Cinefex magazine' 100th issue just came out, and it features a huge roundtable discussion with many old hands in the effects field, talking about how things have chnaged over the last 20 years.

This particular exchange caught my eye:


CINEFEX:
Digital technology has been a liberating force., in that it allows you to do just about anything. But, creatively, is there a downside to the limitless possibilites it affords?

JOHN VAN VLIET*:
Sometimes we're asked to do some really stupid things, just because we can. It's like watching a monkey with a machine gun!

KEN RALSTON**:
The lack of limitations is the worst enemy of an artist. Because when you get to a point where anything can be done, it also means any kind of crap can be done. Any kind of filmmaker can put all kinds of $*** in a movie that you wouldn't watch with a gun to your head.

*ILM, Disney, Available Light. Worked on Tron, Empire, Ghost, Stargate, X-Men.

**ILM, Imageworks. Worked on Jedi, Cocoon, Roger Rabbit, Gump, all Back to the Futures, Contact, MiBII..

Damn straight, boys, damn straight. :lol:

. . . when you get to a point where anything can be done, it also means any kind of crap can be done. Any kind of filmmaker can put all kinds of $*** in a movie that you wouldn't watch with a gun to your head.

So, that explains ST:Nemesis! :thumbsup:

Nothing ruins a movie faster for me than an unbelievable, unnecessary or poorly executed CGI effect. It's like seeing that old Superman serial. When he starts to fly and suddenly becomes a cartoon. :rolleyes:

You have to take the good with the bad. So what if there are a bunch of crummy CGI effect movies, the really good ones make it all worth while. There were alot of crummy effect movies back in the good old days too.

Yeah there were crappy effects shots and we hated them too. When the hero is replaced by cgi it takes away the threat that was there to a real actor or stuntman. We don't care about the cgi getting hurt.
One of the stupidest things I see is cgi cars. There are millions of real cars around and yet they use cgi to make a fake car chase that never looks right.

Special effects should be used only when necessary, not as a cocaine pig out.

Speaking of special FX that didn't work out as planned...

I've finally gotten around to watching the bonus materials for the "Alien" boxed set I got last Christmas. Included in the "Making of Alien3" documentary are shots from a makeup test involving a dog in a rubber alien suit (!) that had me doubled over with laughter. Part of what makes the footage so funny are the comments of the makeup artists responsible; they knew it was a stupid idea going in, but at the director's insistence they gamely forged ahead. FX Supervisor Richard Edlund sums up the resulting footage best: "It happens to all of us... sometimes you have an idea, and it just sucks."

If you have the Alien boxed set but haven't watched the "making of" docs, you don't know what you're missing.

So, that explains ST:Nemesis! :thumbsup:
Mention of that celluloid-induced travesty should be illegal.

Seriously, it makes sense that because of the limitless aspect of the medium, they can do anything. I'm reminded of a lecture in my creative writing class a couple of years ago, in which the instructor said one must hold on to reality in order to produce a viable product that everyone can understand. If one goes off the deep end and creates anything from, as mentioned, automatic-wielding chimps to other deus ex machinae, you're treading the edge of sanity.

My bete noire, my all time most loathed film ever is "Twister". As near as I can tell, the only reason to make that movie was that someone thought the visuals of those tornadoes would be cool. Everything after that (story, characters, logic, etc.) was worked out in service to the visuals of those stupid effing twisters.

That was the first movie I saw where I walked out and said to myself, "Special effects are so good now that they've become a threat to good filmmaking".

Weird but true.

D.

Nowhere is the Less is More rule more obvious than in the original "Star Wars" cantina sequence. Lucas didn't have enough time or money to pull off that sequence, but everyone involved -- actors, makeup artists, art directors, editors, cinematographer, composer -- rose to the occasion and labored to produce one of the most famous scenes in movie history. Compare the cantina sequence in "A New Hope" to the bloated Jabba's Palace sequence in "Jedi." I don't care how much time, money or energy Lucas invests in digitally revamping the latter, he'll never match the sheer giddy fun of the original.

My biggest CGI gripe (among many) is the use of unrealistic points-of-view.

People have an inherent understanding of HOW things should be seen. We are two-legged land mammals and we understand the physical limitations that imposes.

Unfortunately, CGI grants film makers the ability to make us see action from ANY angle...regardless of how absurd.

