how much cgi is too much?

I am with you, I love that RS LOVES practical sets, and that he knows how to build them cheaply relative to other directors (ahem, George Lucas)... It just adds SO much depth and vision to see actors on REAL sets, and I know from all my actor friends that they LOVE working on real sets, and generally HATE blue screens/green screens. So we get BETTER overall films the less CGI is used. Also, to me, CGI just looks bad. Panoramas that fill in these HUGE backgrounds generally just look fake and flat in most places, and God Forbid the use of CGI animation---that is the worst "video game" transgression a movie can make. If I want to see CGI animation, I'll just play a video game and stay at home.

Michael Bay, are you listening??

Yah, Bay and Lucas are perhaps the biggest abusers...

I was disappointed by the amount of CGI in "Cabin in the Woods" too---not just the quantity, but the poor quality...ugh.

95%

I think it depends on the movie and the qaulity. The Thing, every one wanted it to use props and animatronic like the old one. The team did make some good work on stuff like that, but they decided for some scenes to overlay CGI ontop of the actual phsical effects, pretty much like what looks to have happend with the Hanger scene in Promtheus. Only in The Thing some of the CGI overlap was too much, that it made the scenes look too CGI and spoiled the work gone into the actual phisycal effects. What was worse with The Thing was some scenes looked like they was running out of time and budget and so a few CGI scenes was really really poor quality. So i think CGI can work, if done right and it has to be good stuff. As sometimes low budget actual effects can look much more real, than low budget CGI.

@BigDave - I agree with you 100% about The Thing prequel. It looked like quite a bit of work went into practical fx, but ultimately, the overlayed cgi made the film ineffective and dull. I was really looking forward to The Thing prequel and was ultimately disappointed when I left the theater. There's a right way to use cgi and a wrong way. Clearly RS knows how to use it correctly and when necessary and I hope this is the case with Prometheus

One shot of crappy CG is too much, an entire movie of great CG is just fine. Same goes for practical effects. I grew up in the '80s and had to watch plenty of crappy practical effects (and a few good ones) before CG came into popular use. I just don't understand this practical good/CG bad mantra people recite these days. Do they not remember what movies used to look like? It strikes me as nostalgic at best and Luddite at worst. It's about quality for me, I have no bias towards what technique is used.

@BigDave I agree. I don't know why, or what box the people who deal this stuff out are living in, but if only they could get into their heads that what we don't want or need to see, is weirdness flashing across the screen moving with impossible speeds. It's not "dramatic" - nothing screams, "I AM NOTHING MORE THAN PIXELS AND AIR!", better than that. "Jurassic Park"? "King Kong"?....Regardless of everything else, I could at least believe these things had some physicality and not get taken out right of the film every time something flitted across the screen at the speed of sound.

@colonelangus I think the movie had two scenes where the CGI was poor, the one was just as Juliette Thing reveals itself the scenes when she fully changed are good, just the CGI sequence when she starts to change was poor [img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-H9jAjVRRhj0/TyODJZtzwKI/AAAAAAAABhc/vT1U6lbpB5E/s1600/thing-2011-.jpg[/img] The next was Sander Thing [img]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111230070056/thething/images/9/9b/Sander_Thing.png[/img] The CGI on the Thing was decent, just the overlay of Sanders face does not look well done, its like some kid in his bedrooms photoshop celebrity fakes. The other disapointment was we never really saw much about what happened to the Dog that become the one they was chassing at the end of the movie that led to the start of the classic The Thing. It was very suptile, so you kinda knew and made the link but never actually saw how the Dog became infected.. I think maybe Ridley will be a shrewd with the Xeno connection in Prometheus. The biggest flaw in The Thing was that Kate survived at the end, that was silly as the only survivors in the Orginal Things Norwegian camp was the Dog Thing, Lars and returning Helicopter Pilot Matias. All three end the movie and start the 1980's movie.

@juston I think moviegoers want some sense of realism when they watch a film. We can dissect the merits of cgi till we're blue in the face but when you think of the chestbursting scene in Alien nothing gets a better reaction than that. If a director had relied on cgi fx for something like this people would laugh because there isn't that tangible quality imo. same goes for John Carpenter's The Thing. I realize they didn't have the cg technology that we have today but Rob Bottin did an amazing job with the creature fx in that film and it's still memorable today.

@BigDave The Thing prequel's failings were a combination of things for me. I wasn't very impressed with the cgi (too much of it) and I thought the script was a cheap imitation of JC's film. I guess I thought they weren't very creative about how things played out at the Norwegian camp, like the guy with the slit throat, the torching of split face, the filling test or even the ax in the wall. it's like they were trying to be different but couldn't escape the shadow of JC's film

Problem is they made the Thing a rampaging monster, running around with a toothy maw, as if that is the default form on the thing. And the whole thing was over lit. No dark atmosphere, exposes all the flaws in the CG. The Thing in the original was more covert, and it adopted many different forms. But of course, modern Hollywood has to crank shit up to 11. No sense of restraint or modulaiton.

