Hollywood’s visual effects crisis
defector.com
defector.com
> when the studios create VFX divisions in 3rd world countries and then tell you if you want to continue your career you'll follow the jobs overseas
This is one of the things that has to get worse before it gets better. You let them, but you don't go there (or maybe you go, who knows). You start growing a spine
Then let them realize that they "can't come knocking" when the studio is somewhere else. Start putting the foot down with deadlines and revisions (nobody said it was going to be easy). Let them see how the quality suffers with an offshore team with much less skin in the game
"Oh but I might lose my job if I don't do how they tell me how to do it", well, yes. But the way things go you'll lose the job eventually when the company go bust
I was under the impression graphics programming is low-paid relative to similarly difficult programming (or even less difficult like framework CRUD).
This could be like when a romantic partner says, “Let’s be friends.”
They usually don’t want to be friends.
Uber for example has always struggled to operate in my country because anytime it tries to push driver wages down, drivers go on a nation wide strike and protest outside its offices. This prevents them from reducing costs without hurting themselves, so they can’t undercut the competition and reap the reward of becoming a de facto monopoly.
A lot of programmers I've met are either narcissists or autists bereft of self-awareness.
If you're a normal person you go into product management.
A coworker once told me that we are "society's elite". That's the level of delusion we're talking about here.
I also do not really believe in this concept in general. Programming skills are not one dimensional, people have different strengths and weaknesses.
Still have no idea what this mythical 1x - 10x number scale maps to. Inspiration can up anyone's game.
To contrast that look at medicine. Doctors have no union. They have a huge barrier to entry but once you are already a doctor then how much you get paid is determined by your skills and where you work. Doctors can get paid millions with enough prestige on them.
Nurses on the other hand have a terminal limit. Every pay increase is gated by another nursing exam giving an additional certificate. Then in the end, the only upgrade is to doctor. However that means losing all benefits, retraining, and starting in a new track despite both professions being medical. Nurses therefore need a union.
Another thing that stops unionization is the ability to work on your own. Nurses with high enough qualifications can work on their own, but in most cases they still need a supervising doctor even if that doctor is only a warm body. VFX pros are much the same. They need a team with them to work on a big budget movie.
Programmers and doctors though can break away and start their own practice, serving the public directly and no one can stop them. With a little business savvy they can even rival the agencies that would have hired them as employees. If your profession can double as a stand-alone business then you rarely get a proper union.
Even in cases (e.g. electricians) where a union is formed, it will still conduct training and certification which positions it somewhat like a guild.
Citation needed.
It doesn't organize medical doctors for working conditions, salary and benefits negotiation, insurance, or most of the other features of a union. A hospital chain doesn't negotiate with the AMA on behalf of their surgeons and hospitalists.
(It would probably be a very good thing if interns and early residents had a union supervising working conditions.)
That's one big reason why I am unlikely to support unionization for the foreseeable future. If an employer treats us like crap, we just leave and either find a better opportunity or start our own business with blackjack and hookers. As a programmer, you can start your own business today by simply offering your services and looking for clients. We aren't nearly as enslaved to our companies as many other professions are.
This is a good thing for standard of care: it's a chain of accountability. Medical supervision is supposed to set local policies and quality gates across a range of different providers. This also extends to EMT's in the field, for example: their supervision says what drugs or procedures they can use, which affects what the ER is expecting when patients arrive.
This is classism in action. There’s no reason a nurse practitioner can’t bear legal responsibility for their actions. As long as it’s unambiguous who is the responsible party whether they are a physician, nurse or physiotherapist there’s a chain of accountability.
The point is there's a system requirement for interfacing one provider to the next, so that if you're receiving a handoff from someone else you know they prepared the patient for the next guy. There's also a malpractice/liability component.
You are saying a NP is the equivalent of an attending physician, which is absurd.
> A meta-analysis of nurse practitioners and nurse midwives in primary care
> This meta-analysis was an evaluation of patient outcomes of nurse practitioners (NPs) and nurse midwives (NMs), compared with those of physicians, in primary care. The sample included 38 NP and 15 NM studies. Thirty-three outcomes were analyzed. In studies that employed randomization to provider, greater patient compliance with treatment recommendations was shown with NPs than with physicians. In studies that controlled for patient risk in ways other than randomization, patient satisfaction and resolution of pathological conditions were greater for NP patients. NPs were equivalent to MDs on most other variables in controlled studies. In studies that controlled for patient risk, NMs used less technology and analgesia than did physicians in intrapartum care of obstetric patients. NMs achieved neonatal outcomes equivalent to those of physicians. Limitations in data from primary studies precluded answering questions of why and under what conditions these outcomes apply and whether these services are cost-effective.
They also enjoy broad exemptions to antitrust law which would otherwise apply. It's why other classes of worker cannot have the same type of protective guild -- it's legal when the ABA or AMA do it and illegal when someone else does it.
