On the praise of in camera FX work in movies

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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A couple of weeks ago, I went to see ‘Oppenheimer’ (although a bit late to the party, I actually watched it twice, in the theater, I mean). Having seen the film, I went on to listen to the FXpodcast episode on it, as well as the FXshow episode on Barbie/Oppenheimer.

In the latter, right around the 1:00:00 mark (one hour mark), Mike Semour and the guys begin to talk something I’ve been personally kind of observing myself,- with some scepticism, to say the least - in recent years:

On those huge big budget Hollywood feature film productions where they do have very substantial VFX budgets and large amounts of FX-shots involved, there seems to be this hype around the idea of avoiding post-FX and avoiding especially CGI and trying to do as much as humanly possible in camera, one way or another.
And this is then often, - well at least in public, in promotional featurettes or interviews and such - being heralded as some kind of ‘the better, more real, more ground-truth way of doing things’, like if it was somehow an ellbow-grease way of making FX work in a true and honest way, in contrast to CGI being ‘the fake way of doing things’.

Now on a general note, personally, I think this notion of practical- vs. post-FX is largely complete nonsense (in so far as it’s not one versus the other). That’s also why it rubs me the wrong way, when I hear or read about people basically bragging with how they ‘keept it real’ on their filmset, so to speak, and didn’t use CGI and all that, as if that was an accomplishment in itself.
And especially as if practical FX work was actually ‘real’. Sure, it’s maybe tangible objects (miniatures etc.), but it’s a movie set, there’s no reality in a movie set.

Director Robert Zemeckis put it well in some FX Guide article from 2019:

There’s nothing more ridiculous than a closeup as far as the actor is concearned. He’s got a big piece of glass right in his face. You are looking at a piece of tape on a matte box. There are no other actors that you can see. Any fellow actors, also doing the scene, are 20 feet away, delivering their lines off camera. And then there’s a bunch of technicians, with their bellies hanging out, surrounding the camera and the actor or actress having to deliver the most emotional moments of the movie. It’s pretty ridiculous. And yet that’s when everyone says ‘look at that acting,- it’s just so real’, yet it’s being done in a completely unreal environment. Movies have always been technical. It’s a technical art form, nothing is real. It never has been.
- Robert Zemeckis, director

So what’s with this sort of hostility towards CGI, there seems to be floating around?

I will have to say, what is being done on something like a ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movie, where they have a the whole cast in performance-capture gear on a soundstage surrounded by greenscreens, and in post they’ll retarget one to be a two-foot tall raccoon and one to be a,- whatever - 20 foot tall whatever it is, well, I personally think that is taking it a bit far. And before you ask, no, I never watch such superhero-crap, I’m not the most competent to judge the actual onscreen final outcome.
Well, OK, I’m going to be honest here, I have watched like two or three movies of the genre, mostly when it wasn’t my decision what to watch (the first X-Men movie, that I actually watched on my own decision, ‘Green Lantern’, I guess ‘Sin City’ kind of falls into the genre too).

With that said, it is my opinion that creature-FX hardly ever really works that well, if they try to do it practically. A guy in a suit (think ‘Alien’) is a guy in a suit.
And something like that scene from ‘Star Wars Episode IX’, where that one little alien-creature is doing repairs on C3-PO’s head, well, I think it looks pretty cringeworthy. You can tell from a mile away it’s a small pupett made from latex, because something is always wrong about the SSS or something with these and also because it just doesn’t move like a life organic beeing at all.

Now I’m kind of not feeling like typing much more or thinking of/searching for other examples of where practical FX, works well or where it falls short or where either of the two is to be said about post FX and CGI, so I leave the discussion to you.

greetings, Kologe

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Well I can see as a director it’s much easier to work with in camera stuff, rather than first filming void on a greenscreen, then deal with open gl preview and review technical nonsense before actually see the shot…
Probably miniature or on set VFX have a more instant feel that makes things more fun to work with.

