I recently rewatched The Thing. Its practical effects are, of course, astounding, but they do show that even practical effects have their limits. Yes, it feels like the actors are really there, but it sometimes has the B-movie feel of the actors really being there around an unconvincing prop. Like with CGI, the effect is more convincing the less clearly we see it: the puppets / animatronics scurrying around in the dark and/or on fire are wonderful, but the autopsied Thing, just lying about on the table, is clearly a sculpture. But I share your preference: better the feeling that the characters are really actors on a stage manipulating props, than the even worse disenchantment that the actors are wandering around a soundstage.
As an addition bit of speculation, I wonder if part of the explanation has to do with scheduling. As Hollywood is wedded to the Blockbuster model, big budgets need big name actors, big name actors have busy schedules and are very expensive. So its simply more practical to work around their schedule by driving them out to a soundstage than to make more demands of their time by flying them out to location and having them potentially wait around for the practical effects to be assembled and placed.
Agreed Damon. Practical effects can also be see-through. But let's also not forget that CGI now goes so far beyond props. Like in a modern remake, even the station itself would just be CGI, and so on. So it seems to me what started as cool ways to do stunts and animatronics has effectively replaced filming in front of detailed sets / on location in a huge portion of films. That's deeply sad to me.
It's an interesting speculation about the scheduling. I think you're on to something. I'd be really interested in seeing an analysis of if directors and actors are making more movies per year using CGI - like I wonder if the whole industry is using the green screens to speed up production, which I hadn't thought of.
'Armchair filmmaking' benefits from the legibility and outsourcing of digital SFX rather than practical. Studio bureaucrats, as well as the directors, can treat it as much more of a black box: "money goes in, reliably decent effects come out". If you don't like one, you can go get another, or buy two in parallel if need be. Since it's all digital and post-production, you have the option. Very different from practical effects or on-set work, which is opaque, unpredictable, reliant on individuals and prima donnas and an indefinable alchemy, not repeatable or replaceable, or put into a spreadsheet. As budgets increase, can film studios even afford the risk of non-digital SFX?
I think this is a better answer than my "laziness" theory (although I do think that still plays a part) - almost like the effect is one of film mass production by studios and CGI provides the assembly line. While I would have assumed that if everything is made the same way, costs would be down, someone else pointed out to me that costs could still be down if you factor in real movie-making costs vs. total costs, since the HR and management overhead might have ballooned.
I think movie costs would be way up regardless, between Baumol's cost disease and the competition for a global market where you go big or go home; but it's worth pointing out that a bureaucratic approach does *not* optimize entirely or even primarily for lower costs, and so pointing out that the immediate short-run costs are higher this way is not much of an objection. If you are a studio in a high-variance business where gambler's ruin is all too plausible, it is worth paying a lot of money to remove as much variability as possible. You also have only so much management capability to spend on complexity (it is difficult enough to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time for any nontrivial organization). Black box outsourcing is a way to trade dollars for reliability and simplicity. If you are overseeing the next $1b Marvel movie on which the entire company rides, do or die, do you really want to try to build a SFX studio in-house because it'll be 10% cheaper?
Do you think this might be why movies today all kind of... feel the same? I'm not sure if I'm seeing patterns where there are none, but it feels like variety has massively decreased sometimes.
Yes! Rare to find a movie nowadays that plays to different emotions, off the top of my head Minari and Parasite do this well, incidentally these are both light on CGI use (I presume)
There’s also something to be said for limitations. Notice all the projects you mentioned are sequels with bigger budgets. The original Jurassic Park had 58 CGI shots. 58. And it told a story better than any of the sequels. The latest Jurassic movie had about 1,800 CGI shots and none of them felt tangible.
When Peter Jackson had unlimited funds we got The Hobbit. When he had to prove himself & scrimp and save we got Fellowship(and it’s no coincidence that Return of the King, which has the most CGI of the trilogy and the biggest & most outlandish battles, feels most like Jackson unleashed with unlimited funds ala Hobbit. Since the LOTR movies were phenomenons he was able to reshoot and reshoot after filming all 3 films back to back. Legolas taking out that giant Elephant was added late in the game).
