9 ms·

Fury Road's Practical FX Myth

39 points by georgecmu 2y ago

jsheard 2y ago
In the case of Fury Road it was observable before the movie even came out - the very first trailer they released used rough cuts of shots before much of the VFX had been finished. 2014 Comic-Con trailer: https://i.imgur.com/WFUxzgl.png https://i.imgur.com/WFUxzgl.png 2015 release trailer: https://i.imgur.com/I9cWFGj.png https://i.imgur.com/I9cWFGj.png
Aunche 2y ago
The reason why there is so much criticism of VFX is because it is often done without any sort of intent or passion. It seems like the director just give a vague description of what sort of effects they want to the VFX team and just hands it off to them. With practical effects, the director is forced to be more hands on, so this intent shows through with the final product.
- pizzaknife 2y ago
  this is really weird to me. its a fault of the director, if i understand your position on this
- Timon3 2y ago
  That's definitely a big part, but especially recently VFX teams really don't have the option to bring in real intent and passion. Scenes are often changing until a few months or even weeks before release, frequently with very tight deadlines, and after months of crunch. There's no way to deliver a good product under these conditions, just look at many of the recent Marvel movies. Practical effects are much harder to change later on, so VFX built on top is also more likely to avoid this ever-changing crunch. But that's also why they are being avoided more and more - it increases cost of changes, and studios won't give up late-stage changes.
  - sniggers 2y ago
    [dead]
  - tonynator 2y ago
    The recent Planet of the Apes movies show real VFX passion, especially in the CGI faces. You can really tell how much work they poured into them. I would assume they were given adequate time to work!
dblohm7 2y ago
ILM Compositor Todd Vaziri talks a lot about stuff like this both on his blog [1] and on X [2]. One of his pet peeves is marketing campaigns claiming mostly practical effects when in fact the opposite is true. [1]https://fxrant.blogspot.com/ https://fxrant.blogspot.com/ [2]https://x.com/tvaziri https://x.com/tvaziri
noahtallen 2y ago
As the author mentions, the "No CGI is really just invisible CGI" video is a great watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oQ1jV859w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oQ1jV859w) The TLDR is basically that movie studios, directors, and actors start a hype train early "we haven't used any CGI!" or "it's all practical!" When the reality is that vast amounts of the movie still use CGI on top of the practical effects. It's just a really good marketing ploy, because a lot of people hate overdone VFX movies! So it feels more authentic and artistic to go practical. But at the end of the day, most of those movies still have a huge amount of VFX. Some of the examples are extremely egregious and dishonest (e.g. the one TV show where the director/studio claims it was all real puppets on real sets, but the VFX studio has videos showing some massive VFX environments for the show instead.) Others are more of a misunderstanding -- for example, when they claimed the sandworm in Dune 2 was practical... yes, the shot had a ton of practical elements, but of course lots of VFX and compositing was done to achieve the final product. Yes, there was a mechanical portion of a sandworm for the actors to stand on for some of the close-ups, but tons of the sandworm shots are still mostly VFX.
- bombcar 2y ago
  The studios and the viewers know what they mean - if you see a giant explosion, was there a real giant explosion or was it created by CGI? The links above show that the explosion was real, the side parts were CGI; so we call that "practical" even though much of the scene "by volume" is CGI.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I think there are degrees. I don’t think most people who are fans of practical effects get too worked up over painting out wires, or compositing shots with computers, or maybe the odd correction or touch-up to a practical shot, instead of doing those same things with actual film. That probably falls below the level that anyone really minds or regards as substantially altering a “we used lots of practical effects” claim. Usually all that stuff looks pretty good, even seamless, unless it was totally incompetently-realized. Then there’s having actors interacting with mostly-real sets and props but maybe the farther-away stuff or some backgrounds or whatever is computer art, not even a composited-in real shot, and maybe a few excessively-dangerous sequences are even more CG than that. I think lots of folks who are fans of practical effects are still pretty accepting of this, maybe it’s not “pure” but there’s some effort and it usually shows. Especially when the CG is replacing things that really couldn’t have been done practically (at least not these days). Then there’s “literally nothing is real, not even that chair the character is sitting on, not that prop they’re holding, nothing, there are no sets or locations to speak of, hell parts of the costumes are CG”. Thor 4, Attack of the Clones, large parts of other Disney Marvel or stuff, among others. These usually look like shit, the actors are often thrown off by the lack of anything real around them, even the damn floor, suspension of disbelief never quite settles in correctly so emotional beats don’t hit right, et c. This is the kind of thing I think even people with only a little investment in practical effects really dislike. Half the time these would have looked better fully-animated rather than even pretending to be “real”. And there some steps in between those, but my point is there’s a spectrum at play.