I got the same feel when I work on 2D animation projects where part of it is done in 3D because it’s cheaper. 2D at least in the beginning feels kind of instant and easy to work with ( when you know how to draw) while 3D always feel a bit administrative : “make the hand bigger ? call the modeling department, we are actually reviewing the texture of the shirt, but you should keep in mind that the cloth sim will make it more lively…”

Anyway, many comment we get from people who like 2D animation is that it’s more lively, more original than 3D that feels always a bit artificial.
While I can also generally agree to that, we should keep in mind that some 2D animation can be very cheap, and some 3D stuff are truly amazing, the problem has nothing to do with the technique but rather our ability to use it properly.

To me it’s a lot perceptual, some people might think that CG will always look fake because they have good examples where it looks actually cheap, but they might not recall some really good shots that kept them in the story, in some occasion they don’t realize how many stuff is fake in the regular series episode they look so eventually they associate cgi with bad cgi.

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for me the problem with cgi mostly is physics nowadays. the problem isn’t rendering anymore but it totally throws me off when the weight and acceleration of things doesn’t feel right, which more often than not doesn’t. then in blockbusters most of the time the complete last third is a long cgi action sequence where nothing matters. boooring! :slight_smile:

the cgi action scenes also were the flaw with the latest indiana jones movie. not the rejuveniled face of harrison ford. :slight_smile: in the older films he survived totally improbable stuff too but in the latest film the action scenes didn’t seem to be based in our physical world.

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Public became nauseous after a decade of abuse of superheroes movies.
So, “no CGI” became a marketing argument like “light” food.
There can be good and bad CGI and good and bad practical effects ; like there can be tasty healthy well cooked food and insipid unhealthy industrial chemical one.
At the end, people are buying both, not always for good reasons.

Yes. Cinema is still synonym of faking.

Filmmakers have a lot of tools at their disposition. For them, that can be an envy of artist to challenge themselves, to satisfy an artistic idea or simply to modify their routine.
At the end, the ultimate question is just : does the result works or not ?

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Interesting point.
To my eye practical creature FX often suffers a similar problem, only in a bit of a different sense. That is to say, imho you can most of the time kind of tell it is being moved from the outside, passively, so to speak, it isn’t auto-motive (in the literal sense), it has no agency of itself.
The dog-transformation scene from 1982’s ‘The Thing’ is a good example.
Those tentacles just spasm around in a totally random fasion. Actual live organisms move with a certain degree of agency and,- for the lack of a better word - purpose.

Yes, that’s why a movie like Oppenheimer is the closest to modern day blockbusters I’m going to watch at all, these days.
It kind of falls into that category, but not the same way as the n-th ‘Indiana Jones’- , ‘Star Wars’-, ‘Fast and Furious’- etc. franchise movie, or all of that superhero-genre, be it Marvel or else.

As far as those are concerned, I’m with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and others, that’s not cinema, it’s despicable, some kind of screenspace-carnival at best.

greetings, Kologe

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Am I dating myself when I say that I remembered first seeing Star Wars when the title scroll said “The Star Wars” – Lucas had no idea if the movie would sell at all, so there were no “Episodes” – and everything was done “in-camera” one way or the other … except for the Tektronix® display that briefly appeared in the console of Luke’s fighter. There were no computers used to do any of the effects (other than to control the motion-control cameras), because computers at that time couldn’t get out of their own way. Yet. They were just toys. (But then, as now, we were “relentlessly pushing the envelope.”)

When you look at those “old” movies, you just have to look at them the way I did at the time: because nothing like that had ever been seen before, except in Kubrik’s 2001 movie. And certainly nothing close to the level of perfection that the “Industrial LIght and Magic” (internal …) team had just achieved. Painstakingly. By hand.

