It's a thing I've been wondering about - what makes special effects cost so much, compared to previous decades? I mean, everything is done with CG now, that's supposed to be orders of magnitude cheaper than what people did in the XX century.
Here's a good video, from 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k
I think it's the opposite. In 1970s you would just create plastic models of spaceships and film them with normal camera. That's as cheap as creating plastic models can get. Of course end result wasn't that great, but it was enough to get by.
Now you can create pretty much anything you can imagine, and generate it as CG so it looks perfect on the screen, but you need expensive equipment and even more expensive people to operate it.
The point I'm trying to make is that 40 years ago we did simple effects with simple (and cheap) tools. Now we use advanced effects created with the expensive tools. Increased cost is justified by increased quality.
Are you sure? For example, from the ILM history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_%26_Magic we see:
1975: Resurrected the use of VistaVision; first use of a motion control camera (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope)
Following the link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_control_photography gives us:
> The first large-scale application of motion control was in Star Wars (1977), where a digitally controlled camera known as the Dykstraflex performed complex and repeatable motions around stationary spaceship models. This enabled a greater complexity in the spaceship-battle sequences, as separately filmed elements (spaceships, backgrounds, etc.) could be better coordinated with one another with greatly reduced error.
That doesn't sound like a normal camera.
The text immediately before that quote is:
> The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey pioneered motion control in two respects. The film's model photography was conducted with large mechanical rigs that enabled precise and repeatable camera and model motion. The film's finale was created with mechanically controlled slit-scan photography, which required precise camera motion control during the exposure of single frames.
And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the mothership was made of wood, plastic and metal, and wasn't cheap.
Now, to be sure these are high budget movies, but your broad description makes it sound like it was true for all movies in the 1970s.
I think a better comparison would be to look at the model-based special effects in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the CGI effects in Babylon 5; both produced at about the same time. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine :
> DS9 was the first TV show in the Star Trek franchise to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) for exterior space shots. Although a few other television series, like Babylon 5, were using CGI exclusively to avoid the high expense of model photography, the Star Trek franchise had continued to use primarily physical models for exterior space shots because producers felt models provided more realism.
On the other hand, B5 had an absolutely amazing storyline. I wish someone would remaster it, replacing the exterior CG shots with new renders, and release it in full HD. It would beat the crap out of most of the things that are on TV today.
The quality wasn't quite as good, but within a few years it was both cheaper and better than plastic models.
mamon's argument is that with plastic models the "end result wasn't that great, but it was enough to get by". The same argument applies to Bab5.
That's why I disagree with mamon's argument.
Also you may miss how much of the shows are CGI if you aren't looking hard. Watch a few shows from the 70s and 80s, ones with high production values, then watch the average show today and you'll see that audiences demand much more realistic sets and scenery. Just about everything in the background of a sci-fi show is CGI.
In the originals, the battle for the Death Star holds up.
In the prequels, you can see Jedi wildly waving their lightsabers at nothing because the CGI team forgot to animate in certain places.
In the originals, Yoda was a puppet, and his skin and clothing reflected light realistically. So what if his mouth movements had all of the nuance and subtlety of a novelty nutcracker? Imagination bridged the gap between what we saw and what we experienced.
In the prequels, Yoda was CGI, so he didn't have physical depth in the way the other actors did, and didn't reflect light in the same way as the physical cast, and it gave him an eerie, Photoshopped look.
CGI can make special effects look more realistic, but they also have a way of preventing things from actually looking real.
Didn't realize how much this is true until I saw the video 'lfowles posted. That's a good point.
See the Wolf of Wall Street VFX highlights: https://vimeo.com/83523133
It now seems the high costs are more plausible, but then again - shouldn't the diminished need for sets offset that? Or is renting (or building) e.g. a prison yard so much cheaper than doing it in CG?
The vast majority of written science fiction doesn't need a lot of special effects.
There are almost uncountably many stories that could be transferred to television or film at no more cost than any other drama. Take Clifford Simak's Way Station for instance, most of Ray Bradbury's stories, J. G. Ballard, and dozens or hundreds more. Even stories with a grand idea and scope like Clarke and Baxter's Light of Other Days hardly need much in the way of complex sets or difficult special effects.
Why is it that science fiction in video form always has to be space opera, alien invasions and so on?
If we are going to go for special effects let's not waste them on more space cowboys. Let's have Charlie Stross's Accelerando and Saturn's Children or Ken McLeod's Sky Road, etc.
IMHO the best science fiction only needs good actors, the props could be '70s Dr Who quality and we would still love the series.
I think we've got sufficient effects technology to do a good dragon nowadays. Examples would be the dragons in Avatar and the dragons in How to Train Your Dragon (especially Toothless from the second movie).
I'd believe that more if there would have been any wider followup of similar works. But alas, there hasn't been (or at least I haven't heard of them), so I'm more likely to categorize The Martian as an outlier rather than a herald of new era.
But the article is about television. I really am not qualified to say much about television other than until very recently, it was very hard to have a hit TV show that only appealed to a niche audience. A series faithfully based on "The Martian" isn't likely to get a slot in prime time. The closest you'll get is so-called soft science fiction, which presents stories that happen to be set in unfamiliar locations (usually space), but where science has no influence on the story.
Maybe there's a chance now, with a very different distribution model, but even if hard science fiction fans can be perfectly targeted through Netflix or Amazon, special effects will keep production costs high.