Is Modern CGI Unambitious?

[Soviet Heavy]

No, I'm not harping on about how the Alien Queen from 1986 looks better than the shitty one from 2004, or about practical visual effects vs the ease of CGI. What I'm talking about is how the CGI is applied in modern cinema or in video games compared to the older style CGI from the late 80s early 90s.

Allow me to elaborate. Compare a Starcraft 1 CGI cutscene to a Starcraft 2 CGI Cutscene. It might be nostalgia talking, but I do prefer the older scenes.
Compared to

No comparison which scene looks better. But I'm drawn to the older looking cutscene because I admire the tech behind it. It looks like ass and animates as well as season 1 Beast Wars, but for its time, these sorts of cutscenes were the industry standard for quality. With such limited resources and engine limitations, animators needed to get creative with their shots. Mixing the Jurassic Park T. Rex with both CGI and Animatronics helped bring the monster to life far better than the Jurassic Park 3 Rex.

Nowadays, CGI I feel is used as a crutch. Can't make a difficult shot work? COmputer generate it. I just fail to be impressed with CGI today because they have all this power, and yet they aren't really pushing forward with it. They're just polishing up variants of things that were done in the 90s.

Stuff like the Star Wars Prequels or Avatar aren't pushing the boundaries of CGI as far forward as they'd like to believe. They're just putting more stuff on the screen, rather than doing something truly innovative.

What do you think? Do you think that modern CGI is comparatively lazy to the restrictive and yet well done effects of twenty years ago?

 

[Private Custard]

To this day, I feel that the best CGI is the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park. Why? Because they managed to beautifully blend CG and animatronics.

Now, a lot of CGI is just way too flashy, bright, all-consuming, eye-melting and OTT. Even when CG isn't required, people are opting to use it rather than the old techniques, which Blade was a massive culprit of by using CG blood splatter, rather than Tom Savini-esque makeup, blood bags, squibs etc...

Modern CGI is just boring. It's one of the three things in modern cinema that I fucking hate. The other two being pointless remakes for lazy audiences and those fucking annoying shaky-cam fight scenes. The Bourne films could have been so much better, if they'd have focused on the techniques and skill in their fight scenes!

I could complain all day!!

EDIT: When it comes to games though, I'm the opposite. Even though cut scenes from back in the playstation days could be pretty special (FFVII springs to mind), it was only becase they were FMV and not using the game engine. I find that modern games can be very immersive by using the games engine for these same types of scenes. Seamless is a good word for it.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

I think a good mixture of hand drawn and CGI is the way to go.


Looks really crisp, and flows brilliantly.

 

[Jimbo1212]

No, I'm not harping on about how the Alien Queen from 1986 looks better than the shitty one from 2004, or about practical visual effects vs the ease of CGI. What I'm talking about is how the CGI is applied in modern cinema or in video games compared to the older style CGI from the late 80s early 90s.

Allow me to elaborate. Compare a Starcraft 1 CGI cutscene to a Starcraft 2 CGI Cutscene. It might be nostalgia talking, but I do prefer the older scenes.
Compared to

No comparison which scene looks better. But I'm drawn to the older looking cutscene because I admire the tech behind it. It looks like ass and animates as well as season 1 Beast Wars, but for its time, these sorts of cutscenes were the industry standard for quality. With such limited resources and engine limitations, animators needed to get creative with their shots. Mixing the Jurassic Park T. Rex with both CGI and Animatronics helped bring the monster to life far better than the Jurassic Park 3 Rex.

Nowadays, CGI I feel is used as a crutch. Can't make a difficult shot work? COmputer generate it. I just fail to be impressed with CGI today because they have all this power, and yet they aren't really pushing forward with it. They're just polishing up variants of things that were done in the 90s.

Stuff like the Star Wars Prequels or Avatar aren't pushing the boundaries of CGI as far forward as they'd like to believe. They're just putting more stuff on the screen, rather than doing something truly innovative.

What do you think? Do you think that modern CGI is comparatively lazy to the restrictive and yet well done effects of twenty years ago?

You have a point.
With SC2 it did not help as they tried to stylise SC2 when SC was not and was simply the best they could do. Top end cgi is amazing, but very few people do use it - hell, trying to find an example for this post was almost impossible:

 

[Freechoice]

I think a good mixture of hand drawn and CGI is the way to go.


Looks really crisp, and flows brilliantly.

That scene's amazing and I've been looking for it for a while.

Any dislike I had for you is now gone. Well done.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

I think a good mixture of hand drawn and CGI is the way to go.


Looks really crisp, and flows brilliantly.

That scene's amazing and I've been looking for it for a while.

Any dislike I had for you is now gone. Well done.

You...

You mean...

You had some dislike to begin with?

T-T

 

[Esotera]

The guys who did the SFX on Underworld have it down - even though it's a lot easier to use CGI these days, you've still got to think very hard about what will look good, and use models if it's appropriate.

I'd say a lot of people do modern FX badly, but there are a few films that do it really really well.

 

[Erja_Perttu]

I think a good mixture of hand drawn and CGI is the way to go.


Looks really crisp, and flows brilliantly.

Yeah, I'll agree wholeheartedly with that. Also, Ghost in the Shell is bloody amazing and you just reminded me I've not seen it in far too long.