renegade-otter 2y ago
Uh, no - THIS is practical special effects: https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/those-bullet-effects-in-terminator-2-werent-cgi/ https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/those-bullet-effects-in-term...
- bmitc 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/yKAHGwCyamc https://youtu.be/yKAHGwCyamc
brookst 2y ago
This seems like a really elaborate takedown of language ambiguity at best and an outright strawman at worst. The whole thing hinges on: > If the film 90 percent practical special effects aka SFX, then that would suggest only about 10 percent were DVFX/CGI. But... is that true? If a real live stuntperson jumps from a real live car to another real live car, but a safety wire is digitally removed and mountains are added in the background, is that a practical effect or a digital one? The article insists it's a binary choice, and seems to say this should not be considered a practical effect at all. And the author's definition of digital effects really is that expansive: > The film’s color grading process entailed using DVFX to modify certain pre-existing recorded elements within the frame, such as the skies and background environments. Later in the article a bit of nuance appears: > What Jackson and the article make evident then is that Fury Road actually had a LOT of CGI quite literally on top of the practical SFX and stunt sequences, which were often enhanced, revised, transformed, augmented, supplanted, etc. through DVFX manipulation. Such changes were, for the most part, microscopic yet their scope was considerably larger than audiences were led to believe. There are some rhetorical devices that should raise flags, especially the odd "microscopic yet... considerably larger" construction. Ultimately, when I hear that "80 to 90 percent of the effects were practical", I take it to mean the cars were real and not CGI, the people swinging on poles were real and not CGI, etc. No complaints if the author wants to construct definitions that make those shots no longer "practical", but I don't think many people ever interpreted the claims to mean there was zero color grading or background replacement for continuity.
- vile_wretch 2y ago
  Any time someone talks about how films look better when sets and effects are practical someone chimes in to let them know how actually the horizon was composited or they added CGI sand in this sandstorm scene that would be extremely dangerous to film in if it were real. Just internet pedants who take everything way too literally.
  - TheGRS 2y ago
    Bigger tendency of discourse to draw quick association lines instead of looking at the product holistically. A handful of bad video games released with poor micro-transactions, so micro-transactions leads to bad games. A lot of bad movies released with over-reliance on poor CGI, so CGI leads to bad movies. But in both of those cases I can see where the underlying methods could be a net positive for the product - if implemented well and with good intent. In the case of Fury Road, tons of great choices that are a net positive on the product. Including practical stunts and CGI and lots of artfully done color saturation. A lesser movie will try to ape everything Fury Road did just to make a quick buck on its success, but not really taking into account how the color saturation or the stunts enhanced parts of the story and theme. People with an opinion on a piece of work: judge it how it should be judged on the whole! These little shortcuts in discourse are boring and tiresome.
legitster 2y ago
I am really not following the point the author is trying to make. Fury Road clearly uses practical effects and real actors/sets throughout. Yes they did a bunch of image composition and post-processing, but that doesn't change the point of practical effects. The actor was directing real people doing real stunts, and was finding ways of putting things into film. They aren't mutually exclusive. Compare it to the average Marvel sequence now where glassy, unconvincing scenes are computer generated from scratch and it's night and day. It doesn't matter that both spent time on a computer when one actually starts with something real. It would be like saying Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't have practical effects because it was a cartoon.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ghostly_s 2y ago
  Just watch the "No CGI is Just Invisible CGI" Youtube series linked towards the end of the article, it makes the same points much more cogently (and in fact covers Roger Rabbit in depth). The point is more that the studios are pushing this idea that the two are mutually exclusive as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films to make that "grounded" aesthetic possible.
  - legitster 2y ago
    >as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films Fury Road literally hired Cirque de Soleil performers to design, choreograph, and perform actual death defying stunts in the movie. It's not just made-up marketing just because someone on the internet pointed out the images were color corrected. If anything, it's much more disrespectful to the hundreds of people who went to the Namibian desert and actually pulled of these stunts by denying they mattered at all!
    - ghostly_s 2y ago
      Again, I am referring to the argument made in Jonas Ussing's video series, which is not focused on Fury Road. He is not arguing stunt people don't deserve recognition, just that VFX artists do too, particularly for the work they do to make those practical effects work.
