A visual effects artist has revealed the reason why special effects in movies are so much “worse” now.
Fans have long lamented the declining quality of computer-generated imagery (CGI) as a seemingly increasing number of blunders are picked up by eagle-eyed viewers upon almost every big release.
From movies such as Cats, Hulk and Aladdin to Avengers: Infinity War and the latest Mad Max instalment, Furiosa, on-screen glitches and some low-quality visuals have been jarring for moviegoers. The phenomenon is now so ubiquitous that flaws are apparent even in trailers for unreleased movies, such as the forthcoming remake of The Crow.
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“VFX artist here, heres what happened,” he began. “Clients continually change the brief. Shot design and planning are no longer a priority, and we have a lot more work to get through in a shorter amount of time.
“We have and can create work better than back in the day, it just needs the right leadership team, planning, and time to make sure it happens.”
Edji explained that the average film now changes a lot more during postproduction than it used to, adding, “This means new work gets added to our plate and work we’ve already started (and sometimes even finished) gets scrapped. The ‘fix it in post’ mentality also doesn’t help.”
He implored people to not blame VFX artists, saying: “It’s almost always the studio/leadership team who is responsible for when things don’t get done up to scratch and never the actual artists’ fault.”
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It’s an interesting perspective.
And it kinda tracks historically. So many of the great vfx moments in cinema history came out of production lining up for a killer moment and then focusing whatever the technology was on hand into pulling it off.
Captain Disillusion did a great little essay on Flight of the Navigator that touches on this idea. What a world of difference in the outlook and implementation of skills and manpower.
VFX artist explains why CGI in films is worse now
Article includes screenshot from The Mummy Returns which is from 2001 and is therefore old enough to watch any of the other films mentioned.
Had to read it a few times to really appreciate this, thank you.
It’s a bad example anyway because that CGI is really bad even for the time. I was watching Stargate the other day, and even that movie has better CGI and it’s older.
It helps that Stargate could get away with stuff that that would have to be done by VFX now. They had underpaid extras suffering heatstroke when these days some of the budget would’ve been used for digital crowds.
The other effects were somewhat standard rotoscope energy blasts and compositing the water effects.
Did Infinity War have bad effects? Marvel have definitely missed the mark plenty of times, but I recall that one looking pretty solid. I think the only part I remember looking janky was Mark Ruffalo’s head in the giant Iron Man armour, and that was pretty brief
I’m not sure if it’s just the style, but somewhere after the first Avengers everything started to look fake in marvel movies. It may be that they left the more grounded stories/heroes/sets, but the more recent movies all come off as more obviously CGI.
I think you’re right that it’s just that they depicted more and more fantastical stuff over time. Like they stopped pretending that Iron Man’s armour was actually a plausible mechanical thing and just made it magic. It still looked exactly like it should, but it felt less real because it was designed to be less realistic. But the effects on the Hulk, who looked consistent throughout, stayed just as believable for the whole series
Person explains why thing is worse now:
“Management”
I’ve heard once a quite from a fellow, he had mentioned something to the effect of “brevity, or saying something concisely, seems to me to be the essence of what one would describe as simultaneously humorous and intelligent when presented as an idea.”
also nice, tru
It always is. Once a bean counter produce an excel sheet, it is a sacrosanct document, regardless of if it makes sense or not.
No reason to blame a single accountant for the errors of a producer. Do you think producers take orders from accountants?
Yeah they do. If the accountant says the producer has X money to do something, then that’s it. The producer will need to ask for more.
This is how it works everywhere. This is why it’s so fucked up when you see companies with a higher budget for new hires than for keeping the staff. I can assure you that one or more accountants filled out an excel sheet and it has to track.
Uh, no it’s not. Producers are in charge of getting more money and representing the interests of the investors. They take orders from investors. They only hire accountants to count revenues and expenses.
Accountants are just human calculators. They literally just count. They don’t make any decisions unless they’re asked very specific questions like “how much revenue do we expect in the next quarter?” Or “how much money would it cost to do x, y, and z?”
Do you blame your calculator if you spend too much money? Or do you blame your bank if your account has no money in it? That’s crazy.
Don’t count out the fact that shots are oftentimes split amongst multiple effects studios
Yea, and the way, AFAIU, that jobs are auctioned off to the lowest bidder. All around it feels like Hollywood just doesn’t want to take the importance of CGI/VFX too seriously or let the sub-industry get too much power or too large a slice of the pie … so instead it keeps them at an arms distance and culturally emphasises the idea that VFX aren’t “central” to the quality of a film when in reality it’s now a key part of the production/directorial process best integrated from the start (as Godzilla minus one demonstrated, apparently as I still haven’t seen it and don’t want to signup for netflix to watch it).
Yar matey! Step right aboard for yar viewing pleasure! Yo ho! 🏴☠️
The phenomenon is now so ubiquitous that flaws are apparent even in trailers for unreleased movies, such as the forthcoming remake of The Crow.
This is a little unfair. It’s well known that the marketing department will take and use the best shots as long as it looks good enough.
I found out recently that a poor guy on Speed (1994) had to rush through a CGI shot of the gap in the bridge for the bus jump.
You can see the difference between the trailer and the final film below.
is the trailer and film reversed? the top one looks better
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. The worse one, the bottom, is from the trailer.
Trailers have long been known to use shots that didn’t quite have the final VFX work.
I watched Godzilla Minus One a couple of days ago. It was made by a small VFX team, tiny budget, and a director who planned it all out in advance and the results were really impressive.
Two more examples: Dredd and Ex Machina.
Love those movies. Everything Everywhere All At Once had a team of 4 VFX people, IIRC.
I’ve heard it had a small budget. For some reason, I had in mind $35 million and the result was impressive for that budget. Turns out it was $15 million!
Great movie overall elevated even more with fantastic VFX work to boot. Reminds me of old classics like Terminator 1 with a then unproven director James Cameron flexing his VFX background to achieve his big vision on screen stretching a relatively small budget (albeit T1 had his budget increased during production).
