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Comment by alan_wade | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, I've just watched a behind the scenes video [1] about Mission Impossible: Fallout, and was absolutely shocked by how much of it was shot in real life.

Basically, most of it. When I saw the movie, I would've bet my left kidney that 90% of the effects were green screen, I definitely would never have guessed that the skydivig scene, helicopter chase, and the canyon fight are for real. I could barely believe such canyon existed! Absolutely stunning.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=lCv59-y123g&t=0s

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Here's some great unedited footage from Mad Max: Fury Road, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfm4gvxNW_o

Absolutely surreal. No wonder these scenes were so immersive. Props to all the stunt performers!

Thrilling. I prefer this to the final footage, and I have no problem with CG effects in general.

Agreed, that's incredible. As I watch that it strikes me that one of the underrated uses of CGI is to make practical effects possible that wouldn't have been before. An actor can safely fall out of a helicopter or jump between rooftops, knowing that rigging can easily be painted out.

I believe Tom Cruise learned how to fly a helicopter just for that role. Dude's batshit but he has incredible respect for his craft.

The whole time during that massive car chase, I was just trying to focus on when it was clearly CGI and when it was clearly a real goddamn car chase. The transitions were so seamless that I only caught maybe 3-4 examples of CGI.

Thanks, I enjoyed that a lot more than I enjoyed the actual movie. (although I enjoyed that too) A bit like Burden of Dreams vs Fitzcarraldo[0]. In both pairs, the fictional story seems trivial in a lot of ways compared with the real story. Maybe that's often or usually the case? Well, I don't think it's likely I would've enjoyed Terry Gilliam's Quixote or Jodorowsky's Dune more than I did the amazing documentaries about them. (Lost in La Mancha and Jodorowky's Dune)

[0] Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a Werner Herzog movie about a guy who wants to build an opera house in the jungle, which plan involves hauling a ship over a hill between 2 rivers. Burden of Dreams is Les Blank's documentary about the making of the movie.

MI Fallout was one of the most remarkable movies I've ever seen just for this fact. Might be my favorite film this year.

Makes you wonder why they took the risks at all when special effects are so good that nobody needs to do such things anymore. Maybe they actually made a mistake by getting the scenes so perfect.

I believe that it’s almost always wayyyyyyyy more expensive to CGI the thing. Sort of amazing to think about, but I think smashing up a bunch of cars, flying a bunch of helicopters, etc, is simply much cheaper than faking it with a convincing level of fidelity.

I doubt it's true in this case. Tom Cruise has done 100+ skydiving jumps, spent 6 months learning to fly a helicopter, and for the canyon battle they had to transport a crew of 150 people to the mountain and back every day using the helicopters.

No CGI is that expensive. I think they did it because of the craftsmanship, love for the art, perfectionism, stuff like that.

For the reward. Cruise produced the movie in bigger part. The more money they spent, the bigger write off they got. At least I was explain it that way by a friend who happens to direct in Hollywood for about 12 years now.

That makes very little sense: https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ

>...so good that nobody needs to do such things anymore.

There is a lot of CGI that just looks fake. I would even say most, at least to me. I go back to Star Wars (ep 4). The physical models still look good. The original Blade Runner still looks good. I've also noticed that CGI movies look okay in the theater, but once they hit the high compression formats like Blu-ray or streaming, the CGI really becomes noticeable. The practical stuff still looks good in these formats. Go back and watch Hunt For Red October, and know that during the submarine underwater scenes are just physical models in rooms of smoke to simulate underwater. I really notice when they do 100% CGI characters like Spiderman and Hulk.

I have two maybe contradictory things to say about this. On the one hand, thinking all cgi looks fake is confirmation bias. There is so much cgi you don’t notice (cars for example, look incredibly real). But when you do, it’s because it’s bad.

On the other hand, I agree that 100% cgi characters look bad. I recently watched the latest Avengers and was amazed that with all the budget and years of experience they have, the Hulk looks terrible.

It’s a useful tool, but when it becomes the only tool it gets old. There’s a lot of charm to practical effects. Yeah I can tell that Yoda is just a puppet, but it works.

>On the one hand, thinking all cgi looks fake is confirmation bias. There is so much cgi you don’t notice (cars for example, look incredibly real). But when you do, it’s because it’s bad.

Also known as the Toupée fallacy:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy

I'm not sure its /just/ confirmation bias. CGI scenes are qualitatively different. With CGI there's no limit to what you can put on screen. You want a space battle with 12000 ships, each firing lasers and missles? No problem. Models are different, each one costs.

Compare Star Treks. ST:TNG had the Enterprise and maybe one other model at best. Battles were rare, because that would mean destroying your model, battles were an end of series finale thing. Compare that with a modern Star Trek. Where theres a massive battle every episode.

Reminds me of the hallway fight scene from Inception. The fact that they build an entire rotating set instead of relying on CG is what (I think) makes the scene so much more convincing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PhiSSnaUKk

A somehwat inverse effect. Rather than green-screen all the effects in First Man, lots of scenes were shot in front of an enormous LED display.

Solves a lot of problems with simulating realistic in-cockpit reflections.

Also a good way to make the entire crew queasy. The final Moon approach and landing shots are incredible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZEcwrBcqGs

There's also good old fashioned miniatures for the Saturn V.

Part of this is also particular to Tom Cruise and other obsessive action stars like Jackie Chan who commit to doing as many of their own stunts as possible. That's got to significantly affect that planning for these scenes (and save money).

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