When you look at movies like The Arrival, which is not considered a great special effects film because they're understated and get out of the way of the story, the effects artists plop a digital ship into the middle of a field and leave it there. Understated digital effects, in conjunction with practical effects, are often the most effective and least appreciated.
Villeneuve has a tendency to direct movies that do this well (and I apologize for being a bit of a fan boy), and I hope that more movies take this direction.
I enjoyed the Marvel films, but at times they looked a bit like digital vomit on screen and became hard to follow. I couldn't even finish Aquaman, TBH, as it was just over the top with the amount of digital noise. Though, Justice League attempted to do better than this, the Darkside fight was a bit nauseating =(
Again, though, I think the Villeneuve films will stand the test of time, where as the blockbuster comic films will go the way of films like Predator. I enjoyed it at the time, but it doesn't really hold up.
Practical effects are probably getting easier, thanks to various 3D printing techniques, the expansion of low-cost microcontrollers, the low costs of servos, and the proliferation of small cameras and lens adaptations for rostrum/running shots.
But saving money isn't the main reason we don't have practical effects. Saving time is the main reason we don't have practical effects.
https://ymcinema.com/2021/12/03/dune-was-shot-on-alexa-lf-tr...
NEARLY is not EQUALs. The dynamic range that you are touting being nearly the same is the specific feature of film that I was refering to on how it handles highlights. It's taken 25 years to get to where we are nearly there, but I understand why some purists still prefer the acquisition on film. However, the nearly is good enough for most but the purists.
So film has a huge resolution advantage especially when you use 70MM. Theoretically capable of 16K. Yet by the time you've developed the negs, created interpositives, edited, created masters, created internets, and finally created prints for the theaters, that resolution, that dynamic range, those "highlights" (could you be more vague) get lower and lower. Then you send it to a theater with a crappy projector that's out of calibration, or has a bulb out of spec. Then you get crap. Same with when you have this pristine film scanned for DVD/BluRay/4k whatever.
Your reply comes off as if I don't know what I'm talking about which just isn't the case. I've already stipulated in a previous comment that modern digital is good enough for most everyone one but purists. So your audiophile comment implies to me you missed some salient details.
For example, I've seen footage shot on a Red (don't remember specific body/chip) of table top food products with fun issues. Specifically, it was a chocolate shake with whipped cream on top. The sensor had issues with the white so that when the exposure was pushed, the white became magenta. The green data was not hitting at the same levels as the red and blue. To get white, the green channel needed to be pushed independantly, but it was already clipped digitally even though the R/B channels were not.
Scanning that same image from film would not have exhibited this behavior.
Wellll, you might have got a magenta cast from Fuji colour transparency stock... ;-)
Yes, and no. GP is referring to a specific fundamental difference between digital capture and film negative capture that is not vague or woo or wine tasting.
Highlights record differently on film negatives, because they do not clip; they roll off progressively as the negative image gets denser and denser. This is why wedding photographers kept shooting black and white film alongside digital colour for a long time, for instance.
You retain that benefit when you then scan the negative back into a digital form (because the scanner's dynamic range significantly outdoes the range of the developed negative). You can significantly "redevelop" that negative digitally.
I don't know if that specific fundamental difference was what the Dune production was aiming at -- I am guessing that if it was, they exposed their digital files very carefully to maximise the chance of being able to use it the way they wanted to.
1. https://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-compariso...
2. https://www.panavision.com/products/arri-alexa
This is just like LP lovers talking about the warmth of vinyl...
I'm very far from a purist. I do shoot film occasionally (stills, not motion film), but 99.5% digital, and I'm absolutely not coming at this from the LP-lover's perspective.
Not least because the "warmth" thing is purely subjective, when there are fundamental characteristic differences between film and digital regarding the way that highlights are captured by the sensitive medium, and those differences have actual creative impacts that can be exploited.
That was the point about wedding photographers. (Incidentally it's not just that the technological gap has mostly closed where black and white is concerned; it's also that the cost and supply models have changed. People don't shoot film for jobs like that now, because the professional infrastructure does not exist anymore.)
