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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Person explains why thing is worse now:
“Management”
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.
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
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.
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.
Had to read it a few times to really appreciate this, thank you.
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).
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! 🏴☠️
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The only thing that looked jarring to me from those movies was the “And I’m Ironman” scene, but that’s from Endgame
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
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.
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.
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.
This sounds exactly like Boeing (and a hundred other large corps.)
And his elders used to say the same old thing about him and his generation.
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.
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.
its* 2015 predecessor.
Sorry I always get confused. Edited.
Edit: Wait I’m still confused. Someone explain which one is correct. “Its” or “It’s”.
Think of “it” like a pronoun akin to “he” and “her” and so “its” is like “his” and “hers”
It’s confusing because to say “Rebecca’s” you would use an apostrophe, but you don’t do that for pronouns. “It’s” exists only as a contraction of “it is.”
Saved this comment. Much love to everyone that helped.
It’s - The contraction of “it is”.
Its - When you indicate possession, for example: Its ice cream was delicious.
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.
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!
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.
Elapsed time but not necessarily working time. Working time costs a lot more than elapsed time.
“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.
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.
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.
What about the countless of times you’ve seen good CGI - and didn’t notice?
This article is just an exaggeration.
Edit: lol at the downvotes! Bash CGI as much as you want, but c’mon. Recognize the good work too.
You missed the point of the article.
No, I didn’t.
The article has nothing to do with invisible CGI. It’s about the state of the industry.
Oh.
But why is the headline “Artists explain why CGI is worse now”, when CGI isn’t really worse overall?
You should try actually reading the article. That has all the words that appear after you click on the link to it.
You read those words, and hopefully you’ll understand what’s going on in this post.
I’d rather you say “Read the fucking article” like a decent human being.
Nah, I know you won’t anyways. You’re the type that likes to argue meaningless points that don’t have anything to do with the subject at hand. It’s just your nature. And that’s ok, there’s nothing wrong with being you. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.
Enjoy your weekend.
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.
A friend of mine was baffled when I told him that Tarkin was CGI in Rouge One
