What older movies made a good use of either side stepping special effects or have effects that somehow still hold up today? Why are they good movies?
What older movies made a good use of either side stepping special effects or have effects that somehow still hold up today? Why are they good movies?
Lord of the Rings effects still hold up, in my opinion at least. The Balrog uses a lot of “hidden” information with the use of blackness to cover up bad cgi. Horse charges are zoomed out far enough to disguise how few horses are actually there. Most of the movies use practical effects though.
There is an enormous amount of CGI in Lord of the Rings that you don’t really notice. Yes they used lots of miniatures and other practical effects, but that only takes you so far. The extended DVDs are full of some of the really cool ways they combined digital and practical. They show PJ “filming” at one point with a block of wood with a mocap ball on it.
They invented an entire new software just to make the huge battle scenes good. That software, Massive, is still used today to simulate giant crowds.
Gollum hasn’t aged perfectly, but pretty well for an entirely CGI character from the early 2000s.
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We had an apprentice at work a few years ago who had never seen those movies. The first was released the year he was born.
I shrivelled into a corpse as he told me that.
Reading this made my back hurt.
Especially when you compare the effects in Lord of the Rings to the Hobbit. You can really see when the studio is overworked and underpaid, even when it’s a studio as good as weta.
I can usually turn a blind eye to bad CGI, but The Hobbit was next-level awful. It wasn’t so much bad as unfinished. I felt I was watching a pirated movie before post production was complete.
Check out the M4 fan edit. I recommend this at every opportunity haha. They cut down the entire extended trilogy into a 4 hour film, covering only the events in The Hobbit novel. One of the many adjustments they make is colour correction, which really helps with the “unfinished” feel you’re talking about. It’s incredibly well done, and aside from a few janky cuts is the definitive version of The Hobbit movies imo.
Yeah, I was racking my brain to find a major movie filmed in the last decade without digital effects so that I could induce a recognition of the passage of time, and I couldn’t manage it. Covid started more than half a decade ago, and modern movies rarely use solely practical effects
Fury Road was almost all practical effects
There is a LOT of CGI in Fury Road.
They did lots of practical stunts, yeah, but each of those shots is then supplemented with CGI. Extra vehicles and scenery and whatnot.
There’s this weird thing where filmmakers like to pretend they don’t use CGI and it makes us as viewers think that CGI is somehow worse.
Edit: Bonus, check out the episode of It Was a Shit Show about Fury Road. It’s fascinating.
They’ve even started adding NFC to behind the scenes footage to make it seem as if something that was CGI actually wasn’t. Someone linked the corridor crew playlist above. They talk about this when they cover Barbie.
What’s NFC in this context? I only know it as Near Field Communication.
Very weird. I’m sure I typed “VFX”. Then again, that’s the kind of thing autocorrect sometimes thinks it knows better than you do about.
Yup, autocorrect loves to think it’s smarter than it is.
So was sicario edit: and the raid, but most isn’t all. Visual effects are simply too tantalizing and/or useful. Particularly for landscapes, I simply don’t notice
It still had 2,000 VFX shots.
Weren’t a good chunk of those simply editing the backgrounds so they didn’t look familiar?