This even happens in otherwise good movies. I very much enjoy WE WERE SOLDIERS. There is a scene with CGI helicopters flying towards the battle zone. Some pass overhead, some pass BENEATH. It becomes obvious that the only way to observe such action is to be suspended motionless in the air. Well, people aren't hummingbirds! WE know darn well that such a view could not be seen by humans.

Of course, this is done all the time in bad movies. Dare I even mention PEARL HARBOR? There's the infamous "God's Eye View" of the bombing of the Arizona...in which we follow directly behind the bomb for a 10,000 foot fall (that bomb was dropped from high altitude). The only way a human could see that view is if they jumped head-first from the plane dropping the bomb. Don't get me started on the torpedo scene.

There's the infamous "God's Eye View" of the bombing of the Arizona...in which we follow directly behind the bomb for a 10,000 foot fall (that bomb was dropped from high altitude). The only way a human could see that view is if they jumped head-first from the plane dropping the bomb. Don't get me started on the torpedo scene.

I think we should allow filmmakers some latitude in this regard. I for one would not have wanted Stanley Kubrick to shy away from tracking with the bomb-straddling Slim Pickens in "Dr. Strangelove" simply because it was an unnatural POV. And Alfred Hitchcock would never have had a career if he hadn't dared to stick his camera in unlikely places.

My bete noire, my all time most loathed film ever is "Twister". As near as I can tell, the only reason to make that movie was that someone thought the visuals of those tornadoes would be cool. Everything after that (story, characters, logic, etc.) was worked out in service to the visuals of those stupid effing twisters.

EXTREEEEEEMMMME!

I got so sick of that fat nerdy 'genius' and his idiocy. And how many times has that same friggin' character been in other movies? He was in Titanic, Jurassic Park and I don't know how many others.

Oh, and let's not forget the profanity so obviously inserted just to get a PG rating! Oh, yeah, then there's the complete lack of attention paid to physics . . . I could go on and on.

Really, the twisters were not very convincing in many scenes. I prefer the one used in The Wizard of Oz over what was in Twister.

"Alien" would have about as much signifigance to cinematic history as does "The Chronicles of Riddick" if today's CGI technology had been available in 1979. "Alien" is perfect proof that "limitations" sometimes enhance cinematic art rather than the other way around. I hated the POV bomb shot in "Pearl Harbor" as much as I hated the movie it was in because it was pointless. The POV of Slim Pickens in "Dr. Strangelove" is used to great comedic and dramatic effect. Peter Jackson is a filmaker who knows when and how to use CGI - only when it serves the story and when an alternate technique is impractical. If you get the chance, check out "The Polar Express" in IMAX 3D. Sometimes, effects for their own sake are worth the price of admission.

CGI is like any other cinematic tool. It can be liberating/time/budget saver in some cases and subject to abuse in others.

My biggest gripe with CGI lies mostly in commercials. Thank God for TiVo I don't have to put up with them much except during basketball games. There's a stupid Nike commercial where there's a basketball player practicing on the court, when all of the sudden the parkay floor rises up to prevent him from making a basket. My wife and I looked at each other and said the same thing: There's a commercial that was done simply because they could.

José

The same things were being said in the early to mid 80's when the public began to notice visual effects and media began to document the craft.

Effects guys always know what their talking about when it comes to making movies.
Trumbull's Brainstorm, Tippet's SST2, Bruno's Virus .. all cinematic watersheds.
Still waitin' for Ralston in the director's chair.
Visual effects guys always gripe about the boss.
More generally, employees always gripe about the boss.

Nothing's changed ... the old guard doesn't like the next generation's media.

I don't find anything wrong with doing stuff just 'cause it can be done .. that's how the tech improves.

The God POV sometimes bugs me but the multiplex demographic, raised up on gaming, probably doesn't even bat an eyelash.

I gotta go with the "advancing the craft" argument here.

More often than not, attempting new CG camera angles, writing plots to justify overblown FX sequences, breaking laws of gravity and inertia, and other "logic blunders" are done just to see if it can be done, how the final effect looks, and how the audience takes to it. They also learn where they made mistakes that they didn't find during production because they were concentrating on such a massively complex shot.

CG is the latest "toy". Once they reach the limit of what they can do with it - not technically but creatively, things will even out and we'll see more "invisible" FX shots again.

Once they reach the limit of what they can do with it - not technically but creatively, things will even out and we'll see more "invisible" FX shots again.