Doctors, whether MDs or otherwise, tend to be pretty well-compensated in US broadly.
Lawyers are much more of a mixed bag. White shoe law firms--mostly hiring students from top-tier schools with prestigious clerkships? Big bucks though either make partner or are mostly eased out. Some decent corporate law and successful private practices. But it's generally not a particularly well-compensated profession for someone from a mid to low-tier law school. And lots of people who graduate law school and even pass the bar don't actually end up practicing law.
In Germany doctors are heavily unionized. The largest union, Marburger Bund has 131.000 members.[1] The second largest, Hartmannbund has 70.000 members.[2] For comparision: At the end of 2020, there were 409,121 practising doctors (not including dentists) in Germany.[3]
[1] Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburger_Bund
[2] Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmannbund
[3] Source: https://www.bundesaerztekammer.de/baek/ueber-uns/aerztestati...
for screenwriters, most studios will not even review scripts without going through SAG, according to an awarding screenwriter/director who is a good friend on mine.
I've heard people say to freelance musicians (like myself), that you don't really need the union until you start working in recording or broadcast.
I've not seen a screen actor's contract but I'll bet the provisions for working conditions and rights are a bigger deal than the pay scale. Also, I've read that in general, unionization efforts tend to be triggered by working conditions rather than pay. Even programmers could benefit from that.
It reminds me of the scene from the Simpsons: Homer and Mr. Burns are chilling together in what will become the rocket-house:
Homer: Oh Mr. Burns, you're the richest man I know.
Mr. Burns: Ah yes, but I'd trade it all... for a little more.
Tom Cruise makes (e.g.) $10M for being in a movie, and Jane Doe who plays Waitress #2 gets paid $10K for being in the same movie, and yet they're both part of SAG.
You can create union/guild structures which have a minimum pay scale but not a maximum.
There's your answer. Equalize pay and benefits because there's no telling whether those in charge of assigning pay have any good sense at all for quality. It's the argument of salary vs. hourly vs. per-item all over again.
They'll pay what they think you are worth, and you are free to leave if you think they aren't paying you enough. It's not like there are only two software companies in the entire world and you gotta work for one of them.
Also, we don’t stay long hours because we failed to put a light on the correct place. as the article points out, the issue is the director/production has no financial penalties for their lack of planning and indecisiveness. This is just the Parkinson's law of triviality [0] that happens in most businesses, but since VFX studios don’t put a hard cap on the number of revisions, artists end up absorbing that. One of my recent crunches was due to production going through 43 versions of a magic wand effect. IMO, by version 15, we already had multiple and more interesting looks than what was approved for final. [0] https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
They talked about, among other things, how they had to:
- digitally replace the stunt man's face in many of the action shots because his jawline was too dissimilar to Robert Pattinson's.
- digitally modify a hand because a prop gun misfired in a shot
- enhance the fight scenes to look more visceral and violent
- add rain and rain spatter to the car chase (the parts that weren't already fully digital)
I'm no filmmaker but I felt many of those things could have been done without VFX. Hire a stunt man that looks more like RP, reshoot the scene with the broken prop, forget about rain and/or tone down the epic action set piece, etc.
Instead it seemed like it all just came to rest on the shoulders of the VFX artists.
But probably also a question if how expensive filming days are with the whole crew vs. how expensive VFX artists are. The latter work is also highly parallelizable.
However, I would say: I re-watched GoldenEye recently, and - maybe it was because I'm in the industry and notice these things more - but the blatantly different stunt men (especially landing the Cessna in Cuba: the man looked totally different compared to the actor who should have been flying!) compared to the actors did make me personally go "hang on a moment, who's that?"
Some of this stuff can now also be automated to a degree (not completely, it still requires artist input, and sometimes a lot), but it's not often Rotoing every frame like it used to be ten years or so ago.
Things I'd personally argue aren't worth artists having to work on, but I know they do, are things like skin wrinkle removal on leading actresses, removing mustaches on actors, etc. And the biggest issue is clients changing their mind at the last minute, often having previously signed off on lookdev or anim at the earlier stages, or just generally having to deal with bad set preparation because the 'talent''s time on set is 1000x times more important than the unseen artists, who then have to do loads of work to compensate for badly lit (very un-evenly lit) greenscreens or lighting on set, because the on-set VFX supe was likely ignore when he complained ("Oh, they can just fix it in post").
they should have made a movie about the behind the scenes debate on this matter. execs, the star, the VFX team, and the final reception. coulda been really hilarious, entertaining, and use the situation to their advantage.
It's also obvious that the windshield has been removed for the filming.
Also elevator shots!
Is Hollywood intentionally normalizing this dangerous behaviour? Assholes
Not to speak of all the car races and shootings ...
