Anyone else think computerozed special effects look MORE fake?

[HEyHEY]

I sure as hell do...you can always see the outline. It just doesn't look right.

[WillParkinson]

1. I agree!

The recent movie, The Incredible Hulk, looked so...so...CGI that it was just sad. Same thing with some sequences in Spiderman and the departed Birds of Prey (on WB).

[eileen_d]

2. Frequently, yes

I also dislike 3-D animation. I'm a 2-D person, I guess ;)

[THUNDER HANDS]

3. some scenes in the Matrix

Looked really fake.

Like when he was fighting the 100 Agent Smiths and he'd fly through the air with his black coat that didn't look anything close to realistic.

[donotpassgo]

10. what is a man in a computer world doing superhumanmoves

and moving ten times faster than any man ever could is supposed to look like?

[Richardo]

4. CGI figures never appear to have any "mass" -

and their movements usually do not conform to the laws of physics (and I'm not talking about the obvious "Matrix" or "Crouching Tiger" stuff. I mean coming to a stop, turning, running, etc. The mundane physics.


So yes - they look WAY fake.

[Aristus]

5. OTOH, the CGI effects in Lord of the Rings

were spectacular! They have to be done right. It's like any other kind of special effect. Some companies do them well, others don't.

[HEyHEY]

6. Yeah..cheap/lazy producers

The new star wars, the storm trooper were just crap!

[TheBlob]

7. Hell yeah

Give me models any time.

When used the right way, CGI can look great - James Cameron knows how to do it.

When used to excess, you get the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.

Most of the time there's just something about CGI that your eyes know the difference.

It's like watching a really really good..............cartoon.

[Ratty]

8. Definitely. Especially spaceships

I read somewhere once somebody opining that CGI spaceships were simply not as good as models, no matter how realistic. I've noticed this is absolutely true. Enterprise is the first of the Star Trek series to use completely CGI spaceships and yes, they're indistinguishable from models but they seem so lifeless and ugly. The ships in the original star wars trilogy were wonderful, but ever since they've been duds.

Maybe there's something to setting up the ship, lighting the model, planning the various camera pans, etc., that adds a creative life to the whole thing. Maybe something that doesn't happen when you're working only through a keyboard and mouse. Who knows, but I think it's true.

2001: A Space Odyssey, Space 1999--those were the days.

As for CGI characters, when they do true motion capture I think the results are pretty good. The skeletons in that last pirate movie, they were absolutely eerie. But for some reason a lot of production shops prefer to hand animate CGI characters--I have no idea why--and it NEVER looks good.

[Kamika]

9. CGI SUCKS AAARGH

I hate cgi why o WHY did they have to start use it as special effects.

OK it is godo if its just a really minor part but when they have the ENTIRE batte in CGI as in star wars2 or the HULK in CGI i want to kill them, they are ruining their own movies.

Stop motion is a billion times better.

Oh and Terminators2's 11 YEAR old CGI was better then terminator3's !!!

[hunter]

11. Modern CGI is faster, better, cheaper...

Now that the "WOW" factor of CGI is fading away, producers like the "cheaper" feature, and it shows. CGI is just another job, the crew stops when it's "good enough." There seems to be little incentive in most movies (or video games!) to keep tweaking things until they look and feel "just right."

[Interrobang]

12. I think part of it is because of air.

That's right, I said air. Most CGI animators don't take into account that things *blur* at the edges in normal human perception, and CGIs always have these utterly clear, sharp edges, which nothing else has. Even the "edges" on the shading gradations are clear and sharp, which they never are in real life. That's part of the reason why CGIs don't seem to have any mass -- they don't reflect right for things with mass. They're always too shiny and perfect.

If cel animation ever dies out completely, I will take it up simply to preserve it. Nothing compares. Give me those beautiful hand-coloured Fleischer cartoons over the most state-of-the-art CGI any day!!

[Aristus]

13. That life-like blur is what inspired the animators at ILM to

invent Go-Motion. Stop motion created the illusion of motion by running still photos of still objects at 24 frames per second. However, the sharp edges of the posed objects gave away the trick. Go-Motion hooks the poseable models to a motor. When the camera lens is open, photographing the posed model, the motor moves the model nearly imperceptably, creating a blur. When the film is run at 24 frames per second, a life-like motion is created.

The next generation of CGI may have something similar. If people are already disparaging CGI effects as cheesy and unrealistic, the innovators will have to think of something else.

[SOteric]

14. Some are good, some are not

but dude, should you really be harshin' an industry who's capital is in your back yard?