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Discussions of older effects work always make note of the high manual labor effort. But increasingly I'm not convinced that we really have things that much diff

Discussions of older effects work always make note of the high manual labor effort. But increasingly I'm not convinced that we really have things that much different in the CGI era. Certain things can be done in a commodity fashion(e.g. instancing thousands of AIs to make an army) but a good visual effect is designed and crafted, not manufactured. You don't get great animation just by scaling up the processing power. So you still end up with labor effort, but proportionately more goes to the intellectual parts of modelling it on the computer, instead of hiring a crew to sweat over an array of painted glass, miniatures, and puppets. When CGI visuals got really popular for the first time in the 90's and 00's, they often suffered from the belief that the computer would make post-production so fast that the up-front design could be avoided in favor of a brute force "just redo it in post until it looks good" approach. And this is an appealing pitch on the surface, since it means more aspects of the work can stay undecided until the very end. Indecision is one of the things that drives a lot of software complexity. But that kind of futurism isn't touted nearly as much as it used to be. It adds unnecessary risk for expensive mistakes, underwhelming visuals and awkward editing. Post work is still a huge part of doing blockbuster cinema, but it's been supplemented with extensive testing and a resurgent trend of in-camera effects. Meanwhile, the studios that provide CGI services are treated as commodity labor, just like yesteryear's model painters.

bsder 8y ago
I'd say that a whole generation of effects people took the Star Wars prequels to heart as to how too much CGI sucks.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  It was not too much CG, but rather the wrong approach to it. If you stick an actor into a green screen you need to do your damnest as a director to make clear to them what the invisible part of the setting is. As far as I know Lucas failed to handle that correctly. Newer productions with actually capable directors got this right. There was a reason why Lord of the Rings employed previs animations before filming to figure out what the sequence will be. Weta Dgitial gave James Cameron a tracked virtual camera inside the motion capture rig with a real time preview of the Navi so that he could direct the camera while his actors where playing out the movie in a nonexistent jungle in a really drab gray studio with no props. There are tons of examples how the industry has learned to take CG as a tool and tame its abstract nature to make it useable.
jakobegger 8y ago
Yeah, people definitely underestimate the amount of labour needed for CGI. You still need a lot of artists for CGI. Someone needs to sculpt and paint all those 3D models, and rig them, animate them, etc. The difference is that they use ZBrush to sculpt digital models instead of actual brushes, but the work still needs to be done. You also need engineers. ILM employs a lot of people who work on physical simulations to get the effects they need. You can do things digitally that aren't possible with real world models, but I don't think it's cheaper or less labour intensive.

bsder 8y ago

I'd say that a whole generation of effects people took the Star Wars prequels to heart as to how too much CGI sucks.

gmueckl 8y ago
It was not too much CG, but rather the wrong approach to it. If you stick an actor into a green screen you need to do your damnest as a director to make clear to them what the invisible part of the setting is. As far as I know Lucas failed to handle that correctly. Newer productions with actually capable directors got this right. There was a reason why Lord of the Rings employed previs animations before filming to figure out what the sequence will be. Weta Dgitial gave James Cameron a tracked virtual camera inside the motion capture rig with a real time preview of the Navi so that he could direct the camera while his actors where playing out the movie in a nonexistent jungle in a really drab gray studio with no props. There are tons of examples how the industry has learned to take CG as a tool and tame its abstract nature to make it useable.

jakobegger 8y ago

Yeah, people definitely underestimate the amount of labour needed for CGI. You still need a lot of artists for CGI. Someone needs to sculpt and paint all those 3D models, and rig them, animate them, etc. The difference is that they use ZBrush to sculpt digital models instead of actual brushes, but the work still needs to be done. You also need engineers. ILM employs a lot of people who work on physical simulations to get the effects they need. You can do things digitally that aren't possible with real world models, but I don't think it's cheaper or less labour intensive.