This is why I became so upset when George Lucas decided to “improve” those old (sic … ahem …) films, and refused to allow the original versions to continue to be distributed. This was his “owner’s privilege.” But, in my estimation, he utterly ruined them. I still want to see them, and (with and …) without “color correction.” The “red-cast” of early color film stock was actually incorporated into costume and set designs of the period. Modern audiences should still be able to see them now, as they were seen then.

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@sundialsvc4 : Not really sure what point you’re trying to make…

That aside, and while I don’t mean to bad-mouth practical effects in general, what I don’t really understand, is claims like the following:

One of the greatest achievements in practical effects movie history is the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London. Made in 1981, this movie utilized 30 technicians, 6 months of prep and a full week of shooting just for this scene.

From pulling hair through rubber, to stretching out prosthetic limbs, every moment it made my hand, not CGI. Despite its age, you won’t find a better creature effect to this day.
(source: see link below)

Despite its age, you won’t find a better creature effect to this day.

[note that blog-post was published on April 30 2023]

Seriously? I’ve said it before, but when I look at something like this, I can smell the latex. These things never look like actual organic tissue at all.

I perfectly understand it’s the best they could do at the time, using the technology they had.
But still: What’s with those claims like you won’t find a better creature effect to this day?

Are they seriously trying to tell me, those practical FX from ‘An American Werewolf in London’ look better than e.g. the CG apes from that ‘Rise of the / Dawn of the / War for the Planet of the Apes’?

Note also ‘The Wolfman’ for something like a more direct comparison:

And the VFX breakdown which shows it’s largely CGI:

Do we have to chalk that up to Youtube-bullshittery which spilled elsewhere on the net?

With all that said, I don’t mean to sound like I thought practical FX were the inferior option per se. Not at all. For example, I think the miniature work from ‘The Abyss’ holds up pretty well to this day:

greetings, Kologe

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Among the downsides of VFX being used to the point where every movie technically counts as an animated feature is this. Back when big sets and animatronics were constructed and used, it left behind some amazing places that the public could check out and explore long after the movie left theaters (whether it be on location or in a studio building, not to mention the possibility of hand-me-downs to tourist traps). Now you just have green rooms with minimal props outside of what the character is wearing.

The type of place Hollywood does not create anymore (which brings up the secondary consequence of making-of features not being as interesting because half of it is visual effects in Maya). Then comes the third notable consequence which was possibly causing animatronic technology in general to stagnate (which would’ve otherwise led to some great stuff for tourist areas, most of the newer models literally do not look much different from the dream big era of the 1990’s).

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I personally think that CG is fantastic technology, but it is also recent. So far as I know, the films of which you speak (and, of which I spoke) were made at a time when such things were simply not available. At all.

Therefore – we shouldn’t really be “mixing apples and oranges” here. It’s one thing to make the conscious decision to “do something in-camera” to avoid “CG expense” when both options are equally available, or to reduce the CG workload. Entirely another when “CG doesn’t exist yet.”

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Yes, this is of course true. In the meantime, I have been wondering, maybe the author of the blog-post I referred to above, when making the claim

Despite its age, you won’t find a better creature effect to this day.

might have meant that in the sense of creature effect strictly referring to practical creature effect, and to that alone. This way, it would make more sense to me.
Though even then, I’m not entirely sure, I’d exactly agree. Actually, I’m inclined to say Amalgamated Dynamics’ work for the ‘The Thing’-prequel (2011) looks superior to me:

How much of that made it into the final movie is of course another question, and even looking at ImageEngine’s reel on that (see below), I consider it partly hard to tell how much was CG in the end or wasn’t.

But in any case, ‘The Thing’ (2011) might easily be one of the most interesting case-studies for this whole discussion (at least in terms of creature FX), for other than in Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ (1982), they could use both (CG and practical FX) and so they did.
Not all of the CG works great, though on the other hand, I believe I’ve heard somewhere the decision to involve CGI was made late into the production and it had to be done in a rush (probably easily the number one reason for bad CG ending up in such movies in general).

