Im not one for going off on huge rants about things but this is something i've faced all throughout my filmmaking career and seeing as I have a blog, I figured I might as well vent my frustration somewhere even if no-one reads it.
The art of special effects is a rapidly changing industry. Since the first jump cuts, double exposures and scratching negatives, people have strived to create the unreal using whatever technology they had available. This has continued to today and its great to see people constantly pushing the envelope with the many places film can take us.
I myself am a filmmaker/CG artist, I've self taught myself over almost a decade to get to the level I am now. I'm aware the workflow I have is pretty unorthodox, some of the tools I use are ancient, some of the others aren't even designed for FX work. My setup consists of 2 computers (Pc and Mac) a graphics tablet and a trusty sketchpad and I sync these together like my own personal Millennium Falcon (bucket of bolts that gets me there in the end with the odd crash along the way). I'm aware i'll never create something i'm 100% happy with (such is the bane of any artist) but I know i'm improving with each try and i've come along way.
A film I am working on involves a closeup of a sun. It's a tricky thing to get across, but there are many ways to do this, I could point a camera at a bright light or I could create a digital sphere, paint a texture, create glows, place lights and animate the flares and tendrils which blast off it etc.After experimenting, I've decided to do it with a very old technique, I'm painting out many 2 dimensional layers, each representing an element of the sun and placing them on top of each other, I then move them individually to create an animation. The effect is a little two dimensional but its pretty close to what I am looking for.
This technique might sound very familiar because its one matte artists have used for years, a great example is the "V'ger fly though" in "Star Trek: The Motion picture". The difference is they used glass and a camera, I used: "photoshop" "particle illusion" and "Final cut". Its the same great knowledge and experience that has been brought up through generation to generation and it still takes a lot of time, effort and patience to pull off.
So you can imagine, it gets a tad annoying when someone comes along and disses the entire CG medium as "lazy" and "unimaginative". As someone who spends a lot of time on retro TV and special effects forums this happens ALOT.
It's all the little comments like "there's too much CG in movies these days" or "no-one wants to hear how "New Captain Scarlet" was made because it was just a bunch of clicks on a computer screen". It's like people think CG artists are drones and the computer does all the work. They probably don't even realise there are literally thousands of techniques and different ways of working. It's just all "CGI" to them.
They're probably not being deliberately mean, they're just not thinking. I get a lot of lovely comments regarding my work and at times it gets pretty hard to take them seriously when many of the same people will turn around and brandish the entire medium as a poor substitute to the old days. What really hurts is when I see industry people do it. People that it would be cool to work with. SFX works best when all the mediums work in tandem. Im just back from seeing Iron Man 3 and the work done by the different teams that brought the suits to life, both practically and digitally is awesome.
If people want to complain about effects in movies, why not complain about all the bad script decisions that demand over the top scenes that aren't integral to the story, or the poor direction which has the camera doing needlessly unnatural things which take the audience out of the movie. Case in point, the 20 minuite "Building crunch scene" in Transformers 3. A scene where people go up a building, for it to get knocked over so they go up another building. The spectacle itself is fine and the artists did a great job. The robots are just about as real as you'd expect a giant transforming alien robot to be. The fact the scene exists is because the writers wrote it and the director chose the silly slow mo angles.
It's not a new thing either, coming back to "Star Trek TMP" and "Thunderbirds are Go" they fall in the same trap of fx grinding the story to a halt.
As always with these things, the door swings both ways, it pisses me off enormously to see the modern generation complain about model effects and making endless reference to strings or the quality of the model etc.
I'm not trying to say CG is better, that its the future or that you have to like it. I'm trying to say its there as an art form, It has its strengths and weaknesses, but so do models. When you strip down all the details like the techniques and the magic you get the concepts and what it's getting across, thats really what its all about. Your willing suspension of disbelief handles the rest.
So even if you disagree with everything i've just said, remember this, if you diss the medium you diss the artists that use it, so think before you post.
I've had to rewrite this 3 times to avoid offending anybody, I suck at being angry...
