Comment by noahtallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noahtallen | Hacker News Reader

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As the author mentions, the "No CGI is really just invisible CGI" video is a great watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oQ1jV859w)

The TLDR is basically that movie studios, directors, and actors start a hype train early "we haven't used any CGI!" or "it's all practical!" When the reality is that vast amounts of the movie still use CGI on top of the practical effects. It's just a really good marketing ploy, because a lot of people hate overdone VFX movies! So it feels more authentic and artistic to go practical.

But at the end of the day, most of those movies still have a huge amount of VFX. Some of the examples are extremely egregious and dishonest (e.g. the one TV show where the director/studio claims it was all real puppets on real sets, but the VFX studio has videos showing some massive VFX environments for the show instead.)

Others are more of a misunderstanding -- for example, when they claimed the sandworm in Dune 2 was practical... yes, the shot had a ton of practical elements, but of course lots of VFX and compositing was done to achieve the final product. Yes, there was a mechanical portion of a sandworm for the actors to stand on for some of the close-ups, but tons of the sandworm shots are still mostly VFX.

I think there are degrees.

I don’t think most people who are fans of practical effects get too worked up over painting out wires, or compositing shots with computers, or maybe the odd correction or touch-up to a practical shot, instead of doing those same things with actual film. That probably falls below the level that anyone really minds or regards as substantially altering a “we used lots of practical effects” claim. Usually all that stuff looks pretty good, even seamless, unless it was totally incompetently-realized.

Then there’s having actors interacting with mostly-real sets and props but maybe the farther-away stuff or some backgrounds or whatever is computer art, not even a composited-in real shot, and maybe a few excessively-dangerous sequences are even more CG than that. I think lots of folks who are fans of practical effects are still pretty accepting of this, maybe it’s not “pure” but there’s some effort and it usually shows. Especially when the CG is replacing things that really couldn’t have been done practically (at least not these days).

Then there’s “literally nothing is real, not even that chair the character is sitting on, not that prop they’re holding, nothing, there are no sets or locations to speak of, hell parts of the costumes are CG”. Thor 4, Attack of the Clones, large parts of other Disney Marvel or stuff, among others. These usually look like shit, the actors are often thrown off by the lack of anything real around them, even the damn floor, suspension of disbelief never quite settles in correctly so emotional beats don’t hit right, et c. This is the kind of thing I think even people with only a little investment in practical effects really dislike. Half the time these would have looked better fully-animated rather than even pretending to be “real”.

And there some steps in between those, but my point is there’s a spectrum at play.

As others in this thread have already pointed out: look at Top Gun Maverick, or the latest Mission Impossible.

In the former case, they filmed jets and jet cockpits, but all of the jets and cockpits are replaced by CG ones, only the actors remain if they are visible.

In the latter, in the motorcycle chase scene and when Tom jumps over the edge, aside from him and the bike, basically everything else is digital, e.g. digital train, terrain, trees, ground and everything.

They jumped the train off a bridge FOR REAL at the end of the chase, but then paint it over completely with a digital train. The only thing that stayed is some water splashes, that’s it.

This is intentionally concealed by the studio marketing saying it “was practical”. Yes they did do it “for real”, but it erases the work done on all of the digital effects that end up making up the majority of what you see in the movie.

That’s just dishonest, and what people are upset about.

You are being needlessly harsh. The action was real action with a real person interacting with a real object.

The things that moved really moved. The static background that no one touches is less useful as a practical object, because it doesn't get uncanny valley.

Practical effect doesn't mean the film looks the same as if you were standing there live.

A practical effect is still full of weird equipment and often done using miniatures and foam replicas of the fictional object.

The studios and the viewers know what they mean - if you see a giant explosion, was there a real giant explosion or was it created by CGI?

The links above show that the explosion was real, the side parts were CGI; so we call that "practical" even though much of the scene "by volume" is CGI.

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