Sleepy Hollow
The animation and visual-effects industry in this town is pretty much committed to delivering the same kind of oppressive thing, over and over and over. Because coolness, whoa-ness, twee-ness and bitchin’ monsters only come in so many shapes, sizes and colors. Animation/FX is a hollow religion and a golden idol that the majors use over and over for understandable reasons. I’ve said over and over that the effects that truly impress are the ones you don’t notice. But 98% of the effects in films are intended to call attention to themselves, and in so doing become the very essence of boring fascistic entertainment.
Did Alex Jones write this entry, Jeff?
Just kiddin’. You’re absolutely right, of course. It’s tasteless eye candy doled out like the pills in THX-1138 to keep people mildly catatonic.
“I’ve said over and over that the effects that truly impress are the ones you don’t notice. But 98% of the effects in films are intended to call attention to themselves, and in so doing become the very essence of boring fascistic entertainment.”
But doesn’t that essentially negate ANY film that doesn’t occur 100% in the immediate here-and-now?
I can understand applying that standard to, say, a movie like “Hurt Locker” where the effects HAVE to be invisible because they’re trying to recreate situations that exist but that most will never actually encounter. Fine.
But pretty much anything in the scifi/fantasy genre – no matter how real you make it, you still KNOW it’s an effect, because dinosaurs or giant apes or whatever don’t exist.
Yes, because we all know that it’s the EFFECT HOUSE that decides what the effect will eventually look like. Lowly producers and directors come crawling to their opulent doors and are just happy that the EFFECT HOUSE decides what jobs it takes, what approach would like right and executes it without any input from those weak-kneed filmmakers who should be happy with whatever the EFFECT HOUSE decides.
Thank you, Deathtongue…
The difference is this: the fantasy masters of my childhood, George Pal (and his effects team) and Ray Harryhausen….were first and foremost, storytellers….their effects, eye-popping for their time, always served the tale…not the other way
around, as what we suffer through today.
Pal and Harryhausen didn’t proceed with the
exhaustive preparation, execution and lengthy
post-production required unless they had a damn good tale to tell, something to capture our imagination and stay with through beginning, middle and end.
What we have now are armies of keyboard
technicians, bereft of any real creativity, emotion or storytelling sense, afforded vast amounts of screen time to concoct their empty hollow images
around bare outline scripts. And they’re all finally running out of their meager ideas….before “Transformers” audiences view the up-ended aircraft carrier, they’ve already seen pretty much seen the same sequence in the “2012″ trailer that precedes the movie, not to mention numerous freeway collapses and the
Eiffel Tower smackdown in the “G.I.Joe” trailer.
Maybe, just maybe , James Cameron might
return real storytelling to this lumbering CGI circus
….but that’s a big “might”. (And I’ve asked this question before…if none of this garbage involves
scale models, vast water tanks, real pryotechnics, or even real actors….if it’s all accomplished with 300 pocket-pencil guys on laptops….how does it end up costing 200 million?
And how much do the pocket pencil guys get out of that stash…(you know, the ones in the DVD extras who giggle while saying “I thought it would look cool to put wings on this brontosaurus”
Best reading on this topic : Michael Atkinson’s
article “Stop-Motion JIm-Jams: Ray Harryhausen”
…which I found in ‘Best American Movie Writing 2001″ (One great quote: “As F/X capabilities accellerate, I can easily imagine Harryhausen’s rough-hewn images taking on the raw, gritty integrity of news footage. Perhaps that’s what Ray had in mind all along…”)
This post is absurd.
You can’t lump animation and visual effects together. They are two wholly different beings.
I would argue that animation is intended to call attention to itself. It’s called style. Artistry. The old Disney movies had a ‘look’. Pixar has a ‘look’. So does Dreamworks, Blue Sky/Fox etc. It’s not intended to be real. It’s animation.
Visual Effects are NEVER meant to be seen as ‘visual effects’ per se. They are meant to show what the story and director call for.
An explosion is a visual effect. It’s point is to explode, not say “I’m a visual effect”.
A matte painting is a visual effect. You are supposed to think that the background is ‘real’ even it’s impossible (Hoth does not exist).
Models are visual effects. Any space scene in 2001 wasn’t trying to say “Hey, I’m an effect”. The scenes are meant to put the audience into the story and make them believe they are actually in space. In the future (at the time)
You can’t tell me you really thought Kubrick went up in space and shot the movie, can you? When you watch it do you say to yourself “Hmmm. That space station is an effect” and thus is calling attention to itself – this sucks.” No, you buy into the reality Kubrick has designed. It’s a movie after all.
