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> Now, not only were VFX houses responsible for conjuring vast fictional cities, bustling crowds of tens of thousands, and cascading waterfalls, but they would

by rcarr 3y ago

> Now, not only were VFX houses responsible for conjuring vast fictional cities, bustling crowds of tens of thousands, and cascading waterfalls, but they would also spend months fixing mistakes: digitally erasing visible wig lines in period dramas, inserting absent props, snipping away errant strands of hair, tucking in double chins. Take with a pinch of salt because I don't work in the industry, but I'm not convinced this "VFX for everything" approach is cheaper or results in better films. I still think a lot of old films blow the modern counterparts out of the water. The very fact that they had to use practical effects and physical film was expensive meant you couldn't just shoot unlimited takes without burning through money (unless you were Kubrick who was notorious for doing takes from every angle). The whole "fix it in post" mentality leads to sloppy, rushed work and a lack of thinking and commitment on behalf of the director and producing team. See here[1]: > Even after shots are exhaustively delivered, Marvel is allegedly "infamous" for requesting "tons of different variations" until one earns the green light. and even worse: > We've literally made up entire third acts of a film, a month before release, because the director didn't know what they wanted," one source said about Marvel in general. You would never have had this back in the day. You planned out your big set piece in advance and you shot it, and you better get it fucking right because your head was on the chopping block if you didn't. Instead, the directors and producers are now offloading their responsibility to get things right on to the VFX artists. Maybe the demands of HD and 4K means that such work is necessary compared to back in the old days because stuff like wig lines and errant hairs wouldn't be visible due to the resolution. But some of me wonders if it is overproduction, which I think a lot of contemporary music nowadays also suffers from. Another evil is film companies refusing to create a "everything-in-one-place" content model like the music industry has done with Spotify, with the end result being an endless churn of content in an attempt to justify the subscription over their rivals. I imagine this is a contributing factor to the rushed "fix it in post" mentality but I can't see why film would be any different to any other industry - where taking your time to get it right the first time ends up being faster over the long run. [1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artists-are-suffering-now-theyre-speaking-out/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artis...

slaymaker1907 3y ago
I think it’s kind of natural for artists to demand higher standards than is truly necessary, even for discerning audiences. Something that many people are unaware of is that even for classical music, it’s standard practice to do multiple takes on a given piece and the stitch together the best parts in editing. However, I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say live recordings are just as good if not better than these Frankenstein recordings, so why bother going to all that trouble?
- ghaff 3y ago
  A lot of design work is like that. I'm willing to believe we sometimes notice things at a subconscious level but do we actually benefit from the 10 million (or whatever) fonts in existence or from people agonizing for days over the most subtle difference in colors you'll be viewing on a non-color corrected monitor.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Often there is a choice between not showing a thing happen on screen because it wouldn't be practical/economical, or using VFX. Now suppose for instance you're making a disaster movie about a tsunami hitting NYC; your options are doing it with scale models (which will look fake or limit you to very quick shots of the disaster), doing it with computers, or not making the movie at all. That sort of effect for that sort of movie isn't really negotiable. But when the effect isn't critical to the movie and not having the effect was a perfectly valid choice? Like for instance, a character throws a cigar and the director thinks it would be cool to have the camera follow and spin around the cigar as it's flying through the air. Maybe you could do that for real with a sophisticated robot arm holding the camera, but that's expensive. In a previous era, the director would forget about that idea, it wouldn't get into the movie and nobody would care that it wasn't in the movie. But now that computer imagery is cheap and abundant, a director can have that gratuitous effect. And if it doesn't look like crap when the movie is released, it will almost certainly look like crap a few years later. The movie would have been better off without the effect in the first place. But because VFX is so cheap, it is now used for nonsense like this all the time and it makes movies worse on the whole. One of the first movies I noticed this in was Fight Club. At the start of the movie when the MC is in the office, there's a long scene of the camera flying in between garbage in a garbage can. It's all CGI; there would have been no way to get a real camera flying around in between empty cans and donuts wrappers. It's an impossible shot to do for real, but they could do it with CGI. It also looks like crap, completely fake. I saw this movie in theaters and it looked fake then, and even worse now. In an era before CGI, the director could have settled on having a macro camera pan across a pile of trash without flying and twisting around inside of the trash. A real camera filming real trash. It would not have been as dynamic, but it would look real and continue to look real forever. Basically, the cheapness of VFX seems to blind many directors to cases in which less-is-more. Now we have more-is-more movies packed to the brim with every gratuitous effect anybody can think of and it all ages like milk.

by rcarr 3y ago

slaymaker1907 3y ago

I think it’s kind of natural for artists to demand higher standards than is truly necessary, even for discerning audiences. Something that many people are unaware of is that even for classical music, it’s standard practice to do multiple takes on a given piece and the stitch together the best parts in editing. However, I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say live recordings are just as good if not better than these Frankenstein recordings, so why bother going to all that trouble?

ghaff 3y ago
A lot of design work is like that. I'm willing to believe we sometimes notice things at a subconscious level but do we actually benefit from the 10 million (or whatever) fonts in existence or from people agonizing for days over the most subtle difference in colors you'll be viewing on a non-color corrected monitor.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Often there is a choice between not showing a thing happen on screen because it wouldn't be practical/economical, or using VFX. Now suppose for instance you're making a disaster movie about a tsunami hitting NYC; your options are doing it with scale models (which will look fake or limit you to very quick shots of the disaster), doing it with computers, or not making the movie at all. That sort of effect for that sort of movie isn't really negotiable. But when the effect isn't critical to the movie and not having the effect was a perfectly valid choice? Like for instance, a character throws a cigar and the director thinks it would be cool to have the camera follow and spin around the cigar as it's flying through the air. Maybe you could do that for real with a sophisticated robot arm holding the camera, but that's expensive. In a previous era, the director would forget about that idea, it wouldn't get into the movie and nobody would care that it wasn't in the movie. But now that computer imagery is cheap and abundant, a director can have that gratuitous effect. And if it doesn't look like crap when the movie is released, it will almost certainly look like crap a few years later. The movie would have been better off without the effect in the first place. But because VFX is so cheap, it is now used for nonsense like this all the time and it makes movies worse on the whole. One of the first movies I noticed this in was Fight Club. At the start of the movie when the MC is in the office, there's a long scene of the camera flying in between garbage in a garbage can. It's all CGI; there would have been no way to get a real camera flying around in between empty cans and donuts wrappers. It's an impossible shot to do for real, but they could do it with CGI. It also looks like crap, completely fake. I saw this movie in theaters and it looked fake then, and even worse now. In an era before CGI, the director could have settled on having a macro camera pan across a pile of trash without flying and twisting around inside of the trash. A real camera filming real trash. It would not have been as dynamic, but it would look real and continue to look real forever. Basically, the cheapness of VFX seems to blind many directors to cases in which less-is-more. Now we have more-is-more movies packed to the brim with every gratuitous effect anybody can think of and it all ages like milk.