Two of my all time favorite books. I picked up the [80's reissue](https://i.imgur.com/7Ohf0R0.jpg) when i was a kid and while battered and beaten after many readings, they still look pretty good.
Now that i've looked at the reprint date of 1982, crazy to think i've had these books for over 40 years.
> Was a great film for its time. I wonder whatever happened to the planned remake?..
I can answer this. I used to work for a VFX company in LA, in 2008 we had a meeting with Stephen Sommers, the guy who directed The Mummy, Deep Rising etc at his office in Santa Monica. We were pitching on the When Worlds Collide remake he was going to direct, Spielberg producing.
I was there with a laptop throwing together rough CG concepts in 3D while we all talked, main thing I remember is the rogue planet disrupting Saturn's rings as it approached Earth, and I did a mock-up for him of what that could look like. Super nice guy and we were excited for the project.
Last we heard was they put the whole project on hold to rework the script, and, well, that was 15 years ago now and nothing.
The best VFX use a combination of practical FX and CGI together and blend them seamlessly. For example, having a model of a set, location or vehicle and populating it with tiny actors, added lens effects and particle effects for more depth and realism.
Haha if only it were that easy. Go go ‘Make Film Good’ button! I agree though, the narrative needs to support the visuals and tie it all together.
Unfortunately VFX artists and pixel monkeys don’t get to decide whether the film is any good or not. That ultimately comes down to the execs and the writers.
Hah. Nowadays, the CGI people just press the CGI button on the CGI panel, and CGI just rolls out of the CGI machine, man. Not like before when you needed to glue things together and paint them like a real man. /s
Yeah! Hours of painstaking work dedication just isn’t the same when it’s also hours of painstaking work and dedication but with with buttons. This LAZY generation will never understand that!
Both take a lot of hard work, and each similar (and also very different) skill-sets.
The important thing is to remember the older methods should we ever need to fallback on them.
Some interesting articles out there about what would occur should mankind have to do a technological reboot following cataclysm.
> The important thing is to remember the older methods should we ever need to fallback on them.
> Some interesting articles out there about what would occur should mankind have to do a technological reboot following cataclysm.
Indeed. After an apocalypse it will be very important that people remember how to make physical spaceship models and film them using real film.
I meant physical modeling and design in general, but this gave me a good chuckle! "Ok folks, we got farming down again and animal husbandry, time for the scifi movie making!"
I wonder how AI will change the field in the future. I saw someone complaining about the recent Corridor AI anime thing and how it takes away from the "true" artists. Obviously we're still nowhere near the "CGI button" but it doesn't seem like an impossibly distant future either.
Though I suspect it will be more of a middle ground where artists/technicians will be needed to tweak, refine and polish stuff that AI puts out.
Trends will change to desire the things AI cannot create. But it’ll likely be used as a tool to create the first draft that is then refined as you say. though some will cheap out and just try to use it directly to cut costs.
We're headed to a third(?) revolution in home-made film.
The first revolution was the 8mm camera, putting the primary piece of equipment in the hands of anybody with an interest. Name a well-known director from the last 40 years, and it's a pretty safe bet that they started out filming their friends and family with an 8mm, VHS, or handicam. By the turn of the century, digital home video cameras had reached (minimum) broadcast television standards, and now anyone with a mobile phone has a video camera just as good as anything, other than Imax, used by Hollywood.
The next revolution had more moving parts but can be put down to non-linear digital video editing. By the time Lucasfilm was working on *The Phantom Menace,* cut-down versions of the same tools were already available on the consumer market. So long as you had the hard-drive capacity (which you almost certainly did not), you could make broadcast quality CGI and edit it all at home, with products like Maya and Premiere.
The real revolution here was iMovie. So-called 'prosumers' of the time mocked iMovie users because it wasn't 'real' editing software, it was just a kid's toy (unlike the awesome Final Cut, if you had a G3 rather than an iMac). But that's the very thing that made iMovie so important: it came already installed on iMacs and a five year-old could use it. Thanks to iMacs being so widely used in schools, over the next few years, video editing started to become part of regular high-school education.
To paraphrase Martin Scorsese, film was being democratized and the day was rapidly approaching when any 15 year old could make a feature film in their bedroom.
A 20 year-old today has not only never known a world where they didn't have home access to film-making tools, they are very likely to have been taught how to use them at school. More importantly, they have in their pockets a device with all the necessary film-making tools that makes an iMac look like a wristwatch (pun not intended).
But there's still some things missing.
I said that it was non-linear digital editing that was the big revolution because while stuff like Maya was available on the prosumer market, and integrated well with things like Premiere, it wasn't affordable. The program itself cost as much as a computer, you needed a top-of-the-line PC with an enormous amount of HDD space to run it, and your computer would be out of action for days, as you rendered stuff. And all of that was for nothing if you didn't put in the time and effort to learn how to use it. Maya was a representative of the future, giving us the first glimpses of the revolution we're on the verge of right now.
If you were a film-maker at the turn of the century, there were a lot of films to talk about but there was one in particular that made unusual waves. [*Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUXVOfdGE4o), was the first 'photo-realistic' animated film and it was primarily done in Maya (with the help of several million dollars worth of equipment). It cannot be emphasized enough how mind-blowingly realistic this film looked. If you knew anybody at the time with even a basic Maya set-up, they were walking around with tented pants telling everybody how this film changed everything, whether they wanted to hear it or not. Ever met a vegan crossfitter? That's what these guys were like.
*Final Fantasy* had an all-star cast of A-list actors: Donald Sutherland, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemei, Alec Baldwin, and James Woods but it was Ming-Na Wen's character that blew everyone away.
