Discussion Abrams and CGI

How do you think the CGI will be handled by Abrams? Blatant CGI or more tasteful and subdued?

In this day and age CGI has no excuse to be bad. I think he will take full advantage of it personally. It's what a lot of sci fi movies do these days. It's unfortunate yes, but this is what I see happening.

Ah well.

JJ's going to use whatever effects he needs to tell the story. But he's not going to reinvent the wheel in the process. It will be a crowdpleaser from an FX standpoint.

I think he uses it very well and uses it as a vehicle for story telling. And doesn't over use it and resulting in his movies not looking cartoonish.

I like the cgi in Star Trek'09, it blended well with the practical sets, and looked very realistic and not so cartoonish and videogamish. I say use the maximum practical sets and creatures as possible and use cgi more wisely

I don't really care what effects they use, as long as they look good.

I think George takes too much crap for his "use of CGI" in the PT. He wasn't afraid to push the envelope of how far you can go with CGI. Basically he gets criticized for being the "beta tester" for what can be done with CGI. Since TPM and even ROTS, CGI has improved 10 fold.

Also there is the "economics of CGI": It's more cost effective to have animators overseas to use CGI, then to pay model makers in the US, or to pay to build sets in the UK. Keep in mind Lucasfilm just recently completed its studio facility in Singapore. I know fans long for the day where a guy wired 10,000 fiber optic lights in a Star Destroyer model, but it's just not cost effective:


When it comes to sets, Lucas saved money by NOT using the unions to build sets. He used green screens. Remember, Lucas left the directors guild, so he wasn't under particular contract to use them.

As far as CGI, it's here to say. I think JJ will use everything available to him to tell the story. Since JJ IS in the Directors guild, he maybe required and or entitled to using set designers, etc.

They built sets and used location shooting for Trek, so hope this continues for the Wars. Less CGI please.

A combination of CGI, motion capture, and practical effects would be nice.

More CGI for me. I like fantasy films to look like fantasy. I'll watch a Malick film or a Downton Abbey episode when I want location shooting and realistic sets.

I just want a healthy balance of CGI and practicals/sets. Plain and simple

I think ILM will do what they have always done: The best special effects in the business!

You haven't watched Tree of Life, haven't you...

I want effects that last, and a lot of CGI doesn't look that good 10 years down the line.

Films that have aged well, like the OT & Titanic & Jurassic Park, have done so because they used full CGI sparingly and opted for anamatronics and models and sets instead of green/blue screen and not much else.

They say CGI is cost-effective, yet the OT didn't cost half of what the PT did and it still looks great today while the PT does not.

Generally, I must say Weta have at times made them look **** in the last few years.

That part in AOTC when Yoda, Windu and Yoda are chatting in the Jedi Temple, with Yoda floating his lazy ass on a flying chair looks terrible now.

You're suggesting that film didn't have a visual design based on realism? The bulk of the film takes place in a town, a house, some woods, a yard, etc. Malick's creation of the universe used practical effects, and his dinosaurs portraying the path of grace for one scene were hardly something out of Jurassic Park. And the afterlife/Penn coming to grips with his past scene was a beach.

But with a fraction of the scope.

Most of the movies with big budgets (+$200 million) were movies with a lot of CGI in it (Avengers, Pirates, Avatar, Hobbit, Transformers,etc). Prometheus cost $100 million and had enormous sets build, and plenty of location shoots. So the argument that CGI is cost-effective or cheaper is invalid in my opinion.

The Hobbit looks more artificial to me than it was with the Lord of the Rings, who still looks fantastic 10 years later, unlike the PT, the lack of miniature sets and also cgi orcs and goblins instead of people with prosthetic made the movie look more fake.

CGI was used to enhance parts of the OT and increase the scope, but only in a subtle way that didn't overwhelm the movies.


Besides, I would rather it look good and be low-scale than look bad and be epic.

That's fine, if its the story you want to tell. But I think this is less about disliking the tools used to capture Lucas's vision, and more about disliking Lucas's vision.

I like Lucas' vision, if not I wouldn't be here. I would just have preffered it if he shot the PT's special effects the way he did the OT but with the added benefits of modern CGI.

The OT lasts and will last because it doesn't date, the PT is already dated and that is a problem.

But again, that wasn't his vision. Any chump could have made the PT by aping the style of the OT, but replacing the optical printer with Rob Coleman and John Knoll's boys. His vision was a broader scope, a romantic period piece tone, and deliberate contrast to what he'd done in the past.

Probably one of the biggest storytelling strengths of JJ directing is that he won't be using the movie to play jazz with what can be accomplished with effects. He's not really the "under the hood" type, like Nolan, PJ, Cameron, or Lucas. He gets to stand on the shoulders of those pioneers.

But a better story, characters, dialogue and acting.

In talking about Prometheus, Ridley Scott made an interesting comment, that people who say CGI is always cheaper don't know "what h*ll they're doing".

CGI certainly isn't all bad. I actually think Jar Jar, Watto, and some of the other TPM aliens still really hold up well today - and wouldn't have been possible without CGI. However, I think it became a bit of a crutch. For example, in AOTC, they used CGI clone troopers rather than men in suits. The OT had stormtroopers and it's not like the armor couldn't have been made to fit several hundred extras (look at what Lord of the Rings with extras and armor!). Unfortunately, Lucas didn't go that route and the CGI troopers look pretty fake. Even the official commentary in the blu-ray admits that Lucas wasn't satisfied.

I also think CGI and the ease of special effects tempts some filmmakers to throw in effects just for kicks rather than the story. In the OT, ILM only made effects that were necessary for the story. It was so hard to make the effects that they couldn't afford to be gratuitous. Now, however, we see directors zooming in on CGI effects and spending way too much time. As much as I love TPM, I feel like that's what happened with the podracing sequence. Sure, it was really cool that CGI made the scene possible, but it really didn't need to be 10-15 minutes long without any meaningful dialogue.

Basically, if CGI is necessary to tell a story, then by all means use it. But I would hope Abrams would be smart enough to not be gratuitous with CGI. So far, Super 8 has me a bit worried with Abrams. There were a lot of gratuitous shots of trains exploding and the alien.