Another obvious (when you know what you're looking for) tell-tale if the projection is better, is the light direction / shadows within the car compared to what the car's doing: car turns left 90 degrees, but oh no, the sun's still coming from the same direction as before...
I wanna see a larger counter-reaction to all the gloss, and have movies get a lil rougher around the edges, while having the stories & characters be way more refined. Draw attention to the medium's limits, rather than try to make it real, and then it becomes hyperreal/ uncanny.
But I'm guessing the industry will wanna go full immersion (like VR) rather than take a few steps back. Maybe there's room for both, if studios were willing to be more experimental (doubt it!).
Heck, I'll take the Terminator 1 stop motion effects over any scene in the forst half of the last Dr. Strange "movie" (I couldn't bring myself to watch more than that, even Meg is more fun to watch...) any day of the week. Because T1 is still scary and conveys emotion (despair mostly for being chased by an unstoppable killet machine), while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.
As compared to, e.g., the Expense, a ton of sci-fi short films (Dust in a great channel for that on Youtube) or the Mandalorian. I think the over use of CGI is just an easy excuse for bad story telling, and people swallow it.
I think this is the crux of it, moreso than the CGI Orgy (great term btw). You can have movies with visibly apparent CGI, or even straight up animated movies, but the action is great and still drives the plot and pulls on your heart strings. I know every beat of The Matrix by heart, but there's still a ton of suspense in every action shot, because each encounter adds some new angle to the power scaling. At the start, squad of mooks > 1 freedom fighter > several mooks, but even 1 agent is better than several FFs. Then that balance shifts.
Contrast that with the Smiths fight in the later films, and it's totally Conservation of Ninjutsu at play. Adding more baddies just divides the power of a single baddie, because we already know the outcome, so we know 1 Neo = N Smiths.
Watched Aquaman recently, same thing. Completely unprincipled power scaling. No reference frame, and it just scales up and up until it's CGI Army 1 vs CGI Army 2. That spectacle might work if I had more reference for the power levels, plus emotional investment, but I don't.
I have watched so many 2005+ movies, where all the action scenes are just replaced with 'jiggle the screen around', and thus, you see nothing.
Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything.
Someone else mentioned that the reason stunt doubles are changed vfx wise, is because maybe they couldn't find one similar enough.
I call hooey on that, the real issue is cost. Generic stunt doubles are far cheaper than "stunt double who looks like top tier star".
And the jiggle cam is cheaper than a real action scene, and fast cuts are too, because who cares how well it is timed/shot if you can't see it.
I think, much like any industry, all this junk is just cost savings. It also shifts blame, and requires less talent from the director and actors.
I doubt any modern director, or actor, could handle the pressure of expensive shots, dangerous shots, with people running through explosions, or car chases, stunt doubles or not.
Nope. Just throw all that at sfx, and all the stress, cost, and reputation risking shots are no longer an actor's or dieector's issue.
Ah well.
It works in some scenarios but really has been used a lot, likely predominantly, to obscure unreality.
All I know is that shakey cam is incredibly unreal to me. I have never, in my entire life, experienced scenarios where my vision was like a shakey cam, and I say this as someone with a history of racing, stunt driving, and a variety of athletic activities which jostles one about.
When in such real life situations, my body senses motion, my brain sorts it out, and there is no shakey cam effect.
I liken it to making a sound track for a movie, but imagine two people talking, while someone randomly cranks the audio up and down, and changes the aurial position of the speaker randomly.
Sure, that's going to create tension and stress in the movie goer too, but it draws one out of immersion, and is just lazy work.
Intensity can be created with real actual intensity, the shakey cam is a crutch.
Jackie Chan's non-American work is the antithesis of this. Here's a great Every Frame a Painting on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ
It's actually rarely about cost itself, just look at modern movie budget, they didn't exactly get cheaper than 20+ years ago. The main factor is time, predictability and control. When you do it in post with CGI, you always have full control and can change your mind at any time. If you do it practical, you are stuck with whatever you filmed. Going back and doing a reshoot takes a long while, in CGI you just jiggle some parameters and rerender. If your movie-star-lookalike stuntman breaks a leg, you have a problem. If you do it with CGI, it barely matters what you captured in camera, just change it.
With modern movies there is so much CGI to begin with, that it hardly even matters what you filmed, it's not unusual to completely redesign scenes in post, as the script wasn't even finished when they started filmed the thing.
Like everything in our society, the real problem is that the people in charge of managing don't know how to do the work, and rather than listening to, taking feeding, and trusting the people doing the work, they act as if their job is to blindly push orders downwards and micromanage whatever catches their attention. The article ('s followup) touches on this, ("managed to get themselves into really high positions but don’t know how a green screen works... People in the traditional leadership roles are boomers or Gen X guys, and what we do now didn’t exist when they were coming up"), but is naive in thinking that it's going to get better over time. In actuality, the "creatives" of tomorrow are busy gladhanding today, and the dynamic will persist.