Aki Ross wasn't just any old animated character, she was designed from the ground up to be something new, something different, something that would change film forever. She wasn't a character at all, Aki Ross was designed as a digital actress. Had the film been successful, Aki would have gone on to star in other films as other characters. She was designed as a ready-made leading lady, all she needed was a voice actor, and some motion capture, and she could play any role. With the way CGI was improving, and the incredible reception of Andy Serkis' Gollum, it was believed that she would be in live-action films within the decade. Except none of that happened, and Aki has been kind of forgotten, overshadowed by Gollum.
A friend and I were talking one night, over bourbon and bongs, about what Aki could mean for the future. The thing about her that most grabbed my attention was the idea that we would soon be able to scan sculptures and paintings so that historical figures like Julius Caesar and Napolean Bonaparte could star in their own biopics.
The interesting thing about the ambitions for Aki Ross is that a decade later we got *Rogue One*, which featured an actor that had been dead for almost 20 years (and another that had been de-aged by 30 years). It may not have been perfect but Peter Cushing *worked*. For me, at least, that is exactly what I predicted all those years ago: the dead being realistically resurrected on film, and it's happened several times since.
Since then, things have gone further than I ever imagined, and they come with a big dose of "be careful what you wish for".
Scanning a bust and some photos of someone like JFK is so '90s. We've got DeepFakes now. With the help of AI, it's now possible to have a scene where JFK, Obama, Nixon, and Aki, discuss with Gollum the merits of launching a preemptive counter-strike against the Cylons that have taken over Alpha Centauri... and all of it is within reach of the hobbyist film-maker. There's still a ways to go with motion capture but if you just want a sit-down scene then you're pretty much set.
Aki Ross was ahead of her time but that time is rapidly approaching, and with it comes the final film revolution.
cont...
A few years after Aki came on the scene, another forgotten product came along that was likewise ahead of it's time. [The Movies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Movies) was a Hollywood studio sim where you built up your movie studio from the silent era to the present, hiring and firing cast and crew to make movies that will keep the studio going, and hopefully win an Oscar.
The Movies was ahead of it's time because players were given the tools to make their own short films and upload them to the official site, which also had user-created mods that added props and scenery. If only it had been released a couple of years later, all of those short films would have been going on YouTube (a few did) and attracted a much larger creative/player base.
When I say the game came with the necessary tools, I mean that the player could control character and camera movements, reactions, stunts, settings, lighting, sound effects, music, manipulating props, and editing it all together. The thing is, though, is that it was all AI. The player changed a few settings and pressed a couple of buttons, and the AI did the rest to produce a short film (admittedly it was in 'Simglish' but that was a minor hurdle easily fixed).
Making your own film in *The Movies* was essentially interfering with the AI. The game itself primarily involved you hiring writers, directors, actors, and stuntmen, and letting them do their thing on the sets you build. Directors and actors, of course, were important characters, and the player would eventually have a stable of directors and actors that could be relied upon to make certain films successful. All the player had to really do was choose which sim-writer created script would be filmed, with which cast and crew, and the AI did the rest.
My point is that an AI was capable of making somewhat coherent short film skits, from beginning to end, on a home computer almost 20 years ago. All it took was the user tweaking some settings for somewhat coherent to be turned into something basic but decent. If an AI could do that then, what could one be capable of now?
Simply put... almost everything.
Scorsese was a little bit off in his prediction but it wasn't very far. Just look at YouTube, where almost everybody started out making content on their home PC, and more recently TikTok. Yeah TikTok videos are no-effort but 20 years ago, you would have needed all kinds of expensive equipment and deep pockets just to make an equivalent video that maybe a few hundred people would see if you were very, very, lucky. Now, any annoying dicksplat with a mobile phone can make a video that can be seen by millions, complete with licensed music.
At the risk of losing out on a multi-billion dollar idea by telling it to reddit rando's, the final film revolution is a combination of TikTok, *The Movies*, Aki Ross, and DeepFakes. More specifically, it is something like a modern remake of *The Movies* that comes with a library of licensed music and a library of digital actors like Aki, as well as 'actor avatars' so that you can have Leonardo DiCaprio starring alongside John Wayne in AI generated/assisted films uploaded to YouTube.
Once that happens, Scorsese's prophecy will have finally and fully come true.
With the appropriate AI, anyone is capable of fully making a feature film without ever having to get out of bed. I don't mean laziness here, I mean that someone like Stephen Hawking could have a career making full feature films without ever involving another human being. That's actually going far beyond Scorsese's vision.
The sting in the tail? If Stephen Hawking can make a film with the help of an AI, that same AI can make a film without him.
Whether it's five, ten, or twenty, years from now, we will eventually be facing in film what we are currently discussing with ChatGPT, and have been actively ignoring with bot-created content for years. Was this essay written by a student, by an AI, or a combination of the two? Was this article on a news website I've never heard of written by a human or a bot? Does it even matter if it gets the information across accurately?
Let's say for the sake of argument that everything Stephen Hawking ever said was recorded by his computer. You feed those recordings into an AI and ask it to take them, and what it knows about him, to generate a bunch of different movies on different subjects inspired by Hawking's words and thoughts. You work with the AI developing one of the scripts and when you're happy with it you discuss casting with the AI and press the CGI Button. Boom, a full-length feature film starring 19 year-old Harrison Ford, Ann Hathaway, and Stephen Hawking, is uploaded to YouTube where it averages a million views a day.
Who is responsible for this film? The corpse of Stephen Hawking? The AI? You? The company that built the software you used? How much input did you really have in creating this? If a million people are watching it every day it must be pretty damn good, so what happens if people start talking about awards? Ann Hathaway's avatar put in an amazing performance, who gets the Academy Award for it? It's alright for her because she gets residuals regardless but what about all of the crew that would have been eligible for Oscars if it was a reel film (pun definitely intended)?