Ideally, one would probably want to use both approaches in close coordination and cooperation, for these things.

“They got very clever at mixing practical with digital. A sequence where you see four Velociraptors together, two are practical and two are digital and it is very difficult to tell which one’s which because they swap them around. It was brilliantly done…the ability to mix two techniques and be clever about where and when to keep the audience guessing.”
- Neal Scanlan, Special Creature Effects Supervisor on 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' (2018)
source

Anyway, whatever has or hasn’t been done on 2011’s ‘The Thing’, I will claim all of the practical work done for it (weather or not it ended up in the final movie), to me looks a lot more legit than it’s counterpart from the 80ies.
So maybe there’s less stagnation than @Ace_Dragon assumes?

One thing is to be said about advances in practical FX in any case, ironically ( - of all things -) digital post-FX nowadays gives it liberties unheard of in the analogue days:

“In many ways, VFX has revolutionized practical effects. If you go back 15 years ago, and I wanted to put a rod onto a puppet to bring that to life, there was no way of removing that rod, it would have been in shot or we would have had to work out how to hide it from the camera. Nowadays, you can not only have a rod, you can have a whole person in shot and they can be removed digitally afterwards if the scene really demanded it. This does spoil us terribly, and CG has opened up this opportunity.”
- Neal Scanlan, Special Creature Effects Supervisor on 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' (2018)
source

greetings, Kologe

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Almost all of the creature effects on the original John Carpenter The Thing were created by a then only 23 year old Rob Bottin. His work schedule was so intense and his commitment to quality so obsessive he needed to be hospitalised for exhaustion when full production ended.

Of the few effects he didn’t do was the dog changing which was Stan Winston.

In my opinion at least the effects work in The Thing was a high water mark in cinematic and visual effects history. They still stand up. Right up there for me with Scotts Blade Runner, Lang’s Metropolis and Gilliams Brazil for design and visuals that are just so technically and artistically sublime and in tune with the overall vision of the film that I can barely imagine them being better. I am also a big fan of the clever cut with practical effects and also for CGI or when mixed with practical. It so often enhances the illusion I think. Sure the original Alien was done with a man in a suit and sure you don’t see it very much. But has that films power ever been bettered since ? It just works.

I think great art however it might be done is just great art and is always going to be eternal and speaks to all our shared humanity. Last night I was at a wonderful celebration event in central London for Ray Harryhausen. It was at the Regent Street cinema and there was also an anniversary screening of the Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. Those creatures just have such a magic and an energy all their own. The Kali dance, then the multi armed sword fight that comes after. Amazing on the big screen. For me just pure magic and rare alchemy. A thing of never ending mystery and wonder.

Fixed for a typo I was called out on.

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I suppose that was meant to read clever cut.
cleaver cut makes me picture you running around on a movie set, equipped with at least one meat cleaver, slashing crew and cast left and right like a madman in an ungodly onlsaught, a demonic smirk on your face… and it’s not even a slasher-movie! (It’s a romantic comedy) ^^

That’s quite an achievement. On the other hand, this discussion, for what it’s worth, can probably only focus on comparing end-results. We can’t really hand out brownie points for diligence.

While it wouldn’t occur to me to debate the brilliance of ‘Alien’ (1979), which just works indeed, I will debate the general notion of horror works best, if you don't show it onscreen and leave it up to the viewer's imagination.

While I cannot fully decide, weather this was something you meant to imply, it is definitely a view you regularly hear/read in such contexts, often coupled with a derogative remark towards jump-scares, those being branded as cheap and dull.

I’m inclined to call that a myth, mixed with some kind of snobbery. Anyway, my point here is, I don’t really have all that much faith in the average movie-goer’s imagination. The only time people are really scared of their own imagination is when they dream while they sleep.
And it goes without saying, if they do while they watch a movie, well, that maybe doesn’t go in favour of the movie.

