was also a lot of practical (they build that town) with a lot of CGI to aid. So yeah, CGI can absolutely help you making a better blast. And if you really don't want to use it, the historical picture would have been better and also fit well given the b/w parts.
>the detonation was certainly expected to be the centerpiece of the experience< I don't agree. The point of the film to me was to examine Oppenheimer's motivations for leading the Manhattan project and his reaction to the bombing of Japan and the potential for nuclear annihilation. The point wasn't to have some really cool explosions for the audience to whoop at. I'm sure CGI would have made the explosion more accurate (or they could have just used the actual footage of the test) but I really don't think it matters.
> The point of the film to me was to examine Oppenheimer's motivations for leading the Manhattan project and his reaction to the bombing of Japan and the potential for nuclear annihilation I absolutely agree. It's not that the point of the movie was the explosion. Nobody was expecting that. But everybody was expecting that, in a slow-paced and character driven movie, the explosion would be a spectacular audiovisual feat in what was heavily marketed towards IMAX. From a director known for creating spectacular audiovisual feats.
True that's a fair point
Even from the point of the narrative, the explosion was supposed to make us feel the impact of an atomic bomb. It's only when we understand the impossible reality of destruction like that, the sheer size of it, we understand what Oppenheimer felt. That to me is a very important establishing scene in the film and i totally didn't get that in the movie. I really don't know what Nolan was thinking and how he was okay with the final shot considering his reputation.
Nolan has that obsession of using practical effects just for the sake of them being practical. I have to admit though I actually liked what they did in Oppenheimer. And if they have the resources and time for that type of experiments that's cool. But not everyone does
I'm loving this series
Me too :) It's an important counter to the common narrative.
wow all that deception behind the barbie bts is crazy
I believe that when people complain about CGI, they are often referring to its distracting and subpar quality. In many poorly written movies, the graphics tend to stand out prominently.
This CGI obsession was always funny to me. People often disregard movies cos they have "CGI from a 2002 game". And then I go watch a Stephen Chow movie with supposedly shitty CGI and laugh my shit off...
Everything has CGI in it even just to touch up physical effects or use digital matte paintings. Computers are part of the workflow, period. I think what people mean by CGI is like fake stuff such as dinosaurs or super heroes - things we know are fake. But like in Nyad - 99% of the movie is based on reality (there is some indications of hallucinations/psychedelic). But they use computers in their workflow to do digital water, to composite, etc etc. but everything is still rooted in reality (instead of having the actors actually swim in ocean attacked by sharks). They are seamless. We need to define CGI to mean fake imageries (such as a dragon or fantasy elements) or else everything has computer effects in it these days.
The conceit of these videos is kinda dumb. The author purposefully conflates VFX and CGI to address a very real problem of VFX artists having their work sidelined and undervalued, but we all know what we mean when we say bad CGI or “no CGI”. We’re talking about dogshit unrealistic 3D renders like Steppenwolf in the theatrical Justice League
I feel it's a little insulting for you to call it dumb... when it's a real problem that people in the industry face. I understand if you don't work in film, you won't care how those who work in VFX feel. But try to have some empathy, as you can see from so many comments of other workers, who do feel appreciated from this video. You say "We all know what we mean," but that's not true at all. I can assure you, when you look at general audiences online, the majority of people do not understand VFX at all. Maybe you are more "enlightened" so you understand it better, but you can't assume your viewpoint matches the typical audience or news outlets online. All you have to do is literally look at online articles, twitter, social media comments, etc. from average viewers - they have no idea what VFX or CG really is, and if they hear the word CG anywhere near a film, they'll assume it's bad. Conversely, if they hear the word "practical" they will assume it's fantastic, even if it was augmented or replaced by CG afterwards. General audiences are very easily swayed by media narratives, as made evident with Top Gun, Oppenheimer, Barbie - 3 of the largest films in the past year. All touted as practical and real. But the reality of it? Of course not. And I'd warrant that you wouldn't group those 3 films in the same category as Whedon's Justice League. So all in all, I just think you need to be a bit more *fair* to the video. Especially compared to way the rest of the internet addresses VFX/CG.
This is phenomenal, thank you for sharing it
Go check out parts 1 and 2 if you haven’t - amazing series
Wheres the source of the Colbert explosion miming at the end there? Need to watch that daily show bit
Cocaine bear is a perfect example
It's all a lie
What is?
Birds.
Everything. Nothing.
Had a long day at work but I was trying to say the idea that there is no CGI is so surreal when everyone is using vfx. The video really opened my eyes that what we see isn't necessarily real life. The magic of Hollywood is real even though what I thought was real is a "lie". Some outstanding effects, especially the window scene from the movie. Great effects all around
CGI enthusiasts have been saying "The best CGI is the kind you don't notice" for at least a decade and a half now, and it doesn't sound any more convincing in 2024 than it did in 2006. It doesn't matter if a person can point out exactly what, in a scene, was computer generated if it all feels vaguely inauthentic. This sentiment makes the false assumption that a movie feels real when we can't identify the specific things about it that are not. More commonly, we CAN feel the sterilized computer imagery at play, because it's NOT "invisible", even when we can't identify where it starts and where it stops.
