CGI Isn't Ruining Movies?
45sChallenges a common belief with a bold claim, sparking curiosity and debate.
▶ Play ClipAI Summary
This video essay argues that computer-generated visual effects (CG) are not ruining movies, but rather that bad CG is the result of poor execution, time, and budget constraints. The creator explains that when done well, CG is invisible and serves the story, and that modern films are far more reliant on CG than audiences realize.
Chapters
[00:00]
The Common Complaint
The video opens by addressing the widespread belief that CG effects are ruining movies, with audiences nostalgic for a time of practical effects.
[00:42]
The Invisibility of Good CG
The creator counters that we only notice bad CG; excellent CG is everywhere but invisible because it serves story and character.
[01:21]
Computers Excel at Hard Surfaces
CG is particularly good at rendering objects like cars, buildings, and furniture. Aerial shots of vehicles are almost always CGI, and car crashes are often simulated for safety.
[02:02]
Full CG Environments and Characters
Entire cities, like New York in The Avengers, are built in CG. Even actors like Robert Downey Jr. are often fully replaced with CGI, with the practical suit used only for reference.
[02:27]
The Challenge of Humans and Animals
Humans are the hardest to render convincingly because we are so attuned to facial details. However, distant crowds and animals are now routinely created in CG.
[03:15]
Simulating Nature
Computers handle water, explosions, fire, and smoke well. For example, CG waves were used in Titanic (1997), and filmmakers often blend real fire with CG for realism.
[03:58]
The Physics Problem
The main weakness of CG is physics; objects often feel too light. Animators use real-world reference footage and data to combat this.
[04:28]
Gravity and Mad Max Fury Road
Gravity is nearly 100% CGI, including Sandra Bullock's body. Mad Max Fury Road, often praised for practical effects, still relies heavily on CG for backgrounds and compositing.
[05:21]
The Blend of Practical and Digital
Michael Bay's films are cited as a good example of blending practical explosions with ILM's CG to create a greater whole.
[05:33]
Why Bad CG Happens
Bad CG is usually due to lack of time and money. The VFX industry is highly competitive with razor-thin margins, leading to rushed work.
[06:21]
The Real Problem
Great movies with dated effects are forgiven because story and character matter more. The issue isn't CG itself, but the quality of the film and how the tool is used.
CG is a tool, and its success depends on the filmmaker's skill and the story's strength. Bad effects are a symptom of bad filmmaking, not the cause.
Mentioned in this Video
💡 Key Takeaways
💡
Good CG is invisible
This is the core thesis of the video, reframing the debate from 'CG vs practical' to 'good vs bad execution.'
00:42
📊
Full CG actors
Reveals that even lead actors are often fully replaced with CGI, a fact many viewers don't realize.
02:02
📊
Gravity is nearly 100% CGI
A concrete example that challenges the assumption that 'realistic' films rely on practical effects.
04:28
💡
Bad CG is a business problem
Explains that the VFX industry's competitive, low-margin environment leads to rushed work, not a lack of talent.
05:33
⚖️
The real problem is the movie
Shifts blame from the tool to the filmmaker, a nuanced take that encourages better storytelling.
06:21Full Transcript
[00:00] Let me ask you a question. Do you think computer-generated visual effects are ruining movies these days? Your eyes glaze at the glut of glossy CGI-stuffed summer blockbusters. Your fingers rage across subreddits and message boards about a simpler,
[00:14] better time, back before computers ruined movies. If only we could return to the cinema of years past, the cinema of 1992 or 95, like, I don't know, when did the first traffic truck come out again?
[00:26] Whatever year that was. Man, that movie holds up, right? You know why? It's because they use practical effects. And you hear that a lot these days, too. How practical effects are always better, and film editors just need to use more of them. Because the fact is, computer-generated visual effects look bad, and they're ruining movies.
[00:42] Right? You see, I don't think so. I think the reason we think CG looks bad is because we only see bad CG. See, amazing, wonderfully executed CG is everywhere. You just don't know it.
[00:54] When done well and paired with solid storytelling, you will rarely notice that what you're looking at was churned up by a dirty, soulless computer in some kiwi basement. It's because great visual effects serve story and character, and in doing so are, by their very definition, invisible.
[01:08] And the way you get great images has nothing to do with doing more practically, although, you know, certainly that can help. It has to do with understanding the strengths and weaknesses of what the computer can do, and playing to those strengths while supplementing the weaknesses with other techniques.
[01:21] Like right now computers are really good at rendering things. Cars, tables, chairs, buildings, solved objects. Computers handle that stuff fantastically and it's used all the time. You don't even realize it. Like vehicles. So, if you see any movie when you're in the air and you're following a car on the street, that's a CGI car.
[01:37] Any time you're in the air and basically see anything moving, another helicopter, a plane, what have you, that's probably CG too. Like obviously this is. But so is this. Car crashes too are using CG cars and it's much safer that way.
[01:49] And sometimes it was the entire city I mean Iron Man flying through Manhattan in the Avengers the entirety of New York was built from reference photos in a computer allowing them to fly the camera around wherever they needed it to I think it was Iron Man himself.
[02:02] I mean, sure, duh, I hear you thinking, when Iron Man's flying around, of course that's CG. But did you realize that it's fully CG even with just Robert Downey Jr. standing around? I mean, he shot a real actual metal suit for reference for the first movie, and then they replaced the entire thing with CGI.