Thanks to CG we see (or don't see) FAR more "invisible" FX shots today than ever before.

We don't talk about them because, for the most part, we never know about them.

Maybe when it becomes just another tool, they'll stop building their films around it. The silent era had Meles amazing (for the time) camera tricks and no story. We'd like more than an extended magic act please.

Thanks to CG we see (or don't see) FAR more "invisible" FX shots today than ever before.

We don't talk about them because, for the most part, we never know about them.

I Agree Carson - I mean I read somewhere that for a Music (if you can call it that lol)Video Singer (or is that Rapper? ) Lil' Kim had to have "CGI" used to "Clean Up" Opticly some scenes where her Skirt was a Little Too Short (Think "Basic Instinct" ;) Anyhoo I missed the days when "Wardrobe Malfunctions" Were'nt able to be Digitally Corrected! :D Now it seems as though even some of the most Trival things are done with this State of the Art Technology! I thought Forrest Gump was an Incredible Showcase for this Medium (Look at how CGI Helped Gary Sinese play the Amputee Dan,and using CGI in ways that would have made Lon Chaney Envious!) But I've watched Films since Gump and I'll see on the "Behind the Scenes" Stuff How a Filmmaker will say something Like; "Well For This Scene We Were'nt Very Happy with the Quantity Of Trash In The Trash Can So in Post-Production We Added Extra CGI Trash" And they seem quite Proud of it! But It's overkill In my Opinion.And Lastly I still Maintain that I don't care for what Lucas has done with his Star Wars Films (Those Special Editions) I just think at least ONE difenitive Copy Should be Avalible of the Film JUST as it appeared when it was Originally released to Theaters (Just For Us Historians! lol)
HEY HAPPY NEW YEARS!
JOHN/LONFAN

like anything else, its all in how the cgi is used.

has it cramped what would be the arena of more traditional effects, to everyone's detriment? you bet. take almost any genre film from the 80's and count the fx shots that would have been cgi had the technology been available at that time. but would it have made the films any better? no.

i was working in the spfx makeup part of the industry for a short time in 2001. it was dismaying to see how many good practical fx guys that were out of work and closing up their shops due to cgi.

i think the hulk taught the industry a lesson about such things. the producers of the fantastic four movie have made a lot of noise about the fact that the thing is being acheived thru prosthetics.

now on the other hand, when used properly, cgi can enhance a film dramatically. i'll use "harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban" as an example. the director chose when to use the cgi and when to use a practical effect very wisely. the computer fx are never really in your face and terribly obvious.

in relative terms, cgi is still a new toy for the industry. whenever anybody gets a new toy, they are enamored with it and have to use it at every oppertunity. eventually they'll settle down and put it in its proper place in the toolbox, alongside the others

Reading further in the article, one of the FX guys points out that in the past, an effects crew had to use their heads to come up with new creative ways to achieve what was in the script. This is the way innovation in the industry occurred. Dennis Muren said the whole reason ILM invented the motion-control system was because Lucas edited together WWII dogfight footage and said "I want it to look like this." ILM said to themselves "well, how can we do that best?" And the best way was to invent a new system.

Now those days are over, 'cause anything can be done in CGI. Though it is true that they often have to create new software to do things.

ON THE OTHER HAND, many of them people in this article say things like "I do NOT miss messing with optical printing and photochemicals!" One pointed out that it may have taken several tries to get two pieces of film combined and color-matched, at great expense of money and time. Now it's a tweak of a color control to fix everything on the screen.

Even a genius matte artist like Harrison Ellinshaw says he prefers digital painting to, as he puts it, "slopping goo on a board" :eek: (sacrilege!). The only thing he doesn't like is that he's confined to seeing 21 inches of his painting at a time, and needs to print it out a few feet wide to get his bearings. Otherwise he says it's very liberating to able to do absolutley anything and gurantee it will line up with the live action, color match it perfectly, match camera moves. and even be able to animate it.

Did anybody see "King Arthur" yet? I was stunned to discover that the entire environment of the battle on the frozen lake was digital. They shot on a white-painted field for the high, wide shots, then did all the closeups and fighting shots green screen. The mountains and snowfall was all added later. Frankly, it was perfect. I had an inkling the scene wasn't totally real, but I never realized the whole landscape was digital until I saw the featurette.