I think this is why the production setup of Mandalorian got many VFX people excited, despite Engine being so counter to the standard workflow. It pushed the bulk of CGI to where it belongs - as a backdrop for actual acting and storytelling, and directly fed into the director's real time decision making. There are always going to be touch ups and last minute changes, but those are only practical in the context of having larger structure locked down. There are definitely constraints of the digital backdrop technique (watch Mandalorian again after that video, and you see it in everything), but I look forward to seeing how it might trickle out into the rest of the industry.
The shakycam trope can probably be traced back to The Blair Witch Project, but for the action/thriller genre it really comes from the Bourne series. It's an easy way to add verisimilitude to a fight/chase and lets you skimp on the fight choreography because the fighters can't be seen very well. But personally I find it disorienting, and it took me right out of what everybody says was an excellent Bond film (and might've been if they committed to smooth reasonable action shots rather than shakycam).
At any rate it’s a super lazy crutch for bad choreography. Contrasted with something like the Indiana jones airplane fight scene with its wide shots of the action is like night and day.
It's a win-win: you absorb languages for free as a child, and you later get to enjoy art in its original unmutilated form.
You call it a win win, government calls it "foreign influence"....
Those regimes had a... less practical approach to economics, and maybe they didn't want the population to know western languages as well.
We also translate a lot of books, even though the profit margins aren't that big.
The main source of government-critical information during the Communist era were the radio transmitters (RFE, Czech broadcast of the BBC, Voice of America) which were hardest to stop. Those stations broadcast in Czech and Slovak. Anything that had to cross a physical customs point (movies, books) was heavily censored.
Dubbing movies becomes a problem when you are exposed to the actors’ original voice or the original audio track of movies because dubbing is a poor substitute. And hearing the same voice for different actors breaks immersion.
I find I notice effects a lot more in movies when the story has flat spots. And as I learn more and more about visual story telling. All I think about when watching movies that go heavy on stunts and action "how does this progress the storyline".
Supposing she has a contract on the line for a skin care brand, wouldn’t these “little details” be literally millions’ worth to her ?
But this is the stuff which make the movie cinematic and draws the audience. Hiring a stunt man which looks more like the lead might not be possible - historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc. But this makes the scenes less engaging.
A set with full crew and actors present is extremely expensive. For any mistake which can be fixed with VFX rather then a reshoot, it is probably the prudent financial decision to use VFX.
Those were often done, but other options that increased engagement were having actors do their own stunts (not always appropriate) or casting stunt workers into bigger parts.
i want something like Sin City or Hannibal (the tv show) again, I wouldn't really care if it's not the most technically sophisticated thing ever made.
So many forms of art don't need to be hi-fi, latest & greatest, "realistic," or only conform to the "acceptable" trends of the times.
I think even as a kid, some videogame cut scenes in 2D pixel art got me so hyped/ engaged/ moved.
Same goes for comic books, that were nothing more than black and white line art (granted the line art was executed superbly – what up Akira Toriyama & Bill Watterson!).
One can hope that studios would be more willing to try new things, but they don't even pretend it's about anything other than the bottom line.
I don't doubt filmmaking has always, in the end, been about business or they wouldn't be made. But the captains of the film industry, perhaps in optimizing profit, seem to be all circling the same kind of flashy, effects-laden action film.
I've heard people suggest it's a result of the "globalization of the industry", that action films with "effects > dialog" sells to a Chinese audience, for example. Perhaps there is some truth to it (if so, it suggests again studios optimizing for profit).
I've been on a "1001 Films To See Before You Die" tear for a few years now and it is hard not to see many of these old films and sigh, "When would Hollywood ever make a film like this today?"
Please, can we have another, another "new wave"? More indie cinema please. This market has been ripe for disruption since the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise took root.
Arnold Schwarzenegger played a tough guy in a dozen derisive movies.
Heck, even Ronald Reagan’s later movies felt like they were all the same character in different clothes and a pastiche plot.
Guys are just starting to notice the blatant cash grab additions because the target market for the cutesy ones like bb8 and the porgs is girls and women.
Not financially; these movies earn a fucktillion dollars.
Artistically yes, it's boring at best. But these are not artistic movies.
I don't have to watch them, so I don't, and beyond that I don't really care. That said, I don't quite understand why so many folks keep watching them.
A lot of people don't seem aware that other movies exist. Which is odd as the VFX-laden, action-heavy franchise blockbusters everybody complains about are only a small proportion of movies that are made.
Waititi's comments are blown out of all proportion in this article (and also on Twitter). He points at a CGI character and says "does that look real?" but then similarly points at human characters and says "does he look real?".
It seemed like the monitor they used using in the Vanity Fair video had its brightness set too high, making the scene look more fake than it did in cinemas.