yyyyybb 2y ago
A really good composite shot is a practical effect IMO.
lupusreal 2y ago
So I guess this article is sponsored by the producers of the new movie as damage control?
- robxorb 2y ago
  My first thought too. The articles basic premise is something like: "People don't like the new film, but the old film may contain more CGI than they thought, so they're wrong." Who would come up with such a premise unless they were in a corner, and being paid?
  - lupire 2y ago
    On the Internet, pretentious people make ignorant comments all the time, for free. The author of the OP quoted Miller for paragraphs, where Miller explained in detail how he combined practical and computer effects, why he felt the practical effects were valuable because they kept the movie within the bounds of realistic mechanical physics, well, the digital effects improved the overall color and remove small practical objects that are necessary for effects but didn't belong in the fiction. After all that, the OP wrote one sentence completely mischaracterizing the extensive quoting, because the truth didn't fit his thesis. I'll give him credit at least for presenting the evidence that he's trying to ignore.
jrflowers 2y ago
TLDR: The author is thoroughly convinced that Furiosa is getting wildly unfairly judged. Also, >Look, I haven’t seen Furiosa yet.
cjohnson318 2y ago
I didn't really get Fury Road. Why were people spraying silver spray paint in each others' mouths? What was the societal demand that was answered by the heavy metal blitzkrieg of chopped up cars? It was all just a little too much for me. I thought the protagonist was great, it was just all of the extra psychotic flash-bang stuff they added on top that I didn't like.
- stnmtn 2y ago
  I liked how it wasn't explained because the goal is to make you think about those questions. In a post apocalyptic wasteland where valuable resources are scattered far away in an endless desert, wouldn't cars become an almost mythical and religious item? Without the Chrome Cars, everyone would die as they would be unable to travel and get food/water/etc. So is it any surprise that after generations of living like that, they would worship chrome much in the same way primitive cultures worship the sun/rain/water?
  - adrianN 2y ago
    I don't think the Mad Max world building is sufficiently deep to stand up to scrutiny. For example, cars are extremely dependent on high industry. Without an advanced chemical industry cars are impossible to build. There is no way cars would be around long in a post apocalyptic wasteland of endless desert.
    - stnmtn 2y ago
      All the cars are cars that they are maintaining, they have not built any cars from scratch. They find pieces of metal laying about and can put that on cars.
      - 83 2y ago
        While I have no plans to watch these, I have been very curious how they cover gasoline production. Fracking and cracking aint easy.
      - 2y ago
oglop 2y ago
Do people think the first movie was not mostly digital? That’s been my impression and it’s not that hard to tell when you watch it. Furiosa just looks bad though, and I’m a fan of everyone involved in this film. But god damn does it look weird. It’s like Miller gave up trying to hide the digital parts and just leaned into it. Mistake.
- vundercind 2y ago
  The film’s (Fury Road) promotional material was full of before-and-after shots comparing the real shots with the final with-CG shots. They did that because they were showing off that an absolute ton of what’s on screen was real compared to what most other modern productions would have done with the same sequences, but they didn’t really seem to be trying to hide that they also extensively used CG.
ceejayoz 2y ago
I've no opinion on Furiosa, having not yet seen it. It's hard to argue the pre-CGI footage of Fury Road isn't impressive, though; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3fLazkWCgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3fLazkWCgE They built functional vehicles and spent months fucking around in the desert, including actual people on the swingy poles and lots of serious stunts. I'm comfortable saying there's a contrast to, say, https://www.businessinsider.com/avengers-endgame-battle-without-visual-effects-photos-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/avengers-endgame-battle-with....
magic_hamster 2y ago
This article is heavily, almost solely based on silly things like color grading and sky replacement, which compared to the actual stunts - you know, people hanging on poles from real vehicles in motion - is being very nit-picky. It also seems there's a good reason for the changes, mentioned in the article itself: > "The world was medieval, in a way, so it had to be grounded, and we had to do as much of it for real. However, there was not one shot in that movie that wasn’t CGI in one way or another. We shot over months, but [the story] was compressed in time over three days. Which meant the skies had to remain consistent, so every shot virtually had a changed sky. If you’re driving vehicles across the desert, you’re doing take after take, you’re doing track after track. You had to erase all but the necessary tracks…. Landscapes you had to change, if there was some greenery in it, and so on, and so on.” This makes sense to me. I don't really care if the sky was replaced to color match the film. I care about the stunts, cars, trucks, I know that people performing crazy stunts are real, and most of it was captured in camera - more than I realized before watching the "making of" videos.