And I'm gonna disagree with Brent just a little on unnatural viewpoints. Sometimes it enhances a scene perfectly. But I agree that, used badly or inappropriately, it can pull you out of the "reality" of the film. The shot in We Were Soldiers, for example - choppers going over and under could easily have been filmed from a stationary chopper, I've seen similar shots before, so I didn't even notice it. Check out a film called Days of Heaven. The director went out of his way to use extraordinary photography. There's a shot where Richard Gere, running for his life, falls face-first into a shallow brook. The camera shows us a full-body image of him hitting the water from below. An impossible angle, but in context it took your breath away.

Used WISELY, impossible camera angles can be fantastic. The director just needs to keep the monkey-with-a-machine-gun thing in mind ;).

I bought this issue too and another interesting part of the interview is the discussion that a lot of young CGI artists have never touched a film camera and know squat about conventional photography - i.e. lighting, depth of field, etc. This can result in less than convincing CGI renderings of "realistic" effects. It's also pointed out that "Jaws", much like "Alien" is as effective as it is because Speilberg was forced to compensate for a mechanical shark that would not bear close scrutiny by the audience. The tension and drama in that film was created almost entirely by not showing the shark, and relying on the actor's performances and taut editing instead. The comment is made that even in "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World", Speilberg pulled back on the CGI dinosaur shots because he understands that "less is more". Too many young fimakers today believe that "more is more" - and they lose the drama in the process.

It just goes to show - it's not just the tools, but the talent of the people who wield them.

Conversely, the Lord of the Rings films have an escalating number of effects (I think they said over 1500 CGI shots in the last film!), but it SO serves the story that not one of them is unnecessary.

Conversely, the Lord of the Rings films have an escalating number of effects (I think they said over 1500 CGI shots in the last film!), but it SO serves the story that not one of them is unnecessary.

Absolutely. Jackson used every technique in the book to create a believably realistic "fantasy world" with amazing success. I haven't seen "The Aviator" yet, but in an extended trailer it was obvious that almost all of the shots of the Spruce Goose and the Bi-Planes in in the filming of "Hell's Angels" were CGI. Hard to explain but that footage really turned me off to seeing the film. I don't know how else Scorsese could have affordably accomplished these shots but when I see a "realistic" film I want the effects to have that same three dimensional "reality". In that respect, top-notch model work creates the illusion for me more effectively than does CGI (see "The Right Stuff"). Conversely, I thoroughly enjoyed "The Polar Express" and "Sky Captain" as purely technical exercises in the "art" of CGI animation.

I saw The Aviator and I can honestly say the style of the film helped integrate the CGI effects well with the rest of the pic. I liked it a lot!

Did anybody see "King Arthur" yet? I was stunned to discover that the entire environment of the battle on the frozen lake was digital. They shot on a white-painted field for the high, wide shots, then did all the closeups and fighting shots green screen. The mountains and snowfall was all added later. Frankly, it was perfect. I had an inkling the scene wasn't totally real, but I never realized the whole landscape was digital until I saw the featurette.


I saw King Arthur the other night, and that frozen lake scene was great. The CGI served to help tell the story, as the POV shifted to underwater, where we saw the ice breaking underneath the feet of the soliders. At no time was I thinking about the effects, I was simply caught up in the story. When used properly, CG can be a great storytelling tool.

Sean

http://www.mcfergesondvd.com/

The thing about compositing being easier now than back in the optical era is really a separate matter from cgi. Digital compositing is not CGI.

I can't complain about the comps being better, though occasionally edges look a little weird in a soft way (the Brosnan Bond films have this issue in bright light scenes.) But the overuse of CGI IS a big pain to me, and one of the reasons I have cut way back on watching newer movies.

With only a few glorious exceptions like 2001, I'm of the opinion that less is more with most fx films. And one way to prove less is more is very simple: instead of producing 10 mediocre to crappy shots, produce one or two GOOD ONES and see how that works for the audience. You edit around your limitations, but you don't have to quick-cut your way through to disguise the crap.

I wrote for Cinefex between 1990 and 2000, and while some fx folks would agree with my perspective, a lot of them had kind of thrown their hands up on the issue of credibility, since it was more important to give the studio what it wanted.

