Topic: Practical effects or CG?

[tendoboy1984]

Which do you prefer? Practical effects or CG?
 
By practical effects, I mean the following:
- Real explosions / crashes
- Animatronic creatures
- Puppetry
etc.

[Oblivion]

There are no CGI explosions. I don't think you realize how hard it is to fake something like that. Most, if not all, of the explosions in the Transformers series were real.


And considering the age of most of the people in the forum, I think we all know what the majority will think on this topic. Even though Gravity just destroyed all of those ideas.

[nickmitch]

This all really comes down to one thing: The original Star Wars Trilogy.

[Oblivion]

Ha. Star Wars is ugly as **** and hasn't aged well.

[nickmitch]

I think it's gained an "old timey" charm.

[azeke]

Case in point: LOTR.

[Plugabugz]

Terminator 2 has aged extremely well. Not many other films from the 80s and early 90s have aged that well.

[tendoboy1984]

Terminator 2 has aged extremely well. Not many other films from the 80s and early 90s have aged that well.

Jurassic Park?


And there are plenty of movies with digital explosions, look at Pacific Rim. That whole movie was one giant CG-fest.

[Oblivion]

Prove that they were digital. You can't just look at something and say "yup, digital".

[tendoboy1984]

So you really think they built models of an entire city and digitally inserted CG monsters and robots? You are so pessimistic and negative. Good god man.

[ShyGuy]

The Fall.

[ThePerm]

explosions are not to hard to do in cg. Its just a particle effect.

[pokepal148]

I think well executed cgi can easily outdo practical effects by a huge margin. And I think davy Jones here does well with this

[azeke]

The Fall.

Chock full with CG.

Locations sets and costumes were indeed amazing though.

[ShyGuy]

The Fall.

Chock full with CG.

Locations sets and costumes were indeed amazing though.

Didn't the director say that he used all practical effects?

edit: Here is an interview with the New York Times:

These images amaze precisely because they are quite evidently real, bursting with the life and detail that elude even the most advanced digital artist. “I decided it wasn’t going to be C.G.I.,” said Tarsem, using the industry shorthand for computer-generated imagery

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/movies/11kehr.html

[azeke]

Didn't the director say that he used all practical effects?

He can say whatever, man. But in now way birds coming from dude's mouth were actually real.

It's still a great film.

His earlier work, The Cell is better, even with J Lo and tired seriel killer plot and all. Fall is just very disjointed, basically all it has is setpieces.

[ShyGuy]

I thought the Fall was great. It reminded me of The Princess Bride.

[BranDonk Kong]

I think we've finally gotten to the point where CGI is the better choice. After seeing movies like The Avengers, Man of Steel, and Thor: The Dark World the line between reality and CGI is basically gone.

[Oblivion]

Not exactly the examples I would have used from films this year but that point is very true.

[ThePerm]

the thing abouit avengers is they're all on a green screen. The new york you see isn't real.

[BranDonk Kong]

Well obviously they couldn't go around blowing up NYC, but god damn, that's pretty impressive.

[Ian Sane]

I think we've finally gotten to the point where CGI is the better choice. After seeing movies like The Avengers, Man of Steel, and Thor: The Dark World the line between reality and CGI is basically gone.

I would use these same movies to demonstrate how fake and shitty looking CG can be.  What I prefer is whatever looks like it is really there.  A lot of films look like people interacting with a cartoon.  Though some of that is the color grading they do to the film.  I remember people complaining about fake looking CG in the Dark Knight and it turns out those scenes used practical effects.  The color grading made it look like CG.  Why you would bother to go all the trouble to really flip over a semi and then filter things so that it looks like a Playstation cutscene is beyond me.  I think I just don't like the way films look these days.  To me a film should look like how you would see something if you were there watching it with your own eyes (if your eyes operated at 24 fps of course).  If superheroes were fighting in New York City like in the Avengers it sure as hell would not look at all like how that movie looks.  Frankly that clip Perm linked to doesn't impress me at all.  It looks like Captain America fighting cartoons.

[BranDonk Kong]

I think we've all come to the conclusion a while ago that nothing will ever satisfy you.

[ShyGuy]

I think we've all come to the conclusion a while ago that nothing will ever satisfy you.

hahahahaha


I think scenery CGI has gotten good almost to the point of not being able to tell, but characters and animals still look generally bad. Especially animals for some reason. If I see another crappy CGI wolf, I'm gonna shoot somebody.

[Stogi]

Life of Pi has phenomenal animals. I knew the tiger had to be fake, but it was nonetheless gripping.

And while I prefer practical effects...it simply isn't, well, practical; not with the types of movies we have today. If you want something to be visually astonishing that's other worldly, you simply can't do that with practical effects.

Horror films, however, really need to stop with the CGI. They are the hardest movies to keep a participant in simply because of the genre. We want to be scared, but if it's genuinely scary we look for weak points in the film, anything to bring us back out. CGI is that weak point. That is why, to this day, nothing is scarier than a deranged killer whom you can't escape.