Sound is the same. Producers and directors want to keep their options open as long as possible and then everyone wants to touch the final product so they feel they really earned their credit Being a technician is pretty exhausting and unglamorous, plus if you're too good at what you do it becomes a prison because you're a known quantity and nobody wants to take a risk on giving you upward mobility, but you don't necessarily get paid enough to have any economic autonomy.
Now I work in an adjacent area where I have editorial/creative control, which is great, but also a lot more fraught financially (much like any other startup). I do get annoyed when I hear people criticize the media/entertainment industry; there's a lot of celebs and jerks that deserve criticism, but people outside it mostly assume everyone's on easy street and have no appreciation of the workloads and craft involved.
It seems the special effects industry got the short-end of both cut-throat industries (tech and cinema) without the benefits of any of them
Then they will go broke, and wonder what happened. Again
Taika Waititi sounds like a great guy but that jab was better left unsaid.
I think a lot of people (yes, all around us) think that it's easy just because "it's done in the computer" and they have a menu item to merge somebody's wig into the background just like that. But that's "the business fault" because they don't surface the cost of that upfront
But worse, it lets producers “work around” actors schedules by having them film at different times and locations for the same scene.
If newer movies look blurry and bloomy, it's probably because they're trying to look like old movies.
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> In today’s Hollywood, compositors, along with all of their colleagues, are often left to clean up all of the messes left by writers, actors, directors, producers, and all of the other name-brand talent.
"Clean up all of the messes" sounds awfully derogatory. How about the fact that on-set you might have 50-200 people working at any given time, so doing anything that will delay the next shot by even just 10 minutes can be astonishingly expensive, and not every problem can be predicted in advance. Not to mention things like the sun setting. If something can be fixed in post, it's because it's the better more efficient option, not because people meant to leave a "mess".
> is being left to a post-production workforce that is disparate, overworked, confused, and exploited.
News flash: the production workforce is just as disparate, overworked, confused, and exploited. 16 hour days and 6 day weeks are standard for everyone involved. Not saying this is good either, but setup for each day and shoot takes so long (just think the hours spent in daily hair, makeup and wardrobe for actors) that days need to be 16 hours long just to get in a reasonable amount of shooting.
Visual effects may be difficult and suck, but everything in production is like that. I just don't like how this article seems to frame it that the regular production side of things somehow has things easier.
I can recall several years of having to learn how to do things in so many different applications that dictated the end product because the applications were very complex to use, and quite time consuming. I couldn't understand how friends were paid less than application developers (Around 60k annually) to do some of the most impressive VFX things I've observed in commercials and movies, and it was very hard for them to find work even when they had great portfolios.
Fast forward to now, there are mobile apps that can edit videos, and add effects, color grading, etc to videos. I can literally run a video editing session in my car that outputs better product far more quickly than I used to be able to do with $2k software... Even mobile software that can work with object files... Making the process of creation easier will likely be the best field for innovation moving forward. Making things more simple will also save studios and VFX editors tons of money, time and grief.
TikTok formats are dominating the entertainment world right now, VFX movies are beginning to look disingenuous because they either overdo effects, or they cut corners and make things low quality, relying too much on the power of celebrity to push the movie forward... Viewers are also worn out by actors trying to take cues on green screen sets, it comes across often as far too staged, or far too busy visually.
Movies where the VFX trump everything else end up being weak on writing and emotional composition in my opinion. Movies that rely on celebrity become very weak on VFX... I think good movies come from a great script that can be used to plan everything that comes thereafter, and then the quality of the final product depends on the vision of the director and execution of the team involved.
Movies like Blade, Hancock, Ant Man, and even more recent work like "The Boys" are some of my personal favorites because VFX are not the primary hitch to the stories... Avatar completely lost me, even though far more money was spent to make it. VFX is a support tool to great films, when it becomes the primary aspect, the script suffers and budgets balloon, and the worst part is that movies take 5 years to make instead of just taking one.
…what? To pick a random example Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987 with ILM doing the effects. Is the author really claiming visual effects departments sprung into existence in 2012? That’s ridiculous.
Why change when it's working so well?
> “When you see something like the first third of Doctor Strange, you’re like, Why not do something more interesting, where you’re not straining your budget and 1,000 artists to try and make something that you know is going to look substandard? Why not try something else when you have a good director like Sam Raimi?“
... followed by the original paragraph.
There's no big shocking revelation that backs up the "not a cohesive whole" point imo.
I'm a video game developer and I struggle to enjoy the games I work on - all I can see is the bugs and the areas we didn't deliver or where we changed the artistic vision or where yes, we had to re-do certain systems a hundred times. And yet, people seem to enjoy them. They review well. So maybe my opinion as a developer isn't really worth that much.