 

[Kahunaburger]

+1 to Ghost in the Shell being visually awesome (and awesome in basically every other way.)

I strongly agree with the core points, here - I feel like CGI is absolutely used as a crutch by many modern filmmakers. Movies like Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix still look amazing to this day because they use a mixture of CGI and practical effects to create things that not only look real, but move realistically and interact with their environment in a realistic fashion. In each of these cases, the technology is a decade old or more (or, in the case of the later Lord of the Rings movies, pushing a decade) but it still looks better than most modern CGI.

 

[aba1]

Honestly I miss traditional 2d animation. I believe 3d has its place as a live action aid and done right it can mix with 2d decently (very few studios do it well however) but I find there is just levels of style you can get with 2d that just don't work or look right with 3d.

 

[Sixcess]

Good filmmakers (e.g. Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson) use CGI to enhance the story. Bad filmmakers (e.g. Michael Bay, George Lucas) use CGI as the story.

For video games, the best of the modern stuff is still fantastic - like the SWTOR cinematics by Blur Studio, or their Prototype intro. But getting to that level takes time, money and talent that most developers don't have and won't pay for, so they churn out something that's 'good enough' and call it a day.

 

[The_Waspman]

Well its like you say, there are far fewer restrictions on modern cgi, you can do literally anything with it now (bar realistic animals and humans), whereas 'back in the day' (The Jurassic Park era, for example) the technology was nowhere near as good, so they had to, I dunno, make an effort.

I was having this debate in another thread, so I may be repeating a few points, and I don't mean to disrespect all the digital artists that work in the industry, because they have a tough thankless job, but the use of cgi has become so commonplace and... accepted... and I don't like it. I've never been a fan of cgi. Especially not when its used in place of stuff that could be done practically. So yes, its use in films like Gladiator for example, I that I don't mind so much. And I'm not saying it cant be useful. I saw the Avengers this weekend, and I'll admit I was very impressed with it as a technical achievement. Its a huge film, very ambitious, and aside from a few moments here and there, the CG never feels... invasive. Unlike in something like, Transformers say.

I will have to disagree with Kahunaburger though. On the LOTR thing. I never found the cg in LOTR to be very impressive. Even at the time. Especially in movies 2 and 3. A lot of it looked fake, even at the time, and it has not aged well. Not at all. And a lot of the cg n that did feel very invasive. Which is what I hate, because it takes you out of a movie and it becomes flat. You cant invest yourself in a movie when its all just dull, repetative cgi, which doesn't do anything new.

But what can you do?

 

[Iron Criterion]

Or to end this thread a lot faster just compare John Carpenter's The Thing to the 2011 Prequel. One has amazing practical effects which hold up to this day, the other features CGI so poor it couldn't even hold a candle to an Eiffel 65 music video; can you guess which is which?

 

[Hollyday]

I think a good mixture of hand drawn and CGI is the way to go.
Looks really crisp, and flows brilliantly.

This is the perfect example. CGI should always be used to enhance what is already there, not to create something from scratch in a live action or hand-drawn film/series. There's a great video on the Batman begins DVD extras (I can't find it on youtube to post here) that shows scenes from the film with and without CGI and the way that they use it is always to touch up and enhance what they are already doing. CGI scenes that come out of nowhere are always incredibly jarring and break the immersion (To bring it back to games, I find this one particularly bad for some reason, although I think the voice-over has something to do with it. Thankfully it's an opening video and can be skipped).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtrKfZqokl4

 

[Joshimodo]

The main reason for this is twofold:

-Older CGI was on a much more limited basis, so creative solutions had to be utilised.

-Creativity was lauded over spectacle and effects.

 

[teknoarcanist]

I watched Jumanji earlier with my 13-year-old sister. She commented 4 or 5 times how much she liked the effects and how cool and "real but not quite" everything looked. At one point (the spiders) she even literally said, "If they made this today, those would just be CG, and it would suck."

I agree.

 

[The Unworthy Gentleman]

Choosing to go for top end, pushing the limit, CGI means you're going to have some of the best shots you could ask for but you're also going to have inflated expenses and higher resource demands. It's much easier to opt for the studio that's offering a decent shot for a lower price and average resource demands and much smarter too.

As for the two shots you showed us you're definitely looking at them through nostalgic eyes. The second shot is far and away the best of them and there's little room for denial. It may not be pushing any boundaries but there's no demand for it to. The shot is good and it doesn't need the best resources to render it out. It might not be reaching to the very edge of cutting edge CG because doing that would be a waste of time and money. The first Starcraft did because frankly games looked like shit back then and people wanted better.

Now there are groups focused on pushing CG and groups using their technology to deliver a good but reasonable game. Look at LA Noire: that pushed the boundaries of CG through facial structure and took up 3 fucking DVDs of space for it. That technology needs to be refined to make it more accessible to the industry and the market. By that time though we'll have some other guy come in and say it looks like ass compared to the Star Wars prequels and ask if anyone's doing anything about it.

The woman could do with a make over though, there is no way in hell anyone would look like that in the midst of combat.

 

[burningdragoon]

Nowadays, CGI I feel is used as a crutch.

Yep, that's how I would put it, though maybe a little less generalized.

 

[him over there]

I think a good mixture of hand drawn and CGI is the way to go.


Looks really crisp, and flows brilliantly.

That was... Damn O_O. Gotta go find some ghost in the shell.