VFX artist explains why CGI in films is worse now

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Emperor@feddit.uk⁩ to ⁨movies@lemm.ee⁩

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/vfx-cgi-movies-avengers-b2557019.html

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.

…

“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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RGB3x3@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Person explains why thing is worse now:

“Management”

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- Croquette@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It always is. Once a bean counter produce an excel sheet, it is a sacrosanct document, regardless of if it makes sense or not.
  
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  - KevonLooney@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No reason to blame a single accountant for the errors of a producer. Do you think producers take orders from accountants?
    
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- Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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Deebster@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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.

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- echodot@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- snekerpimp@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Had to read it a few times to really appreciate this, thank you.
  
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IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- modeler@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Two more examples: Dredd and Ex Machina.
  
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  - IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Love those movies. Everything Everywhere All At Once had a team of 4 VFX people, IIRC.
    
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- ours@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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).
  
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UKFilmNerd@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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.

Image

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- TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  is the trailer and film reversed? the top one looks better
  
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  - UKFilmNerd@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sorry, I wasn’t clear. The worse one, the bottom, is from the trailer.
    
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- ours@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Trailers have long been known to use shots that didn’t quite have the final VFX work.
  
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RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Don’t count out the fact that shots are oftentimes split amongst multiple effects studios

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- maegul@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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).
  
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  - el_abuelo@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yar matey! Step right aboard for yar viewing pleasure! Yo ho! 🏴‍☠️
    
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  - mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Other Hollywood unions need to bust the studios’ balls about this. It’s the same shit they went through - and it ends the same way.
    
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sevenoverthree@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
In other words, the Invisible Hand Of The Market has determined that the ideal quality of CGI for optimal profit is lower than previously believed.

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theangryseal@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
And of course there’s an old dude in the comments on the article.

“When I was a youngin’, we worked and cared about the job. The kids just want to hang out. They come from bad schools today!”

That is always the answer. I’d say the old heads above him felt the same way.

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- corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In my field, we’re actually suffering from decisions made 2 decades ago to fire the most expensive staff first after Y2k.
  
  When we did so, we lost a LOT of our mentors and collected wisdom from talented, experienced staff at the pinnacle of their career. New staff and journeyman-level workers lacked the wisdom to understand why we did the whole job instead of rushing for a head-pat from management. Now, with a few generations behind us - work generations being shorter - we have a systemic problem where the new framework on which the crap is build is itself crap from a crap design using crap tools for crap reasons. And we don’t visibly understand why that’s leading to the poor results we’re getting because we simply don’t know better.
  
  The skills gap is an insidious, layered problem that needs to be addressed even if it means a few (dozen) quarters where numbers do NOT go up.
  
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  - TurtleJoe@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This sounds exactly like Boeing (and a hundred other large corps.)
    
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- ours@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And his elders used to say the same old thing about him and his generation.
  
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Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Furiosa cgi was not that bad, maybe a downgrade to it’s 2015 predecessor but it was alright. I would want a healthy workplace more than a perfect cgi scene.

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- laughterlaughter@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  its* 2015 predecessor.
  
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  - Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sorry I always get confused. Edited.
    
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- ours@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Furiosa also has some absolutely bonker stunts. Furry Road was going to make the pole boys using CGI but the stunt team told Miller they could do it for real. Furiosa has a bunch of insane motorcycle stuff, aerial stuff, and trucks climbing steep hills, many of them probably too dangerous to do with people.
  
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Skua@kbin.earth ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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- TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think infinity war had Mark Ruffalos magic floating head in it.
  
  Idk I think it all looks fine. My gripe is the magic dis/reappearing helmets and armor. But that’s a design choice, not a CGI complaint.
  
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- Zo0@feddit.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The only thing that looked jarring to me from those movies was the “And I’m Ironman” scene, but that’s from Endgame
  
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- jacksilver@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Skua@kbin.earth ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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
    
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mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Studios act like arbitrary VFX changes, a week before release, are “push a button and make it different.”

They need to treat it like “go reshoot this crowd scene on location.”

Post-production takes time. That’s why you can’t release the movie as soon as shooting ends. When you tell VFX to start over, it takes all of that time, again. You are throwing out the time they already spent. Some shots look like they got slapped together overnight because - thanks to you - they did.

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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Oh God I’m sick of this argument. The problem isn’t CGI the problem is bad CGI.

It’s like saying all model shots look bad. Yeah some do but a lot don’t. You have to pay attention to it and you have to put in the effort.

Oh and by the way The Barbie movie had a lot of CGI in it despite what the creators claimed, and no one noticed.

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- ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  yes, but the question is “why is it bad/worse?” and the answer is “management needs to pull their finger out”
  
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- CylustheVirus@beehaw.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What argument? The article appears to claim that the reason there’s more bad CGI now is studio leadership changing stuff in post and failing to plan.
  
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laughterlaughter@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What about the countless of times you’ve seen good CGI - and didn’t notice?

This article is just an exaggeration.

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- TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - laughterlaughter@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No, I didn’t.
    
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- TheOakTree@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  One can both celebrate the good and criticize the bad. This article seems to focus on criticism, which does not exactly mean it’s an exaggeration.
  
  I think you missed the point.
  
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- ouRKaoS@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A friend of mine was baffled when I told him that Tarkin was CGI in Rouge One
  
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autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

Rassoul Edji, a lead VFX artist in the film industry, shared his thoughts on the reasons behind the blunders in a post that has since gone viral on social media racking up over 18 million views.

Edji has worked on films including Seeker, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, according to his IMDB page.

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.

The artist also explained that “VFX is often used as a crutch to fix issues which should be fixed on set”, adding that a film that is fully CGI can be made very well and to a high quality “if it is planned well, changes aren’t constantly made, and the VFX teams have enough time to create and refine it.”

The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 45%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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CitizenKong@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What I don’t understand is why movies like Flash also look shitty although that one was getting postponed for literal years. Plenty of time to improve the visuals.

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- BluesF@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Elapsed time but not necessarily working time. Working time costs a lot more than elapsed time.
  
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- anakin78z@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  “WE got you more Time!” One of the worst things to hear. You’ve already blown through the budget with all the delays and changes. And you have to pick up a few additional shots from that studio they hired on the very cheap, because they don’t match the rest of the film.
  
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