Originally posted by: mverta I've been a visual effects supervisor in LA for the last 12 years; most recently commissioned to do work for the upcoming Star Wars Complete Visual Dictionary. These credentials don't mean much, except in that I am intimately familiar with exactly how and what went into the shots for those films, and have plenty of friends who worked on them. They are not masterpieces, they are the result of grossly overworked and overloaded crews producing the best work they can under insane circumstances. As a result, you get extremely spotty work. Some of it is brilliant, lots of it is average, and some of it atrocious.
Uhh, so, are you talking about Star Wars or LotR?
If you're talking about Peter Jackson's work, I have nothing to disagree with in your above statement. Not all of the cgi work or special effects sequences in his latest films are great. A lot of it is boring and useless. What I am defending are the sequences which actually have artistic value in a visual sense. Taken on there own, disregarding the movie as a cohesive object, they can be appreciated in many ways, and I don't believe you are denying that (and thus my "visual person" comment doesn't apply to you after all).
I suppose my point is that both crowd simulations and plastic models are merely a physical form like paint that can be used well or used poorly by a given artist. Your outright dismissal of one such tool over another seems arbitrary to me. I could claim that actual film is itself a cheap tool that leaves supposed artists focusing on "what they can do" (cheaply capturing images) as apposed to "what's necessary" (truly giving a concrete form to their concepts and emotions).
Originally posted by: mverta
The problem is not CG or practical effects, per se. The problem is when you supplant storytelling for gimmicks, which only gets worse when your gimmicks aren't even consistent. Rather than have 2000 visual effects shots, which will NEVER be of equal quality, films will be best served by returning to 200 - 300 shot count limits, where they can control the quality better. The quality fluctuations take the viewer out of the experience. It ruins the suspension of disbelief. Younger filmgoers actually say things like, "it had good effects". When I started in this business, that would've been considered an insult of the highest order. We don't want you looking at the effects - you're not supposed to see them. You're supposed to be drawn into the story. A couple of decades ago, with less sophisticated audiences, you could get away with a lot more practical effects and models. Now, more than any time in history, effects have the chance to be as "invisible" as one can imagine, when we can literally fool 99% of the people... when we're doing our best work. But the problem is that with the bar set that high, the substandard effects reek like a fart in an elevator and destroy the flow. So the solution is to reduce the shot count. And that is totally possible, because the other thing that has come with all the advantages in technique is a love-affair with over-using them. The fact that some filmgoers are so accustomed to spotty work that they are willing to forgive it is generous, but totally unnecessary.
I'm sensing another artificial distinction on your part. You take the word "effects" and seem to give it a simplistic meaning. People do not always mean a "special effect" as something which "stands out" in an absurd, surreal, or flawed sense. Sometimes people will say the special effects were good simply because they saw some amazingly impossible things on the screen that looked flawless to them and they assumed that they had just seen a good special effect.
If we took your idea of limiting special effects to its extreme, we would have to conclude that filmakers should never use them at all, which is ridiculous. To some degree, a special effect in a visual sequence is actually meant to be experienced by the viewer is it not? So, to that degree, should not the true focus of a special effect be to perfectly balance that experience with regard to the artistic purpose on a case by case basis? To invent clumsy and arbitrary rules in response to obvious excess is going too far in my mind.
To address your last point though: certainly, special effects are supposed to serve the artistic focus and not the other way around. If pulling people into the story is the goal of a project, then one should not place random special effect shots that detract from that goal. I completely understand what you are saying about ship flybys as well. By far, the worst Special Edition addition to the original trilogy was at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. The emotional intensity and pacing for the hyperspace sequence was always so powerful. Yet what did George Lucas do? He destroyed that whole scene by showing Darth Vader landing on his damn star destroyer for absolutely no good reason. It's awful now. Forget Greedo Shooting first! We have the climax of one of the best films of all time ruined!
Originally posted by: GilleanI said the reasons for theatre's current situation were two-fold. The second reason is entirely their fault; the cost of tickets and food and the loss of ushers to keep order. Neither of which have anything to do with the quality of movies.