[02:14] Robert Downey Jr. barely wears a practical suit these days when they shoot these things. They just slap it on him in the computer. Computers are also pretty good at stuff like more complex materials, stuff like cloth, animal fur, and skin. Skin was a real challenge at first,
[02:27] because at the time, Final Fantasy's spiritual thing was bragging that they were photorealistic, and Didgeridoo Mane's early attempt at Neo in The Matrix Reloaded, well, these days looks pretty artificial. But the same technology and the team that worked on him
[02:39] got better by the third Matrix movie, and then got really good by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That's a long way. Old Man Button's face is actually fully 100% CGI, even though a lot of people thought it was a makeup effect.
[02:51] But the thing is, human beings are still super difficult. It may be because we're so used to what other human beings look like, so any anomaly sticks out to us. Far away human beings, though, has no problem. They don't hire nearly as many extras as they used to
[03:03] because large crowds can be built and animated inside the computer. Now, animals, we're pretty good at. I mean, I think so. Look, I'm not a shark, so if you ask a magical talking shark what he thought about this shark, he might think it looks weird.
[03:15] But I feel like you have better things to talk to him about. When it comes to stimulating our world's water, computers are down. They were doing CG waves back in 1997 for Titanic. Explosions, fire, and smoke, generally okay depending
[03:27] on who's doing it and also the context. Sometimes they can look a little weird, like people breathing in cold environments, and other times you never even realize that they didn't actually blow something up. You'll notice that in this example Fincher and his
[03:39] VFX supervisor Eric Barber made sure to have some real fire in the scene, which is helpful for the VFX artists when it comes time to combine CG elements with real ones And in the hands of Neil Blomkamp and Imogen for example simulated reality should look really fantastic Physics though continues to be the tough part of this because while the materials might pass the test of looking photorealistic oftentimes the animation
[03:58] betrays the fact that it's CG. A common feeling of CG objects is that they seem too light or they don't seem to have enough weight. To try and combat this, most of the time the animators will work off of some kind of real-world reference, be it reference footage or actual
[04:11] reference data captured from an actor. Put it all together and you can get some amazing work. I mean, top of my list is F of the Chlorone and Framesource Gravity. Take a look at this shot, for example. We're going to freeze frame it. How much of this do you think is practical and how much of this do you think is CG? Eh, eh, surprising, right? Not only are most of
[04:28] the environments in this movie not real, a lot of times most of Sandra Bullock isn't even real. I mean, this is the rig they put her in. There are times when you see her body is fully CG minus her head and face. In fact, gigantic chunks of this movie are nearly 100%
[04:41] CGI. And when it comes to blending practical and digital, George Miller basically drops a mic on Mad Max Fury Road. What's interesting here is that when you look at this visual effect breakdown, there's a lot of CG still happening. In these backgrounds, those canyons.
[04:54] Here, they're taking practical footage of other cars to add back into this shot. Everybody pointed out this movie as an example of how good practical effects should be, but if you watch and listen to interviews and behind the scenes, you're not too surprised to find that Miller was completely comfortable letting CG artists do a lot of stuff in the computer
[05:09] for this movie. And speaking of practical elements, Michael Bay, love him or hate him, is a director who also understands how the blend of practical elements and computer imagery can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Every glorious frame of his action
[05:21] blends real practical explosions and practical elements in some of the best CG works of all time by ILM. And I hope by now you've realized that modern movies are a chock full of visual effects, maybe even more than you previously thought. And while it's easy
[05:33] to sit back and cherry-pick bad visual effects and blame the industry for making movies the way they are, you're really not seeing the whole picture when you do that. The reason is you can usually boil down bad quality visual effects to basically two reasons It money and time And the whole visual effects industry is in a tough spot You have a very competitive landscape There razor margins
[05:51] Studios looking for vendors who can profit the most, the fastest, at the lowest price. I mean, think about this. Visual effects artists combine incredible artistry and technical skill, toiling over shots for hours, and if they do their job well, nobody even notices it.
[06:05] But they still do it. And if that's not the definition of love for your craft, I don't know what is. Finally, let me leave you with this. You ever wonder why you almost never see a great movie with awful visual effects? I mean, even classics with practical effects that might look dated to our modern sensibilities.
[06:21] We don't really seem to mind those, and audiences certainly didn't at the time. Maybe it's because we don't have much to complain about when it comes to great movies. The craft and storytelling so enchants us that we're not, in the back of our heads, looking for an easy scapegoat.
[06:33] And when we think about a great movie, I mean, what do we think about? We think about story, we think about character. and when the visual effects aren't perfect, we forgive it. So maybe the reason why people seem to think visual effects are ruining movies isn't really a problem with the visual effects.
[06:47] Maybe it's just a problem with the movies themselves. Because visual effects have, since the beginning of cinema, always been a part of this art form. And CG, just like every innovation in cinema, is simply a tool on the filmmaker's tool belt to tell a story.
[06:59] But when the end result is bad, maybe it's really not the tool's fault. Maybe it's on the filmmaker to use the tool wisely. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this ramble about visual effects.
[07:11] This is part of an ongoing series of visual essays we're doing as part of the Rocket Jump Film School. If the craft is still making interest to you at all, I recommend you subscribe to this channel and check out some of the other videos that we have. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll see you next time.
[07:32] Thank you.