Where the cinema-oriented, digital-printing-to-colour-negative-motion-stock situation is concerned, I am not convinced that the digital source yet has enough extra headroom to really take advantage qualitatively without very careful capture exposing for the highlights; it's certainly not going to be an automatic, magical conversion.
> But it gave us the feeling we had been picturing a certain texture that’s painterly but feels timeless…The film has softened the edges of the digital. It gave us something that film acquisition couldn’t give us, and it gave us something that digital acquisition couldn’t give us
Cinematography still has clearly a long way to go. It's currently in the "we don't know what perspective is" phase of painting.
¹ anamorphic lenses are, generally speaking, horrible. It's extremely obvious when they're used, which is probably the main reason why there has been a huge anamorphic filmmaking craze going on for a few years.
DAD cataracts?
And not just time in general. The CGI could take more time to produce than the practical effects, but it's in post. The practical effects have to be ready for the shot.
Absolutely. There are a lot of reasons this is happening.
Prior to the pandemic (which will be seen as a kinetic accelerant to a thermodynamic inevitability), screen space was limited, meaning the biggest tentpoles would eat up a somewhat predictable lion's share of box office revenue and thus command a large percentage of screen real estate. If you churn out big things fast, you can fill the calendar year with your films, monopolizing on total screen space/time. You can bargain with theaters for placement and advantageous timing, maximizing your own ROI and preventing other studios from outcompeting you. This is more a function of pipeline maturity and scale than development time, but efficiency absolutely helps.
It's also true that viewers only have so much time (and therefore money). You want them to spend more time watching your content than they do on alternatives (other streamers, video games, social media). Quick delivery of successful series is essential. Netflix is trying to fill its slate to compensate for media losses, but also to run quick experiments to find things that maximize for view time. Content doesn't necessarily have to look good to fit the need.
The dust may look like it's settling, but it's not. Increasing efficiency will lead to lots of new competition in the space.
I think 3D animation is just starting to hit its stride. The Netflix series Arcane is really beautiful, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was incredible, and I was even blown away by Hotel Transylvania 4, which I was ready to write-off as corny kids dreck, but the manic slap-stick stuff they did in it is outrageously good. This isn't even getting into the epic-budget Pixar stuff...
Also if Ghibili is your bar I'd say 99% of 2D animation isn't even on par.
I am in no way saying Arcane does not 'look good' to me or in any objective way, in fact, I really enjoy the over all look of the show. But I think it is a bit disingenuous to use Arcane to prop up the advancements in 3D animation compared to 2D.
Plenty of people liked it, but I think it’s more people getting used to the style than it actually being good. Most modern animators and many viewers grew up with bad 90’s CGI, worse the old guard of computer animators where making it.
Taking with some of these animators they still recognize quality, but it’s like their uncanny valley has moved.
I don't really buy the idea that animators grew up with bad animation and have somehow lower standards... in the case of the handful of pro animators I know, they're absolutely massive animation nerds and their taste extends far beyond what they grew up with.
Anyway as long as we are talking animation. I asked one of the Frozen animators why the faces looked so freaky and they basically said meh, needs to be distinct to sell toys. Serious props to their skills and the massive R&D involved but that right there was the core issue. Moana’s water does a lot of cool animations but looks vastly less “real” than the objectively worse CGI water tentacle in Abyss. Again same deal it’s aiming for a style.
Ok fine you say what about CGI in blockbuster movies, except the article again points out how fake they look for various reasons.
You chose three films that are widely considered to be among the greatest films of all time in their genre.
It's not really a rousing endorsement that practical's greatest achievements are cases when you have the thematic luxury of not actually showing anything.
And remember, the the prequels were literally the first movies to have CGI major characters. Basing the effectiveness of the technique on them would be like basing all of practical effects on the first movie to have puppets.
Not surprising, given that there aren't many triple-A movies with Black lead actors around in the first place, much less movies that are predominantly Black starred - it was labelled as "revolutionary" [1] for a reason and so generated a lot of (well-deserved) hype. That it turned out to be a damn good movie too only helped the matter along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Studio_Ghibli_works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Unive...
Not that I'm a fan of Marvel, far from it! Apart from a few exceptions, they seem mostly geared towards kids (and adults who still inherit fantasy worlds).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB3tdMDRQBc
But it looks great so you don't really notice it.