One issue with comps, having to do with scanning film images in. I don't know what kind of tweaking they are doing (or perhaps it just is what gets lost when you go from a 35mm film image, which is like a 4K or better image, down to 2K or less, which sadly is the norm), but we're seeing more and more stuff where they shot a real element or a miniature that looked fine, but once it gets scanned in and comped with a CG background, the whole thing starts looking phony. So you get people saying, 'what a crappy cg plane in the hanger in xmen' when in fact it is only cg when it is flying -- the static view in the hanger is a very nice miniature by MWD, which I saw in person. But by the time the image gets comped, THE VERY QUALITIES THAT MAKE A WELL PHOTOGRAPHED MODEL LOOK GOOD SOMEHOW GET LOST ... and they wind up with something that looks like mediocre CG in some cases.

Crappy window lights are the death of a lot of CG in my mind ... geez, there are so many real-world shots in CONTACT that completely blow because the windows look like white avery labels, totally without luminosity. VOYAGER always looked like this as well. I was really impressed with most of the first MATRIX (except the hovership stuff) because they didn't wreck their shots with a limited dynamic range ... the fetus field stuff and the docbot stuff had the range of image brightness and contrast you'd expect from a photographic image, but unfortunately the sequels seemed to shy away from that (along with shying away from most of what I liked about the first one, but that's a side issue here.)

I saw King Arthur the other night, and that frozen lake scene was great. The CGI served to help tell the story, as the POV shifted to underwater, where we saw the ice breaking underneath the feet of the soliders. At no time was I thinking about the effects, I was simply caught up in the story. When used properly, CG can be a great storytelling tool.

Sean

http://www.mcfergesondvd.com/

Those underwater shots were so convincing I was wondering what kind of physical rig they'd set up to do them! I was actually surpirsed to find out they were 100% CG.

Trevanian - lots of good points there. tell me some issue numbers and articles you wrote, I'll go pull them out and read them :).

I still think that 2K and HD stuff looks soft.

Thankfully, 4K intermediates are starting to come into fruition when it comes to digital posting of film-originated pictures. I hope that this will help prompt the use of the emerging "Quad HD" or similar digital format that surpasses the current HD being used by the digital filmmaking crowd for feature production.

With a resolution of 3840x2160, Quad HD has four-times the resolution of HDTV. Dynamic range is also being addressed, with chips that mimic the structure of film emulsion grains, with larger pixels for clarity and detail in the black areas and smaller, finer pixels for the upper white areas. It's not true 4K resolution, (as standard HD is not true 2K resolution) but it's in the ballpark.

Until we move into this range of resolution with digital imagery, I believe that originating on film is still the best bet. Particularly when you consider that when a "scope" feature originates in HD, you're cropping the already low resolution (by 35mm film standards) from a 1920x1080 pixel frame down to a 1920x800 pixel frame, effectively throwing away over 25% of your vertical resolution!

No matter how much digital filmmakers claim that by shooting digitally with current HD gear allows for an "original" negative when scanned to film at final output, thereby saving several generations when going to release print, the digitally-originated features still seem soft to me.

I argued this and several other film vs. digital points with David Tattersall a few years back and drew a stalemate (it was a friendly discussion!) on the issue. During the course of the conversation, he challenged me to call out the HD-originated shots in Episode One. He was surprised when I was able to pick most of them out! He then prompted me to tell him what it was about the shots that gave their origin away.

By Episode Two, the HD cameras and images they produced were noticeably better than those incorporated into Episode One. I expect that Episode Three will be even better looking than Two. But, down the road, we may look back and consider these chapters as the "low-res" episodes, in comparison to their strictly film-originated predecessors.

It blows my mind that he was surprised you could pick out those shots. Everybody at Cinefex caught them too, even the circulation people, who you'd think wouldn't know this from a hole in the head. I seem to remember they intercut digital and 35 when Liam Neeson is talking to the woman about the kid at night ... there is a lot of video noise in his closeup, I think.

I think the handwriting was on the wall for high quality imagery when even Doug Trumbull said that 2k was good enough these days. That, coming from the guy who tried for years to get showscan going, a process that would have made IMAX look like double-duped Super-8! Clearly, the experience of seeing a good image in a big theater is going to be a thing of the past, except for revival houses with film projectors. And on that note, I'm going out to see a new print of TOUCH OF EVIL

I had no idea we had such insiders here! this is very cool.