Or look at Harry Potter. The last movie revisits a set from the 2nd movie. The Chamber of Secrets. The 2nd movie built the actual set. The last film used all green screen CGI and boy can you feel the difference.
But even the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix sequels pale in comparison to what’s happening now with the Marvel movies. Every shot is touched by CGI. Not one shot in the latest Spider-Man didn’t have some sort of CGI augmentation. Nothing feels remotely real or tangible. I feel like digital cinematography has added to that loss of realism.
Did you see that movie Uncharted advertising? It’s suppose to be a modern Indiana Jones and yet it looks more like a video game. These movies cost hundreds of millions. They do well internationally because eye Candy sells in foreign markets. But Raiders of the Lost, a movie that featured top of the line VFX in 1981, still holds up over any action movie made in the last 15 years. One of the reason the Mission Impossible movies are as popular as they are now is because the audience knows Cruise is really doing these stunts. Sure there is CGI here and there but at no point do you question if a CGI stunt double was used. One of the most tense sequence I’ve seen in a theatre in the last 15 years was the Burj Khalifa sequence in Mi4. In IMAX that sequence was astounding.
Look at Ghostbusters(1984) and the 2016 reboot. The original film had one Ghostbusting scene and then some FX antics at the end. The reboot had ghost after ghost after ghost. They relied on eye Candy over laughs and character. And none of it looked as interesting or iconic or funny as The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man walking down Central Park West. The original cost a then huge 25-30 million. That’s a big budget movie back then. The reboot cost 150-160 million. Why? The Ghostbusting was always the least interesting part. The characters are what made the movie.
Don’t get me wrong. I love visual effects. Heck, I love a lot of the movie you mentioned like the Star Wars prequels and even The Matrix sequels. But CGI is 100% hurting movies. Ask yourself this:
If Jaws were made today, would it be as terrifying and as good/successful? No. Why? Because we’d see the Shark ALL THE TIME. We didn’t see the Shark back in 1975 because the prop didn’t work. Out of that limitation Spielberg came up with the yellow barrels and John Williams did the rest.
Look at Star Wars. Sure Lucas wasn’t fond of the compromises he had to make for that original film. But I’ve read the script drafts he didn’t use due to cost and limitations. Thank god he was held back by the times. Han Solo would’ve been a green alien. I would argue Phantom Menace, which I get, people don’t like. I do. That’s CGI used well enough. We see vistas and planets we’ve never seen before. Pod racing, a wonderful sequence, would be impossible otherwise. The prequels actually use alot more miniatures and models than people think. The Star Wars movie with the most miniatures? Revenge of the Sith.
And my god I’ve ranted for far too long. As a parting word I leave you with this anecdote. When making the first Jurassic Park sequel, Spielberg could’ve had any budget he wanted. But he limited himself. He gave himself only 20-25 extra CGI shots in the movie from the first one(which was 58). And the finally tally was I believe somewhere around 81 CGI shots. Sure it wasn’t a great movie but it still shows you his understanding of how CGI could be used to dull the movie. Spielberg knows limits spark the imagination. I wish Hollywood would remember that.
It's true. Another thing is that mattes used to be painted in oil, and I think that medium is still the absolute high watermark in terms of capturing reality across sci-fi and fantasy. The people painting 70's star wars backgrounds just understood light and could replicate it better than modern CG artists.
And even if your background is "fake" it's at least a real physical object, so like light and distance and perspective will interact with it in subconscious ways.
CGI also frees the camera from physical space, which can definitely feel “off” and break immersion when overused. I was re watching Jurassic Park, and while the effects are stunning, what really sells the dinos for me is that they’re shot from the ground, from about the height of a human being. It feels like someone had to be in the room with them to get the shot. They clearly planned the scenes around what could be accomplished in a physical spaces.
