By James Ball
This is the first of 8
blog post I will be doing for my ANM220 Class over the coming 10 weeks. The
research topic for this week is as follows, “Describe how the history of a chosen specialization has influenced
current industry best practices.” For this Research topic I will pull my
focus towards that of “Bad CGI in Film and the Uncanny Valley”.
1 – Practical Vs CGI
To start off with I
would just like to point out that I personally think that CGI is perfectly fine,
if it looks cool that’s great; if it enhances the storytelling and movie going
experience then that’s even better. Now before you get all “But there is a lot
of crap CGI out there” I will grit my teeth and say “Yes, yes there is if you
cherry pick particular movies from here and there, but most of the time the CGI
if fine. Most of it though, comes to that triangle of Time, Money, Quality and
studios want all 3 when they can really only get 2”. Carrying on into recent
years CGI has made the leap and has surpassed the uncanny valley with advancement
in technology, software and rendering power. Below I give you 3 examples of
this uncanny valley break which work.
In contrast to this I
will also show you a video from www.whatchmojo.com
that showcase the “Top 10 Worst CGI
Movie Effects”
As the Host of the
episode stated, “Nothing takes you out of the moment like a bad special effect.
Just to be clear, we're singling out the CGI from films with respectable or
massive budgets that shouldn't have settled for second rate and unfinished
looking effects”. So what correlates a “good”
CGI effect in a film? Well as I stated at the beginning of this post, I
personally think that CGI is perfectly fine, if it looks cool that’s great; if
it enhances the storytelling and movie going experience then that’s even
better. But notice that I never said it had to be realistic. In the new Tim Burton
adaptation of the movie Alice in wonderland and soon to be released “Through
the Looking Glass”. We go into his films expecting whimsical and magical stuff
to happen and we accept that there is a Queen of hearts with an oversized
balloon head. But Why? We know this character has to be manipulated and created
with CGI so why do we accept this CGI character that interacts with real life actors
in this crazy world? While there were a number of green screen shots in this
film, there were also a large number of practical effects used as well. Put
this on top of the fact that the Queen of Hearts was performed by an actor in
the shot so that the other actors had someone physically there in the scene to
act and react off of helped to improve the final CGI work and in turn aided Tim
Burton in telling the story that he wanted to tell and show his audience
the world that he wanted to show.
2 - Original Shot
3 – Final shot
But how about something
a bit more hard core, gritty, a bit more MAD . . . MAX. MAD MAX: Fury Road, the
4th instalment in the franchise created from the original director
Gorge Miller and praised as being something that goes back to his roots of
practical effects in camera film making. While this is true, Miller has discussed
in multiple inter views and in the behind the scenes of mad max that he was not
afraid to utilise and embrace new technologies to help him with his film
making. Not only has every shot in the film seen a computer in not only colour
grading and in conversion to 3D, but out of the 3200+ shots that were in the
final film, over 2000 of those shot have some form of CGI done to them. Whether
it be removing wires and rigging from performers to painting out Charles Theron
left arm in every single frame of footage. There is a hell of a lot that is
going on and to say that MAD MAX Fury Road would be great as a purely practical
effects movie would just be naïve. The camera work, story board planning and music
and sound design are all worthy of their own post and discussion themselves. A
discussion that I will get around to within a couple of months, so stick around
for that.
So looping back around now
to the discussion topic at hand “Describe
how the history of a chosen specialisation has influenced current industry best
practices” I will say that we have come to a time in the film industry where we
are going to see a lot more new film makers utilizing traditional practical techniques
and enhancing what is already there in camera with visual effects/CGI bring in
to the forefront a time in movie history of Hybrid effects.
If you read through my ramblings and have gotten to this point then
how about sharing this post on social media and leaving a comment down below and
discuss your thoughts.
OK. As always this is Ballzy247 signing out.
Useful Links:
All of the stuff on MAD
MAX Fury Road
Image 1- http://imgur.com/gallery/qxoDSI1
Image 2 and 3 - http://www.cgsociety.org/news/article/221/making-mad-max
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