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Comment by vertexmachina | Hacker News Reader

A lot of what this article talks about rings true in a presentation I watched recently by the team at Weta Digital which did the VFX for The Batman

They talked about, among other things, how they had to:

- digitally replace the stunt man's face in many of the action shots because his jawline was too dissimilar to Robert Pattinson's.

- digitally modify a hand because a prop gun misfired in a shot

- enhance the fight scenes to look more visceral and violent

- add rain and rain spatter to the car chase (the parts that weren't already fully digital)

I'm no filmmaker but I felt many of those things could have been done without VFX. Hire a stunt man that looks more like RP, reshoot the scene with the broken prop, forget about rain and/or tone down the epic action set piece, etc.

Instead it seemed like it all just came to rest on the shoulders of the VFX artists.

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As someone in the VFX industry myself (but as a software dev writing the tools the artists use), I'd argue those examples are generally useful work being done on the movie to make things "more real". Whether it's worth it, is going to be very opinionated.

However, I would say: I re-watched GoldenEye recently, and - maybe it was because I'm in the industry and notice these things more - but the blatantly different stunt men (especially landing the Cessna in Cuba: the man looked totally different compared to the actor who should have been flying!) compared to the actors did make me personally go "hang on a moment, who's that?"

Some of this stuff can now also be automated to a degree (not completely, it still requires artist input, and sometimes a lot), but it's not often Rotoing every frame like it used to be ten years or so ago.

Things I'd personally argue aren't worth artists having to work on, but I know they do, are things like skin wrinkle removal on leading actresses, removing mustaches on actors, etc. And the biggest issue is clients changing their mind at the last minute, often having previously signed off on lookdev or anim at the earlier stages, or just generally having to deal with bad set preparation because the 'talent''s time on set is 1000x times more important than the unseen artists, who then have to do loads of work to compensate for badly lit (very un-evenly lit) greenscreens or lighting on set, because the on-set VFX supe was likely ignore when he complained ("Oh, they can just fix it in post").

But Superman with a mustache would have looked weird.

Ok, now I want to see Magnum P.I. era Tom Selleck as Superman.

deep fake to the rescue

He would have looked like Omni-Man.

to be fair, Henry Cavill looked even weirder with his CGI-removed "shaved" face as well.

they should have made a movie about the behind the scenes debate on this matter. execs, the star, the VFX team, and the final reception. coulda been really hilarious, entertaining, and use the situation to their advantage.

Once I knew what process shots were, I just can't unsee them in older movies. In particular, where the actors are driving in a car, when the background is clearly a rear projection on a screen.

It's also obvious that the windshield has been removed for the filming.

> It's also obvious that the windshield has been removed for the filming.

Also elevator shots!

Not not mention that they tug the steering wheel back and forth as if they were playing real life frogger just to signal that they are "busy doing something". This doesn't make sense either.

It always seemed to me like there was a simple solution. Record the steering wheel movements of the stunt car. Use a motor in the fake car to replay the steering wheel movements.

Not so simple before widespread computers in cars ?

My personal "favourite" is the driver constantly turning to face the person on the other seat because they are having a conversation, you see.

Is Hollywood intentionally normalizing this dangerous behaviour? Assholes

> Is Hollywood intentionally normalizing this dangerous behaviour?

Not to speak of all the car races and shootings ...

I find that even real, natural driving shots often look fake, but I'm not sure why. I've accused a film maker friend twice of using "janky and obvious looking greenscreen" for driving shots and both times I was completely wrong. Once was a car on a trailer which might have accounted for some of the unnatutalness, but the second time was a real quad bike driving on a real road with a chase car in front of it and a backwards facing camera-person.

Some films (and a lot of TV shows in the 80s/90s) often got the angle of the projection wrong as well, so there's an obvious miss-match between the perspective of the interior of the car and the outside... i.e. the angle of the camera in the car is roughly horizontal, but the projection is looking upwards towards the sky at around 10/15 degrees.

Another obvious (when you know what you're looking for) tell-tale if the projection is better, is the light direction / shadows within the car compared to what the car's doing: car turns left 90 degrees, but oh no, the sun's still coming from the same direction as before...

Have you ever counted how many hub caps Steve McQueen’s mustang lost in the famous Bullitt chase scene?