In movies with conspicuous CGI, the camera is often just “floating” in space. This lets directors storyboard whatever they want, but it’s easy to make a scene that feels like you’re no-clipping around in a video game. Super heroes fighting each other in the sky always feels flat to me for that reason.
I just produced a short film last week shot entirely on a virtual stage, we were the first film to do this in NYC. It's the future of filmmaking – no physical sets, just virtual worlds on an LED screen which render in real time and move with the camera. The background actors will be metahumans created using the Unreal Engine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXuVqfasT90
I personally prefer old-school things but it is amazing to be able to create any physical environment and have the actors be able to see it in real time, unlike greenscreen. Mandalorian was the first production to shoot this way. We'll see if it's a step up from CGI!
That's super interesting Katrin! A couple people have now mentioned the LED screen usage and how they like it more, so seems like a good way to go. And wow had no idea about how easy it was to create the "metahumans," the Unreal Engine has gotten really really good!
I think some people explicitly notice it, but I also suspect that a lot of people who say don't notice it *do* notice it, and it affects their viewing experience unconsciously. They take what they're watching less seriously.
Nice piece! I do think the laziness aspect is the true bit here. But there's an additional piece of context. I looked at one of the top special effects cos, and one of the interesting things that stands out is their ability to produce life-realistic productions have vastly increased. Not just in sci-fi, but say in Fast & Furious, there are places where the actors are CGI and its not noticeable at all. So its not technique that's been lost/ misused.
In most cases, including Tarzan, Jurassic World, most of Marvel, most of the reality we see seems hyper-realistic. And some of what seems reality is actually computer generated. So while I'd agree over-reliance on the same things (London blowing up, alien portals raining fire) has gotten formulaic, its lazy storytelling and not CGI. Constraints are helpful, and making scenes unconstrained can also make them boring.
Erlebnis - das Erlebnis - is the German word you are looking for. I wrote a longer answer, but then the system crashed. erlebbar would be a possible adverb in the movie-context. Not the same as "experience" as that would be "Erfahrung". An Erlebnis touches you, you feel alive (lebendig) when you are having one. If a movie was not an Erlebnis it might have been a "cultural experience" - but who gives a f.rt for those?! Read "Erlebnisgesellschaft"
lol, fine then - I was actually trying to find sth. "even more German" - with ö /ä / ü - but then this is no a heavy-metal-blog. Elfen-Schwert itself / "elven sword" does kinda sound like Erlebnis (the "r" is close to the English "r" in both, not French; stress is on the "leb" - e as in E-rik).
"Consider Peter Jackson’s decline from The Lord of the Rings to The Hobbit trilogy. "
Uhh hey, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, along with the Star Wars prequels released contemporaneously, were *the* seminal catalysts of the very problem you're analyzing! They just look good compared to the Hobbit movies because the CGI overuse problem was so much worse by the time the Hobbit was made (not to impersonalize this too much given that we're looking at different parts of the same director's oeuvre but you catch my drift).
I had to say that because the LoTR movies being bad and a bad influence on film is one of my hobbyhorses, otherwise I agree with every word of this post and am a bit surprised by how many people are pushing back against your argument in the comments.
Interesting. I do remember how bad the ghost army was in RoTK, but as someone who saw The Fellowship in like 8th grade and it had a huge impact, it’s almost impossible for me to be objective. I would say the trilogy gets worse as they go along, for sure, and you’re right that CGI plays a big part.
If you can bring the CGI into the real world before filming, it may bridge the acting and effects until movies look like something closer to the benefits you describe with practical effects era
That's interesting, I definitely liked the Mandalorian over a lot of other sci-fi I've seen recently, perhaps this explains why. I still think that like... how hard can it be to find a cave with some good lighting? Those long panning shots on Tatoonine of the droids stumbling around from A New Hope look better and realer than the desert scenes of The Mandalorian, which is crazy since that's closing in on a half-century gap!
