OK slightly offtopic, but I almost had a mental breakdown when I saw this:
I didn’t know they are being that shameless nowadays…
greetings, Kologe
Welcome to:
Are stories getting worse or only copying from older publications or ist just my imagination ?
“They” just do not have ideas anymore… or “they” simple do not pay authors but just use already bought concepts which was sucessfull…
“They” just do not understand beeing cheap leads to cheap (in the negative sense) products. 
It’s almost like in the days when you wanted to “spice up” some movie you just do some explosions of cars when… oh wait !! 
They made already a parody of it back in 1984:
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That is funny. I can confirm there are many mechanical designs based on how easy they are to model rather that what would be best. CAD has not been a positive influence in this regard.
The other reason may be (depending on where it is), the square concrete block benches might be the only ones that don’t get damaged or stolen too quickly.
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I think there can be no doubt that stories are falling off the rails in general but that’s a different topic except that there is often an attempt to cover that with excessive VFX.
Whether it’s stories, VFX, engineering, video editing or whatever, the trend I’ve noticed over over time as computers got faster and software got better is this (and I’m guilty of it as well):
What used to be ‘Think > Do > Results’
Became ‘Do > Think a Little > Do Again > Think a Little > Do Again…> Results’
I’m not sure that this is a good trend.
When you look at this from a software engineering point of view, your first example sort of resembles the waterfall model, which isn’t really used anymore, simply because it doesn’t work in the real world.
When you have a perfect understanding of the problem at hand, those steps might work. But as soon as the requirements are uncertain to a certain degree, this doesn’t work anymore because you are working based or incorrect assumptions.
An iterative approach allows you to make progress while getting a better understanding of the requirements. When working with customers, this is essentially unavoidable, because in my experience, not matter what they say initially, their understanding of the problem at hand tends to become better too and as such the requirements from them evolve as well.
There is no perfect way of handling this kind of iterative approach. And as you correctly stated, it allows for laziness, which can be both good and bad. Thanks to that, I have seen people come up with very clever solutions we didn’t anticipate at all. On the other hand, there have been obvious solutions which required the responsible person to sit down and carefully work out a way in which everything can work together beforehand, but the lazy approach they took was way more time consuming.
Personally, when I am working alone, I usually tend to use “Think → Do → Result” when I know where I am going.
On the other hand, when I am working in a team, the iterative approach is a must (unless if there is a proven, streamlined approach that can be taken, which is usually not the case). The reason for this is mostly communication. Communication among the team, such that everyone has the same idea of what the current state is, where things are heading and most importantly, what are the open questions, what has changed, … . But also for the communication with the clients as this gives them the opportunity to intervene if there was a miscommunication regarding the requirements or whatever. (Here is the risk they may want to start micromanaging, but there are good ways of dealing with this, but that is not the topic).
I wouldn’t be surprised if what you mean somewhat differs from what I just described. Would it be easily achievable to anticipate early on what the result is supposed to be, if they took the time to initially think more about it? Or could you do it because you have gained the experienced to do it?
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I don’t know if it’s really a downturn, I think it’s much easier to produce convincing image, probably less artists/people are needed to produce a VFX shot that 20 years ago.
And in the meantime there is so much more demand, each series now comes with so many VFX shots even if most of the time it’s invisible FX, set extension or else…
Since there is so much more demand and there is much more challenge also,
then it’s understandable that there is good a less good and that we might see the glass half full or half empty.
Basically a whole range of FX would simply not being done 20 years ago, I think mostly about series.
Another point is that since it’s easier to make CG we can either try to get the best stuff ever or simple get something of low/average quality for a low budget. Which would probably correspond to the state of the art and highest budgets of 20 years ago. But it obviously feels cheap in comparison to the best of today.
And lastly, still I think that some people tends to be a bit more over-confident in something being doable or not, maybe some stuff feel a bit cheap because it’s not as prepared as it would be when things where fairly new.
But in the end, I think it’s very mixed, we currently produce much better VFX than ever and much more, but that also leaves room for more poor/cheap content as well.
Yeah, part of the problem is the over reliance on VFX to fix things that really should have been taken care of during production. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to paint out production gear that was left on the set, or a wardrobe mess-up. I get to make money from the work, but I still think it’s damn sloppy.
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One of my personal favorite moments was several years ago, when the creative director decided to shoot 8 to 12 people on a green screen giving little 5-minute discussions.
They handed me all this 4:2:0 footage, and asked me to cut all the people off the green screen so that we could change the background.
What color should the background be?
Full black.
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My example was highly simplified of course. There are iterations each way. The idea was that there is a lack of thought at the beginning which results in far more work than necessary. One of those is uncertainty in the requirements.
I’ve found that clients and team members often fail to plan well because they think that changes are no big deal. It’s just start and see where we end up. That might be necessary in some cases but I think there tends to be too much of it which results in lost time, over budget low quality work at times.
In the VFX realm, if you know something is going to take hours per frame to render, there may be a lot more care taken early on.
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We can’t schedule the actors to be in the same room at the same time, so just make each one of them talk to a tennis ball.
Yeah, that’s always a riveting performance…
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That could explain some of the riveting performances of late.
Yeah, I did some shot cleaning too in another life so I can totally relate !
It’s probably that people want to save money on the shooting, so people spend less time making sure everything is ok… I never took the time to think it through but since it’s like that since a while it’s probably better for the budget. It’s best to spend a few days cleaning up shots rather than having extra days for the whole filming crew + location to make sure everything is right from the start.
Of course that lead to weird situation where it’s pretty difficult to salvage in post on some occasion.
That gives me in the same kind of vibes from the whole movie industry, where I wonder if producers tends to rely mostly on post prod, with a tendency to rush writing and shooting. And once we reach post prod things are probably much easier to manage and it’s easier to secure a deadline for the movie.
This is probably the complete opposite that what was happening in the 80/90 with movies like back to the future, ghostbusters… where the story is pretty solid and directing too. It’s very likely that much more time/effort was put in writing and planning before shooting.
But that’s just me speculating as I don’t really know the details of movie making production wise.
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A very long time ago when I was a video editor, non-linear editing was just becoming a thing. So this would happen:
The client came in thinking this is so much faster! Then they’d re-edit one scene 100 times then panic rush through the rest of the show because they had no time left.
It’s like they did know how a clock worked and that time itself was non-linear somehow.
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Usually, if you can plan, my experience is that this can be a massive time saver. Just the understanding of the major roadblocks can be very valuable. Or getting a basic understanding of the options you have can sometimes significantly impact how you tackle the problem.
If that’s how it is done… As you said, sometimes it may not matter, but this for sure leads to wasted resources quite often.
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That’s absolutely a factor. When people were paying for every foot of film, you had to do the work before the shoot. Sure, Kubrick did his whole weird thing of shoot 125 takes, but he wasn’t the norm. Most everyone else had the story locked down, solid dialog, the sets designed and built, etc.
It’s hard to look at a set filled with 80 Union Guys looking at their watches, while they think about all the overtime you’re going to pay them because you had no firm plan. Far easier to shoot “whatever”, then throw it to the VFX house where overtime isn’t quite a thing, crunch time = all the time, and in the end the film sucked anyway.
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Oh i meant exactly this
No story → let FX it…
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