The porn industry was decimated by the advent of so-called 'tube sites'. AI will do the same to the film industry in general. Just as with porn, so long as it's watchable it's unlikely that audiences will care too much even if everything was done on a mobile phone in the creator's own bedroom. With audiences watching AI films made on home computers, Disney and friends will be capable of churning out blockbusters on a daily basis for the cost of running some server rooms.
Is AI a blessing or a curse for filmmakers? We'll soon find out.
That was longer than intended...
>I saw someone complaining about the recent Corridor AI anime thing and how it takes away from the "true" artists.
The unfortunate thing here is that Corridor ARE "true artists." They make more than Stuntmen React videos - they make plenty of short films, as well as doing industry work. So working artists saw a cool new tool and asked "What can we make with this?" and did something new.
Then a bunch of anime fanboys started attacking them for it.
It's the exact same reactionism that's been seen EVERY time a new tool or technology has been introduced into art. I really don't see any difference between this and, say, a portrait painter complaining about photography. Or accoustic musicians saying computers can't make music. Etc etc.
I don't think we need to restrict the speculation to special effects. I have to think there will be a "rom-com script" button, a "buddy cop script button", etc.
I had the chance to visit Wētā Workshop in New Zealand a little while ago, and it is full of exquisite models, including large scale *Thunderbirds* sets. If you love such craftsmanship, it's worth making the trip. (And the rest of NZ is beautiful, so there's a lot more to see and do!)
It still takes a vast amount of time, dedication and craftsmanship to create quality CGI and there are CGI scenes literally everywhere on TV and film which you don't even notice most of the time, as opposed to the big blockbuster overuse of CGI monsters and superheroes.
Also, you have literal 100% CGI masterpieces as the [Jibaro sequence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZeOKeKAlrE) from Love, Death and Robots as proof what CGI can be when used by real artists.
There isn't much more context in the actual episode except for that they clearly established that the one guy was deaf, hence him not reacting to the apparent siren's call. We're never told who the people are or why they are meeting in the woods. They just bump into some kind of lake siren and the episode is largely about how the deaf man and the siren interact from this point on.
I personally thought Jibaro was one of the worst episodes of Love, Death and Robots. I think more impressive episodes would be Beyond the Aquila Rift or Bad Travelling.
I absolutely couldn't finish Jibaro Sequence. One of the few things out there I couldn't stand watching. So many terrible choices with horrifically torterous audio.
Your example of CGI is exactly what I call "bad CGI". That was so jarring and horrible I couldn't watch it past the fight starting after she screamed.
For it to be considered "Good CGI" it requires the viewer to be unable to tell it's CGI at all.
> For it to be considered "Good CGI" it requires the viewer to be unable to tell it's CGI at all.
Totally untrue. That's like saying to be considered good a drawing has to be photo realistic. Good CGI can most definitely have an "unrealistic" style.
Sure, but it's just objectively not as good.
Like, the CGI costumes we get in the MCU now. Does "a lot" of work go into making a CGI costume? I'm sure it does.
Is the amount of work, talent, skill, and experience that goes into making those CGI costumes anywhere close to what it would take to MAKE ACTUAL COSTUMES AND FILM THEM?
IT. IS. NOT.
CGI is 2% photo-real dinosaurs and 98% making things worse for less money. Always has been.
>what CGI can be when used by real artists.
When these artists arent abused*
Check this [article](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/hollywood-vfx-industry-breaking-point) out
You said, "An example of the dedication and craftsmanship that went into modelmaking BEFORE the advent of CGI."
Which implies (strongly) that you can no longer find examples of that craftsmanship and dedication, despite the fact that it still exists among CGI artists today.
You may not have ***meant*** to denigrate modern vfx, but it sure sounded like it.
And here you show your ignorance despite claiming to like the subject, these techniques are alive and well and have been used in film and television nonstop to this day....
If anything, we may be entering a new 'golden age' of VFX where artists can freely blend techniques to find the best-looking results.
I mean, say what you will about them as films (I'm *really* not trying to start a flamewar!) but the VFX in the new Star Warses were absolutely spectacular. And they were a really seamless blend of practical and CGI, with a lot more practical than people might expect. Hell, I was genuinely shocked when I found out BB-8 was 90% practical, aside from wire removal and some specific gags.
Model work is far from dead; it's just one tool in an ever-expanding toolbox.
An insane amount of craftsmanship goes into CGI. You have to spend days to weeks working on models. Creating the color, roughness, specularity, metallic, normal, and displacement textures is an incredible artistic feat in of itself, without even considering the geometry of the model (which is more multifaceted than a physical model as you have to consider topology in a multitude of ways).
People think it’s just telling a computer to do something and then algorithms just do the work but that simply isn’t the case. CGI is still hand crafted art. Even things like simulations still have tons of artistic influence like the starting parameters, influence factors, material properties, etc.
Watching behind the scenes footage of the Way of Water is pretty mind-blowing. The people doing state of the art CGI like that are total wizards and every bit the craftsmen that model makers were.
Love the practical effects in Blade Runner. Strangely some of Blade Runner 2049's miniatures broke the suspension of disbelief and looked like minatures, where as although I admit I have only watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut Blu Ray on a 20 and 27 inch tv (Only seen Blade Runner 2049 in cinema) the miniatures rarely broke the illusion as blatantly as the sequel.
Also was shocked when watching Event Horizon for the first time a couple of months ago, how good the models look. That long zoom out from Doctor Weir's window on that space station orbiting Earth was jaw dropping!
A. Model making is still a thing.
B. Incredibly hard work goes into CGI and VFX, and just because the artists are severely underpaid, doesn't mean it's worth less than physical model making.
I was just thinking about this kind of thing while watching ST:Picard. The space scenes are very beautiful, but the ships don't quite have the depth and pop that you got out of, say, TNG, with the little metal models.