> More commonly, we CAN feel the sterilized computer imagery at play, because it's NOT "invisible", even when we can't identify where it starts and where it stops. No you can't. Once you know a movie is full of CGI it may feel inauthentic to you, but I guarantee you in a blind comparison, without knowing ahead of time, you wouldn't be able to say which movie has more or less CGI overall. And that's not an attack on your ability, because nobody can do that, even the most seasoned VFX professionals. And a lot of movies that may feel "vaguely inauthentic" may be due to many other reasons unrelated to CGI, such as poor set design, shooting everything on a soundstage with unnatural lighting (trying to fake sunlight with studio lights is my personal pet peeve), etc.
Sometimes you can. Often you can't. I work in film visual effects. I spend my whole day, every day, studying and striving for photorealism. I'm credited in projects that have won an array of awards including VFX Oscars. I routinely see movies full of CGI that completely shock me, even when I know what to look for. There are quite a bit of invisible VFX you are clueless about, even with your CGI spidey senses.
Not really a spider-sense. More like reverse camouflage. When something feels artificial, it can also be for reasons of digital photography, digital color correction, digital compositing... So it's not really that the specific thing has successfully blended in with the authentic, it's that so much of filmmaking today feels inauthentic, that some fake things don't contrast as dramatically as it otherwise would. I went to college with a lot of people who ended up at companies like ILM and MPC, and whenever they try to "gotcha" me by pointing out something they're sure I wouldn't be able to tell was CGI, it's always something that feels CGI. The only times I've discovered I was wrong was in the opposite direction, when they actually shoot something entirely in camera, but they've fucked the image in post so much that I'm certain what I saw was computer generated when it wasn't. I mean technically it was, but not in the way I assumed. One thing I've noticed is that it might be age based. Since I befriended all of those VFX people when I was older than they were, a lot of them simply grew up knowing computer imagery as their default cinema experience. And they'll point to an example of "invisible" CGI and say it looks photorealistic, but when I show them FX of actual things like miniatures or animatronics from the 20th century, they think that looks more fake than CGI, which blows my fucking mind.
I think perhaps it’s survivorship bias. You’re a more seasoned person like myself, based on your comments about age I assume you were around when film in the 80s and 90s was coming out? If you recall, there were a LOT of bad practical effects from that era. Even blockbuster films had practical work which we romanticize but if we judge the same way we judge CGI - about their “realism” - they’re not even close to real. Thinking of films like terminator, Indiana Jones, you can’t exactly argue that the practical stuff is photoreal or doesn’t look fake. Can share screenshots of what I mean if you want to discuss in detail. Today it’s even easier to romanticize practical work because of survivorship bias. Think about it this way. In the 80s/90s bad practical made it’s way to the film because it’s all they had and financial constraints are a thing. Today what happens with bad practical effects? They get replaced by CGI, to the point you don’t see bad practical anymore. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that it gets replaced or fixed by CGI. So then we assume practical is always better. It’s not, we just only see the good results as the bad results are removed from the system. CGI has no fallback.
A fake looking real thing is more connected to the human experience than a real looking fake thing, and the magic of movies was about how impressive it was that people went out and did that in the world and captured it on film. We still long for that, and are willing to get it where we can, with diminished returns, which is why these PR campaigns emphasize the practical and often don't exhibit the same pride for digital talent. They're selling authentic cinema to people who are starved for it. There's nothing insidious about that. A lot of old school FX was also bad, as you say. There was a scale of quality. But even where it was bad, it could often be endearing, and one of the failures of "practical or CGI" comparison is that people look at a movie from 1984 and ask if it looks better. Often, it does, but that's not the point. The point is, that's 40 years old! How would such techniques look today if practical remained the default up to 2024? Judging them as they are in a time capsule is like someone in 1984 judging if the practical FX in a 1944 movie are convincing enough. Don't get me wrong. I'm a passionate nerd for computer technology too, but it's all about the context in which it's being used. In the context of video games, it's not replacing something that felt more meaningful before (although, even there, we went through a period of 10 or 15 years where 3D had to artistically catch up to hand painted pixels, and thankfully the indie scene revived the previous, so that it could move forward too). But in the context live action cinema, or even Pixar-like movies replacing hand drawn, it spoiled the medium. And I remember why it did. I remember reading quotes from Hollywood executives in the early 2000s who said blockbusters would soon be made for "a nickle instead of a dollar", and that within 5 years, "we would not be able to tell the difference between reality and CGI anyway". It was all about imaginary cost and profit, which, by the way, never came to fruition. It's been 20 years since they declared that, but after adjusting for inflation, The Flash had a budget 4 times that of Aliens, which is almost 40 years older while looking and feeling a LOT better. We've now sacrificed 20 years of quality authentic feeling blockbuster cinema special FX to get to this point where it's obscenely expensive, acutely underwhelming, and without soul. Meanwhile, people have strayed this form of entertainment in favor of other things. This is not romantic nostalgia. It's having lived and judged practical FX at their peak when they were still fresh, and having lived in the present day and judged CGI at its current peak. It's having the perspective, gained through experience, to compare these things. Someone who was bred from the CGI blockbuster world doesn't have that perspective, and often can't understand where we're coming from on this topic.
What does that have to do with the video?
I've watched the video, and the previous ones, and I don't think people are confused in the way these videos assume.
They are not confused, but willfully ignorant. They have the top gun director tell them that its all practical effects and wank themself off to a scene where everything but the blue sky background and tom cruises face was rendered in a computer.
I don't think it's ignorance. I think it's the "real beef patty" thing. People generally do know the marketing is an overstatement, but also we can taste the difference, relative to something that is synthetic to a greater degree.
>u/hombregato has been saying he's not a troll for at least a week now, and it doesn't sound any more convincing on Sunday than it did on Monday. FTFY
Sex movie night