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Or Pokemon Pr0n for that matter.
Registered: Feb 2005
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
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You know, I dunno if Mim has a really good eye or if he saw it in HD or something, but I was actually quite floored by how real the CGI and bigature shots in LotR looked. For me the Balrog was utterly believable - it looked just like it would look if it were actually real. The only thing that looked obviously CGI to me were the oliphaunts and the dead people, but you really couldn't get away from the dead people looking fake; I imagine in real life they'd still look fake
Registered: Jul 2005
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That's funny, I have actually started to feel some of the CGI-age feedback that has started to come; clips that are real but almost too beautiful to be true are suspected as CGI by me sometimes, like the end shot of "Hidalgo", with the beautiful herd of horses flowing over the big field in an aerial shot. My first thought was "wow, nice", my second was "CGI or real, can't tell", which actually lessened the experience.
It's so easy to touch up stuff in film nowadays that anything might be cheesy fake, that's why I liked hearing Spielberg say they would go to lengths not to incorporate large-scale CGI in Indy IV, as it needs to look and feel like the first three, as much as possible.
I tell you now that any large action/adventure production should have at least one good femur- or tibia-fracture among the cast and crew.
Registered: Aug 1999
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
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I guess it's about attitude, too. I love seeing things that couldn't happen be brought to the screen. I have problems imagining things in scale, so scenes like ten thousand orcs or a giant monster X meters tall or a starship Y meters long...I can't picture it, it's almost meaningless. Seeing it as 'real' as can be really helps me get into the story. I dunno, maybe I just have a weak imagination...
Registered: Jul 2005
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Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
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quote:Originally posted by Daniel Butler: I guess it's about attitude, too. I love seeing things that couldn't happen be brought to the screen. I have problems imagining things in scale, so scenes like ten thousand orcs or a giant monster X meters tall or a starship Y meters long...I can't picture it, it's almost meaningless. Seeing it as 'real' as can be really helps me get into the story. I dunno, maybe I just have a weak imagination...
perhaps just a weak stomach? or weakness for cuddly ninja cuddle kittens? (since the only known counter for said cuddle ninja kittens is to smuggle them, which does nothing harmful to them or you but wastes time as you smuggle them...
we're still talking about Bender... right?
Registered: Jan 2004
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No, you are talking like those randomly generated spam poems that roamed the earth years ago.
quote:No one can allay flax when it's a hundredfold despoiling The corbel curry bellhop. In nature's dandy amatory They revealed a crucial dictionary pizzeria With which he combatted clairvoyant counsels. Finally, the hierarchal catenate called Kelsey Mossy Arachnid Managed to emulsify Afghanistan.
quote:Originally posted by Nim: It's so easy to touch up stuff in film nowadays that anything might be cheesy fake, that's why I liked hearing Spielberg say they would go to lengths not to incorporate large-scale CGI in Indy IV, as it needs to look and feel like the first three, as much as possible.
That *is* good to hear! The Indy movies have a certain look & feel to them, and a lot of CGI in the new one just wouldn't look right.
Registered: Jul 2002
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To me, the whole development of SFX thing is analogous to that of architecture. Many of the most impressive, long-lasting structures built by humans were designed and constructed without any use of modern technology.
The Pyramids and Mayan cities of millennia ago are so massive and intricate and complex in their engineering as to represent a complete mystery to modern architects. To this day nobody can figure out just how they built this stuff. The art, skills, and science behind them have been lost.
Why? Because we think smaller now. Everything is done in a cost efficient corner-cutting way. We don't think in terms of man power, but of machine power. We will settle for something of lesser quality if it is more practical, if it's easier.
Go stand in front of the Pyramids and then tell me that the prefabricated-and-assembled-on-site Empire State Building is as impressive. Go watch Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and tell me you'll ever look at any mass battle sequence done with CGI in the same way again.
Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I'd say that's a huge over simplification. I used to work on building sites and trust me, the three most common "technologies" we used are the exact same ones the Egyptians relied on. Scaff, handtools and manpower. DeWalt and CAT just speed things up a little.