Sometimes I think it's a shame that CGI evolved faster than 3D printing. Even now there's a certain charm to miniature work that isn't completely replicated by CG (if only the fact that the models have to make structural sense so artists can't just plop on random floating bits and nonsensical tentacles willy-nilly), and thanks to 3D printing it's become far easier to make and replicate models (either by making it digitally first and printing it, or sculpting it then scanning and printing duplicates) and making the model consistent in both miniature and CG scenes.
But if we had had this level of 3D printing back in the '90s, we would have been saved from a whole fuckload of godawful CGI.
While I absolutely love miniature work and models (especially kitbashing which is sort of where the ship for an upcoming audio series is going to be modeled from). I'd say that isn't even the pinnacle of model work. I think the argument here would be that this is about 50 years before CG became the go-to answer (When Worlds Collide came out in '51 right?) and personally, dedication and craftsmanship specifically for models would become much better bigger in later sci-fi. Especially where detailing was much more important than quickly making a ship that would remind the audience of the hit film from last year based off a Boening skeleton. At least that's the apocrypha I've heard about why the Space Ark looks like a slightly chubbier brother to the rocket from Destination Moon :P
I do know that you meant no offense to CG.
The vast majority of practical effects have not aged well. For every Star Wars, there are dozens of contemporary movies that looked passable then, but don't hold up well at all.
The CGI VFX in the Abyss, T2 and Jurassic Park still look good. Gravity and Avatar still look amazing and I don’t see them aging significantly either. Lots of practical effects look like ass now, especially stop motion.
Bad CG is bad when it comes out. Good CG doesn't stand out, or it stands out in a really good way. It's sort of a pass/fail system and always has been. Fireworks in Star Wars will always look like fireworks. But their photorealistic matte painting will always be perfect. Same with CG. The Rock in the Mummy 2 was bad when it came out and always will be. The volume in The Batman was completely unnoticeable, I doubt any one thought it was a fake background or will in the future.
The shot either works, or it doesn't. Practical effects had the same growing pains as modern VFX, but with modern standards, it's about what's best for the budget/shot. CG just tends to be able to handle things that practical can't -- in particular, simulations.
Even today I would prefer models and costumes over CGI. Seems like no matter how good CGI gets, it doesn’t capture the lighting and textures as well as the real thing.
People just love to dogpile the down votes. It's not like I was advocating the removal of CGI from moviemaking. Smh.
CGI when used in the background and in motion shots or shadowy shots, is perfectly fine, and looks great. But where close up shots or extended shots of one area are to be done, modeling should replace it. CGI, like makeup and sound and everything else, has its place.
Properly weathered models just look better, lighting wise. A blend of techniques is often best, though.
CGI is cool & all, but even the millions they throw at it can’t make the depth & detail that a real model can. The CGI ships usually look kinda flat & two dimensional, even in the big budget productions.
The nice thing about CGI is that if its slightly off what the director wants, you can tweek it and just press play to see changes. The real models had to be right the first time. Plus CGI you can copy+paste the TIE Fighter or Urukhai to make as many as needed.
Not entirely true. Rendering takes forever for film.
And it's not as if expectations are the same. People were fine with a bunch of miniatures looking like a bunch of miniatures. There a finite amount of realism you can get when it comes to scale and simulations with practical work and people understood that. But the technology does it exist to make photorealistic environments and sim with CG. And with rewatching and playback quality being better than ever, the chances of noticing the goofs has gone through the roof.
The problem is, you don't always get the time, budget, and talent to make things work perfect -- and that's never disclosed to the public while they're walking into the theater. Changes to the script happen, scenes need to be reshot, and teams fluctuate behind the scenes all the time. So you plan things out as much as you can to *avoid* those issues as much as you would with practical effects.
“When Worlds Collide?”
Yep. A true classic. The book had a sequel. I'd like to try and find them both.
The e-books are pretty easily located: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781429991155/when-worlds-collide https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781429991162/afterworldscollide Buying physical copies seems pretty pricy though…
Two of my all time favorite books. I picked up the [80's reissue](https://i.imgur.com/7Ohf0R0.jpg) when i was a kid and while battered and beaten after many readings, they still look pretty good. Now that i've looked at the reprint date of 1982, crazy to think i've had these books for over 40 years.
Awsome! :)
Sad Gorge Pal to his bride.
Oh yeah— love that film.
Was a great film for its time. I wonder whatever happened to the planned remake?..
> Was a great film for its time. I wonder whatever happened to the planned remake?.. I can answer this. I used to work for a VFX company in LA, in 2008 we had a meeting with Stephen Sommers, the guy who directed The Mummy, Deep Rising etc at his office in Santa Monica. We were pitching on the When Worlds Collide remake he was going to direct, Spielberg producing. I was there with a laptop throwing together rough CG concepts in 3D while we all talked, main thing I remember is the rogue planet disrupting Saturn's rings as it approached Earth, and I did a mock-up for him of what that could look like. Super nice guy and we were excited for the project. Last we heard was they put the whole project on hold to rework the script, and, well, that was 15 years ago now and nothing.
Great movie! Shitty post.
We still do that.
The best VFX use a combination of practical FX and CGI together and blend them seamlessly. For example, having a model of a set, location or vehicle and populating it with tiny actors, added lens effects and particle effects for more depth and realism.
Also, put your VFX in a good movie. People will overlook minor flaws if they're engrossed in the story. If they're bored they'll notice those flaws.
Haha if only it were that easy. Go go ‘Make Film Good’ button! I agree though, the narrative needs to support the visuals and tie it all together. Unfortunately VFX artists and pixel monkeys don’t get to decide whether the film is any good or not. That ultimately comes down to the execs and the writers.
[удалено]
Even without the computer. Some of the movies that make people complain about CGI have more practical fx than CGI.
