When I worked in the VFX industry we would come up against those sorts of situations all the time. For most clients it was never an issue of cost and more about the lead up time involved. For example, a lot of time goes into research and ensuring you get good reference photography and physical measurements. For something like a plane you would need to track down the exact make/model and send out a survey team for a few days to a week. Obviously this doesn't include the work done to determine how the plane would disintegrate and what the resulting explosions would look like. Someone in the art department would probably spend a week or more compiling plane crash reference.

Sure, there are outfits that won't go to that amount of trouble but the end result is almost always junk.

Wouldn't a plane exploding be a fairly standard sequence?

I must say that I lost interest in all-cgi action sequences. Too smooth and cartoonish to feel real. I miss the roughness of the movies from the 90s. The archetype is something like Die Hard 3. From a cinematographic point of view, I fully support using real planes when possible.

So recently I was watching through Marvel movies to get ready to finally watch the last two Avengers ones. I'm not crazy about them but it's ok fun. Part of the problem with them is what you say, the action is so much CGI it just turns meh.

But then I was watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and I was not very engaged but following it. At some point I caught myself having a elevated heart-beat and at the edge of my seat. This was the highway bridge scene.

I asked myself what is going on, I don't really care that much about the characters or plot, why am I so engaged?

Then I saw this episode of Corridor Crew's Stuntmen React[1], where one of the stunt performers mentioned almost every stunt in that scene was a practical stunt. And with that it all made sense.

[1]: https://youtu.be/SgGpPRBTBTI?t=45

Take a look at Jurassic Park sometime, the Spielberg one from 1993. They used animatronics for most of the dinos and they look almost real still, almost 30 years on.

The same with the original Star Wars trilogy, they're all models lit by actual lights so there's a depth and "realness" to the lighting that makes it look so much more authentic than even modern CGI.

Indiana Jones special effects were pretty interesting too in that regard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN4weKvqmb8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YceegyOXzh0

There is some selection bias going on. There was an amazing amount of bad and unconvincing special effect in movies before cgi. We just tend to remember the successful and convincing examples. Modern movies and tv productions have an amazing amount of cgi going on, and we only notice the effects when they are not convincing.

And I guess with CGI since the possibilities are endless, the bikeshedding about how it must look also doesn't help with efficiency.

I agree with you, the HN headline is click-bait.

What if you significantly mess up the first attempt with a real explosion? Like to the degree it isn't usable at all. Anyone know any costly examples of this?

During filming of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the bridge explosion had to be done twice. The first time a miscommunication caused it to be blown before the cameras were ready. No idea how costly it was, though.

I once got a tour of ILM through a coworker -- this is a very real concern even with blowing up miniatures.

So you always make three: the one you plan to blow up, the backup, and the one you hope will go into the archives to show people later.

Is it that likely, as messing up the CGI? You could just abort before explosion if all your cameras don't look ok.

Some failures might not be obvious until the big red button has been pushed. What if the C4 in the cockpit is dud? What if the igniter at the wing spar is dud? What if the wires to the empennage have not been connected properly? What if the undercarriage collapses before the windows blow out? What if the vertical stabilizer's collapse causes a wind that exposes the hidden cameras from other angles?

This is fun, I should go on.

Please do!

You would think blowing up a real 747 is riskier if it fails on the first attempt.

> Where as CGI or miniatures take longer and add more risk if they don't look right on the first attempt.

Well, at least next attempts would be relatively cheap with CGI. Less so for the 747.

Especially with https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect in operation.

I imagine that the problem with that was that he started filming this thing before the coronavirus came around.

I can’t see a 747 going for much more than scrap metal cost these days.

While they're being taken off passenger routes, a cargo conversion makes them great propositions: they have a greater higher Maximum Take-Off Weight (MTOW) and Maximum Landing Weight (MLW) than anything else in the same price class both in terms of purchase price and running costs.