You're on point. I think the issue is the fourth wall is becoming thinner. When you watch an old movie, you don't get the immersion you got watching it when it was out

Actually older movies (80s-90s) didn't have much special effect, I find the more realistic, rougher nature of the scenes much better than the cartoonish, hyper-polished SFX today. When you see a fire, it's a real fire, not something digitally added, etc.

As much as I love advances in tech & art & visuals, I'm also getting pretty tired of live-action films that are basically computer generated. It has a certain look to it, too clean & precise & shiny, even as they industry overall gets better at matting things down.

I wanna see a larger counter-reaction to all the gloss, and have movies get a lil rougher around the edges, while having the stories & characters be way more refined. Draw attention to the medium's limits, rather than try to make it real, and then it becomes hyperreal/ uncanny.

But I'm guessing the industry will wanna go full immersion (like VR) rather than take a few steps back. Maybe there's room for both, if studios were willing to be more experimental (doubt it!).

Yup I was watching old James Bond movies recently and there is barely any visual effects. But it's still pretty entertaining.

I did a rewatch marathon of sorts with the kids, Alien, Aliens, Terminator 1-3, stuff like that. Those new action flicks, especially the super hero movies, cannot compare against those. An opinuon my son shares, and he grew up with Marvel. He was glued to the screen when we watched Alien for the first time together, because it did build up astory ajd tension (his words, not mine). Compared to Marvel were the CGI orgy starts 2 minutes into the movie.

Heck, I'll take the Terminator 1 stop motion effects over any scene in the forst half of the last Dr. Strange "movie" (I couldn't bring myself to watch more than that, even Meg is more fun to watch...) any day of the week. Because T1 is still scary and conveys emotion (despair mostly for being chased by an unstoppable killet machine), while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.

As compared to, e.g., the Expense, a ton of sci-fi short films (Dust in a great channel for that on Youtube) or the Mandalorian. I think the over use of CGI is just an easy excuse for bad story telling, and people swallow it.

Have had the same experience with my son. The T1 eyeball scene, even while quite primitive by modern standards, was much more impactful to him than anything in Stranger Things.

I think if special effects are limited technically and expensive, people use them much more prudently. Today, CGI is cheap and easy to come by.

> while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.

I think this is the crux of it, moreso than the CGI Orgy (great term btw). You can have movies with visibly apparent CGI, or even straight up animated movies, but the action is great and still drives the plot and pulls on your heart strings. I know every beat of The Matrix by heart, but there's still a ton of suspense in every action shot, because each encounter adds some new angle to the power scaling. At the start, squad of mooks > 1 freedom fighter > several mooks, but even 1 agent is better than several FFs. Then that balance shifts.

Contrast that with the Smiths fight in the later films, and it's totally Conservation of Ninjutsu at play. Adding more baddies just divides the power of a single baddie, because we already know the outcome, so we know 1 Neo = N Smiths.

Watched Aquaman recently, same thing. Completely unprincipled power scaling. No reference frame, and it just scales up and up until it's CGI Army 1 vs CGI Army 2. That spectacle might work if I had more reference for the power levels, plus emotional investment, but I don't.

What really gets me are two things. The jiggle cam, and "let's film stuff but obscure what is happening in post".

I have watched so many 2005+ movies, where all the action scenes are just replaced with 'jiggle the screen around', and thus, you see nothing.

Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything.

Someone else mentioned that the reason stunt doubles are changed vfx wise, is because maybe they couldn't find one similar enough.

I call hooey on that, the real issue is cost. Generic stunt doubles are far cheaper than "stunt double who looks like top tier star".

And the jiggle cam is cheaper than a real action scene, and fast cuts are too, because who cares how well it is timed/shot if you can't see it.

I think, much like any industry, all this junk is just cost savings. It also shifts blame, and requires less talent from the director and actors.

I doubt any modern director, or actor, could handle the pressure of expensive shots, dangerous shots, with people running through explosions, or car chases, stunt doubles or not.

Nope. Just throw all that at sfx, and all the stress, cost, and reputation risking shots are no longer an actor's or dieector's issue.

Ah well.

To me, this seems subjective and grouchy. It might be that when you were growing up, things were a certain way, and now they're a bit different. You have a minor aesthetic disagreement. Some people like the shaky cam.

The only people who like shaky can are those who haven't experienced real, well choreographed, action sequences that are clear and visible.

It works in some scenarios but really has been used a lot, likely predominantly, to obscure unreality.

