05 April 2013
TIM AT TFE: IN PRAISE OF OLD CGI
In this week's edition of my new column at The Film Experience - oh, how I like that! "My column". It makes me sound all grown-up - I tackle the subject of the 20-year-old Jurassic Park on the event of its anniversary re-release, particularly how its then-revolutionary visual effects have aged so much better than pretty much anything else from the same period, or many periods since. Go check it out!
3 comments:
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Good article, Tim.
ReplyDeleteDennis Muren (who supervised the VFX in "Jurassic Park") once said that, because CGI was a Brand New Thing, our eyes and minds weren't yet trained to see the seams and flaws embedded in the approach, but that over time, as our visual sophistication increased, "Jurassic Park" would begin to look as quaint to future eyes as "King Kong" does to our modern eyes.
Well, 20 years on, and I'm still waiting for the realism of those CG dinosaurs to fall apart.
A lot of that has to do with the points you made about how CG was used in the film i.e. very sparingly. The decision to employ computer graphics in that film was actually made pretty late in production. The original idea was to use stop-motion animation, and use computers to blend between frames, smoothing the jerky feeling of that technique. But tests using full CG animated and rendered dinosaurs were so successful, that the stop-motion approach was scrapped completely. Even so, the dinosaurs are only CG in shots where you see the full body. Shots involving only a part of a dinosaur were achieved with animatronics.
Which brings to mind another reason why "Jurassic Park" was so successful- pre-planning. You may love Spielberg or you may hate him, but one thing is certain- that man is PREPARED. Each shot involving dinosaurs was extensively planned out in advance, so that the animatronics experts designed each of their creations to carry out specific actions in the storyboards, and built to showcase those actions in the specific framing Spielberg had laid out. "Jurassic Park" is a marvel of organization and forethought.
It's light years away from how so many other directors approach their movies. It's dismaying to see how "anti-planning" the Hollywood culture is today, where having to plan things out and make decisions in pre-production (and stick with them) is viewed by many directors as an egregious burden on their creativity. And the studios bend over backward to enable them. One of the many reasons so many visual effects companies have gone belly up of late.
Great writeup, although I hope you'll do an actual review of Jurassic Park the movie.
ReplyDeleteI see that no-one seems to explictly mention a concept that's vital for good-looking digital VFX (from what little I've read about it), although RickR comes very close: RENDER TIME.
ReplyDeleteAs you know, time is money. And not every movie gets a filmmaker so prepared in advance, so monetarily efficient (making sure the budget is well used) and committed to quality as Mr.Spielbeg.
Too many movies get on production rushed by a release date, etc.
It seems like JP only had a 6-month postproducion period but I guess they started way earlier with the VFX work.