Oh boy... are you sure you want to open that can of worms?
There is this "lets blame the CGI for ruining my experience" trend going on right now and as a technical artist working so hard on these movies, I must admit, it's hard not to get offended. But let's face it, most people love to complain. They thrive on finding reasons to complain about, and with social medias all over the place, there are easy ways of verbalizing our feelings without fully digesting our emotions or thoroughly researching all the information to help us make an informed statement. The human brain tends to generalize a lot of information so we can easily fit our ideas into neat little boxes in our head and label them. Also, our survival instincts encourages us to agree with the masses so we can more easily fit in. I have surprised myself many times in changing my opinion on a movie because I heard/read a lot of negative critics about it. I started noticing things that initially didn't bother me. All these critics changed the way I reflected back on that experience. I say this because people got conditioned to point the finger at CGI as the first reason why these movies are not as good as they had hoped. Everyone else is saying it, so it must be true. I'm not sure where it started, but obviously there's been plenty of bad CG in the past to create this trend. It's usually due to producers who make bad calls that lead to bad CG. Since you can pretty much do what you want in CG, bad calls stand out so much more. It's even more frustrating when most people can't even notice what we've done when we do our job well. As long as there are bad calls from the clients, I think we are doomed to always get blamed for bad effect shots. It's like actors. We've seen a lot of terrible acting from really great actors that where simply misused. Good for you if you can find good clients, but most of us don't always have that luxury to chose who we work with. Also, our job is to make the impossible look possible. People want to see new things they haven't seen before, but when you show them something they haven't seen yet, they have no point of reference to compare it too, so it tends to looks fake. It's the nature of our job and why we work so hard to figure out a way to make it look believable. This might sound silly, but people who complain a lot are just people who want to help. They just don't know how to say it in a constructive helpful way. They believe old techniques are better then newer CGI based ones (and some times they are absolutely right). They hope that by complaining enough times, producers will take notice and revise the way they do things. Problem is, a lot of producers know as little as these people do and might force an approach that ain't quite the best way of doing such work. I still believe that in the end, it comes down to who you are working for and how collaborative and flexible they are. Sadly, some of these decisions are made way before we are even involved. All we can do is give it our best effort, hope for the best, and ignore all the noise that comes with it. Sorry for the long post. This has been on my mind for a while and it feels good to write it down. I guess it's the same reason these people write these type of articles and posts too. -Math -----Original Message----- From: "Pierre Schiller" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Date: 07/24/15 13:43 Subject: OT: Jurassic World, Mad Max, Avengers Ultron ... money over story? "From the moment is called "FICTION", doesn´t hold on to reality. Unifying some reality to the spectator is just a NARRATIVE resource". - P. Schiller Based on that premise, all arguments about CG effects (good or bad to make the story absurd or empty) are debunked. There´s only CGI as a resource for the spectator. Seems that these basic things are forgotten by a lot of cgi-movie critics. The fact that the VFX/CGI industry has contribute to so much in digital editing, doesn´t give those critics the right to make themselves into a critic-director-technical-specialist on marketing-AND movie comentarist as if they were in front of the orchesta. Truly, ignorance is defiant. I wonder if football comentarist feel the same, making themselves: investors-spectators-technical directors-fans and commentarists. So, I took just a simple example to know all of you guy´s points of view about this: Making more money on the tickets make a better story? Probably you´ve all read this article: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-expensive-films-end-up-with-crappy-special-effects_p2/ ...and I´m taking notice of how bad news like this spread like wild fire with no basis to blame the vfx industry. I´ve read the counter article (here: http://bit.ly/1DCsfGH), and some others; so now I´m just continuing the thoughts here on the list. What are your thoughts? Cheers. -- Portfolio 2013 Cinema & TV production Video Reel