The thing is, people being scared of their own imagination during a dream probably mostly stems from the fact one usually isn’t aware its a dream, at the time. And while even lucid dreams can be scary (from my experience at least), all dreams are usually much less so after one wakes up.

So at its core, my claim here is: People are usually only scared of what they see or otherwise experience first hand. That’s why everybody does just great at ignoring abstract impeding doom, even if perfectly aware, on an intellectual level. Just think of global warming for a prime example.

Now this is not to say one cannot make use of all sorts of editing- and cinematography-tricks to be quite effective in terms of eerieness and all that.
Those unsettlingly slow, lurking dollys through the corridors of the Overlook hotel from ‘The Shining’ (1980) are great at that.

And I will neither debate the brilliance of something like ‘Cat People’ (1942), which is, - same as ‘Alien’ (1979) - often referred to as an example of keeping the scary offscreen, so to speak.

But I don’t buy this notion of the less you show it, the scarier it is.

.
greetings, Kologe

*** dodges Cameron Diaz’ Gwyneth Paltrow’s head flying off, which lands right inside an empty cardboard box somewhere inbetween gear and equipment ***

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Another great I forgot to mention for incredible effects work and design must be Forbbiden Planet 1956. Whole thing blends together so beautifully and I think it is so suspenseful and dream like. The invisible monster from the ID a real nightmare when seen and as said by a character in the film as we first see a cast of it’s footprint. A fifty’s science fiction esthetic and vision so wonderfully and compellingly brought to life.

Edit : the original Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from 1954. Amazing practical effects work and design. Mentioned here as another that has arguably not really been bettered. They totally nailed and cemented the design of the Nautilus right there. Has there ever been a better looking version of Jules Verne’s imaginary submarine ? League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen ? Anything before that or since ? Just see the sequence where the Nautilus rams a ship.

I am not really a fan of putting isolated clips up against each other out of the broader context of the film. But an interesting comparison could be Harryhausen’s version of medusa from the original Clash Of The Titans and then the CGI one from the remake. Certianly for me there is no comparison. For me Harryhausen’s is the far better in design and also for the sequence itself. CGI is an amazing tool and I have been working in it myself for years. But it is simply another tool. It does not make redundant nor overshadow surely the best of what came before.

I still prefer One Million Years BC to Jurassic Park as my top dinosaur film.
The designs might be outdated by science now but so are the designs in Jurassic Park. The science is always moving and evolving as we discover and understand more. But great art will always be great art. I think the beasts in that film evoke such a feeling of primordial mystery and wonder. The Allosarus moves with an almost demonic frenzy and crackling energy and I still find it an incredible creation.

Blimey ? OK very sorry for eliciting such a strong reaction. Fixed now. I edited it. I often write my posts in a text editor so it might have been a rogue spell checker moment.

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“What’s in the box?? What’s in the boooooxxxxxxx?!?!?!!” - Mills in Se7en

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Now that I come to think about it, for the sake of this discussion, are there any examples of digital FX-work you’d hold in comparably high esteem? Any high water marks on that front you could think of?

I probably start to sound as if I wanted CGI to “win” here, by now. I don’t.
What I’m mainly interested in is rather the meta-level of how these things (different kinds of FX work) are being perceived, their reception, if you will.
Looking at that seems more interesting to me than strictly looking at the FX itself (it’s an ever evolving field anyway).

A little addentum to that: I suppose if that principle of keeping the scary offscreen works so well for me in ‘Cat People’ (1942), it’s mostly for that is much less a film to be classified as monster horror, than it is to be classified as psychological horror, in terms of subgenre.

In that sense, its much closer to e.g. ‘Psycho’ (1960), ‘Bunny Lake is Missing’ (1965) or say Roman Polanski’s early(ish) genre works, such as ‘Rosemarie’s Baby’ (1968), ‘The Tenant’ (1975) and of course ‘Repulsion’ (1965), than it is to e.g. ‘Alien’ (1979).
Especially with Polanski’s works just mentioned, ‘Cat People’ (1942) shares much of that idea of a certain, carefully cultivated ambiguity in terms of which onscreen events are to be seen as diegetic or not, which, in the latter case, herein means they might just as well be fantasies/hallucinations/delusions of a character instead.

