Compare apples to apples
I mean, this is what your 2024 videogames look like, rendering in real time. I'd say we've come some distance.
And this is what offline CG looks like now. I'm all for repurposing this thread as an appreciation of how far scientists, engineers and artists have pushed CG in the past 30 years.
EDIT: Ugh, this stupid site's terrible image support. Changing links.
I thought this was a close up of a Chihuahua
From behind it seems. They are running away, but the vid is reversed.
Indeed. There still are films with good CGI, but don't expect Disney to spend real money on a movie aimed at kids to get at their pocket money (or their parents sparetime activities budget). The kids won't know the difference.
I mean, Disney put out a casting call several years ago for little people to fill the dwarf roles for a live action Snow White. But Peter Dinklage balked at it, claiming that it was oppressive to cast little people just because they're little and not giving them serious acting roles based on skill or merit.
However, a lot of little people in Hollywood got mad at Peter Dinklage for ruining job opportunities for them, because they're rarely cast for anything else and they had no problem taking the roles based solely on their height.
But it was too late; Disney pulled the casting to avoid controversy and now we're stuck with this CGI abomination to replace little people in this film.
That's awful. A lot of people do a lot of degrading work in life... you do what you gotta do. Besides, I would imagine getting your foot in the door in a big budget movie would do tons for the rest of their careers and could have helped with getting other roles easier. Pretty sure that's how it works for everyone in the industry. Did Peter not do anything like this?
Guess in reality, you first have to afford the bills before being able to afford virtue.
It's such a stupid take on his part
It'd be like a studio needing to fill a role for a black character with a black actor, putting out a casting call for black actors, then a famous black actor coming out against it.
It's stupid and only harms those that he's trying to help.
It's not like the studio was just going to hire the first 7 little people to show up, they were still gonna have to try to get the role.
I'm also confused, hasn't he had plenty of roles that were typecast for little people? The two I know him most for are Game of Thrones (a character with dwarfism in the source material) and Elf (a character who's entire written purpose seems to be "little person that Buddy mistakes for an elf").
yeah its sorta redic of him. Its like saying they should not cast backup dancers because it oppressive to the lithe. They are decent jobs and not everyone can be a starring role.
Peter Dinklage probably feared that other with his medical condition was able to find acting jobs and he would have to fight to find a gig then.
For awhile it was being remade as Snow White and the Seven Magical Creatures then images from the set came out and backlash led to this CGI trash
another win for political correctness, xisters
Time to retire that term. Being "politically correct" in the US clearly means being a bigoted Christian white nationalist, judging by the most recent election.
Most of the stuff in Jurassic park is not CGI
And let's be honest, the stuff that is CGI looks like it's 30 years old
20, maybe. It may have been the paranoia about blending everything together driving so much of the focus for on-set lighting, but a bunch of that is cut and lit the right way to hold up.
Terminator 2, on the other hand, absolutely looks of its age.
I think the original got re-touched up more recently, too. So you'll probably have a hard time finding the theatrical release cgi version to even watch.
We can thank Steve for the leaps and bounds that happened in the early 90’s with CGI - tl;dr he was a brilliant animator who snuck in under the radar at ILM and was given run of the animation department because he/his working partner literally invented many of the cutting edge animation techniques, from scratch.
Dude has a tragic story (personality disorder & alcoholism) that led to him being uncredited and blacklisted, pretty well captured in a biopic, worth the hour-ish watch imo.
- The Abyss, 1991 - Academy Award for Visual Effects
- Terminator 2, 1991 - Liquid Metal for T-1000
- Jurassic Park, 1993 - work featured throughout, with the highlight of the T-Rex’s movement and skeletal modeling
- The Mask, 1994 - Nominated for Academy Award for Visual Effect
Photorealism and stylized animation are not the same thing and are used in different contexts.
That screenshot is so blurry, there is nothing visible that would be wrong with the CGI
Looks a thousand times better. No hair on the dino. The trees were real and the dino was just pasted in behind. It also barely moved and has no lines. It’s almost like you weren’t around to see what else was being put out in cgi at the time. This was during the live run of the show Reboot go watch that to get an idea of computing power at the time.
They knew what they are capable of and acted accordingly, like Spielberg and this wrecked cursed doll in Jaws. They cut every scene keeping in mind that they should avoid giving away how fake it really looks. With these dynos it's the same, they constructed the picture in a way these rubber water hoses fit in.
There they kept that seemingly unfair close shot and oked it. More than that, direct shots right-in-yer-face are usually avoided because they are always uncomfortable even with real actors, but there they doubled down and got the best of uncanny valley effect. I feel like it's more plausible to be a sabotage rather then incompetence.
On other points I agree, gfx jumped seven miles just between these to pictures, but technology can't replace good taste and basic sense.
Bottom image looks like if you asked an AI image generator to give you a screenshot of Sidorovich from Stalker 2.
I think the issue is more that a realistic human shaped like that, no matter how realistic the CGI is, will trigger the uncanny valley effect
I read something about how the best outputs are done using a blend of make-up/models with CGI adding the layer of realism on top so pure CGI is worse but film studies pursue that because its cheaper and outsourcable compared with a heavy unionised make-up/prop workers.
Yeah it's not impressive but I think it's stylized and it's decent enough CG to get a pass. Pinocchio otoh, released not that long ago, that was difficult to look at.
morb