Well, going by his post above, trekace clearly knows the tech a lot better than I do (or ever did) ... my background is in old fashioned trick photography, putting a spaceship on a pole and underexposing as you drag it past camera so the pole doesn't show, shooting miniatures in daylight, and not even using CG for readouts, but instead bending coat hanger wire into ship contours and painting it with UV to give a faux cg wireframe look. I sorta HAD to learn about CG when doing the writing, but I guess I'm a little old fashioned about the methodology, mainly cuz I saw 2001 when I was 7 and it ruined me for just about everything that followed it in the last 37 years.

Those underwater shots were so convincing I was wondering what kind of physical rig they'd set up to do them! I was actually surpirsed to find out they were 100% CG.

Trevanian - lots of good points there. tell me some issue numbers and articles you wrote, I'll go pull them out and read them :).

I was on staff from May 98 (GODZILLA issue) through NOV 2000, so I've got at least 2 articles in all those issues (that's probably like 74 or 75 up through 83 or 84.) Plus I freelanced for them from 1990 to 98. So I did all their STAR TREK movie pieces from TUC to INS, plus MATRIX 1 And WHAT DREAMS MAY COME and DEATH BECOMES HER and their origin of ILM SW issue and THE ARRIVAL and FIGHT CLUB and THE CELL and Spielberg's ALWAYS.

Then there was STU LITTLE and MISSION TO MARS and WILD WILD WEST and WING COMMANDER and VIRUS and DEEP IMPACT and RED PLANET and MY FAVORITE MARTIAN (I didn't ASK for any of those.) I must have written about 35 articles altogether for them.

Did about half of their BATTLEFIELD EARTH article before it was given to the boss's current wife to do, and had written most of a huge 50,000 word piece on 2001 when we parted company (they completely rewrote it, which is why it is full of errors, like getting the YEAR wrong on when the dawn of man sequence was shot)

I wrote most of the PHANTOM MENACE article (did 42 interviews in 3 days at ILM, which is a record I hope no one ever has to try and beat), though they wound up not using a 20,000 word article on ILM's R&D dept (it only ran in the Japanese issue of the mag, a couple or three years later.)

I'm not all that pleased with the cinefex work, because there was almost no way to get any personality into the work,except maybe in the opening paragraph or two. But it did help pay bills for awhile.

So, that explains ST:Nemesis! :thumbsup:

No... that explains "Insurrection" <wretch..vomit..wretch>.

Just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean that you should.

I very much enjoy WE WERE SOLDIERS. There is a scene with CGI helicopters flying towards the battle zone.

Brent you are one of many that enjoyed that movie. I was, however, not counted among you. While the story, directing and execution were good -I failed to sit back and enjoy the movie while watching it. Why? Because I couldn't get past the fact that Vietnam looked exactly like southern California, live oaks, cat tails, golden grass, and evergreens!

With the money they could have gathered up Mexico or Hawaii could have been used as location shots! But I suppose I'm the only guy, all the other guys loved the movie. It was ruined for me because I couldn't "see" Vietnam, I just saw the golden hills of California and the cheap filmakers who couldn't go the extra inch and film at a suitable location.

I watched the film from Saudi, I am in the military, and the look of the movie has to be there to suspend disbelief for me. Having been to those locations in the movie, I could tell you it wasn't Vietnam. "Black Hawk" down was incredible. I didn't for one minute think about location or anything, I was caught up in the story. That's the way it should be, well minus some dicrepancies I saw at the airfield shots, but they were small.

I don't find anything wrong with doing stuff just 'cause it can be done .. that's how the tech improves.

Well, could they have done SW Ep. II's clone troopers as live action costumes? Would it have killed them? I mean we have fan made vacum formed ones running around conventions, why couldn't Lucas Film press out 30 or so suits for extras and CGI'd the rest. I mean the scenes where Padme is interacting with a CGI trooper is pathetic. Yoda was nice though.

Anyhoo I missed the days when "Wardrobe Malfunctions" Were'nt able to be Digitally Corrected! :D Now it seems as though even some of the most Trival things are done with this State of the Art Technology!
HEY HAPPY NEW YEARS!
JOHN/LONFAN

Ditto on the SW Special Edition crap. In addition to the wardrobe and invisible special effects thread; "Rockstar". When you listen to directors commentary there were a myriad of CGI clean ups that you never, ever knew about. Like t-shirts with beer or Harley logos that weren't paid for and thus had to be clean-out. Who would have ever known?!? These aren't short scenes but long dialogue scenes where if you scrutinized you may have been able to pick it up. Even with that information, I couldn't see the clean up. Good job there.