I feel the same about the opinion you copied here - having watched Multiverse of Madness 3 times now I don't see any issue with the opening sequence. It looks pretty good from visual standpoint in fact. But I'm sure a trained VFX artist can point out the areas where it fell short and how many times they had to change it. The only visual effect in this entire film that stood out to me as "bad" was the sequence with illuminati right after they killed their thanos - that just looks like a poor Photoshop.
I’m curious why you think that. I thought it was one of the most boring Marvel films in the franchise, and I’m surprised I was able to stay awake for the entire thing. On the other hand, its twin, "Everything Everywhere All at Once", had me deeply engrossed and interested.
I've watched it 3 times now and I still love it - it's their best film since Infinity War, everything else after that was very much meh.
In contrast to DC movies - very hit and miss in quality, but you can at least watch a movie without having to follow a dozen other TV shows and other films in the franchise.
But - I can also see why this is a problem - you're right that people who haven't seen Wandavision would be very confused by this film. Wanda went from being a hero in Infinity War/Endgame, to suddenly being a villain.
No one else has really cared about it since then.
That said, Dredd 3D was a high mark in 3D because it was almost all native, especially the component effects photography (the Slo-Mo scenes in particular blew me away). The few upconverted shots stick out like sore thumbs. Upconversion can be done well - see T2 3D, which was mesmerizing - but nowadays 3D conversion is now just another VFX workflow with the same drawbacks.
TIL
This meant that in the middle movies, they went through puberty. My generation of VFX people cut their teeth doing puberty based acne removal. Both harry and ron had pretty bad zits, and because continuity is kind, the needed to be removed.
Meryl Streep in MamaMia had "digital makeup" applied by one bloke working the night shift.
I don't understand why 60fps is the default for all nrw productions. Lots of movies today cut the action into tiny pieces, make the camera shake a lot and the set itself may shake as well. With 24 frames per second one can hardly see anything but blurred colors. Slow camera pans also tend to become choppy and unpleasant to lool at.
The "we'll fix it in post" attitude in particular has been around for as long as computers have been used in VFX.
The backgrounds are “real” and can be captured in-camera, so there is no need for special effects to blend hair. Similarly, reflective surfaces aren’t a problem either.
This was used to good effect for the Mandalorian series where the protagonist wears shiny metal armour.
If you want to talk about The Mandalorian, IMDB credits over 380 compositors on that series. In-camera effects are fantastic, but they’re not reducing the visual effects burden.
Even when the background is updated in real time according to the camera position?
My understanding it the rendering is done at higher quality when the background is the cameras field of view to save resources.. the rest is there just for ambient light.
Of course this takes a lot of pre planning, but those virtual set ups kinda always do.
No the main problem is indecision.
As other people have pointed out, virtual sets require a solid and stable vision of what the story and look of the movie is going to be, before filming starts.
Some film makers work like this. For example medium to high budget TV shows between 2010-2018 (before marvel basically.) Notably also chris noland.
There are numerous examples of poor planning/indecision: the two poorer modern james bonds (quantum and spectre) both started shooting before the script was fixed. So loads had to be made up in editing.
Another example is this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfVu52tZxd0 "the sand room" from prince of persia. This was designed, scripted and executed by one of the VFX houses, because the producers realised that they had no way to link the two halves of the film.
This example here: https://clash-of-the-titans.fandom.com/wiki/Deities?file=Zeu...
In Clash of the titans (2010) they spent loads of money making mount olympus with a real set. Hired all the old masters. after filming, the producers were like "Nah, I don't like that, lets make it like google maps". So the set was removed (I'm not sure if it was digitally done or a reshoot).
Then Hades's cloak was a pain because the producers first wanted smoke. Then ink, then smokey ink.
As alluded to in the post, the producers can get away with this because the contract is to do as many revisions until its done. There is little to no cost hit to the producers of the film to fiddle, be indecisive or back track.
No virtual production does not solve VFX. Many reasons including the ability of the screens in resolution and max lumens, and the fact that a VP stage doesn’t allow you to shoot anything, because of size and other limitations. It also won’t add a CG character in front of your characters.
Such arrogance! “This is a solved problem”…
basically you use a game engine (unreal typically) to act if front of circular led tv wall and act inside. It helps with ambient lighting.
Details about the madelorian from Disney use of this:.
https://www.starwars.com/news/the-mandalorian-stagecraft-fea...
Industrial light and magic (vfx house of old) has a bunch of these setups to rent now. Stagecraft is what they call it.
While at the same time, when seeing that initial shot I could immediately tell the background was fake. Like in any fake-ass marvel-movie.
And I’m not into VFX tech, I’m not into the industry as whole. I’m just a casual movie-watcher (going from being a hard-core movie-watcher), and my involvement in these movies is getting lower and lower as the movies increasingly gets less and less real.
The last truly great movie I saw was Mad Max Fury Road. It has you engaged all the way through, because everything which matters there actually is real, something your mind can tell.
