Explosions 'n' shit

I want to talk about CGI. I want to do this, because last year the highest grossing movies -the ones that the most people went and saw- were all CGI heavy, but none of them won an Academy Award. I figure this means that although 300, Spiderman 3, and Transformers were all fun (which is the point of movies), they didn't really make for compelling viewing, while Juno and No Country for Old Men did. Since this is notionally a technology blog, I'm going to try and figure out if CGI itself really has anything to do with this.

I'll start with the obvious, since a lot of people are saying that CGI is used as a substitute for proper plotting and character (I'm looking at you Michael Bay). Compare the original The Poseidon Adventure from 1972 with 2006's Poseidon. The former featured smallish sets and unconvincing model work, which left plenty room for Gene Hackman's struggle with God, Ernest Borgnine's embarrassment over marrying a prostitute, and Shelley Whithers' swimming. The latter killed off unlikeable characters in increasingly unlikely scenarios, sometimes by having them kill each other. It held the Guiness World Record for the most detailed CGI model in a film. What we have here is a clear example of too much CGI (and that model was used a lot) at the expense of drama.

I think it's time to put the lesson here in its most important terms: There is only so much money under the bed, and more CGI means less money for everything else. But I don't think this is strictly fair on CGI. The money is spent on CGI because people want CGI. I'm not going to argue about why, or even who (Its Michael Bay, mostly), because it seem pretty obvious that you could spend CGI money on other things, like real props, or real scripts, or real people. Like most everything, there can be too much CGI, and deciding how much CGI there is is as much a part of good filmmaking as casting or scripting.

I don't think that was a surprise to anyone, so I'll move on. To Revenge of the Sith. Just so you know, I have to try really hard not to mention all the reasons this movie sucked, and just mention one. You know in Empire Strikes Back when Vader tells Luke who he really is, and Luke is dangling off an aerial? You know how Han spends most of that movie up to his knees in wiring? Did you see that in Revenge of the Sith? No. Harrison Ford looked genuinely perturbed when the guts of the Millenium Falcon sparked in his face, probably because a chunk of pyrotechnics actually went off near his eyes. For most of Episodes II and III, Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor look at most mildly irritated, even when riding robots through lava for some reason.

The thing is, Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen couldn't see lava-robots, they could just see a giant green room. Which is why they act like they are in a giant green room, and debate betrayal and the nature of good and evil (or something), instead of worrying about the fucking lava.

This is a more fundamental problem than over-use. CGI can't actually be present during recording, so actors have nothing to react to. But this is not a new problem: actors could hardly react realistically to stop-frame animation dinosaurs back in the thirties, and they didn't have to. Model work was separated from the live action sets for reasons of necessity, which meant actors weren't really called on to react to things that weren't there. split screened effects changed the situation slightly, but there was never any interaction with physical objects that weren't in the room. So again the problem isn't with CGI itself, rather its use, which in Episode III was hardly judicious (I think at the end there is a CGI Peter Cushing). So there is a limit to what CGI can do well, but that's true of almost everything in film making. Deciding when to use CGI is also part of good filmmaking.

I think now its time to talk about a real problem with CGI. The 1933 King Kong was a pretty simple movie. It had straight-forward characters with few dimensions that didn't develop, and the plot consisted of a series of set pieces where a giant gorilla broke things, usually people. But to show the gorilla breaking things took hours and hours of stop-frame, slightly adjusting the plasticene models, taking a photo, then repeating: a second of film took about thirty photos. That's really hard, since it takes forever and needs to be really well coordinated. The 2005 King Kong was basically the same story, with some mild character development, and a shitload more action. Instead of stop-framing, the animators built an incredibly detailed CG model, including the underlying bone and muscle structure, as well as software to translate human expressions inot gorilla expression. This was then combined with motion capture from a suit worn by Andy Serkis. I have no idea what most of that means, since like most people I've never done anything like it. I have, however, made models, and know thirty photos is a lot for one second of footage. Here I think is the most important characteristic of CGI. People have no idea how it works, its just "all done with computers". The average movie-goer can't really relate to the effort put into coding, like they can with model making and taking loads and loads of photos. The incredible complexity of CGI also means that opening titles now say "Visual effects by Industrial Light and Magic" with the closing credits full of names that are too small to read. Back in the day there were no closing credits, and the titles said "Special effects by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen" and that was that. So if there is any problem with CGI itself, it is that it is difficult to relate to, since noone knows know who made it or how they did it.

So I hope I have made a good point here, that techinology only makes things better if you use it right, and that art, real art, is better if people know how hard it is to make. I mostly hope though, that noone actually makes a Macgyver Movie.