You may like the shakey cam, and that's fine naturally, but claiming age has something to do with it is weird. It is also unfair to call me grouchy.

All I know is that shakey cam is incredibly unreal to me. I have never, in my entire life, experienced scenarios where my vision was like a shakey cam, and I say this as someone with a history of racing, stunt driving, and a variety of athletic activities which jostles one about.

When in such real life situations, my body senses motion, my brain sorts it out, and there is no shakey cam effect.

I liken it to making a sound track for a movie, but imagine two people talking, while someone randomly cranks the audio up and down, and changes the aurial position of the speaker randomly.

Sure, that's going to create tension and stress in the movie goer too, but it draws one out of immersion, and is just lazy work.

Intensity can be created with real actual intensity, the shakey cam is a crutch.

> Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything.

Jackie Chan's non-American work is the antithesis of this. Here's a great Every Frame a Painting on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ

Yes, I sort of wish he'd dive more into producing/directing.

> I call hooey on that, the real issue is cost.

It's actually rarely about cost itself, just look at modern movie budget, they didn't exactly get cheaper than 20+ years ago. The main factor is time, predictability and control. When you do it in post with CGI, you always have full control and can change your mind at any time. If you do it practical, you are stuck with whatever you filmed. Going back and doing a reshoot takes a long while, in CGI you just jiggle some parameters and rerender. If your movie-star-lookalike stuntman breaks a leg, you have a problem. If you do it with CGI, it barely matters what you captured in camera, just change it.

With modern movies there is so much CGI to begin with, that it hardly even matters what you filmed, it's not unusual to completely redesign scenes in post, as the script wasn't even finished when they started filmed the thing.

In theory, the flexibility is great. In practice it is itself a problem, as those decisions are avoided throughout production and instead accumulate into post. Where they get further kicked down the road - client for first 80% of schedule: "looks alright". client for remaining 80% of schedule: "[now that we've actually thought about this] we want it to be this way". The artists lament what they could have done had they gotten this direction earlier, ultimately just polish the turd with weekly extensions until the client is satisfied-slash-actual-deadline, and look forward to the next show where things might not go as awry.

Like everything in our society, the real problem is that the people in charge of managing don't know how to do the work, and rather than listening to, taking feeding, and trusting the people doing the work, they act as if their job is to blindly push orders downwards and micromanage whatever catches their attention. The article ('s followup) touches on this, ("managed to get themselves into really high positions but don’t know how a green screen works... People in the traditional leadership roles are boomers or Gen X guys, and what we do now didn’t exist when they were coming up"), but is naive in thinking that it's going to get better over time. In actuality, the "creatives" of tomorrow are busy gladhanding today, and the dynamic will persist.

I think this is why the production setup of Mandalorian got many VFX people excited, despite Engine being so counter to the standard workflow. It pushed the bulk of CGI to where it belongs - as a backdrop for actual acting and storytelling, and directly fed into the director's real time decision making. There are always going to be touch ups and last minute changes, but those are only practical in the context of having larger structure locked down. There are definitely constraints of the digital backdrop technique (watch Mandalorian again after that video, and you see it in everything), but I look forward to seeing how it might trickle out into the rest of the industry.

Shakycam is the worst. Casino Royale (2006) was loaded with it. It was so bad I couldn't parse what was going on in an action scene. In a James Bond film, which is supposed to ride on its action scenes.

The shakycam trope can probably be traced back to The Blair Witch Project, but for the action/thriller genre it really comes from the Bourne series. It's an easy way to add verisimilitude to a fight/chase and lets you skimp on the fight choreography because the fighters can't be seen very well. But personally I find it disorienting, and it took me right out of what everybody says was an excellent Bond film (and might've been if they committed to smooth reasonable action shots rather than shakycam).

If yt wasn't so hostile to fair use, running shaky scenes through video stabilization to explore the artistic contributions of camera shake could make for an interesting channel. Is the scene ridiculous without it, like the stabilized Star Trek scenes making the rounds years ago? Or is watchability improved by the contents not bobbing and weaving around?

In my memory it was Batman Begins (2005) that had if bad and started the trend, but you’re right about the first Bourne movie (2002) being somewhere near the start (as far as tent pole movies go).

At any rate it’s a super lazy crutch for bad choreography. Contrasted with something like the Indiana jones airplane fight scene with its wide shots of the action is like night and day.