39 points by georgecmu 2y ago

In the case of Fury Road it was observable before the movie even came out - the very first trailer they released used rough cuts of shots before much of the VFX had been finished. 2014 Comic-Con trailer: https://i.imgur.com/WFUxzgl.png https://i.imgur.com/WFUxzgl.png 2015 release trailer: https://i.imgur.com/I9cWFGj.png https://i.imgur.com/I9cWFGj.png

Aunche 2y ago

The reason why there is so much criticism of VFX is because it is often done without any sort of intent or passion. It seems like the director just give a vague description of what sort of effects they want to the VFX team and just hands it off to them. With practical effects, the director is forced to be more hands on, so this intent shows through with the final product.

pizzaknife 2y ago
this is really weird to me. its a fault of the director, if i understand your position on this
Timon3 2y ago
That's definitely a big part, but especially recently VFX teams really don't have the option to bring in real intent and passion. Scenes are often changing until a few months or even weeks before release, frequently with very tight deadlines, and after months of crunch. There's no way to deliver a good product under these conditions, just look at many of the recent Marvel movies. Practical effects are much harder to change later on, so VFX built on top is also more likely to avoid this ever-changing crunch. But that's also why they are being avoided more and more - it increases cost of changes, and studios won't give up late-stage changes.
- sniggers 2y ago
  [dead]
- tonynator 2y ago
  The recent Planet of the Apes movies show real VFX passion, especially in the CGI faces. You can really tell how much work they poured into them. I would assume they were given adequate time to work!

dblohm7 2y ago

ILM Compositor Todd Vaziri talks a lot about stuff like this both on his blog [1] and on X [2]. One of his pet peeves is marketing campaigns claiming mostly practical effects when in fact the opposite is true. [1]https://fxrant.blogspot.com/ https://fxrant.blogspot.com/ [2]https://x.com/tvaziri https://x.com/tvaziri

noahtallen 2y ago

As the author mentions, the "No CGI is really just invisible CGI" video is a great watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oQ1jV859w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oQ1jV859w) The TLDR is basically that movie studios, directors, and actors start a hype train early "we haven't used any CGI!" or "it's all practical!" When the reality is that vast amounts of the movie still use CGI on top of the practical effects. It's just a really good marketing ploy, because a lot of people hate overdone VFX movies! So it feels more authentic and artistic to go practical. But at the end of the day, most of those movies still have a huge amount of VFX. Some of the examples are extremely egregious and dishonest (e.g. the one TV show where the director/studio claims it was all real puppets on real sets, but the VFX studio has videos showing some massive VFX environments for the show instead.) Others are more of a misunderstanding -- for example, when they claimed the sandworm in Dune 2 was practical... yes, the shot had a ton of practical elements, but of course lots of VFX and compositing was done to achieve the final product. Yes, there was a mechanical portion of a sandworm for the actors to stand on for some of the close-ups, but tons of the sandworm shots are still mostly VFX.

bombcar 2y ago
The studios and the viewers know what they mean - if you see a giant explosion, was there a real giant explosion or was it created by CGI? The links above show that the explosion was real, the side parts were CGI; so we call that "practical" even though much of the scene "by volume" is CGI.
vundercind 2y ago
I think there are degrees. I don’t think most people who are fans of practical effects get too worked up over painting out wires, or compositing shots with computers, or maybe the odd correction or touch-up to a practical shot, instead of doing those same things with actual film. That probably falls below the level that anyone really minds or regards as substantially altering a “we used lots of practical effects” claim. Usually all that stuff looks pretty good, even seamless, unless it was totally incompetently-realized. Then there’s having actors interacting with mostly-real sets and props but maybe the farther-away stuff or some backgrounds or whatever is computer art, not even a composited-in real shot, and maybe a few excessively-dangerous sequences are even more CG than that. I think lots of folks who are fans of practical effects are still pretty accepting of this, maybe it’s not “pure” but there’s some effort and it usually shows. Especially when the CG is replacing things that really couldn’t have been done practically (at least not these days). Then there’s “literally nothing is real, not even that chair the character is sitting on, not that prop they’re holding, nothing, there are no sets or locations to speak of, hell parts of the costumes are CG”. Thor 4, Attack of the Clones, large parts of other Disney Marvel or stuff, among others. These usually look like shit, the actors are often thrown off by the lack of anything real around them, even the damn floor, suspension of disbelief never quite settles in correctly so emotional beats don’t hit right, et c. This is the kind of thing I think even people with only a little investment in practical effects really dislike. Half the time these would have looked better fully-animated rather than even pretending to be “real”. And there some steps in between those, but my point is there’s a spectrum at play.