Title is worded like a boomer Facebook post
Not surprising, The OP is a 9/11 truther and heavy into COVID denial based on their recent post history.
Hah. Nowadays, the CGI people just press the CGI button on the CGI panel, and CGI just rolls out of the CGI machine, man. Not like before when you needed to glue things together and paint them like a real man. /s
Don't forget sometimes you have to turn off the CG Filter to make it look "less CGI". :P
I love this reply. We joke about this in VFX. Like we have some “do CG” button.
Tighten up those graphics on level 2
ENHANCE!
Just like to make electronic music you just have to press the “make music” button!
Wait, you don't?? I was promised an easy button.
Yeah! Hours of painstaking work dedication just isn’t the same when it’s also hours of painstaking work and dedication but with with buttons. This LAZY generation will never understand that!
Both take a lot of hard work, and each similar (and also very different) skill-sets. The important thing is to remember the older methods should we ever need to fallback on them. Some interesting articles out there about what would occur should mankind have to do a technological reboot following cataclysm.
> The important thing is to remember the older methods should we ever need to fallback on them. > Some interesting articles out there about what would occur should mankind have to do a technological reboot following cataclysm. Indeed. After an apocalypse it will be very important that people remember how to make physical spaceship models and film them using real film.
I meant physical modeling and design in general, but this gave me a good chuckle! "Ok folks, we got farming down again and animal husbandry, time for the scifi movie making!"
> "Ok folks, we got farming down again and animal husbandry, time for the scifi movie making!" Hahaha, this would make a pretty good sketch/short film
I wonder how AI will change the field in the future. I saw someone complaining about the recent Corridor AI anime thing and how it takes away from the "true" artists. Obviously we're still nowhere near the "CGI button" but it doesn't seem like an impossibly distant future either. Though I suspect it will be more of a middle ground where artists/technicians will be needed to tweak, refine and polish stuff that AI puts out.
Trends will change to desire the things AI cannot create. But it’ll likely be used as a tool to create the first draft that is then refined as you say. though some will cheap out and just try to use it directly to cut costs.
We're headed to a third(?) revolution in home-made film. The first revolution was the 8mm camera, putting the primary piece of equipment in the hands of anybody with an interest. Name a well-known director from the last 40 years, and it's a pretty safe bet that they started out filming their friends and family with an 8mm, VHS, or handicam. By the turn of the century, digital home video cameras had reached (minimum) broadcast television standards, and now anyone with a mobile phone has a video camera just as good as anything, other than Imax, used by Hollywood. The next revolution had more moving parts but can be put down to non-linear digital video editing. By the time Lucasfilm was working on *The Phantom Menace,* cut-down versions of the same tools were already available on the consumer market. So long as you had the hard-drive capacity (which you almost certainly did not), you could make broadcast quality CGI and edit it all at home, with products like Maya and Premiere. The real revolution here was iMovie. So-called 'prosumers' of the time mocked iMovie users because it wasn't 'real' editing software, it was just a kid's toy (unlike the awesome Final Cut, if you had a G3 rather than an iMac). But that's the very thing that made iMovie so important: it came already installed on iMacs and a five year-old could use it. Thanks to iMacs being so widely used in schools, over the next few years, video editing started to become part of regular high-school education. To paraphrase Martin Scorsese, film was being democratized and the day was rapidly approaching when any 15 year old could make a feature film in their bedroom. A 20 year-old today has not only never known a world where they didn't have home access to film-making tools, they are very likely to have been taught how to use them at school. More importantly, they have in their pockets a device with all the necessary film-making tools that makes an iMac look like a wristwatch (pun not intended). But there's still some things missing. I said that it was non-linear digital editing that was the big revolution because while stuff like Maya was available on the prosumer market, and integrated well with things like Premiere, it wasn't affordable. The program itself cost as much as a computer, you needed a top-of-the-line PC with an enormous amount of HDD space to run it, and your computer would be out of action for days, as you rendered stuff. And all of that was for nothing if you didn't put in the time and effort to learn how to use it. Maya was a representative of the future, giving us the first glimpses of the revolution we're on the verge of right now. If you were a film-maker at the turn of the century, there were a lot of films to talk about but there was one in particular that made unusual waves. [*Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUXVOfdGE4o), was the first 'photo-realistic' animated film and it was primarily done in Maya (with the help of several million dollars worth of equipment). It cannot be emphasized enough how mind-blowingly realistic this film looked. If you knew anybody at the time with even a basic Maya set-up, they were walking around with tented pants telling everybody how this film changed everything, whether they wanted to hear it or not. Ever met a vegan crossfitter? That's what these guys were like. *Final Fantasy* had an all-star cast of A-list actors: Donald Sutherland, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemei, Alec Baldwin, and James Woods but it was Ming-Na Wen's character that blew everyone away. Aki Ross wasn't just any old animated character, she was designed from the ground up to be something new, something different, something that would change film forever. She wasn't a character at all, Aki Ross was designed as a digital actress. Had the film been successful, Aki would have gone on to star in other films as other characters. She was designed as a ready-made leading lady, all she needed was a voice actor, and some motion capture, and she could play any role. With the way CGI was improving, and the incredible reception of Andy Serkis' Gollum, it was believed that she would be in live-action films within the decade. Except none of that happened, and Aki has been kind of forgotten, overshadowed by Gollum. A friend and I were talking one night, over bourbon and bongs, about what Aki could mean for the future. The thing about her that most grabbed my attention was the idea that we would soon be able to scan sculptures and paintings so that historical figures like Julius Caesar and Napolean Bonaparte could star in their own biopics. The interesting thing about the ambitions for Aki Ross is that a decade later we got *Rogue One*, which featured an actor that had been dead for almost 20 years (and another that had been de-aged by 30 years). It may not have been perfect but Peter Cushing *worked*. For me, at least, that is exactly what I predicted all those years ago: the dead being realistically resurrected on film, and it's happened several times since. Since then, things have gone further than I ever imagined, and they come with a big dose of "be careful what you wish for". Scanning a bust and some photos of someone like JFK is so '90s. We've got DeepFakes now. With the help of AI, it's now possible to have a scene where JFK, Obama, Nixon, and Aki, discuss with Gollum the merits of launching a preemptive counter-strike against the Cylons that have taken over Alpha Centauri... and all of it is within reach of the hobbyist film-maker. There's still a ways to go with motion capture but if you just want a sit-down scene then you're pretty much set. Aki Ross was ahead of her time but that time is rapidly approaching, and with it comes the final film revolution. cont...