I think the word you're looking for about that natural feel, of irreducible freshness, is "aura." The German thinker Walter Benjamin wrote about it in an essay yours reflects: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I don't know why I'm telling you this bcos from your essay, I think you must have read Walter's essay.
Very interesting Carl. I have not read Walter Benjamin, but I have read enough people referencing him to know a bit about who he is and his thoughts, so there could be some metempsychosis at work...
Carl is right* and so is Jetse**. Still, I stick to "Erlebnis". As in: "If the movie/the scene is not an Erlebnis then it's merely a cultural or social Erfahrung(experience), i.e. meh!"
* yeah Benjamin often quoted, rarely read - I read the essay, good work, not all out-dated, still "aura" feels over-applied in your context - and horribly high-brow. (but then "metempsychosis" - so, you might go for it)
** that is the thing about those big Heideggers words - they somehow always fit. As with the other great H.-philosopher: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
I've seen that objection put forward for CGI, and I definitely believe it. But I also think that it applies to things like backgrounds and skies and fake CGI trees. Like we know it's not real, somewhere, deep down, and it affects the viewing experience.
Funny you should mention the year 2000, because 2001’s A. I. has the most seamless FX made since. I don’t think the reason is laziness. Directors just don’t fully direct anymore. Movies like Disney don’t have distinctive vision and are a committee product where CGI artists have too much power. And yes, that includes auteurs like Villeneuve whose voice was lost in the latter parts of Dune.
I recently rewatched The Thing. Its practical effects are, of course, astounding, but they do show that even practical effects have their limits. Yes, it feels like the actors are really there, but it sometimes has the B-movie feel of the actors really being there around an unconvincing prop. Like with CGI, the effect is more convincing the less clearly we see it: the puppets / animatronics scurrying around in the dark and/or on fire are wonderful, but the autopsied Thing, just lying about on the table, is clearly a sculpture. But I share your preference: better the feeling that the characters are really actors on a stage manipulating props, than the even worse disenchantment that the actors are wandering around a soundstage.
As an addition bit of speculation, I wonder if part of the explanation has to do with scheduling. As Hollywood is wedded to the Blockbuster model, big budgets need big name actors, big name actors have busy schedules and are very expensive. So its simply more practical to work around their schedule by driving them out to a soundstage than to make more demands of their time by flying them out to location and having them potentially wait around for the practical effects to be assembled and placed.
Agreed Damon. Practical effects can also be see-through. But let's also not forget that CGI now goes so far beyond props. Like in a modern remake, even the station itself would just be CGI, and so on. So it seems to me what started as cool ways to do stunts and animatronics has effectively replaced filming in front of detailed sets / on location in a huge portion of films. That's deeply sad to me.
It's an interesting speculation about the scheduling. I think you're on to something. I'd be really interested in seeing an analysis of if directors and actors are making more movies per year using CGI - like I wonder if the whole industry is using the green screens to speed up production, which I hadn't thought of.
'Armchair filmmaking' benefits from the legibility and outsourcing of digital SFX rather than practical. Studio bureaucrats, as well as the directors, can treat it as much more of a black box: "money goes in, reliably decent effects come out". If you don't like one, you can go get another, or buy two in parallel if need be. Since it's all digital and post-production, you have the option. Very different from practical effects or on-set work, which is opaque, unpredictable, reliant on individuals and prima donnas and an indefinable alchemy, not repeatable or replaceable, or put into a spreadsheet. As budgets increase, can film studios even afford the risk of non-digital SFX?
I think this is a better answer than my "laziness" theory (although I do think that still plays a part) - almost like the effect is one of film mass production by studios and CGI provides the assembly line. While I would have assumed that if everything is made the same way, costs would be down, someone else pointed out to me that costs could still be down if you factor in real movie-making costs vs. total costs, since the HR and management overhead might have ballooned.
