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Comment by qrohlf | Hacker News Reader

My favorite example of this is the fact that in the film "Knives Out", the looming oil painting of Harlan (the murdered patriarch) was actually just a green square all throughout filming - the oil painting itself was digitally comped in during post.

Is Knives Out still a good movie? Yes. Would it have been possibly, perceptibly better if the actors had a real eyeline to work with on that painting, or the camera work was done with the cinematographer being able to see the real painting through the lens? Maybe.

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Just seems lazy in that case really, what was the excuse? They didn't commission the artwork soon enough? Couldn't come to a decision on what the painting should look like soon enough?

Think filmmakers are just too used to large amounts of post work so you end up with this lack of decision making and things become bland and diluted.

If you didn't read this post, you would have had no idea the painting was CGI. Calling it lazy is probably as justified as if your boss called you lazy for using a third party library like Python Requests instead of writing your own http library.

The fact is there is more CGI in modern films then you know. There are a million videos like this, but this [1] video on CGI in David Fincher films is really worth a watch to get a small understanding on how modern CGI is used in films in ways you might not have noticed or thought about.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QChWIFi8fOY

We don’t consciously notice it. But it may make the film worse because we subconsciously notice something wrong, or because the actors don’t act as well without the real props and setting to help them.

Well I consciously notice that Knives Out is a pretty good movie, so I think the conversation of what we subconsciously notice or not in this case is pretty silly.

This isn't an especially compelling theory without some data to back it up. Not to mention some less nebulous criteria for good or bad films.

> This isn't an especially compelling theory without some data to back it up.

It's not difficult to reason how a real painting could plausibly incite a more realistic performance out of actors than a green screen. This trope of asking for "data to back it up" for the most obvious things is tiring. This is an internet message board, not a top tier scientific journal. You can ask for evidence if you want, but do you really need to do that in this case?

> You can ask for evidence if you want, but do you really need to do that in this case?

I mean, the job is called "acting" and I'd think someone is a pretty bad actor if they can't pretend it's a real painting instead of a fake. They're already pretending to be an entirely different person, in an entirely different setting, dealing with a reality that often has extremely different rules than ours.

So, yeah, it seems like a pretty extraordinary claim to insist that they can handle stunt doubles, fake props, and painted backgrounds... but a single green screen painting is just too much for them to handle.

> So, yeah, it seems like a pretty extraordinary claim to insist that they can handle stunt doubles, fake props, and painted backgrounds... but a single green screen painting is just too much for them to handle.

Nobody said that the problem is a single green screen painting. Since you read the OP, you know that the OP laid an argument against the prevalence of CGI, specifically how overt use of CGI leads to movies feeling less realistic. This single green screen painting is merely one small thing contributing to the overall problem. But now we're asking for scientific studies to conclusively prove at p<0.05 that having a single green screen painting on set reduces actor performance? If you genuinely want that level of proof, why are you reading anything on the internet at all? Nothing you read should be convincing to you of opinions you don't already hold.

I’m not sure if this is the reason, but the lighting on the painting, and the expression and pose of the subject, change subtly from scene to scene- reflecting the story as it unfolds.

The painting also changes over the course of the movie... Of course they could have just made more than one painting.

I do think it probably just wasn't ready, but you should probably see this as a win for quality: they got to take more time to get the painting they wanted without delaying production, and paid no visible price for it.

I would never have known that the painting was pasted in had I not read it here. I have been contemplating watching the movie again, maybe I should wait another year or two first. Now I want to pay more attention to this detail.

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