I recently saw Bullet Train. It was OKish because it was mostly about characters, and it had a semi-decent story to tie it all together. All the excessive VFX bits at the end was pretty “meh“ though. It would have been a better movie without it.
This comparison is increasingly out of date. From my experience and what I've heard, the notion of video game developers crunching is getting rarer and rarer, while I haven't heard of any such trend in visual effects.
That said, while reading this article I did think about Dogme 95, and started wondering what a similar manifesto specifically related to the use of VFX would look like, if it were maybe a little bit less reactionary, and more tailored to "how do we make VFX an integrated, manageable, sustainable part of movies?". Has anybody done this already?
As I understand it the reason things get out of control on big movies is that there's no incentive to plan shots properly or be decisive, because VFX houses are expected to sign stupid contracts. There are smaller movies where people are more disciplined, eg. Monsters, where I believe director Gareth Edwards did all the VFX himself.
Taking existing footage and in words accepting instructions like "remove the facial hair on X"
I worked for hardware manufacturers for all my career.
It involved a brazen disdain for software, yet also an assumption that hardware defects could be "spackled over," using "magic" software.
I really enjoyed the VFX in Miss Marvel. They obviously really enjoyed their job, and they had the advantage of not having to look "real."
A few random thoughts…
There is a massive industry-wide labor shortage and a massive surplus of work to be done. Artist rates are way up, there are more junior artists than ever, there are more shows with more VFX than ever, VFX shops are turning away tons of work, new shops are springing up, investment groups are buying and consolidating VFX houses to try and become big players, etc. This is a boom time for VFX.
This is absolutely a (labor) seller’s market. Individuals and companies that are not taking advantage of this to create a better environment for themselves are missing a huge opportunity. There’s never been a better time to quit a job you don’t like and find a better one. Or to start a company!
It’s not actually true that the contracts allow studios like Marvel to make whatever changes they want at any time. I’m sure it can feel like that to artists at times but that’s not how it works. Contracts are negotiated at a fixed price for a certain scope of work, with the tacit understanding that both parties will be flexible. If requests for changes push that scope of work outside the original deal VFX studios can negotiate overages and schedule changes (and they’re free to attempt this at any time). It is totally within their power to be firm and demand livable contracts. But… it’s a subtle art. Like any human endeavor or any contract worth tens of millions of dollars trade offs and accommodations are made. No vendor wants to leave a client high and dry or totally screw them over, and no client wants to ruin their relationship with a vendor they rely on. I can’t imagine there’s anything about this that is specific to either the visual effects industry or the movie industry. There are a lot of people running VFX companies that are simply bad at this part of the job and get themselves into hot water. When that happens it’s the front line workers (as always) who have to work the extra hours.
That said, there are a number of (very large) companies where it is absolutely normal to work 6 days a week 10 to 12 hours a day. This is not a secret, it’s been very common for a very long time. Personally, I wouldn’t work for a company like that.
What we’re experiencing is a huge shift in how movies are made and an industry that is struggling to keep up. Workflows, infrastructures, and tool chains designed for how movies were made for decades are being pushed to the limit, both because of the volume of work and the way in which people want to work. We’re moving from a world where everything had to be planned way in advance (because of how massively expensive and slow everything was) to one where we’re expected to be more improvisational (because of how much much cheaper and faster it is to do the work). You can’t characterize that as a change from a good way of working to a bad one, it’s simply change. One with countless industries have also faced.
And keep in mind that just like any other industry, many of the changes to the film/tv business are technology driven, and VFX is at the forefront of that. So producers looking to totally reinvent how movies are made end up using the VFX industry to do it. If you take VFX out of the conversation there is little that’s changed (technologically) about how movies are made in the last 20 years. So VFX is baring the brunt of the changes that are happening in the larger industry.
Webb would like a word...
[1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2019/20/4377...
> And the disrespect for VFX workers, my god, they should come join an ops team they’d get more respect.
> I guess it’s kinda to be expected when you’re just perpetually milking cash cow IP to death (hardly the innovation it once was)
I can’t help but smile reading this.
Replace “studios” with “organization at big tech company”.
Replace “vfx workers” with “software development engineers”
Replace “cash cow IP” with “legacy systems that still bring in $$$”, although yeah there’s IP there too from a while ago.
Sorry, I don’t mean to take this completely on a tangent, but I can’t help but think there are similarities here.
* Devs are harder to find and currently they are likely to flat-out refuse to work on location * In dev, "time+materials" (bill by the hour) is much more prevalent.
One of the reasons VFX work is so miserable is that the producers will try to place a project in the cheapest locality and with a fixed bid, implying an unlimited amount of change requests as long as the deadline is not passed. One of the best medicines against the indecision and non-commitment from clients is making them pay for time spent (both waiting while they meddle and working when the umpteenth change requests comes about). This works very well - it does imply you have to fire clients who do not want to work like this.
