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Edit: for context the comment I was responding to originally said that these days you can hardly tell when something is CGI or not. They edited theirs to delete that part.
MODOK is inherently goofy as a character. Looks fine on static comic page or even 2-D animation. Once it's translated into "big head guy in chair" and "guy has weirdass proportions because of a miniaturization accident" and 3-D and "still has to kinda look like a real guy", then it's just goofy4.
If you're getting your money from people who only loan money out to make money... they want to make money.
If you're getting your money from people who are invested in the product they won't cut these types of corners.
Unfortunately, you won't be able to raise enough money from people who are invested in the product, not a return, unless your viewership actually responds negatively towards instances where you were unreasonably prioritizing returns over quality.
Or more shortly... this behavior will continue until consumers wake up and act like they care.
Yup. The CGI in this movie took time and money. Two things that studios are refusing to spend now.
At the same time they are over relying on CGI. Because CGI artists foolishly decided not to form a union. Because they believed their skills would be enough to defend them. So there's now nothing protecting them from being overworked. Or fired, once the project is completed.
Factor in stagnant wages, work life balance being out of wack and you start to lose your most talented and passionate employees who simply give up and leave the industry for good. Causing a constant spiral of seniors leaving and causing brain drain stagnating innovation aswell.
I mean, overworked, underpaid talent was definitely an issue in the 00s, too. This post just cherry picks one of the best examples from that decade and compares it to the common of today
The other part is in the 2000's most teams knew they still had limitations to the CGI characters so they designed them in a way to compliment the limitations.
It absolutely is timelines. Transformers put a lot of effort into designing and planning the CGI. They started designing the CG for Transformers 1 in 2005. Big films now have a lot more last minute rewrites and on set changes, which mean that all of the CG plans need to be changed last minute too.
You obviously aren't familiar with how many redesigns the characters went through, Megatron's face was redesign months prior to release due to fan backlash. Its more about evecutives choices, they don't commit to a certain aspect during shooting because they know it can be changed in post and it's also cheaper than reshoots, so they overwork their CGI staff
*Approach would be a more correct word. Timelines are similar, but production pipelines and mindset did change. Movies didn't rely on post as much as they do now. "We'll fix it in post" mentality ruined many movies.
But its not just the mentality of post production. Large reshoots are far more common and when things are reshot the timelines for post production arent adjusted for it. So the post goes from months to weeks to days with no warning.
My best friend's wife is a very experienced CG artist and the time/effort involved in doing a good job is immense. That kind of talent is not cheap. It kind of makes sense if you're a studio looking for margin and "good enough" is good enough for a lot of the popcorn movies out there.
There are also a thousand subtle things people don't consciously pick up on that distinguish top-dollar CGI.
I point that out whenever someone posts, like, "This YouTuber re-created a multi-million-dollar Star Wars scene with a laptop." Like, yeah, it looks professional if you ignore the static shots, flat lighting, etc., and also include the general production overhead in your cost comparison.
he was able to take from what's already been made, all the work that went into deciding how to do this or that, has already been done for him, and then recreating the shot it looks nice, but it's not as good as the original, obviously, and they even left some stuff out of the shot
I’m such a design dork I will wax poetic about excellent lighting and how incredible it is to see it well animated or done in cgi. It’s absolutely incredible to see scenes and shadows lit so perfectly it feels real or rather makes perfect sense to our brains. Thankfully my husband enjoys my tangents
Not exaaactly the same thing, but every time I want to make something quick in Blender that I think will take like 30 minutes, I get basically what I want in 30 minutes, but then actually tinkering with it and tweaking it with subtle things to make it look better ends up extending it to like 3 hours
Yeah exactly, I'm a vfx artist, so many decisions are made last minute. You can spend weeks on a shot, then it's thrown away, then you have just days to work on the next idea they have. 1/2 the time you are patching poor story decisions, or lack of on set planning! Transition doesn't work? Oh VFX will figure it out. A lot of the work has also been going overseas to the cheapest bidder. We formed a VFX Union recently under IATSE, hope we get more shows to join!