I think movie costs would be way up regardless, between Baumol's cost disease and the competition for a global market where you go big or go home; but it's worth pointing out that a bureaucratic approach does *not* optimize entirely or even primarily for lower costs, and so pointing out that the immediate short-run costs are higher this way is not much of an objection. If you are a studio in a high-variance business where gambler's ruin is all too plausible, it is worth paying a lot of money to remove as much variability as possible. You also have only so much management capability to spend on complexity (it is difficult enough to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time for any nontrivial organization). Black box outsourcing is a way to trade dollars for reliability and simplicity. If you are overseeing the next $1b Marvel movie on which the entire company rides, do or die, do you really want to try to build a SFX studio in-house because it'll be 10% cheaper?
Do you think this might be why movies today all kind of... feel the same? I'm not sure if I'm seeing patterns where there are none, but it feels like variety has massively decreased sometimes.
Agreed. I also think they are emotionally very one-note (another new "dark and gritty" batman movie, for instance) which doesn't help
Yes! Rare to find a movie nowadays that plays to different emotions, off the top of my head Minari and Parasite do this well, incidentally these are both light on CGI use (I presume)
There’s also something to be said for limitations. Notice all the projects you mentioned are sequels with bigger budgets. The original Jurassic Park had 58 CGI shots. 58. And it told a story better than any of the sequels. The latest Jurassic movie had about 1,800 CGI shots and none of them felt tangible.
When Peter Jackson had unlimited funds we got The Hobbit. When he had to prove himself & scrimp and save we got Fellowship(and it’s no coincidence that Return of the King, which has the most CGI of the trilogy and the biggest & most outlandish battles, feels most like Jackson unleashed with unlimited funds ala Hobbit. Since the LOTR movies were phenomenons he was able to reshoot and reshoot after filming all 3 films back to back. Legolas taking out that giant Elephant was added late in the game).
Or look at Harry Potter. The last movie revisits a set from the 2nd movie. The Chamber of Secrets. The 2nd movie built the actual set. The last film used all green screen CGI and boy can you feel the difference.
But even the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix sequels pale in comparison to what’s happening now with the Marvel movies. Every shot is touched by CGI. Not one shot in the latest Spider-Man didn’t have some sort of CGI augmentation. Nothing feels remotely real or tangible. I feel like digital cinematography has added to that loss of realism.
Did you see that movie Uncharted advertising? It’s suppose to be a modern Indiana Jones and yet it looks more like a video game. These movies cost hundreds of millions. They do well internationally because eye Candy sells in foreign markets. But Raiders of the Lost, a movie that featured top of the line VFX in 1981, still holds up over any action movie made in the last 15 years. One of the reason the Mission Impossible movies are as popular as they are now is because the audience knows Cruise is really doing these stunts. Sure there is CGI here and there but at no point do you question if a CGI stunt double was used. One of the most tense sequence I’ve seen in a theatre in the last 15 years was the Burj Khalifa sequence in Mi4. In IMAX that sequence was astounding.
Look at Ghostbusters(1984) and the 2016 reboot. The original film had one Ghostbusting scene and then some FX antics at the end. The reboot had ghost after ghost after ghost. They relied on eye Candy over laughs and character. And none of it looked as interesting or iconic or funny as The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man walking down Central Park West. The original cost a then huge 25-30 million. That’s a big budget movie back then. The reboot cost 150-160 million. Why? The Ghostbusting was always the least interesting part. The characters are what made the movie.
Don’t get me wrong. I love visual effects. Heck, I love a lot of the movie you mentioned like the Star Wars prequels and even The Matrix sequels. But CGI is 100% hurting movies. Ask yourself this:
If Jaws were made today, would it be as terrifying and as good/successful? No. Why? Because we’d see the Shark ALL THE TIME. We didn’t see the Shark back in 1975 because the prop didn’t work. Out of that limitation Spielberg came up with the yellow barrels and John Williams did the rest.