renegade-otter 2y ago

Uh, no - THIS is practical special effects: https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/those-bullet-effects-in-terminator-2-werent-cgi/ https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/those-bullet-effects-in-term...

bmitc 2y ago
https://youtu.be/yKAHGwCyamc https://youtu.be/yKAHGwCyamc

brookst 2y ago

This seems like a really elaborate takedown of language ambiguity at best and an outright strawman at worst. The whole thing hinges on: > If the film 90 percent practical special effects aka SFX, then that would suggest only about 10 percent were DVFX/CGI. But... is that true? If a real live stuntperson jumps from a real live car to another real live car, but a safety wire is digitally removed and mountains are added in the background, is that a practical effect or a digital one? The article insists it's a binary choice, and seems to say this should not be considered a practical effect at all. And the author's definition of digital effects really is that expansive: > The film’s color grading process entailed using DVFX to modify certain pre-existing recorded elements within the frame, such as the skies and background environments. Later in the article a bit of nuance appears: > What Jackson and the article make evident then is that Fury Road actually had a LOT of CGI quite literally on top of the practical SFX and stunt sequences, which were often enhanced, revised, transformed, augmented, supplanted, etc. through DVFX manipulation. Such changes were, for the most part, microscopic yet their scope was considerably larger than audiences were led to believe. There are some rhetorical devices that should raise flags, especially the odd "microscopic yet... considerably larger" construction. Ultimately, when I hear that "80 to 90 percent of the effects were practical", I take it to mean the cars were real and not CGI, the people swinging on poles were real and not CGI, etc. No complaints if the author wants to construct definitions that make those shots no longer "practical", but I don't think many people ever interpreted the claims to mean there was zero color grading or background replacement for continuity.

vile_wretch 2y ago
Any time someone talks about how films look better when sets and effects are practical someone chimes in to let them know how actually the horizon was composited or they added CGI sand in this sandstorm scene that would be extremely dangerous to film in if it were real. Just internet pedants who take everything way too literally.
- TheGRS 2y ago
  Bigger tendency of discourse to draw quick association lines instead of looking at the product holistically. A handful of bad video games released with poor micro-transactions, so micro-transactions leads to bad games. A lot of bad movies released with over-reliance on poor CGI, so CGI leads to bad movies. But in both of those cases I can see where the underlying methods could be a net positive for the product - if implemented well and with good intent. In the case of Fury Road, tons of great choices that are a net positive on the product. Including practical stunts and CGI and lots of artfully done color saturation. A lesser movie will try to ape everything Fury Road did just to make a quick buck on its success, but not really taking into account how the color saturation or the stunts enhanced parts of the story and theme. People with an opinion on a piece of work: judge it how it should be judged on the whole! These little shortcuts in discourse are boring and tiresome.

legitster 2y ago

I am really not following the point the author is trying to make. Fury Road clearly uses practical effects and real actors/sets throughout. Yes they did a bunch of image composition and post-processing, but that doesn't change the point of practical effects. The actor was directing real people doing real stunts, and was finding ways of putting things into film. They aren't mutually exclusive. Compare it to the average Marvel sequence now where glassy, unconvincing scenes are computer generated from scratch and it's night and day. It doesn't matter that both spent time on a computer when one actually starts with something real. It would be like saying Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't have practical effects because it was a cartoon.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ghostly_s 2y ago
Just watch the "No CGI is Just Invisible CGI" Youtube series linked towards the end of the article, it makes the same points much more cogently (and in fact covers Roger Rabbit in depth). The point is more that the studios are pushing this idea that the two are mutually exclusive as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films to make that "grounded" aesthetic possible.
- legitster 2y ago
  >as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films Fury Road literally hired Cirque de Soleil performers to design, choreograph, and perform actual death defying stunts in the movie. It's not just made-up marketing just because someone on the internet pointed out the images were color corrected. If anything, it's much more disrespectful to the hundreds of people who went to the Namibian desert and actually pulled of these stunts by denying they mattered at all!
  - ghostly_s 2y ago
    Again, I am referring to the argument made in Jonas Ussing's video series, which is not focused on Fury Road. He is not arguing stunt people don't deserve recognition, just that VFX artists do too, particularly for the work they do to make those practical effects work.

yyyyybb 2y ago

A really good composite shot is a practical effect IMO.

