4 Reasons Movie Special FX Are Actually Getting Worse
When every summer movie is like 80 percent special effects and 20 percent actual people (mostly Gary Oldman), it might be time to stop calling them "special." It's gotten so ridiculous that pretty soon IMDb is going to have to create new categories for all those digital hair tracers, ab sculptors, and dick jiggle physics specialists working on every movie. Unfortunately, past the flashy visuals and explosions of the big screen lies the seedy underbelly of the visual effects industry, which involves shady dealings like ...
#4. Visual Effects Are Making Even the Best Filmmakers Lazy
Fun fact: Here's what the orcs in The Hobbit almost looked like.
New Line Cinema
Congratulations, you're now suffering from metal poisoning just from this picture.
And, of course, here's what we ended up with:
New Line Cinema
Never mind, you're cured.
What the hell happened? A phenomenon we've lovingly named the CGI effect ... effect.
As we've mentioned before, Peter Jackson's attention to detail on the Lord of the Rings trilogy was so insane that every armor was crafted based on the backstory of an orc, most of which were onscreen for a whole six frames before being decapitated -- not only that, costume designers painstakingly handcrafted over six miles (for metric enthusiasts, that's "a shitload of kilometers") of chain mail, just so that they could put them on orc actors who would be wearing armor over the mail, at night, in the rain. After Jackson was dragged kicking and screaming back to the director's chair for The Hobbit, though, he said to hell with that and created all the orcs in nice and easy (for him) CGI. Hence the buttlord in the screencap above.
And The Hobbit trilogy is just one example in an increasingly disturbing trend of filmmakers who use CGI where practical effects would at least suffice, if not be better. Check out this supercut of VFX from The Expendables 2, where CGI was used for breathtaking effects like making a white helicopter black:
Lionsgate
The same technique was used on the cast's hair.
Or the scene where Sly sends a CGI motorcycle careening off a ramp into a CGI helicopter. We're talking about the same guy who became a film legend by actually jumping off cliffs and getting knocked out on camera. But, OK, maybe the helicopter/bike thing isn't such a good example, because when have you ever seen a scene like that using practical effects?
20th Century Fox
Oh.
Yes, even the lesser Die Hards have more balls than today's movies: the famous helicopter scene from Live Free or Die Hard was filmed using a real car, helicopter, and pee-soaked stunt man, with only a dash of CGI to make it a little bit more explodey in the finished film.
The CGI effect effect is even working its way into non-genre films. For The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese apparently got tired of scouting locations, so he just filmed his scenes wherever he set up his camera and then Photoshopped the proper background in later:
Paramount Pictures
The Jonah Hill cocaine party was filmed at a completely different Jonah Hill cocaine party.
At least the CGI companies must be getting loaded from all this extra business, right? Nope. It's the opposite, actually, because ...
#3. Studios Pick Whichever VFX Company Is Most Desperate
Remember that big Noah movie with Russell Crowe that came out this year? The one that featured every animal ever, a world-ending flood, and (for some reason) giant rock monsters, all made from CGI? Guess how much money the visual effects company made from that gig. If you guessed "nothing," then you're wrong -- it's less than that. They actually lost money for the "privilege" of working on a $125 million movie that racked up $359 million worldwide.
Paramount Pictures
At least they managed to cut corners by having the studio execs pose for this shot.
And that's not a fluke: that's just how the visual effects business works today. There are so many VFX shops vying for a limited number of movies that, instead of hiring them based on any measure of skill, studios are literally handing over their multi-million-dollar investments to the lowest bidder. Hell, tell them you can do Avengers 2 on MS Paint for $5 and you've got yourself a contract. Basically, picture the special effects companies as violently detoxing meth addicts and the movie studios as unscrupulous dealers with blue balls. Now do the math.
Warner Bros.
This scene was painfully familiar for the artists.
In turn, this means that the VFX companies have to take on so much work to try to turn even a meager profit that their artists end up working 15-hour days for weeks at a time, on top of cutting frivolities like health insurance or overtime, just to keep their lights on. The Noah company, Look Effects, isn't some little start-up: they also did the CGI on shows like Lost and Game of Thrones. However, the only way they could land Noah was by low-balling it, and then it's not like they could go back to the studio and say, "Hey, so, apparently we can't generate an apocalyptic flood and some 3 million odd animals stuffed on to a giant boat for the price of a Happy Meal."
Their only hope, at this point, is to deliver something badass enough to impress other studios (and hopefully get a little golden statue). Of course, to do that, that probably means you're going to have to cough up for good CGI, and the slight problem there is ...