As for special effects, as I said I think you'll find there's not as much "CG" (a phrase ignorant people use to describe everything effects related)as you might think. In reality the computer's greatest advantage over the old school stuff is in compositing, image manipulation and editing rather than image generation. It's just another tool and it has it's uses. The problem is that allot of film makers in the last 15 years or so have used it as a crutch and so have given people the odd impression that everything is CG.
OnToMars
Now on to the making of films!
Member # 621
posted
quote:Originally posted by Reverend: As for special effects, as I said I think you'll find there's not as much "CG" (a phrase ignorant people use to describe everything effects related)as you might think. In reality the computer's greatest advantage over the old school stuff is in compositing, image manipulation and editing rather than image generation. It's just another tool and it has it's uses. The problem is that allot of film makers in the last 15 years or so have used it as a crutch and so have given people the odd impression that everything is CG.
Quoted for truth.
-------------------- If God didn't want us to fly, he wouldn't have given us Bernoulli's Principle.
Registered: Jun 2001
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
I'm reminded of something from the DVD extras of the extended edition DVD of the Fellowship of the Ring. They show the visual effects guys doing just that - touching up minor artifacts and putting the polish on. For example, Legolas leans forward slightly past Aragorn in one scene to deliver a line; they lightened his face ever so slightly as he did so, something you won't consciously notice but which draws more attention to him as he speaks. That's not at all CG, but they used the same software to do it that they used to generate, for example, the Balrog (Maya).
As for the buildings, remember that yes, the Great Pyramids survived the thousands of years...but how many ancient Egyptian equivalents of office buildings, malls, and apartment complexes survived? I mean, I'm sure Mount Rushmore will outlast the Empire State Building - it's carved from solid rock, like the pyramids were.
But you do have a point about craftmanship - the tolerances to which they built the pyramids, I've heard, are comparable to those of the space shuttle program. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that each side of the great pyramid is less than an inch longer than any other, that it's perfectly aligned with each face (or vertex? I can't remember which) facing a cardinal direction, and that the base which they had to carve out flat is so smooth and flat that there's less than an inch of difference in any one spot from any other. This with chisels and things which (if I'm not mistaken) were made from stone themselves.
Registered: Jul 2005
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I'm certainly not advocating the total eschewal of digital techniques. What I'm saying is that the inherent restraints imposed by traditional practical filmmaking techniques force the filmmaker to think creatively and come up with inventive ways to represent unreality within the confines of reality. It also forces films to focus more on story and character rather than scenery.
There won't be a movie like Lawrence Of Arabia made again, any more than there will be structures like Pyramids built. Cinema is dying. That's not solely due to CGI by a long shot, but it's a prominent factor IMO.
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
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We're playing this game now? Fish live in the sky! Beer is a type of baseball bat! Hamburgers are made from old man's glasses!
Like, if for some reason you attribute the dearth of whatever films you seem to enjoy (as far as I can tell it's either none at all, or bad ones ((Sass)) ) to some kind of death of the art of cinema, or some kind of overarching collapse of the movie industry, then I guess that is cool? But blanket, controvertible and sort-of-nearly-the-opposite-of-true statements like "Cinema is dying" are bizarre at best, and knee-jerk reactions to the scuffles of pretense at worst. Film Theory and Aesthetics was bad enough the first go round.
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
I suppose you think we're in some kind of Second Renaissance?
There are of course still good, original films being made by some--mostly independents. Mainstream Hollywood films (which the LOTR movies certainly are) are more derivative and devoid of substance and style than ever before.
It's important to note that I'm not saying this as an older person who can't accept the changes that are occuring from what's familiar to him, ("Back in my day...") but rather a young person who's experienced a lot of new and old films and decided that there is clearly more artistic merit in the latter than in the former. (Not that there aren't bad old films and good recent ones as well, but what is considered by most to be the best of today comes nowhere close to the best of 1930-1980.)
It's still just my opinion, of course. I'm entitled as much as you.
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
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