Clone Troopers, not "good job".

I saw The Aviator and I can honestly say the style of the film helped integrate the CGI effects well with the rest of the pic. I liked it a lot!

Won't see the "Aviator". Two syllables "DiCaprio". I'm glad I didn't listen to myself though when "Titanic" came out. But that pre-pubescent voice and his total lack of talent turn me off.

THE VERY QUALITIES THAT MAKE A WELL PHOTOGRAPHED MODEL LOOK GOOD SOMEHOW GET LOST ... and they wind up with something that looks like mediocre CG in some cases.


Concur. This readily apparent in Matrix II. The convuluted and complex freeway crash scene which kicked-A in the special features section was too watered down in the final cut to have the same impact. When viewed without colour adjustment, comp'ing and final touches it was right there in your face realistic -because it was. But when viewed in the movie it looked like CGI -when it wasn't. Make any sense?

Brent you are one of many that enjoyed that movie. I was, however, not counted among you. While the story, directing and execution were good -I failed to sit back and enjoy the movie while watching it. Why? Because I couldn't get past the fact that Vietnam looked exactly like southern California, live oaks, cat tails, golden grass, and evergreens!

With the money they could have gathered up Mexico or Hawaii could have been used as location shots! But I suppose I'm the only guy, all the other guys loved the movie. It was ruined for me because I couldn't "see" Vietnam, I just saw the golden hills of California and the cheap filmakers who couldn't go the extra inch and film at a suitable location.

I watched the film from Saudi, I am in the military, and the look of the movie has to be there to suspend disbelief for me. Having been to those locations in the movie, I could tell you it wasn't Vietnam. "Black Hawk" down was incredible. I didn't for one minute think about location or anything, I was caught up in the story. That's the way it should be, well minus some dicrepancies I saw at the airfield shots, but they were small.
Contrary to popular belief, Vietnam is not 100% covered with rain forest and jungle. Large tracts are covered with a species of live oak and evergreens, there are also areas of grass that is indeed yellow depending on the season. Considering that participants of the actual battle were consultants on the film, I'm willing to bet that the location was very close to the actual conditions. Since you're active duty, ask around, there are probably a few gray-haired 'Nam vets floating around over there, see what they thought of it.

I was on staff from May 98 (GODZILLA issue) through NOV 2000, so I've got at least 2 articles in all those issues (that's probably like 74 or 75 up through 83 or 84.) Plus I freelanced for them from 1990 to 98. So I did all their STAR TREK movie pieces from TUC to INS, plus MATRIX 1 And WHAT DREAMS MAY COME and DEATH BECOMES HER and their origin of ILM SW issue and THE ARRIVAL and FIGHT CLUB and THE CELL and Spielberg's ALWAYS.

Then there was STU LITTLE and MISSION TO MARS and WILD WILD WEST and WING COMMANDER and VIRUS and DEEP IMPACT and RED PLANET and MY FAVORITE MARTIAN (I didn't ASK for any of those.) I must have written about 35 articles altogether for them.

Did about half of their BATTLEFIELD EARTH article before it was given to the boss's current wife to do, and had written most of a huge 50,000 word piece on 2001 when we parted company (they completely rewrote it, which is why it is full of errors, like getting the YEAR wrong on when the dawn of man sequence was shot)

I wrote most of the PHANTOM MENACE article (did 42 interviews in 3 days at ILM, which is a record I hope no one ever has to try and beat), though they wound up not using a 20,000 word article on ILM's R&D dept (it only ran in the Japanese issue of the mag, a couple or three years later.)

I'm not all that pleased with the cinefex work, because there was almost no way to get any personality into the work,except maybe in the opening paragraph or two. But it did help pay bills for awhile.
:eek:!
Don't worry about putting life into the articles. I read the mag strictly to hear about the tech end of things.

Which is one reason I'm thinking about dropping my sibscription after all these years (I have every single issue). It's not so much fun reading about how CG is done! I used to love finding out what clever mechanical means were created to come up with a result. Now it's all just "we wrote some software that did it." Pfooey.