Yes I suspected something like that. And I hope it is well understood my reaction was an amused one (my sense of humor is always like that).

greetings, Kologe

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It is still easy to forget how very recent it is that “CG can now do everything.” When Spielberg talked about stop-motion … when George Lucas used motion-controlled cameras and a whole lot of styrofoam to create the final run on the Death Star (and actual explosives to then blow it up …) … this was, then, the only way(!) to do it.

“CG” then came upon the scene, but it did so gradually, because the microprocessor designers at Intel and AMD were still racing to catch up. Movie designers were eagerly embracing the technology “as fast as it developed,” but it was still developing.

From the clip: “I’m a firm believer that whatever is the best [then available …] technique to achieve the shot, is how it should be done.” Well, that has certainly changed tremendously within my lifetime. (“May you live in interesting times …”)

Also – I think that it was very significant(!) that, during this very-transitional time, the moviemakers used physical motion-sensor technology to digitize what traditional stop-motion animators had been doing … so as to allow them to continue doing what movie audiences had long become accustomed to seeing on the screen. At the time, I think that was very important. (And perhaps then, “the only way to be sure to sell it.”)

After all, the “Tron” movie project – “innovative” though it may have been – did not perform especially well at the Almighty Box Office. “At that time.” The investors were probably less than pleased, and the producers then had to answer to them.

Today’s audiences are now entirely accustomed to the “fluidity” of “digital animation curves.” But this technology simply did not exist at the time, “and you nonetheless have a movie to make … and hope to then make money from!” :slight_smile:

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It wasn’t really to do with the fluidity of digital animation curves. They were the same then as now. The use of the motion-sensor technology was because at that time there were not many digital animators with classical animation knowledge and in particular the deeper and more rare understanding of animating convincing creatures. A lot of digital animation theory up to then was around manipulating bézier curves to ease in and out. If you animate a creature or character like this it will normally look too floaty or smoothed out.

At the time it was mostly stop motion animators who had this deeper understanding. These days of course there are many many more exclusively practising 3D digital animatiors who have this knowledge. We do have slow in and slow out in most kinds of organic movement but it is more complex than that. In a moving creature there are sudden stops and starts and sharpness and irregularity’s in the curves. I was asked what I thought was a high water mark in CGI visual effects and this was. Everything changed after this film but I don’t think CG devalues nor puts in the shade the best of what came before.

There are a few clips in there too of the original Kong and also One Million Years BC. I still have a deep love of those and they still inspire me and also leave me with a sense of awe. Harryhausen and other stop motion creature animators during this time animated straight ahead with no video frame grabbing to reference from, holding it all in their heads. I find the life and personality of these creations mesmerizing. I was at a screening of Golden Voyage Of Sinbad last week. It was discussed in the QnA afterwards just how difficult it is to animate two different creatures in combat in stop motion. Having to keep track of two different body types movement patterns and personality’s frame by frame while needing to keep everything always moving and fluid

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And it is just as easy to forget how cinema itself is only five generations old, as Francis Ford Coppola put it once. About the same as heavier than air flight.

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Indeed. And it is the first time in human history where some people were granted a form of immortality or at least a way to remain always present and vivid and bright as long as we are able to watch those films. Those who are elderly now can still be seen and revisited when very young. Those who are no longer here can still inspire and move younger generations long after they are gone.

At no other point in human history has this been possible. And now everyone has a camera so it has become universal if somebody wishes it. It’s sprits or phantoms created with chemistry and mechanics boxes and lenses. It’s quite incredible really. And also very poignant and deeply magical. Ghosts and sprits surround us everywhere due to 20th Century science.