Look at Star Wars. Sure Lucas wasn’t fond of the compromises he had to make for that original film. But I’ve read the script drafts he didn’t use due to cost and limitations. Thank god he was held back by the times. Han Solo would’ve been a green alien. I would argue Phantom Menace, which I get, people don’t like. I do. That’s CGI used well enough. We see vistas and planets we’ve never seen before. Pod racing, a wonderful sequence, would be impossible otherwise. The prequels actually use alot more miniatures and models than people think. The Star Wars movie with the most miniatures? Revenge of the Sith.
And my god I’ve ranted for far too long. As a parting word I leave you with this anecdote. When making the first Jurassic Park sequel, Spielberg could’ve had any budget he wanted. But he limited himself. He gave himself only 20-25 extra CGI shots in the movie from the first one(which was 58). And the finally tally was I believe somewhere around 81 CGI shots. Sure it wasn’t a great movie but it still shows you his understanding of how CGI could be used to dull the movie. Spielberg knows limits spark the imagination. I wish Hollywood would remember that.
It's true. Another thing is that mattes used to be painted in oil, and I think that medium is still the absolute high watermark in terms of capturing reality across sci-fi and fantasy. The people painting 70's star wars backgrounds just understood light and could replicate it better than modern CG artists.
And even if your background is "fake" it's at least a real physical object, so like light and distance and perspective will interact with it in subconscious ways.
Are you forgetting rear projection? It was "fake" and unconvincing; CGI is a massive improvement over old-timey car shots.
Are you saying that cgi can't mimic perspective projection better than oil painting because of "subconscious ways"? This is completely non nonsensical
CGI also frees the camera from physical space, which can definitely feel “off” and break immersion when overused. I was re watching Jurassic Park, and while the effects are stunning, what really sells the dinos for me is that they’re shot from the ground, from about the height of a human being. It feels like someone had to be in the room with them to get the shot. They clearly planned the scenes around what could be accomplished in a physical spaces.
In movies with conspicuous CGI, the camera is often just “floating” in space. This lets directors storyboard whatever they want, but it’s easy to make a scene that feels like you’re no-clipping around in a video game. Super heroes fighting each other in the sky always feels flat to me for that reason.
I just produced a short film last week shot entirely on a virtual stage, we were the first film to do this in NYC. It's the future of filmmaking – no physical sets, just virtual worlds on an LED screen which render in real time and move with the camera. The background actors will be metahumans created using the Unreal Engine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXuVqfasT90
I personally prefer old-school things but it is amazing to be able to create any physical environment and have the actors be able to see it in real time, unlike greenscreen. Mandalorian was the first production to shoot this way. We'll see if it's a step up from CGI!
That's super interesting Katrin! A couple people have now mentioned the LED screen usage and how they like it more, so seems like a good way to go. And wow had no idea about how easy it was to create the "metahumans," the Unreal Engine has gotten really really good!
Forced visual fantasy repulses me
I think some people explicitly notice it, but I also suspect that a lot of people who say don't notice it *do* notice it, and it affects their viewing experience unconsciously. They take what they're watching less seriously.
Nice piece! I do think the laziness aspect is the true bit here. But there's an additional piece of context. I looked at one of the top special effects cos, and one of the interesting things that stands out is their ability to produce life-realistic productions have vastly increased. Not just in sci-fi, but say in Fast & Furious, there are places where the actors are CGI and its not noticeable at all. So its not technique that's been lost/ misused.
In most cases, including Tarzan, Jurassic World, most of Marvel, most of the reality we see seems hyper-realistic. And some of what seems reality is actually computer generated. So while I'd agree over-reliance on the same things (London blowing up, alien portals raining fire) has gotten formulaic, its lazy storytelling and not CGI. Constraints are helpful, and making scenes unconstrained can also make them boring.
synthetic landscapes may not only be a threat to movies but actual reality -- good piece!
Now I kind of wish I had gotten in a Metaverse reference somewhere...
