I think it is a good thing to get an educated critique and honest
feedback, even if it is going to be biased.
I´d actually hope to see more critics point out that a good story,
regardless of it´s tonality goes a long way
in creating an experience and just because it´s meant to entertain
doesn´t mean one can dumb it down
and ignore the need to first of all get the basics of telling a
compelling story to an audience right.
Growing up with 80s/90s sci-fi and action movies, Star Wars, Aliens,
Jurrassic Park, Men in Black,
Blade, Terminator, True Lies, Indiana Jones, The Thing, Rambo, Universal
Soldier, Timecop, 48hrs,
Beverly Hills Cop, Escape from New York, etc, etc. did have an effect on
me, too. I´m loving it.
It took me a few years to also appreciate that there´s this or that odd,
old Woody Allen movie and pick it up myself
and another few years to find out that both directions can have a common
factor, the dedication to their craft.
It´s a lot easier to spend millions and waste all the people involved
than spending one dollar wisely.
The ever growing trend of trivialising the actual craft required in
doing something properly just shows...
Cheers,
tim
P.S: As a personal pick, here´s a documentary that has great practial
effects, an Inception style corridor scene,
absolutely gorgeous wires work, wonderful art direction and a cast and
crew that got it right. If you don´t believe me,
believe imdb. Also note, the Rotten Tomatoes Rating vs. the IMDB Rating.
What we do in the Shadows http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3416742/
Am 25.07.2015 um 01:37 schrieb Mathieu Leclaire:
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]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
To: [email protected]
<mailto:[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 <http://be.net/3dcinetv>
Cinema & TV production
Video Reel <https://vimeo.com/3dcinetv/reel2012>