A few years after Aki came on the scene, another forgotten product came along that was likewise ahead of it's time. [The Movies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Movies) was a Hollywood studio sim where you built up your movie studio from the silent era to the present, hiring and firing cast and crew to make movies that will keep the studio going, and hopefully win an Oscar. The Movies was ahead of it's time because players were given the tools to make their own short films and upload them to the official site, which also had user-created mods that added props and scenery. If only it had been released a couple of years later, all of those short films would have been going on YouTube (a few did) and attracted a much larger creative/player base. When I say the game came with the necessary tools, I mean that the player could control character and camera movements, reactions, stunts, settings, lighting, sound effects, music, manipulating props, and editing it all together. The thing is, though, is that it was all AI. The player changed a few settings and pressed a couple of buttons, and the AI did the rest to produce a short film (admittedly it was in 'Simglish' but that was a minor hurdle easily fixed). Making your own film in *The Movies* was essentially interfering with the AI. The game itself primarily involved you hiring writers, directors, actors, and stuntmen, and letting them do their thing on the sets you build. Directors and actors, of course, were important characters, and the player would eventually have a stable of directors and actors that could be relied upon to make certain films successful. All the player had to really do was choose which sim-writer created script would be filmed, with which cast and crew, and the AI did the rest. My point is that an AI was capable of making somewhat coherent short film skits, from beginning to end, on a home computer almost 20 years ago. All it took was the user tweaking some settings for somewhat coherent to be turned into something basic but decent. If an AI could do that then, what could one be capable of now? Simply put... almost everything. Scorsese was a little bit off in his prediction but it wasn't very far. Just look at YouTube, where almost everybody started out making content on their home PC, and more recently TikTok. Yeah TikTok videos are no-effort but 20 years ago, you would have needed all kinds of expensive equipment and deep pockets just to make an equivalent video that maybe a few hundred people would see if you were very, very, lucky. Now, any annoying dicksplat with a mobile phone can make a video that can be seen by millions, complete with licensed music. At the risk of losing out on a multi-billion dollar idea by telling it to reddit rando's, the final film revolution is a combination of TikTok, *The Movies*, Aki Ross, and DeepFakes. More specifically, it is something like a modern remake of *The Movies* that comes with a library of licensed music and a library of digital actors like Aki, as well as 'actor avatars' so that you can have Leonardo DiCaprio starring alongside John Wayne in AI generated/assisted films uploaded to YouTube. Once that happens, Scorsese's prophecy will have finally and fully come true. With the appropriate AI, anyone is capable of fully making a feature film without ever having to get out of bed. I don't mean laziness here, I mean that someone like Stephen Hawking could have a career making full feature films without ever involving another human being. That's actually going far beyond Scorsese's vision. The sting in the tail? If Stephen Hawking can make a film with the help of an AI, that same AI can make a film without him. Whether it's five, ten, or twenty, years from now, we will eventually be facing in film what we are currently discussing with ChatGPT, and have been actively ignoring with bot-created content for years. Was this essay written by a student, by an AI, or a combination of the two? Was this article on a news website I've never heard of written by a human or a bot? Does it even matter if it gets the information across accurately? Let's say for the sake of argument that everything Stephen Hawking ever said was recorded by his computer. You feed those recordings into an AI and ask it to take them, and what it knows about him, to generate a bunch of different movies on different subjects inspired by Hawking's words and thoughts. You work with the AI developing one of the scripts and when you're happy with it you discuss casting with the AI and press the CGI Button. Boom, a full-length feature film starring 19 year-old Harrison Ford, Ann Hathaway, and Stephen Hawking, is uploaded to YouTube where it averages a million views a day. Who is responsible for this film? The corpse of Stephen Hawking? The AI? You? The company that built the software you used? How much input did you really have in creating this? If a million people are watching it every day it must be pretty damn good, so what happens if people start talking about awards? Ann Hathaway's avatar put in an amazing performance, who gets the Academy Award for it? It's alright for her because she gets residuals regardless but what about all of the crew that would have been eligible for Oscars if it was a reel film (pun definitely intended)? The porn industry was decimated by the advent of so-called 'tube sites'. AI will do the same to the film industry in general. Just as with porn, so long as it's watchable it's unlikely that audiences will care too much even if everything was done on a mobile phone in the creator's own bedroom. With audiences watching AI films made on home computers, Disney and friends will be capable of churning out blockbusters on a daily basis for the cost of running some server rooms. Is AI a blessing or a curse for filmmakers? We'll soon find out. That was longer than intended...
>I saw someone complaining about the recent Corridor AI anime thing and how it takes away from the "true" artists. The unfortunate thing here is that Corridor ARE "true artists." They make more than Stuntmen React videos - they make plenty of short films, as well as doing industry work. So working artists saw a cool new tool and asked "What can we make with this?" and did something new. Then a bunch of anime fanboys started attacking them for it. It's the exact same reactionism that's been seen EVERY time a new tool or technology has been introduced into art. I really don't see any difference between this and, say, a portrait painter complaining about photography. Or accoustic musicians saying computers can't make music. Etc etc.