Having studied and interned in the things I have (not vfx, but design) one of the most marvelous realizations was how many hours upon hours can go into the littlest thing that will never be noticed by most (but hopefully felt by at least a few) . . . and how the most grandiose, overwhelming, massive thing in the world is sometimes just held together with a fucking safety pin.
while its not strictly CG, Wildwood is a great example of this. amazing production with some of the best visuals i've seen in a movie, doubly so for stop motion animation. Time and Money need to be invested.
That's partial blame to Marvel's falling off at least. Sure, their writing is shit nowadays and probably AI generated (can't convince me otherwise) but half the complaints is that it's giving Spy Kids.
It is in no way a lack of effort or care from the visual effect artists. It comes from executives trying to min max every cent of profit. It’s puts a higher demand on the artists to do more work for less pay.
A huge reason deadman’s chest looks so good is because they had the actually time to make the work look flawless. Thats why something like planet of the apes or avatar looks great.
Blame the directors, producers, and movie studios. They are the ones who’ve crushed VFX into the ground. Directors realizing CG allows them to constantly change things and never have to make a concrete visual decision until the very end. Producers who refuse to reign in indecisive directors, and who compress post-production schedules to become insane crunches from day one instead of meticulously planning. And movie studios for slashing VFX budgets because they can only recoup so much with film subsides and cutting costs on VFX is fine because they think this stuff is easy because it’s digital.
I watched an interview with a director recently (I think it was Denis Villeneuve, not sure) and they said the root cause of bad CGI was essentially lack of planning. Lile you described, a lot of movies use CGI/VFX as a "get out of jail" card instead of a tool.
Villeneuve is a fantastic example of a director using his team to their fullest potential. Eg. watching the BTS for the Dune movies, the lighting, camera, design, VFX, sound, and music departments all work together through the whole production process to make the end product better. I work in film sound and when they mentioned that they got the VFX department to re-animate the sandworm vocalizations to some cool sound design they came up with, I was floored. That kind of back and forth almost never happens, but it absolutely results in a more cohesive experience for the audience.
They said effort and care was worse. Who does that malign if not the people doing the work? The people that put in long hours and care deeply about what they do?
The same logic goes for writing/story. Don't blame the writers. Blame the fact that studios are meddling and demanding constant rewrites and mass appeal. They used to let writers on set to be able to help with production, but now they only get tasked from afar and have lost creative liberty. Writers don't even get paid much.
In every form of art you see a range of talent and that’s a GOOD thing.
The expectation that CGI is always better year after year is deeply flawed. Yes there are better rendering techniques, tools and experience the following year, but the quality of work drastically varies by the artists themselves.
Imagine expecting piano music to always be progressing year after year.
I mean when you have your billionaire dad funding everything you don’t have to be profitable. I love Laika but its not fair to compare them to companies that have to turn a significant profit for how much effort/work is put in.
Those are two completely different mediums, so I disagree with your assertion. Stop motion has always taken immense effort and care. There are very few shortcuts that can be taken while allowing it to be an effective medium.
CGI is already the shortcut for practical effects. When it's used as the "easy" way to do things, of course studios will look for ways to cut costs even further, which degrades the quality more and more.
Pretty much every shot in a Laika film is a VFX shot. If there's more than three creatures on screen, most are probably digital. The environment usually only exists in areas the characters will move in, with the foreground and background being digital. Weather, fog, and water are usually 100% digital. Even when none of that is happening, the characters almost always have rigs sticking out of their backs and/or legs that have to be removed.
You can't tell because their physical team makes excellent reference for the VFX artists to work off of and the VFX artists are working on the film for the entire duration of shooting. They don't take shortcuts with the CGI and it works so well that people don't realize it is there.
I think it’s less the effort and care and more budgeting out the time to work on shots. Cg is a labour intense, time consuming part of movie making. The studios want their budgets as low as they can get them so the artists aren’t getting the time they need. It doesn’t matter how much effort and passion they put in if they’re only given a month to work on something instead of two or three.
