[A Bit of Rambling] Has CGI helped or hindered "movie magic" and our experience of films?

My postmodernist poetry professor said the other day, "If you can imagine a white stallion galloping across a tomato, then you can grasp what is surrealism. I don't mean a tomato with a horse standing on top, the tomato crushing beneath its weight, but a horse literally galloping freely across the edge of the tomato. It takes imagination."

Well, I was thinking about it and, you know, nowadays with CGI and computer technology, making a horse gallop across a tomato is nothing.

But what does this mean for what we call "movie magic"?

On the one hand, it makes anything possible. There are no limits today of what you can put on the silver screen. If you can dream it, you can make it into a movie.

At the same time, though, one of the things that made movies like the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones great was that they felt so...genuine. You knew that Harrison Ford was doing his own stunts on big sets and that they were filming real explosions, though many were on a miniature level. It was impressive.

Now I'm not saying we should completely resist technology or anything and, really, CGI has given film makers so much more freedom to tell their stories. But...are we ever really awed anymore by what we see on the screen? Has CGI really led to more imaginative film making? Perhaps it's that despite all this freedom we're still telling the same old stories. Now, instead of blowing up miniature buildings, we're blowing up computer generated buildings.

I guess I'm still waiting for them to make that stallion to gallop across the tomato.

 

Interesting question. It *can* be a help, but if it isn't good, it doesn't.

 

CG is ok, but only if they aide the movie. But if a movie is built around 'cool' special effects, it doesn't work.

 

Exactly. Compare the CGI in Children of Men to just about everything else since I'd wager that 99.99% of the people couldn't tell when CGI was used in that film unless they were told.

 

I was going to start a thread on this topic, but I had time constrants then, and I still do. I'll be making a long post here sometime soon.

(I'm making this post so I can find it more easily.)

 

film in itself is an effect, isn't it. it's what confuses me when people discuss CGI v trad fx as if cgi made a sudden difference. when harryhausen created his monsters people were also in awe THEN. so i wager the fx themselves don't kill either imagination or magic, the film isn't simply what you see in a given frame, is it?

 

CGI does make certain films affordable--that's why historical and fantasy films are now more common. "Gladiator" for instance.

 

CGI has also helped television sci fi shows to be more affordable, also.

 

'Gladiator' did have a lot of CGI - most of the Roman architecture was digital - but even if you discount that then the crowds and all of the compositing still stem from the same basic technology: the microchip. So the idea still stands, in my opinion.

Maybe it's silly, but I've always had a feeling that having purely practical effects just has a more visceral, immediate emotional impact on the viewer. When I think of the asteroid scene in ESB vs. AOTC, I'm much more impressed by ESB (even today) because, even though I know they're foam-core, those darn asteroids feel so damn real!

I know Christopher Nolan, when making 'Batman Begins', expressly wanted to make as many effects as possible practical rather than digital (and from what I've seen on YouTube, is maintaining this strategy for the sequel).

I do think that sometimes having so much power (and CGI gives the director to do literally whatever he wants, create whatever he imagines) leads to arbitrary application of that power, like a cop shooting a guy just because he's got a gun and knows there'll be no serious consequence. And soon enough you've just got guns and bullets flying everywhere and there's just no real logic or thoughtfulness anymore. (Anyway!)

 

I agree; the ESB asteroid chase sequence is still one of my all-time favorite sequences in the films.

 

Most of the directors today could stand to hear this:

Don't you see the danger, inherent in what you're doing here? CGI is the most awesome effects tool ever seen on this planet. But you wield it like a kid who's found his dad's gun.

The problem with this computer power you've used is it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge yourselves, so you don't take the responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, you packaged it, you slapped in on a plastic lunch box, and now -- you want to sell it. You wanna sell it.

Your FX guys were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

 

I think JKH has a first class point here. They use it whether or not they need it, and sometimes to the detriment of character development and plot, and the Prequel Trilogy is a first class example.

 

they can definitely be overdone. Remember how much bullet-time we had to watch?

 

CGI is just a tool, and like any other tool it depends entirely on the skills of the people using it. Asking a question like this even after Pixar, Gollum, Children of Men etc feels to me a bit like asking 'have screwdrivers helped or hindered DIY?'

This strikes me as a touch presumptuous. Can you actually back up the arguement that the use of CGI had a detrimental effect on the character development and plot of the prequel trilogy? Do you have any solid reason to believe the scripts would have been superior if practical special effects were to be used?

 

ROTS. We had the completely extraneous action scene with General Grievous instead of more information on why Anakin turned. The novelization makes it clearer, even.

 

^ I don't see what the decision to focus on action sequences over character scenes has to do with which techniques were used to realise those action scenes.

 

I am aware that you don't get the point.

 

I still don't think you've given a good reason for holding the tool responsible for what you perceive as poor directing decisions, beyond making those decisions easier to implement.

To cook up yet another analogy for my point of view: over-eager use of synthesisers and new electronic music technology resulted in a lot of terrible, dated music in the 80's. But since then people have used the same technology to create brilliant music which could never have existed otherwise. So I think the only smart thing to do is accept that the technology is out there, celebrate and promote the good and try to ignore the bad.

 

Bad CGI can really ruin a moment. In that one car stealing movie with Nick Cage and Angelina Jolie there is a car jump; or I should say a cartoon car jump. My eye was not fooled. Yet in Punisher those are two real cars chasing after each other and crashing and jumping and so on.

I guess you could say that about any form of special effect though. There are a couple of moments in Dragonslayer that show that the dragon is a puppet. The rest of the film and effects are great and I still say it is the best dragon effects on film with the CGI of Reign Of Fire a close second.

But I think perhaps it's the human factor. The opening battle of ROTS is a feast. CGI or not that was not an opener that I dwelled upon wondering about the CGI effects. But one film earlier computer stunt man Anakin sumersaults onto the back of the horned beats and it looked totally fake and stupid. However, in the same film I did not know that Obi Wan being pulled on the ground through the rain during the Jango fight was a digital stunt man.

Perhaps it just boils down to fooling the eye and the method be damned. What is better, an actual painting on canvas doen by a person with brushes or a computer generated image? I don't thing the medium is important, the result is important. Fool my eye and I could care less.

 

I agree, the overuse of CGI in films really annoys me these days, and I feel it DOES take away from the film - one of my all-time favourites, "Raiders" was SO much better because you KNEW Ford was doing all his own stunts, and it just looked more "authentic" than even the best CGI. For this reason, a large part of me is NOT looking forward to the 4th instalment next year.

 

JAWS ran on Turner Classic Movies last night. Like everyone else, I'd seen it a thousand
times. But even though it seems a bit retro now, it had an AUTHENTIC feel to it withOUT CGI.
I believed Shaw, Dreyfuss and Scheider were out there on the ocean battling a big shark.
It wouldn't be the same film if made today. And I don't think I'd enjoy it nearly as much
with a CGI shark.

In fact, Spielberg and many others have talked about how much difficulty they had with the mechanical shark and how the shark being unseen for so much of the film made it so much more effective when it finally does appear. So even the technology they had at the time was more useful when used CONSERVATIVELY. Two-thirds of the film doesn't even have special effects in it, even the type available in those days. Less is more. It was the drama, the tension, the performances and the situation, not the bells and whistles.