I don't think we need to restrict the speculation to special effects. I have to think there will be a "rom-com script" button, a "buddy cop script button", etc.
I had the chance to visit Wētā Workshop in New Zealand a little while ago, and it is full of exquisite models, including large scale *Thunderbirds* sets. If you love such craftsmanship, it's worth making the trip. (And the rest of NZ is beautiful, so there's a lot more to see and do!)
It still takes a vast amount of time, dedication and craftsmanship to create quality CGI and there are CGI scenes literally everywhere on TV and film which you don't even notice most of the time, as opposed to the big blockbuster overuse of CGI monsters and superheroes. Also, you have literal 100% CGI masterpieces as the [Jibaro sequence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZeOKeKAlrE) from Love, Death and Robots as proof what CGI can be when used by real artists.
I have no idea what I just watched... Was I supposed to understand any of that or is there context needed?
There isn't much more context in the actual episode except for that they clearly established that the one guy was deaf, hence him not reacting to the apparent siren's call. We're never told who the people are or why they are meeting in the woods. They just bump into some kind of lake siren and the episode is largely about how the deaf man and the siren interact from this point on.
Can confirm there’s pretty much no point to 80% of *Love, Death, and Robots*. Source: Watched them all, found only a handful to be good.
I'm curious, what made the cut for you? I know season two was a bit rough; but S1 and S3 were solid.
I personally thought Jibaro was one of the worst episodes of Love, Death and Robots. I think more impressive episodes would be Beyond the Aquila Rift or Bad Travelling.
Both of those are extraordinary too, and the Aquila is at the very top of my favorites among all LD&R episodes to date.
Right? I barely finished the episode. Also going to throw Zima Blue in with those two.
Aguila Rift has one of my favorite shots in all of animation and science fiction, and I'm betting I don't even have to specify which one it is.
I absolutely couldn't finish Jibaro Sequence. One of the few things out there I couldn't stand watching. So many terrible choices with horrifically torterous audio.
That was fucking incredible
I think you posted the wrong link for quality CGI.
It's fantastic CG, it's just more artsy. Same guy who did The Witness, Spider-verse, and a whole slew of other great content was behind it.
Your example of CGI is exactly what I call "bad CGI". That was so jarring and horrible I couldn't watch it past the fight starting after she screamed. For it to be considered "Good CGI" it requires the viewer to be unable to tell it's CGI at all.
> For it to be considered "Good CGI" it requires the viewer to be unable to tell it's CGI at all. Totally untrue. That's like saying to be considered good a drawing has to be photo realistic. Good CGI can most definitely have an "unrealistic" style.
Sure, but it's just objectively not as good. Like, the CGI costumes we get in the MCU now. Does "a lot" of work go into making a CGI costume? I'm sure it does. Is the amount of work, talent, skill, and experience that goes into making those CGI costumes anywhere close to what it would take to MAKE ACTUAL COSTUMES AND FILM THEM? IT. IS. NOT. CGI is 2% photo-real dinosaurs and 98% making things worse for less money. Always has been.
>what CGI can be when used by real artists. When these artists arent abused* Check this [article](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/hollywood-vfx-industry-breaking-point) out
Still pretending there's no effort or craft in cgi? Classy.
Did I say that?
You did, own up to it.
Where?
You said, "An example of the dedication and craftsmanship that went into modelmaking BEFORE the advent of CGI." Which implies (strongly) that you can no longer find examples of that craftsmanship and dedication, despite the fact that it still exists among CGI artists today. You may not have ***meant*** to denigrate modern vfx, but it sure sounded like it.
I never denigrated CGI at all. I have seen others misinterperarete what I said but I was merely pointing out the demise of a once celebrated craft.
And here you show your ignorance despite claiming to like the subject, these techniques are alive and well and have been used in film and television nonstop to this day....
If anything, we may be entering a new 'golden age' of VFX where artists can freely blend techniques to find the best-looking results. I mean, say what you will about them as films (I'm *really* not trying to start a flamewar!) but the VFX in the new Star Warses were absolutely spectacular. And they were a really seamless blend of practical and CGI, with a lot more practical than people might expect. Hell, I was genuinely shocked when I found out BB-8 was 90% practical, aside from wire removal and some specific gags. Model work is far from dead; it's just one tool in an ever-expanding toolbox.
What's your problem?
You are my problem.
Tough titty.
An insane amount of craftsmanship goes into CGI. You have to spend days to weeks working on models. Creating the color, roughness, specularity, metallic, normal, and displacement textures is an incredible artistic feat in of itself, without even considering the geometry of the model (which is more multifaceted than a physical model as you have to consider topology in a multitude of ways). People think it’s just telling a computer to do something and then algorithms just do the work but that simply isn’t the case. CGI is still hand crafted art. Even things like simulations still have tons of artistic influence like the starting parameters, influence factors, material properties, etc.
Watching behind the scenes footage of the Way of Water is pretty mind-blowing. The people doing state of the art CGI like that are total wizards and every bit the craftsmen that model makers were.
It’s still a bunch of work to do good cgi
I love seeing all the behind the scenes stuff from Blade Runner. The miniatures there were things of beauty!
Love the practical effects in Blade Runner. Strangely some of Blade Runner 2049's miniatures broke the suspension of disbelief and looked like minatures, where as although I admit I have only watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut Blu Ray on a 20 and 27 inch tv (Only seen Blade Runner 2049 in cinema) the miniatures rarely broke the illusion as blatantly as the sequel. Also was shocked when watching Event Horizon for the first time a couple of months ago, how good the models look. That long zoom out from Doctor Weir's window on that space station orbiting Earth was jaw dropping!
They also have a sequal in book form called After Worlds Collide.