What's funny to me is you can have all this "immersion" and then for most bigger markets you get some rando voicing for Brad Pitt. I can't believe e.g. Germans are ok with this. I can't watch Spanish movies with English voiceover, I'd rather have subtitles

Subtitles vs dubs/voiceovers are largely a cultural thing. I envy countries where movies/tv shows are pretty much exclusively subtitled, for example Sweden. Coincidentally, Swedes seem to be really fluent in English on average.

It's a win-win: you absorb languages for free as a child, and you later get to enjoy art in its original unmutilated form.

"you absorb languages for free as a child"... This is the reason thou.

You call it a win win, government calls it "foreign influence"....

For countries/language areas with less than 20M people, dubbing isn't economical, so they end up speaking better English.

Czechia is a dubbing stronghold with 10M people. The tradition is just too strong.

Is that tradition from the Communist era?

Those regimes had a... less practical approach to economics, and maybe they didn't want the population to know western languages as well.

The tradition is a bit older.

We also translate a lot of books, even though the profit margins aren't that big.

The main source of government-critical information during the Communist era were the radio transmitters (RFE, Czech broadcast of the BBC, Voice of America) which were hardest to stop. Those stations broadcast in Czech and Slovak. Anything that had to cross a physical customs point (movies, books) was heavily censored.

If you grow up with movies being fully dubbed in your native language you don’t question it much. Usually the same voice actor voices the same actor(s), so Brad Pitt has the same voice actor voice in all movies.

Dubbing movies becomes a problem when you are exposed to the actors’ original voice or the original audio track of movies because dubbing is a poor substitute. And hearing the same voice for different actors breaks immersion.

Hah, and then you have countries like Poland where it’s just “That one dude” who talks over everything while he does the voice for all the actors.

One point regarding Goldeneye and fx generally. From a lay persons perspective Goldeneye has pretty snappy pacing so from memory some of the sets, such as the starting chemical plant explosion look a little fake, but the movie just chuggs along and and has a fairly good storyline that doesn't stall out.

I find I notice effects a lot more in movies when the story has flat spots. And as I learn more and more about visual story telling. All I think about when watching movies that go heavy on stunts and action "how does this progress the storyline".

> skin wrinkle removal on leading actresses

Supposing she has a contract on the line for a skin care brand, wouldn’t these “little details” be literally millions’ worth to her ?

Sounds like fraud.

Only if you think movies are reality ;-)

Actors are selling an image.

But also billions of wasted consumers’ money

I’m not holding my breath on makeup and skin care becoming meaningless in our societies for another 50 years.

Yep! And it’s part of a contract.

Since you say you have experience in the vfx industry. Do you think someone can release a killer app that can reduce the use of many visual artists and just make vfx with the use of software instead? And how feasible is this?

It always tickled me that James Bond in all of the dam scenes is very obviously not Pierce Brosnan. It's all part of the fun!

VFX artists are cogs.. I guess they're like cloud servers. Cheap for some things, but misused for too many things

It's probably also everything that is accidentally overlooked during the shoot. Previously you would hat a different take, perhaps, or live with the goof. Now you can just offload that to post-production.

But probably also a question if how expensive filming days are with the whole crew vs. how expensive VFX artists are. The latter work is also highly parallelizable.

It’s probably a good ol perfectly rational slippery slope. Fixing a minor mistake or two in post is absolutely the best choice for everyone. Each additional fix is not worth a reshoot either. But slip too far and the product suffers.

> forget about rain and/or tone down the epic action set piece, etc.

But this is the stuff which make the movie cinematic and draws the audience. Hiring a stunt man which looks more like the lead might not be possible - historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc. But this makes the scenes less engaging.

A set with full crew and actors present is extremely expensive. For any mistake which can be fixed with VFX rather then a reshoot, it is probably the prudent financial decision to use VFX.

> historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc.

Those were often done, but other options that increased engagement were having actors do their own stunts (not always appropriate) or casting stunt workers into bigger parts.

You can't have lead actors perform actual dangerous stunts (despite what marketing might tell you). The financial risks are far to high and insurance would never accept that. Just imagine the financial loss if the actor is not able to complete the movie due to an accident. It only really happens in B-movies and movies produced outside of Hollywood.

When you say that a prop gun misfired, do you mean that a real gun, used as a prop, went off accidentally? Between this anecdote and the rust shooting, actors seem to have really poor trigger discipline. Is this something that happens a lot?

"eh, we'll just fix it in post"

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