Are you fooled by CGI or do you see something as real?

I remember hearing an interesting story on Jodie Foster's DVD commentary for Contact.

There is a scene wher she kisses Mathew McConaughey under an enormous sattelite dish.
As she kissed him she raised one eyebrow which was later CGI'd out by Robert Zemeckis.

She wasn't sure how she felt about it and I'm not sure either.
 
On a more portentous note, I would like to add that I echo the intimations of several posters herein that CGI reached its peak prior to the turn of the millennium - as exemplified by this fine film (but then that's Paul Verhoeven for you too where the judicious application of trailblazing SFX is concerned, Total Recall another excellent case in point).
 
I sometimes wonder how some people actually enjoy films when all the do is look for flaws. Yes, we all know CGI is not real, but when I saw Avatar, it felt real, I just got transported into this new world for a couple of hours and loved every minute of it, believing it all to be real (even though I knew it wasn't - think of a kid in Disney World).
 
I don't know about all of that but thanks for organising this evening's entertainment. Liverpool v Spurs can go hang - I'm loading up Denise RicharRAB, space pilot extraordinaire. Just don't tell me she was CGI, too.
 
The most convincing CGI I have seen in recent years has been from the clips I have seen of Where The Wild Things Are....only they weren't entirely CGI but men in costumes with CGI'd facial features.

The reason why this proved more successful than pure CGI was because the creatures possessed a real physicality and it is their physical interaction within a real world environment that makes it work more successfully.

Film makers invest so much time and money into developing hyper-realised CGI characters, and whilst these may seem more and more convincing with the development of technology, their shortcoming become evident when placed in, and forced to react within a real world environment.

It might not necessarily be the animated character that fails to illude us but it is the animated characters' reaction to a real, three dimensional environment is often unconvincing, it lacks physicality and it's interactions may seem subtly inconsistent, thus breaking the illusion. It is extremely difficult to merge the two dimensional and three dimensional effectively and pass it off as reality.

Perhaps the reason why Avatar has a more convincing CGI is because most of the movie appears to have been filmed in a two dimensional world and there is less inconsistency, however there is then the problem of trying to convince the viewer that they are in a true, three dimensional world when it is apparent they in a two dimensional animated world.

I guess to sum it up, CGI is more convincing when used sparingly, to embellish the three dimensional rather than to try and compete with it.
 
I can usually spot SFX/CGI because I dabble in them as an amateur, but my noticing them doesn't really bother me; it's just one aspect of the suspension of disbelief that watching any movie requires (i.e. reacting to on-screen deaths as if they are real etc.)

I wish some directors/film-makers would opt for fewer high quality SFX shots instead of a whole movie full of soso SFX shots though.

The remake of War of the WorlRAB got it right; this is a great shot, but getting it right costs a fortune.
 
Interesting; to my eye, that's the epitome of the nadir of CGI as it's just so obviously nonsense. I feel absolutely nothing towarRAB it whatsoever other than 'ho hum'. This is genuinely not to be disparaging; it's just to point up how radically different people's perceptions are.
 
I guess the whole idea of Martian hordes destroying lots of stuff is nonsense though, and that is the sort of thing that happens when death rays go to town on a town...

War of the WorlRAB isn't in my top #10 movies or anything (and not much happens in it because not much happens in the book), but it's much better than a piece of crap like 2012.

If you want bad examples of CGI or SFX driven movies or just don't like CGI, then are much worse candidates than War of the WorlRAB (I'm not a massive Speilberg fan, but at least he uses SFX with a degree of restraint).
 
For me the puppet is a real thing that inhabits the environment, if its done well then its much better than cgi
Someone mentioned Jurassic Park the use of cgi and animatronics is why it works so well
if a film relies on CGI then it becomes dead, and boring, even the recent animations are not that great anymore when they are only cgi
 
based on what? people always say this like we're talking about puppets where you can only make it so realistic before it hits physical limitations. cgi is time effort and technology. tech keeps advancing, and research into making better cgi continues. cheap half assed cgi always exists but it doesn't mean anything other than that its cheap and half assed. each mile stone keeps getting passed, from realistic clothing to hair to now realistic facial movement.





broad generalizations about relying on cgi making a film dead really go no where. a bad film is a bad film. lucas's starwars films were rendered at hd resolution..a mistake. and cgi at the time was not quite up to the task. plus the simple fact was that they were BAD films, BAD art direction, BAD vision of dead environments in a lifeless world. you don't blame cgi for that, you blame the filmmaker. the cgi for gollum was about the same as that of yoda. but the film was better, so the complaints are not there even though basically he's just an animated corpse.

this phantom menace review says it best
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
esp interesting later in the review where you see everyone is afraid to take lucas on to his face...
 
nail on head. the Empire Strikes Back commentary is interesting, because Irvin Kershner makes the point that he had to convince the audience that the characters were ordinary people, living in an extraordinary place, but having the same kind of issues as everybody else. fear, hope, rejection, love, jealousy etc

Lucas' decision to direct the prequels himself was a massive error. he had at least the hunger of a maverick in 1977, but utlimately he is just a nerd who can't direct people for toffee.

the CGI updates to the original trilogy too, are just bad
 
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