In anime at least, CGI cuts costs a lot, especially for 3D scenes. On the other hand, people are getting better and better at doing CGI these days. In general I feel like current animation has more movement overall, but it's not budgeted well. For example, in the introduction of Patlabor 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydCLeclaKik, there are lots of still shots, but some movements are impressive, and the backgrounds are gorgeous. It is one of the best anime movie ever made though, so it's not like everything at that time looked like that.
Some shows/movies make it work well enough because there's things other than the animation that keep you watching, some use it for walking/transition scenes where it's easier to "blend" it in since it's background to the dialogue most of the time; but I really wouldn't say the "2d animation look" is even close to being achieved in many cases right now. Again, not because I feel the tooling is incapable of it - but because doing it right would nullify the cost savings and defeating the purpose.
https://mangathrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/pjimage-2...
https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
Most 2D animation these days is just CGI dressed up to look like 2D hand drawn animation. Actually, the reduced production costs is why we are seeing so many magna/light novel being translated into anime series, even if the underlying content isn't that great.
I prefer even old grindhouse trash (that I haven't seen until fairly recently) over the nonstop modern day CGI drenched sequels and reboots.
Once CGI rolled in - and really, this was true of all graphics when you look at things like 90's magazines overusing Photoshop filters - we got a taste for adding multiple layers of production on top of everything, which made the final image less "tied together" and more of a chimera.
I do think animation has gotten better overall, even 2D, because animation has always embraced being chimerical and covering that up by finding a consistent approach to the final image. All that's changed is that there's a lower reliance on large numbers of drawings. In the 80's, very few animation productions could really achieve their full vision - with few corrective tools available, you had to have some excellent draftsmanship just to get a product out the door. While there were opportunities to use that to expressive effect, most of TV animation stuck to simple shots and reused as much as they could get away with. This also really pushed the default look of animation towards whatever was easy to draw, which dampened the tone of works trying to feel serious.
Now we have digital puppets that still are fundamentally 2D but allow the animator to spend more time on creating a performance that reuses snippets of pre-drawn material, which is overall a good thing. If they want to push a scene further and add additional camera angles or poses, they have the option to do so and can apply CGI to create the necessary references too - you aren't bottlenecked so much by drawing, but neither are you stuck trying to composite in a CG image, because you can paint over it and get whatever look you want, as long as that look isn't live action.
This scene does pretty much everything marvel movies are criticized for. Lots of CGI. Lots of explosions. Banter in dangerous moments. But I think it works extremely well.
The use of bright color contrasts between red and blue; then later darkness is really sharp. The sound design of the moment highlights the villain's confusion and spidey comes off as really distraught that this guy is in this situation. You don't really have reason to think that Spidey will die here, but it does set up a level of belief that some civilians could get hurt here, and it does come off as pretty exciting to see him need to immediately pull off a difficult, slo mo maneuver to save them. The fighting is incredibly quick, with both players only doing heavy fight-ending moves. It's stylistic as fuck.
tl;dr the biggest problem with superhero movies is the awkward uncanny valley of trying to be both realistic and absurd with CGI. Go big and stylistic.
I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was as good as I remembered, and that the special effects held up remarkably well.
I enjoyed its first major fight scene than the one you linked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiaTyUcu5VM
The frozen people effect in Amazing Spiderman 2 reminded me this:
I don't know that the special effects here held up especially well though. The machine gun and rocket are dorky. There's some irrelevant punching as well, but not too much. It could be argued just enough to establish GG as physically strong. The fight conclusion feels a bit weak though. I'd say it's a pretty solid scene despite this stuff.
Classic movies from the 80s like Alien, The Thing, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. look so much better to me than the latest blockbuster Marvel movie.
There is something about actors acting in the same set you see, with the actual monsters you see, and the fog and lighting and everything else being real. And shooting on film just looks better to me.
Hand drawn 2d animation looks so much better too. I much prefer its soft and imperfect look to the HD perfection of modern computerized animation. 3d animation while great in some movies, I feel is an overused default animation style today.
I feel like we reached the perfect balance between visual art, technology and original stories back in the 80s, and have been steadily implementing cost/time saving optimizations ever since.