It's also being careful about how you're using the CG. Davy Jones holds up because he's a slimy squid monster largely shot in the dark or in shadow. If the same crew with the same time and budget was asked to make Thanos at the time, he'd have looked like shit
yes dark and shadow is an easy way to hide downfalls of cgi/vfx in the past, but that doesn't mean, that we didn't have very close to humans looking EXCELLENT cgi characters without darkness and shadow helping them stay believable.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest came out in 2006.
lotr the two towers came out in 2002 with gollum a full cgi character, that looks very close to human and is very well lit generally and tons and tons of close ups.
it HAD to be good enough to be believable and they knocked it out of the park of course.
so NO thanos done in 2006/2002 wouldn't have looked like shit, but he would have looked worse and on the level of gollum.
and again the cgi of gollum in the lotr trilogy was good enough to hold up great today still.
so you are underestimating or downplaying what was possible back then with the best artists and tools and budget and of course time.
Endgame made 3 times what dead mans chest made. Endgame also had significantly more CG scenes than dead mans chest. It's not a case of not putting in the effort but more how much can be spent to tell these stories.
They haven't skyrocketed since COVID. Things folded because COVID shut down production and right as it started to come back we had a year of strikes between writers and actors. Production was basically shut down for three years and it was brutal to the studios out there.
If anything stuff has gotten cheaper as we have gotten better and faster and making it.
I am a game developer, and those costs are kind of an illusion. If you are so concerned about costs, use Blender, Houdini, and Unreal Engine. I am a fancy lad who prefers Maya, but even that isn't like buying a sofa.
The software cost is a drop in the ocean, it's salaries that drives the cost. Smaller teams are required to do more in less time = a hitter quality. Even if we have better tools and hardware these days there is still a lot of manual labor needed to produce good cgi.
Not really. And tbh, most people have very little clue as to how much of a movie that they are watching is CGI in the first place.
For example, the girl with the dragon tattoo is like 15 yrs old now, right? That movie was composited and green screened like hell, and people never notice.
Devs use prebuilt engines (unreal, unity, etc) which while impressive and massive, also limits them (especially if they want to save money and not tinker enough).
You can build your own engine but it costs a lot.
Well, cgi departments probably going through the same thing. Everyone using some prebuilt stuff and just small tinkers.
CGI is better than ever, Kingdom of the Planet Of the Apes has a river scene in it that is easily one of the greatest VFX shots of all time.
No one that knows even a tiny bit about this topic will say things are progressing backwards.
This is also really stupid because tons of the shots like the one posted above are in the dark and wet, which makes them far easier to look realistic. This is why Jurassic Park holds up, its best shots are at night and/or during the rain.
That is the budget allocated that decreases, so VFX artists have very little time to tune to perfection. Also big studios tend to change their mind constantly
I honestly don’t think CGI really needs to get better than this (depending on the genre). It’s real enough whilst retaining a fantasy/cartoonish charm. By contrast some live action Netflix films somehow look unreal today.
It's a garbage point and it wasn't true then and it isn't true now. The CG is so good now that it's in 90% of the shit you watch on TV but you'll only ever notice the stuff that doesn't hold up so you THINK none of it holds up. You aren't even aware of how much CG is working perfectly rendering it totally invisible to your radar.
I will never understand calling out reposting as long as I live. It makes sense when something happens and everyone posts the same thing at once, then dupes need to be removed.
But in cases like this where popular content keeps reaching the front page why is the problem OP and not the people who keep voting it to the top? The obvious conclusion to me is there are enough unique people who don't check the sub everyday so each instance is a different set of people who liked the post. What's the problem with this?
Tbf, the director admitted editing got cut short and they had to ship the movie with incomple effects, so it's basically the same point others are making here. It wasn't necessarily a lack of skill that made it so terrible.
I still love that piece of crap. It's flaws are genuinely enjoyable. It's much more fun than when a big production of early CGI uses them seriously and it's laughably terrible. I grew up through the whole evolution of early CGI tho, so it always has its charm to me.
Absolute top-tier, cutting edge CGI that cost over 100 million to create for one of the biggest blockbusters of the year still looks really good?
Someone get me a chair, the room is spinning.