VFX studios are in a bind because if you want to work "big ticket stuff" (Marvel etc.) they will negotiate hard on contracts, they will want insane deadlines, and they will want fixed bid. And they will want you to be in a locality which provides tax breaks.
I'm not partial to old movies, but there are some gems, and they show how much you can do without modern VFX. I don't know what modern live-action movies were even improved by fancy effects besides The Matrix, which was awesome. Even when the scene is about action, it's cooler when it's realistic, like the Blues Brothers chase where they're actually driving 118 MPH and 104 real cars are getting wrecked.
The Revenant is one of the last movies in recent memory that seemed to do something novel.
If we’re going to primarily be inundated with highly computer-influenced content, I prefer it to not try to look perfectly real which is why I’ve really enjoyed some of the animated series that have popped up recently. I’ll also admit that I’ve seen Into the Spider-Verse because my friends wouldn’t let me avoid it. I’ll give Marvel a pass on that one—the animation is amazing.
This reminds me: you know that scene in Tenet where a Boeing goes into building? It was neither VFX nor a model. It was a full size, real Boeing. Nolan said it was cheaper.
Credit where credit is due: Spider-verse is the result of the phenomenal teams at Sony Pictures Imageworks. They absolutely nailed this movie, I could rewatch it countless times and still be amazed.
SPI has also produced some amazing technology for the industry, such as being the originator of the Arnold render engine, OpenColorIO (OCIO), and Open Shading Language (OSL).
In Matrix reloaded they replaced them.
The result was inferior.
And the Uncharted games are great. They have good characterization, good writing and funny comedy bits. None of these were present in the movie.
Was there ever a movie made based on a video game which was good? I can't think of one.
Also Steins;Gate, though that's a visual novel turned anime, not a regular game. But probably the best example of staying very close to the source material and succeeding.
Same, but for a different reason: I saw too much of how the "sausage gets made", and watching an artistically shitty Marvel blockbuster just doesn't provide enough entertainment to "zone out" of the human suffering that goes into producing that stuff.
Perhaps, but then again people have been saying that about Hollywood since at least the 1930's. Hollywood has always been an industry aimed at making money thorough entertaining people. Sometimes this has resulted in great art being created, and Hollywood is not averse to art as long as it makes money.
What worries me is that I watch these productions because they are the lowest common denominator, the kind of thing attractive to my friends and partners who didn't finish high school.
These movies, to justify their budgets and make the money back, have to be appealing to the widest possible audience. Therefore, they can not afford to hurt any sensibilities, and their plots need to happen in worlds as disconnected as possible from our reality. They can't be neither "political" nor "well-educated" in any obvious way. So when anybody watches a Marvel movie, they are maximizing their social futility, the amount of brain-bleaching they get. Worse, they are not using their time to assess/judge the work of a smaller studio who wants to bring public attention to something more concrete.
It is like social media.
Republicans led states do not. That seems to be clear evidence indicating one cares more about labor than the other.
Democrats also almost passed significant child care benefits and tax credits in the original build back better bill in 2021, which of course was voted against by every Republican. Even a single Republican voting with the Democrats would have enabled millions of poorer families with children.
In my entire adult lift (since 2000) I cannot recall a single bill proposed by Republics to benefit lower income/poorer people. I do know they pushed through two wars and a bunch of tax cuts.
I know Democrats tried to reform healthcare as early as mid 1990s (which then culminated in Affordable Care Act).
Seems like pretty conclusive evidence that the parties are not the same at the federal level too, and the voting rules at the Senate level do not leave any options other than severe compromise.
The problem, of course, is that both parties (though not Bernie Sanders) are beholden to big corporate interests. So they have to fight for lukewarm policy that doesn't really excite the people, but satisfies their major donors. They could fix this by advocating for election reform, but I don't think the party establishment really wants to change that.
It is worth noting that Bernie Sanders even did a town hall style meeting on FOX news, with positive reception. The Democratic Party could see the value in what Bernie was doing and support candidates like him, but they choose to go after big corporate interests instead. And I think that is their folly.
> but they choose to go after big corporate interests instead.
Yet we established in this very comment chain that Democrats have passed some significant bills against big corporate interests, and Republicans have done the opposite.
And yet this is a clearly identified phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanders%E2%80%93Trump_voters
> Yet we established in this very comment chain that Democrats have passed some significant bills against big corporate interests
I don't believe we established that? I allowed that these two bills you mentioned may have benefited labor, but that is not the same as going against big corporate interest. Certainly some labor policy would go against corporate interests (and that policy I believe is unsuccessful), but the ACA has been described as a massive government handout to insurance companies.
https://socialistworker.org/2013/10/31/paying-the-price-for-...