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Comment by Flatcircle | Hacker News Reader

I heard a podcast, (the town with Matt belloni) and he had an CGI guy on from a company called MARS. And the most interesting thing he said is 80 percent of the visual effects in films are cosmetic. Meaning artists are basically photoshopping lines off the faces of older actors to make them look better etc. That's 80 percent of the work!

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Just curious, and this is hacker news so I feel emboldened to ask about linguistic quirks, do you pronounce “CGI” in a way that necessitates an “an” instead of “a” preceding it? If so where are you from and what accent would you say you have? Do you pronounce the letters or the words?

I swear I’m asking from a place of genuine curiosity and am not trying to be a pedantic jerk.

Not a native speaker but I usually see it when using acronyms. Please someone clarify this :)

As the poster commented, it was a typo in this case and should have been "a". But, in general, we would use "an" preceding an acronym whenever the pronunciation of the acronym begins with a vowel sound. To use some broadcast networks as examples, you could say "A CBS production" [analogous to "a CGI"], but "An ABC production" or "An NBC production" (note NBC is pronounced starting with a vowel sound, at the start of "en").

You use `an` in front of an acronym when the first letter of it has a vowel _sound_, even if the letter itself is not a vowel.

Example: "A member of parliament talked to me." "An MP talked to me."

Here when pronouncing the m in `MP` the vowel sound for e is made, as in 'em'.

thank you both!

no that was a mistake, was gonna use a different word. "An effects guy" but at the last minute changed to CGI.

Hah well thanks for humoring me and my apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill.

Matte painting I believe it's called. Green screen is just it taken to the extreme.

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