In George Lucas' defense: He did create A LOT of sets, however, the backgrounds areas would have been too cost prohibitive to create. I don't see many flaws when GL uses CGI for his own movies, but when he allows other companies to use ILM I think they don't get the "full treatment" and the CGI looks lousy (not to mention costly). On the other hand: Star Wars IV, V & VI: No CGI - Masterpiece movies (originals not the re-releases) Star Wars I, II, & III: Mega CGI - Not terrible movies, but certainly not masterpieces (but with budgets EACH dwarfing the prior 3 added up all due to costly CGI/"post-production-work") So yes, GL is one of the heaviest abusers, but he being the "originator & purveyor of CGI" can get higher quality CGI in his movies than those purchasing it from him through the ILM house.

I don't think there is such a thing as too much CGI. What hurts a movie is CGI that distracts the viewer and yanks them out of the film experience. If at any point during a movie you think to yourself, "That's CGI." then that's a failure to use it well. Special effects, if done well and used correctly, should never be noticed during your first time watching a movie. Best example I can think of for this was the Dune miniseries. There are a couple of scenes in it where they are in the desert and and I remember wondering is the background was a green screen shot or a matte painting. If the effect attracts your attention to itself and away from the story, then it';s a bad special effect. And CGI is no exception.

@takka_takka_takka You cannot know how that made me laugh. Definition of a Gripping Movie Experience: viewer muses, "Hmm - is that a matte?...."

I thought Peter Jackson's King Kong made great use of cgi. The thing that made it work was that the movements and textures were more realistic and not herky jerky like a lot of movies. another decent use of cgi was for the Battlestar Galactica tv series. Ok, the cgi Cylons were crap but the space battle scenes were done very well, mainly because they added some realism with the shakey camera movements.

...and I think this is why George Lucas pulls it off so well. He has always been very reluctant to jolt a viewer out of the experience by wondering about the believability of a special effect. My top 3 directors are: George Lucas Ridley Scott Steven Spielberg With Top 4 favorite movies being: Star Wars - A New Hope (the original) Alien Bladerunner Tron (the original) All 4 movies made around the same half-decade, or so.

@colonelangus Agreed we all knew before that movie what happened, we saw the crashed ship, the remains of mutated team members, and off course the Dog Thing and Two surviving men trying to shoot the Dog. So the prequel was going to show how they found the ship and how the Organism escaped, every angle was covered well, they covered the story leading up to The 80's Thing, they showed how the Axe got into the Door, they showed how one guy slit his own throat. But all they did by doing that was joining the dots from clues left in the 80's movie. Thus the movie never had same effect, no depth or story to the plot, it was never as engaging and we knew what to expect from the prequel. And i think thats why Ridley choose not to do a direct prequel to Alien because it would have the same short commings, all he would do is show a movie where it would. Tell who the Space Jockey was, and that maybe he was carring a Cargo of Bio Weapons on his ship. Ridley could go in detail on the creation of the Xeno, who the Jockey was and where he was going and how it ended. But then like the Thing prequel it would be linear, we would know pretty much what goes on etc. So thats why Ridley has decided to add more depth to the Space Jockeys and throw in the creation and ancient aliens theory and Prometheus Myth. And he has also decided to go the route of concentrating more on Weyland and its agenda, and Space Jockeys and the connection with our creation as opposed to the flat/direct preqeul route of Space Jockey creates Xeno, to use as Bio Weapon, loads them onto ship and sets off somewhere but then one of the Cargo gets lose and forces a emergency landing.

@colonelangus "If a director had relied on cgi fx for something like this people would laugh because there isn't that tangible quality imo." Except for when there is. CG can and has been used to great effect, you say so yourself. There's nothing inherent in CG or practical effects that guarantee positive results. They are tools and must be used well and in service of the story for positive results. Like I said before, crap CG is crap... but so are crap practical effects. Takka said what I was getting at far better than I did. PS: @Takka. For the most part the desert shots in the Dune miniseries were large photo-backdrops mounted against a wall of the sound stage. A practical effect, for those keeping count. ;)

Alien 3 just looked like it was cg because they had to put the alien puppet in front of a green screen.

Yeah, XxSkeletitsxX's right. Most of the alien effects were done with a rod puppet on a green screen and a few were a dude in a suit. I think the only CG shot was the one where you see cracks forming on the alien after it's dunk in molten lead.

Overuse of it is bad, however if it is blended in seamlessly and actually looks real I don't mind, but yes it was well overdone in the Thing movie, especially considering they put CGI over practically done effects that looked far cooler. IMHO of course.

@colonelangus [b] May God, Whomever That Turns Out To Be, Bless You Man![/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1colonelangus.gif[/img]