A 747-400 is about $15m, and can carry 412 metric tons. A 747-8 will cost you more, but you're heading up to 447 metric tons.

The only stuff that can lift more is: an A380 which will be _at least_ 10 times the price for an extra 130 tons MTOW, but you can only hand with ~50 tons more, so 80 tons of that is for range you might just not need in a cargo operation; a Strarolaunch which is a complete non-starter on many counts; or, finally an Antonov An-225 which comes at a high purchase price and a whole bag of operational problems you likely don't want as a cargo operator, including high running costs and a relative scarcity of spare parts.

There are plenty of businesses out there who can throw down money for a 747 in reasonable working condition and be confident they'll recoup that after other costs, and also know there are lots and lots of parts out there that will help them keep their fleet in the sky for a long time, and pilots and ground crew with plenty of experience on them too.

The AN-225 also has the issue of there being only one of them.

I know there has been noises around building at least a few more, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

He probably meant An-124.

I assume MTOW must mean the total take-off weight, not the cargo weight. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400#Specifications it suggests about 125 tonnes, which - if I'm correct - means that quoting the MTOW is unhelpful.

Also looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400#Retirement_and_... it disagrees with running costs you say

"The 747-400's leasing, resale and salvage value has dropped steeply because it is relatively expensive to operate. As most 747-400s are now more than 20 years old, airlines are beginning to replace them. Airlines using the 747-400 have been retiring the model, replacing it with more fuel efficient aircraft"

Running cost is a cutthroat competition, companies replace aircrafts for 5-10% better fuel efficiency, which is up to 70% of the running cost. If 747 has 20% worse fuel efficiency than the most modern plane on the market, then it is considered very inefficient, but it actually costs only ~15% more to operate, assuming everything else is comparable.

Two were sold a couple of months ago for $48M total:

https://fortune.com/2017/11/22/boeing-747-jets-taobao-auctio...

Running it seems the going price is $16+ or so

But this was filmed in Victorville and they likely had an old stripped 747 laying around that could have been bought for very little

The airport itself received a $600k+ location fee:

https://www.vvdailypress.com/news/20191108/new-details-emerg...

You sure? I flew recently. Things aren't that different now, and even restaurants are opening up.

I was going to say more, but let's not start a big coronavirus subthread in the middle of a neat CG thread. However, it's kind of interesting how normal it seemed to fly. Everyone is very cautious, things are sterilized, and there's not even any drink cart anymore -- it's individually-wrapped packs of food, to dampen contamination.

Not saying whether it's good or bad that things are going back to normal-ish, just that they seem to be trending that way.

Almost every major passenger airline is retiring their 747s. The only ones still in the air are the 747-8, which are relatively new, and cargo planes.

Yeah, but it's not due to COVID-19. At most, COVID-19 accelerated it a bit, but four-holers were being phased out well before COVID-19.

It is in large because of the virus: the reduction in demand for flights made the 747 the prime target for retirement. Without a pandemic they would have been replaced gradually by newer planes, now they are just sitting unused so they are sold and scrapped.

This is inaccurate.

The phase-out of the 747 was well on the way long before the pandemic was ever a twinkle in a pangolin's eye, or wherever it came from. Those airlines that still fly them are mostly not changing their plans to either phase them out or keep flying them due to the pandemic.

As at the end of 2019, there was not a single scheduled passenger operator of the 747 anywhere in the Americas, and only two in Europe (BA and Lufthansa). Prior to the pandemic, BA announced plans to retire all 747s in 2024. They brought forward the date due to the downturn, but they're the only airline to do so for their 747 fleet as far as I can tell. Lufthansa flies the new 747-8 and is very unlikely to retire them any time soon.

There are still plenty of 747 operators in Asia: among others, Air China, Air India, Thai, Rossiya, Korean, China Airlines. Thai and China Airlines both had existing plans before the pandemic to retire their aging 747s, and the rest have all indicated that they plan to keep flying them.