Now if your post was commenting on the rampant use of CG in movies today I would probably agree. However, no post house wants any effect to look like an effect. They want it to look real within the physics and boundaries that the director wants. Blame the director. Blame the budget. Blame poorly executed fx and trying to do too much before the technology is there.
But don’t blame the industry, especially when your logic is so ill-conceived.
Why the hell did Funny People cost $75 million? http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i6098aad6d9c8d3fb35461e4912d60434
Mr. Brooks had even more problems besides the script.
http://www.thresq.com/2009/07/louisiana-tax-credits-bribery-.html
Ridley Scott is hoping to pull off a Nolan.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118006722.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
It’s all in the hands of the directors and how much of a standard he wishes to hold the FX crew up to. Look at Superman Returns: the effects in that movie were brilliant. Watching the behind the scenes material you realize how many effects you actually missed because you didn’t know they were digital because they were done so well.
Or look at the new District 9 – that shot of the spacecraft hovering the city looks so real you’d think it was, except we know no aliens have come here yet.
So how does [i]Avatar[/i], a CGI extravaganza on an unprecedented level and full of bitchin’ monsters, fit into all of this? You seemed to have enjoyed the footage, Jeff.
Best “invisible” CGI ever – the CG penis in Irreversible.
Amen to that. When its used as just a brush stroke is when its most effective. But just look at the Star Wars prequels now. They already look dated.
the hovering ship in District 9 really does look authentic
I just finished my way through the Benjamin Button making-of stuff and for all the “obvious” effects you would be AMAZED at all the totally invisible work in the movie.
I don’t know if there’s any other director out there who is better than Fincher at knowing how to use effects to achieve a seamless reality. I know the test reel of what was done in Zodiac has appeared here before too.
The point is that effects are just a tool. Used well they can be invisible or at least not draw attention to themselves as effects. That doesn’t mean the audience is never allowed to stop and go, “cooooool!” but it’s true that you can’t keep blowing up things or toppling famous landmarks in your film/trailer and expect people to be automatically impressed.
I’m so tired of CGI. It’s to a point where I intentionally avoid any film with CGI, which means 90% of films out there.
The main problem with CGI is that they try too hard to look realistic and that’s a dead give away. A great movie, realistic or not, is stylized by the director’s vision, production values and cinematography. CGI is usually totally bland/fake/pretend realistic imagery that is totally devoid of any style. A great cinematographer takes a shot of something as simple as an apple on a table and can make it look like a work of art with composition, lighting, etc. CGI never ever takes that notion and applies it to their visuals. It tries to replicate reality but not the reality seen through the director’s vision, etc, if the director has any vision to start with.
The dinosaurs or King Kong in Peter Jackson’s remake had nothing intrinsically Jackson-esque about them. King Kong’s visuals could be totally interchangeable with any other films out there. CGI always stand-outs. It always takes me out of a film. In the end, it’s basically anti-cinema.
Bravo to larry braverman, my sentiments exactly.
Like I said in the other thread, CGI is all in the eye of the director. When used with economy, with subtlety, with *restraint*, it’s still a beautiful thing.
But the closer you get to doing something “fake,” paradoxically the more important it is for CGI to look like CGI. CGI will suck you out of a movie if it looks fake– but what that means is, you either have to have it look real, or look fake, no swapping between the two.
Example: Titantic. Great CGI effects. Sure, you know in many scenes the boat isn’t real, but you don’t care. It sucks you into the film.
Then. . . wait. . . down there. . . little walking people on the deck! Who look fake! Who *are* fake!
Magic moment over, folks.
Directors who try to do too much with CGI ought to forget about trying to make it look realistic, and just accept that it’s fantasy. Look at Zak Snyder’s films– BRILLIANT use of CGI, because he doesn’t care that the audience knows that it’s CGI. He’s not looking to trick you into stumbling through the Uncanny Valley, but instead creating his own visual universe to match the story he’s telling.
Anyway, I wish the world was still full of Rob Bottins and Stan Winstons, practical effects assisted by CGI, but not replaced by it. But that’s not the way the world works anymore, which means the NEXT best situation we can hope for is one where directors learn when to use restraint with CGI, or when to abandon that restraint entirely.
It’s when they try to straddle the divide that it looks like crap, feels like crap, and *is* crap.
Until computers can come up with something as thrilling and real as the village attack in “Apocalypse Now”, we ain’t talking.
I totally agree with larry braverman’s view that you can’t lump animation and visual effects together. They are two wholly different beings. Anyway keep sharing your views with us.