Johnboy3434 said:

Tiptup said:

What happened to the painstaking care that used to look at each shot and scene for excellent visual details? I preferred it when people did real work to make sure that a particular image was as good as it could be. Though, I suppose that Guillermo Del Toro does a fantastic job in his movies. I can't wait for Hellboy 2 and he gives me hope for a good translation of the Hobbit.

A lot of visual effects artists would find that offensive. Using computer-generated effects is incredibly painstaking, regardless of what the public at large may think.

I don't care what they take offense at. Most visual effects artists in the movie industry are either lazy or they have no skill. :P

A bunch of time and money spent on a CG model is worthless if the final result in a given movie looks like crap. In other words, what I care about is the end result we're given in the actual movie's frames (not the relatively unseen details put on some CG leaf). I'll enjoy the real puppet we had for Yoda in Empire more than the shitty, CG Yoda we got in AotC any day (on the basis of the realistic textures, flexibility, and lighting). In comparison to Farscape quality puppets, or a CG character of Gollum quality, the CGI of Yoda was a joke.

Most movies, though, are filled with shit CGI that's even worse than what we got from Lucas in AotC. (I'm not sure why this is, but hopefully movie studios are at least getting more bang for their bucks or something to justify it.) You'll get an occasional movie with fantastic CGI use (like Episode I, Lord of the Rings, AI, Hellboy, and many others), but the capacity of CGI elements to look terrible is more often realized than its capacity to look good. I'd guess between old directors, who have trouble spotting bad CGI, and new directors, who think they're making video game cut scenes, and the fact that everyone tries to stuff too much crap into their movies in general (just because they can) is the primary culprit of this. Oh well.

Anyways, you dumped on some of the special effects in Temple of Doom (which I'm certainly not fond of by any means either), but I can honestly say that I'd take some of its worst models and matte shots over an emotionless, flat-looking, digital blob filling my screen. Essentially, I expect more from CGI because I know what it's capable of. Being a huge animation fan and someone who knows quite a bit about digital art, I'm not going to let a movie get off easy when it's budget is twice as high as Temple of Doom's budget (adjusted for inflation).

My biggest problems with CGI (using my own silly terms and in no particular order):

1. Movement flicker; when a moving CG object is hard to follow in a smooth way as it moves on the screen and seems to jump from position to position with a mess of blurry crap offered in between. (This problem has been intermittent since the first uses of CGI in movies and it's still around today. It ruined the insect fairy from Pan's Labyrinth for me since I know what a real insect movement caught on film should look like.)

2. Poor texture; shiny, rubber balloon surfaces are generally gone now (. . . generally), but we're still often left with internal surfaces that clearly appear to have no real depth in relation to other, nearby surfaces on the model. (Gollum suffered from this flatness at places on his model despite having an excellent design for the coloring and shape of his skin texture in general.)

3. Poor lighting; this is when things like contrasts and highlights present on a model don't look soft enough, hard enough, or generally complex enough to be real. (This looks the worst when a model is placed within a filmed image since fake lighting doesn't merge well with what we see on real objects.)

4. Hover; when CGI seems to not look solidly connected or in a fixed position within a filmed image but instead seems to look like it's closer or further away than the real objects it is supposed to be aligned with. (Gollum's arm looks like this when wrapped around Frodo's neck.)

5. Flatness; this is a general, flat look that CGI will almost always seem to have due to something I'm not quite sure of (whether it's the focus of different depths or it's the way light would wrap around a real surface, the logical shapes of a CG object just don't seem as pronounced as a real-world object that's put on film would be).

6. No sense of subtlety; considering how the positional nature of CGI can be tweaked to the finest of small degrees, I'm far too often surprised at the absurd extremes that are used when animating the expressions of CG characters or the movement of an entire object in relation to the physics involved. (Gollum was a masterpiece in this regard, and even Jar Jar looked great, but the CG Yoda looked like he had liquid skin on his forehead.)

The problems I have with CGI would be avoidable or at least properly minimized if directors and technicians were looking for these things and using every appropriate technique in the industry to get the best results (instead of throwing pure CGI at every problem). This is what I mean by the lack of care involved. CGI can do a lot of amazing stuff when coming from the most skilled of artists, but money and time spent on computers does not automatically equal a good special effect and CGI still has its limits no matter how skilled an artist is.