:eek:!
It's not so much fun reading about how CG is done! I used to love finding out what clever mechanical means were created to come up with a result. Now it's all just "we wrote some software that did it." Pfooey.
Interesting that a lot of the experts in the Cinefex interview express the same sentiment towards the effects themselves. It's stated in the interview that some of the younger artists coming up had never even seen a Harryhausen film. One of them sat his crew down and screened a couple of Harryhausen classics and the comments afterward were to the effect of "that didn't really look very good". The boss's response was - "okay - I want to see you design the creature, make the armature, mold and paint the skin, make the tabletop sets, light the sets and match the rear projection plates, and then animate each frame by hand for 16 hours a day - all by yourself with no assistance - and we'll come back in about 5 days and see what your stuff looks like."

It seems to me, if you really want to practice a craft, then you should know the history of that craft to some degree. I'm not saying that you should be able to do what Harryhausen did, but you damned well ought to know who he is!!:confused:

Two syllables "DiCaprio".
LOL
Di-cap-ri-o.

It seems to me, if you really want to practice a craft, then you should know the history of that craft to some degree. I'm not saying that you should be able to do what Harryhausen did, but you damned well ought to know who he is!!:confused:

Excellent point! :thumbsup:

There has to be, if nothing else, great value in analyzing those early effects and movies and learning what set designs and creatures were used and what the strengths and weaknesses of them were. It's nice sometimes to 'stretch the envelope' but first one needs to know what the envelope is.

... because there was almost no way to get any personality into the work,except maybe in the opening paragraph or two.
There definitely was a personality in the articles written by Kevin H. Martin.

^I appreciate the sentiment, but there is a pervading JoeFriday approach that suffuses nearly all Cinefex articles, and it is quite deliberate on the part of the staff.

I think the only bit of humor I ever got into a piece (intentionally anyway) was a reference to Chris Plummer's eyepatch in TUC ... since he wanted the bolt holding it to his head partly unfastened, I got a reference in to a klingon "with a screw loose." That is one reference out of about, maybe, 20 tries (and it got tougher later on, because Don stopped editing the mag after the TUC issue and Jody, after taking over, got really tough on this matter. Either that or she has no sense of humor, which is at least as likely.)

The thing that made me feel like I'd arrived as a writer was picking up one of those James Van Hise trek books (the ones that are 5% based on interviews he has done and 95% based on -- as in, COPIED NEARLY WORD FOR WORD FROM -- other people's work, though usually not credited as such) and seeing that he had used my 'klingon with a screw loose' reference almost verbatim.

I still don't know how the guy didn't get sued out of existence, you'd figure that even if the magazines didn't care, that Paramount would have 'fixed' him, given how vicious they've been with minor offenses and transgressions.

To push it back on topic a little, it amazes me that the newer artists are not versed in either traditional photography or any of the non-digital arts. It is common sense to me that you understand something about real-world objects and how light falls on them before you start trying to recreate them in a computer.

But in a way this echoes what happened with a lot of filmmaking starting in the mid70s. You started getting filmmakers raised on TV whose ideas for shots and storytelling were derived in part from the limitations of that medium, and films got more trivialized and mainstreamed sometimes, usually in a dumbed down way. They didn't necesssarily study paintings or early films, and so the films they made often didn't reflect the usual necessary background for making a film that built on what had gone before. Sometimes that could be a good difference, but other times, it was like having a 5 year old make a movie.

I'd hate to see the current crop of CGI artists generalized - For every one that doesn't know/understand/appreciate the history, there are likely many more who are aware of the legacy of earlier SPFX artists. In interviews (including ones in Cinefex) I remember reading passages where the artist sets up an effect or scene as an homage to Harryhausen, Obie, or whomever. Of course, as younger artists fill in, Douglas Trumbull and Phil Tippett are ancient history...

BTW, I'm finally reading "Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life" which I picked up at WF - thoroughly enjoying it!

And I agree with JohnP - the pedigree of the members here is very impressive - thanks for sharing with us!

[edit - to trev:] ^Wow, that sure sounds like my description of modern Trek.

Just to jog that line of thought sideways into writing - Star Trek (TOS) was written by people who had DONE something. The stories were written by men who had been in WWII or Korea, seen freinds die, travelled the world struggled with a difficult situation that could effect their lives. current trek is written by sheltered college students who have never left the LA basin, and whose entire concept of writing is based on TV and movies they've seen, rather than things they've experienced or observed.

IMHO, of course.