BBC: Why filmmakers may return to old-school special effects

Quote:
"Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) has allowed moviemakers to create almost anything. But is it turning audiences off? And are special effects more special when they’re real? "

"But The Phantom Menace and its sister prequels fell flat with audiences, with some noting the lack of depth and substance created by an all-digital universe – one that fellow film-makers wasted no time in emulating. “The prequel not only boasted some of the most impressive digital effects to date, but also ended up influencing, for better or for worse, how Hollywood has made blockbusters ever since,” noted Entertainment Weekly last year"

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20...t-physical-agai

(The Irony is that the example they are using "Phantom Menace" had a ton of old school model FX)

I'm not sure about film-makers, but not being able to access a BBC website from the UK does turn me off...

why phone-manufacturers may return to old-school buttons.

its not gonna happen. some may give it a try and it might be succesful, but you cant avoid evolution.

Seriously, what a horse-shit article, sorry but this stuff is rampant. Easy fashionable target, when this year the "C-word" has created tons of completely seamless and very impactful imagery, that had "depth", and which few in the audience ever thought twice about. Special effects are special when they look good and work with the movie, period.

Really sick of the anti-CG, anti-blockbuster, talk like this. I love practical effects, makeup, models, big sets, whatever you want, but they're all part of the puzzle. Everything that goes into making a film is just a tool, it's up to the users to make it work properly towards the end product.

People that toss off articles like this are just tools, too.

That EW article is retarded. Yeah, all the current CG heavy films that we have now are all because of Phantom Menace. ok...

It would be a nice change of pace though to see another star wars film less in your face CG.

The audience can be only turned off by bad storytelling, effects can be marvelous or very bad but they are not decisive factor.

I am sorry, but the "cg-bad" or "I liked seeing the imperfections" view will be an irrelevant fad. CG VFX are the product of a vicious live or die selection process. The majority spoke and wanted them. Rolling back to all practical will never even be a blip at the box office, unless some artsy outlier with a killer story gets award buzz.

There is still a "radio shows were magic", "I like to imagine the action better" crowd. It is a small interesting little group of people, whose flag-ship property is Prairie Home Companion, which is subsidized by the US federal government (which I find hard to believe just because that thing must make money.)

The reality is that market demand said, "we can't not listen to that crap fast enough, give me TV". Same for newspapers when radio came out, there were 100+ daily Newspapers in New York City in 1900..one city! Lots of movies came out between Jurrasic Park and Pirates of The Caribbean 2 (my jaw dropped when I found out that the creature hand fx were cg as well, not practical rubber things.) and the simple fact is that some had more CG fx than others. It seems likely, without any actual number analysis that, my gut says that the big CG FX movies pummeled the less CG movies.

AND, beside being a superior product, based on market financial feedback, the reality is that practical isn't cheap. Koerner(spl?) Optical, the practical component of ILM which split off, when ILM was like, "yeah...we don't do that stuff any more", went bankrupt right after doing amazing work in Transformers 3...like...if you can't survive after really contributing to a film that prints money like that one...it's over.

The Phantom Menace and the other prequels "fell flat" because they were weren't very good films, not because of the VFX. What a phenomenally stupid example.

I'd love to read the rest of it but it seems the BBC doesn't want its British readers to access its international site.

I have never met anyone who said radio was superior to any other medium. Usually it seems to be younger people who dismiss older artworks as irrelevant. On movie forums where there are members over 50 or 60, they do watch newer movies quite often. Anyway radio is still around despite the existence of tv and film, just as books written before 1990 are still being printed and sold.

The fx article is kind of silly though.
People used to mock stop motion and rubber costumes.
There is always that element. Kneejerk dislike of fx. The dislike of cgi is pretty strong however--I encounter it a lot--although often they dont cite specific examples.

There is a kickstarter funded film
Harbinger Down, which promises to use no digital fx--except for wire erasing etc.

I prefer films that combine fx techniques. Usually it sells an illusion better.

Somebody needs to write "Why Hollywood-blockbuster-story-formula way too lack-luster for any type of VFX method to possibly save it! Why Hollywood needs to fire the 'story-committee' ".

Agreed completely! Especially considering that, at the time, the effects were actually well regarded ...

This kind of "journalism" is getting more and more tiresome.

It's all the subsidies fault
It's all the For Profit Colleges fault
Things were better way back when
Things are different now
Overly simplified answer to intensely complicated problem
Overly complicated answer to completely invented problem

There. I just listed nearly every article we've looked at for the last year and probably covered every article we're going to look at for the next two .... ugh.

I greatly prefer practicals, and I'm pretty young, but this article doesn't state the position correctly b/c the author doesn't have enough knowledge of the topic but makes overreaching claims (bad combination). I would love to see a move away from CG, especially since CG is so often used where it absolutely doesn't need to be. Note that they will still need to actually go on location or build sets though, bc a lot of old shots of composited backdrops etc. also looked crappy in old movies.

This article is actually much more insightful into the current movie problem.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...cat.single.html

That was a pretty interesting, and accurate, article.

The other night I heard on NPR, they developed software that will scan movie scripts and then predict box office profits, based on the script. Has anyone else heard of this?

I think that's called the Awesome-O 4000.