Erlebnis - das Erlebnis - is the German word you are looking for. I wrote a longer answer, but then the system crashed. erlebbar would be a possible adverb in the movie-context. Not the same as "experience" as that would be "Erfahrung". An Erlebnis touches you, you feel alive (lebendig) when you are having one. If a movie was not an Erlebnis it might have been a "cultural experience" - but who gives a f.rt for those?! Read "Erlebnisgesellschaft"
Erlebnis is a great word - sounds like an elven sword (but I'm probably not pronouncing it very Germanic way mentally)
lol, fine then - I was actually trying to find sth. "even more German" - with ö /ä / ü - but then this is no a heavy-metal-blog. Elfen-Schwert itself / "elven sword" does kinda sound like Erlebnis (the "r" is close to the English "r" in both, not French; stress is on the "leb" - e as in E-rik).
"Consider Peter Jackson’s decline from The Lord of the Rings to The Hobbit trilogy. "
Uhh hey, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, along with the Star Wars prequels released contemporaneously, were *the* seminal catalysts of the very problem you're analyzing! They just look good compared to the Hobbit movies because the CGI overuse problem was so much worse by the time the Hobbit was made (not to impersonalize this too much given that we're looking at different parts of the same director's oeuvre but you catch my drift).
I had to say that because the LoTR movies being bad and a bad influence on film is one of my hobbyhorses, otherwise I agree with every word of this post and am a bit surprised by how many people are pushing back against your argument in the comments.
Interesting. I do remember how bad the ghost army was in RoTK, but as someone who saw The Fellowship in like 8th grade and it had a huge impact, it’s almost impossible for me to be objective. I would say the trilogy gets worse as they go along, for sure, and you’re right that CGI plays a big part.
Thoughts on the Lucasfilm studio used in Mandalorian? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8
If you can bring the CGI into the real world before filming, it may bridge the acting and effects until movies look like something closer to the benefits you describe with practical effects era
That's interesting, I definitely liked the Mandalorian over a lot of other sci-fi I've seen recently, perhaps this explains why. I still think that like... how hard can it be to find a cave with some good lighting? Those long panning shots on Tatoonine of the droids stumbling around from A New Hope look better and realer than the desert scenes of The Mandalorian, which is crazy since that's closing in on a half-century gap!
I think the word you're looking for about that natural feel, of irreducible freshness, is "aura." The German thinker Walter Benjamin wrote about it in an essay yours reflects: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I don't know why I'm telling you this bcos from your essay, I think you must have read Walter's essay.
Very interesting Carl. I have not read Walter Benjamin, but I have read enough people referencing him to know a bit about who he is and his thoughts, so there could be some metempsychosis at work...
Carl is right* and so is Jetse**. Still, I stick to "Erlebnis". As in: "If the movie/the scene is not an Erlebnis then it's merely a cultural or social Erfahrung(experience), i.e. meh!"
* yeah Benjamin often quoted, rarely read - I read the essay, good work, not all out-dated, still "aura" feels over-applied in your context - and horribly high-brow. (but then "metempsychosis" - so, you might go for it)
** that is the thing about those big Heideggers words - they somehow always fit. As with the other great H.-philosopher: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
I wasn't necessarily saying my input was the German word. Erik is the one looking for a German word. Thank you nonetheless for adding to my vocab!
Is this the "Uncanny Valley" applied to film? In a way, the skeletons of the old "Sinbad" movies were far less objectionable.
I've seen that objection put forward for CGI, and I definitely believe it. But I also think that it applies to things like backgrounds and skies and fake CGI trees. Like we know it's not real, somewhere, deep down, and it affects the viewing experience.
Funny you should mention the year 2000, because 2001’s A. I. has the most seamless FX made since. I don’t think the reason is laziness. Directors just don’t fully direct anymore. Movies like Disney don’t have distinctive vision and are a committee product where CGI artists have too much power. And yes, that includes auteurs like Villeneuve whose voice was lost in the latter parts of Dune.
Agree. Just because you have a capability doesn’t mean that you have to use it.
This is true.
I can die happy knowing someone agrees
zeuge des Seins german word for witnessing being.