lupusreal 2y ago

So I guess this article is sponsored by the producers of the new movie as damage control?

robxorb 2y ago
My first thought too. The articles basic premise is something like: "People don't like the new film, but the old film may contain more CGI than they thought, so they're wrong." Who would come up with such a premise unless they were in a corner, and being paid?
- lupire 2y ago
  On the Internet, pretentious people make ignorant comments all the time, for free. The author of the OP quoted Miller for paragraphs, where Miller explained in detail how he combined practical and computer effects, why he felt the practical effects were valuable because they kept the movie within the bounds of realistic mechanical physics, well, the digital effects improved the overall color and remove small practical objects that are necessary for effects but didn't belong in the fiction. After all that, the OP wrote one sentence completely mischaracterizing the extensive quoting, because the truth didn't fit his thesis. I'll give him credit at least for presenting the evidence that he's trying to ignore.

jrflowers 2y ago

TLDR: The author is thoroughly convinced that Furiosa is getting wildly unfairly judged. Also, >Look, I haven’t seen Furiosa yet.

cjohnson318 2y ago

I didn't really get Fury Road. Why were people spraying silver spray paint in each others' mouths? What was the societal demand that was answered by the heavy metal blitzkrieg of chopped up cars? It was all just a little too much for me. I thought the protagonist was great, it was just all of the extra psychotic flash-bang stuff they added on top that I didn't like.

stnmtn 2y ago
I liked how it wasn't explained because the goal is to make you think about those questions. In a post apocalyptic wasteland where valuable resources are scattered far away in an endless desert, wouldn't cars become an almost mythical and religious item? Without the Chrome Cars, everyone would die as they would be unable to travel and get food/water/etc. So is it any surprise that after generations of living like that, they would worship chrome much in the same way primitive cultures worship the sun/rain/water?
- adrianN 2y ago
  I don't think the Mad Max world building is sufficiently deep to stand up to scrutiny. For example, cars are extremely dependent on high industry. Without an advanced chemical industry cars are impossible to build. There is no way cars would be around long in a post apocalyptic wasteland of endless desert.
  - stnmtn 2y ago
    All the cars are cars that they are maintaining, they have not built any cars from scratch. They find pieces of metal laying about and can put that on cars.
    - 83 2y ago
      While I have no plans to watch these, I have been very curious how they cover gasoline production. Fracking and cracking aint easy.
    - 2y ago

oglop 2y ago

Do people think the first movie was not mostly digital? That’s been my impression and it’s not that hard to tell when you watch it. Furiosa just looks bad though, and I’m a fan of everyone involved in this film. But god damn does it look weird. It’s like Miller gave up trying to hide the digital parts and just leaned into it. Mistake.

vundercind 2y ago
The film’s (Fury Road) promotional material was full of before-and-after shots comparing the real shots with the final with-CG shots. They did that because they were showing off that an absolute ton of what’s on screen was real compared to what most other modern productions would have done with the same sequences, but they didn’t really seem to be trying to hide that they also extensively used CG.

ceejayoz 2y ago

I've no opinion on Furiosa, having not yet seen it. It's hard to argue the pre-CGI footage of Fury Road isn't impressive, though; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3fLazkWCgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3fLazkWCgE They built functional vehicles and spent months fucking around in the desert, including actual people on the swingy poles and lots of serious stunts. I'm comfortable saying there's a contrast to, say, https://www.businessinsider.com/avengers-endgame-battle-without-visual-effects-photos-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/avengers-endgame-battle-with....

magic_hamster 2y ago

This article is heavily, almost solely based on silly things like color grading and sky replacement, which compared to the actual stunts - you know, people hanging on poles from real vehicles in motion - is being very nit-picky. It also seems there's a good reason for the changes, mentioned in the article itself: > "The world was medieval, in a way, so it had to be grounded, and we had to do as much of it for real. However, there was not one shot in that movie that wasn’t CGI in one way or another. We shot over months, but [the story] was compressed in time over three days. Which meant the skies had to remain consistent, so every shot virtually had a changed sky. If you’re driving vehicles across the desert, you’re doing take after take, you’re doing track after track. You had to erase all but the necessary tracks…. Landscapes you had to change, if there was some greenery in it, and so on, and so on.” This makes sense to me. I don't really care if the sky was replaced to color match the film. I care about the stunts, cars, trucks, I know that people performing crazy stunts are real, and most of it was captured in camera - more than I realized before watching the "making of" videos.