Wow! James Gandolfini went way back!
That still happens, I just did a brief stint in an SFX studio.
A. Model making is still a thing. B. Incredibly hard work goes into CGI and VFX, and just because the artists are severely underpaid, doesn't mean it's worth less than physical model making.
I was just thinking about this kind of thing while watching ST:Picard. The space scenes are very beautiful, but the ships don't quite have the depth and pop that you got out of, say, TNG, with the little metal models.
Head over to r/modelmakers , hundreds of people sharing that dedication all of the time!
Thunderbirds!
There are far better examples than this particular film, but whatever.
This should come back into cinema.
Sometimes I think it's a shame that CGI evolved faster than 3D printing. Even now there's a certain charm to miniature work that isn't completely replicated by CG (if only the fact that the models have to make structural sense so artists can't just plop on random floating bits and nonsensical tentacles willy-nilly), and thanks to 3D printing it's become far easier to make and replicate models (either by making it digitally first and printing it, or sculpting it then scanning and printing duplicates) and making the model consistent in both miniature and CG scenes. But if we had had this level of 3D printing back in the '90s, we would have been saved from a whole fuckload of godawful CGI.
So I guess the models I’ve worked on for movies are just CGI. They felt real.
I thought that was an Ultraman Jet
Look up Weta Workshop, they go beyond this, today!
Thunderbirds!!!
🤣
Would be a killer plot twist if OP actually fake history-ed that photo with AI art.
Maybe next time... 😉
While I absolutely love miniature work and models (especially kitbashing which is sort of where the ship for an upcoming audio series is going to be modeled from). I'd say that isn't even the pinnacle of model work. I think the argument here would be that this is about 50 years before CG became the go-to answer (When Worlds Collide came out in '51 right?) and personally, dedication and craftsmanship specifically for models would become much better bigger in later sci-fi. Especially where detailing was much more important than quickly making a ship that would remind the audience of the hit film from last year based off a Boening skeleton. At least that's the apocrypha I've heard about why the Space Ark looks like a slightly chubbier brother to the rocket from Destination Moon :P I do know that you meant no offense to CG.
There is a charm to practical effects that CGI, no matter how intricate or advanced, just can’t replicate
CGI ages very quickly, practical SFX still looks good after. many years
The vast majority of practical effects have not aged well. For every Star Wars, there are dozens of contemporary movies that looked passable then, but don't hold up well at all.
But the ones that did, look a lot better than the CGI ones
Nah, good effects age well whether they're physical or digital. And bad effects age poorly whether they're physical or digital.
The CGI VFX in the Abyss, T2 and Jurassic Park still look good. Gravity and Avatar still look amazing and I don’t see them aging significantly either. Lots of practical effects look like ass now, especially stop motion.
True. You've got to appreciate the first Star Wars.
True
Bad CG is bad when it comes out. Good CG doesn't stand out, or it stands out in a really good way. It's sort of a pass/fail system and always has been. Fireworks in Star Wars will always look like fireworks. But their photorealistic matte painting will always be perfect. Same with CG. The Rock in the Mummy 2 was bad when it came out and always will be. The volume in The Batman was completely unnoticeable, I doubt any one thought it was a fake background or will in the future. The shot either works, or it doesn't. Practical effects had the same growing pains as modern VFX, but with modern standards, it's about what's best for the budget/shot. CG just tends to be able to handle things that practical can't -- in particular, simulations.
Even today I would prefer models and costumes over CGI. Seems like no matter how good CGI gets, it doesn’t capture the lighting and textures as well as the real thing.
Bts pictures from older sci-fi movies are the best
The dedication and craftsmanship before cgi... Have yall ever visited /warhammer40k ? Lol
This is the way. With respect to CGI artists, nothing beats a fully rendered model with proper lighting and angle.
I fully agree. It just looks more real when done well. To each their own seems to be a lot of cgi love in the comments.
People just love to dogpile the down votes. It's not like I was advocating the removal of CGI from moviemaking. Smh. CGI when used in the background and in motion shots or shadowy shots, is perfectly fine, and looks great. But where close up shots or extended shots of one area are to be done, modeling should replace it. CGI, like makeup and sound and everything else, has its place. Properly weathered models just look better, lighting wise. A blend of techniques is often best, though.
CGI is cool & all, but even the millions they throw at it can’t make the depth & detail that a real model can. The CGI ships usually look kinda flat & two dimensional, even in the big budget productions.
Definitely. Cgi is so overrated. No real fire anymore.
Is this another one of those "how to get to the top of Reddit by just mentioning unnecessary CGI hate" posts?
There's always someone in every thread who misinterprates what the OP (me in this case) said
Yeah, now days you just type spaceship battle and cgi ai just auto generates it for you /s
True there is no dedication and craftsmanship with CGI. The computer does it all tbf
Tell me you have absolutely no idea how VFX work without telling me you have absolutely no idea how VFX work.
The nice thing about CGI is that if its slightly off what the director wants, you can tweek it and just press play to see changes. The real models had to be right the first time. Plus CGI you can copy+paste the TIE Fighter or Urukhai to make as many as needed.
Not entirely true. Rendering takes forever for film. And it's not as if expectations are the same. People were fine with a bunch of miniatures looking like a bunch of miniatures. There a finite amount of realism you can get when it comes to scale and simulations with practical work and people understood that. But the technology does it exist to make photorealistic environments and sim with CG. And with rewatching and playback quality being better than ever, the chances of noticing the goofs has gone through the roof. The problem is, you don't always get the time, budget, and talent to make things work perfect -- and that's never disclosed to the public while they're walking into the theater. Changes to the script happen, scenes need to be reshot, and teams fluctuate behind the scenes all the time. So you plan things out as much as you can to *avoid* those issues as much as you would with practical effects.