CGI in cinema

I was wondering what you all thought of CGI in cinema. As the years go on, we see more and more films that include CGI. Some films, like "Avatar" or "Tron Legacy" are mostly CGI-based.

The question is: do you think the use of heavy CGI in a film is another style of filmmaking, or is it simply a digital art?

After consideration, I really don't think it can qualify as filmmaking. After all, some of these directors don't even need to pick up a camera for CGI scenes. It can all be done on a computer. I'm not putting down CGI completely. I think it can be helpful for small details of a film, such as eliminating stunt harnesses. But if a director doesn't have his/her hands on a camera, and if they're not manually lighting a scene and setting it up to be shot properly, but instead doing all of that on a computer, then I don't think they're a filmmaker, in the traditional sense. They're literally skipping over the entire art of filmmaking and having a computer do it for them. A skilled visual artist? Perhaps. Or their digital effects team is, at least.

I'm also not saying that digital effects work is easy. I've done some work with it before and I'll never do it again. You really need to have patience and a keen sense of what you're doing. Frankly, I thought it was hell working with 3D/SFX programs, and fucking tedious.

Maybe a different kind of filmmaking? I think it's a legitimate medium for storytelling, and that's what I think it the most important thing. Not that it's usually going to be used well for those purposes...

Well, without it, you simply can't tell the stories of some of these films. It has its pros and cons in that regard.

It's good because it's expanded storytelling into places we where never able to touch before due to limitations in technology. It's bad because it's replaced analog SFX even when models and stuntwork looked better in certain situations and those filmmakers who use it extensively seem to have issues with using restraint.

tl,dr It's broadened our film horizon, but the older limited horizon is what made some films great to begin with.

Depends on how it's used. If it's to portray/do something impossible, that is appropriate within the context of the film, then great.

If it's just being used because the filmmakers are being too cheap to pay for the actor/stunt double's insurance, or too lazy to come up with a creative way to piece a sequence together, than it's bad

Or if it's used just to give work to the special effects company you also own. We call that "Lucasing". :D

Salomé wrote:

Or if it's used just to give work to the special effects company you also own. We call that "Lucasing". :D

Creating a piece of Lucashit.

I don't mind when CGI is used to enhance a scene, if done correctly. My problem lies with films that are 80%+ CGI, and in that case, I'd hesitate to call them "films". It's also discouraging when directors are too lazy to properly light and add color to a scene, and instead, use the computer to do it for them, often leading to that shitty steel blue/gray color scheme we see in every Hollywood film.

If you're not moving a camera by hand, if you're not setting up lights, or directing actors, or working within a hand-made set, then I don't know how one could consider that "filmmaking". And, in all seriousness, what's the fun of that?

CGI to me is just another form of animation - to me it seems just as legtimate as the old hand-drawn animation, claymation or whatever type of thing, they're telling a story and if CGI is the current innovation for creating such universes, I'm totally fine with that. So I think Brown's complaint:

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If you're not moving a camera by hand, if you're not setting up lights, or directing actors, or working within a hand-made set, then I don't know how one could consider that "filmmaking". And, in all seriousness, what's the fun of that?

Ought to apply to all forms of animation - which of course would count out Disney, Pixar and co from the reams of proper "film-making". Its just a different visual method of storytelling, for example if Pixar had made NORTH BY NORTHWEST exactly as it was, except it was a computer animation, its still a film to me.

Speaking from preference , when it comes to my films I watch for the actors and the plots usually more than anything else, so I'm always with just watching actors do their thing in a normal environment. Animated films and fantasy aren't overly my bag - except of course for the Harry Potter books and films which were a great love of my childhood and teenage years. And thankfully for the films they found real locations for the castles, built a lot of fantastic sets and have had some utterly fantastic production values in depicting magic. So its all a relative matter of good usage.

Professionals seem to be pretty divided on this too. I just got done interviewing some vfx guys about the future, and while one was all gung-ho to get the analog part - production - turned into a part of the process like prep and post, which are mostly digital, the other folks were more about getting as much in-camera as possible.

Part of what happens now is virtual filmmaking for what is supposed to be perceived as live-action...the skydive in QOS is a good example. That was mostly data capture of live folk, but not a cinematography approach at all.

Frankly, I just seem to be very aware of most CG approaches as looking different and distracting. Same used to be true in pre-dig era with a lot of matting, but now the whole image is diminished, not just the compositing. And a lot seems to get lost in the scanning and outputting at 2K, which is really maybe half the resolution of 35mm film. So you've got lots of factors bringing the screen image quality DOWN, which maybe makes the new mediocrity more acceptable, but keeps it all from looking gorgeous as it COULD in the earlier era.

I think Cuaron's GRAVITY might be the movie that makes all this stuff transparent and photoreal ... like the unmade Fincher RAMA, it seems to be pretty much a motion capture movie, with faces mapped onto animated figures. But even if he pulls it off, that won't guarantee other movies operate on the same level.

Sorry I haven't been posting lately, just got lots of issues going on. Will try to get by more.

Harrison Ford has just taken a swipe at the overuse of CGI in movies and, needless to say, I agree with every word of it:

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Harrison Ford has taken a swipe at Hollywood's reliance on computer graphics, just months before his own CGI-heavy blockbuster hits screens.

Speaking to the LA Times in an interview to promote forthcoming actioner 'Cowboys & Aliens', the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ star slammed recent blockbusters such as 'Transformers' and Avatar'.

He said: "I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale. With the CGI, suddenly there’s a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don’t need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion. I don't have time for that."

Ford’s earlier films emphasise his point. 'Indiana Jones' was praised because of its real-life effects driven by spectacular sets and models, as was the original 'Star Wars' trilogy.

However the fourth Indy movie, 'The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull', was actually slated for using too much CGI. It featured a much-ridiculed scene showing Shia LaBeouf swinging through trees with a swarm of computer-generated monkeys. The 'Star Wars' franchise has also recently had yet another digital remastering announced.

'Cowboys & Aliens', which sees Ford team up with Daniel Craig as a pair of cowboys fighting off an alien invasion, is likely to be another effects-heavy affair. The film reaches UK cinemas in August.

You can't beat the ingenuity and genius required to actually plan and pull off a stunt or special effect. CGI, however good, never quite looks right. I love models and actual stunts.