And are we pretending that the modern equivalent, the big Marvel movies aren't leaps and bounds more advanced and look excellent, regardless of whether or not this example still holds up?
This post was incredibly fucking stupid the first time it was posted, and it gets continuously more stupid each of the 8000 times and counting that it gets reposted.
Puppeteering is the real lost art, the CGI decline is nothing but a function of cash. Throw $100 million at something and it looks like PotC. Throw $10 million and it looks like, well, most of the shit
There's not even a decline. Even movies with giant budgets can look garbage of the director doesn't have a vision. You can spin your wheels finding what something looks like and spend 100 mil so that you have to rush the final stretch as though you had 10mil and a fraction of the time. Looking at you marvel.
Practical is making a big comeback and as a VFX artist I love it. When they shoot practical we have something to match, we have scans and ref of real objects to build and they can use as much as possible from the plate, replacing only what needs doing or only in certain shots. The results are better than sticking with one or the other exclusively.
Because they're always cherry-picking to make a point. There's at least as much good CGI now as there was in the past. There's just at least as much bad CGI as well.
i mean there is a WHOLE LOT LESS bad cgi, than there was in the past % wise and that is simply because the hardware and software tools are there now and "affordable".
in the past it was going to ilm (industrial light and magic) with an insane budget and tons of time and they then with the best engineers and artists had to figure out how to make the tools needed, that also are able to run on the very very shity cutting edge expensive hardware of the time, to then being able to actually create the cgi for the movie.
AND you of course had the money to pay a ton for the render farms to render out the cgi.
if you couldn't do those things, then the cgi would be very likely be a serious issue visually in the movies.
that is basically no longer the case today.
so the floor of cgi in movies/series has been VASTLY VASTLY lifted.
The Transformers videos they do show are randomly shaped pieces of shiny metal wiggling in space in physically arbitrary ways, superimposed over something like a 1990s-style image “morph”. It actually sucks if you pay any attention to any details.
Gross over-simplification of modern VFX complicated by confirmation bias. You notice the bad VFX and you go "look how bad VFX are now" and completely overlook some of the absolutely stunning work in recent years. You want to talk about amazing VFX, look at Stranger Things. A fkn TV show.
I know it's an older film but Zodiac for instance has soooo much CGI. Fincher has become notorious for using loads of CG when most would opt for practical effects.
There is also an issue of apples to oranges comparison. Every CGI model is not as easy to make as the next one. Usually people point to humans being bad when referencing bad CGI and humans are extremely hard to get right because they are something we are all very familiar with and any discrepancy is immediately jarring. Unlike a poorly lit tentacle covered monster for example.
They redid some of it post release after realising that this TV show was becoming pretty much netflix advertisement. It's not exactly just a fucking TV show, it's a machine that had almost 1 billion dollar budget to be made. And honestly, for that budget, it wasn't that mindblowing.
So I kind of see where you're coming from, but that example is not good.
I never said just a TV show. That billion dollar budget was spread over 5 seasons. The final season's budget was comparable to a blockbuster movie for over 10 hours of runtime.
The VFX in Season 3 alone were wild, and that had a much more modest budget of $80M for the whole season.
I could literally just sit here posting scenes from the last three years that are so insanely good that they don't even look like CGI. Just looks like they went out shooting somewhere in Utah on film with an actual talking raccoon but they're walking in a solid colored soundstage with a ball.
Edit: Not to mention that Davey Jones was practically the peak of that generation's CGI. Go find the peak of this generation and compare them. Now go back and look at the mid-tier CGI, and look at the worst stuff. We're still light years ahead of where we were on average. It's not even close. It's just not all generation-defining work and you don't remember the shit-tier stuff.
No disrespect bu please, kindly f*ck off. CGI is so good you don't even see it. It's all about budget. If you have the money and time, you get quality product. Avatar is exceptional CG wise.
Agreed, budget and also employee treatment / morale, i remember Marvel had some CGI mishaps and it came out they basically ran their animators into burnout.
I mean this is true for all things in film, look at LOTR versus the hobbit in terms of practical effects, costumes etc. You can tell which one was done with heart and time and which one was rushed by Exexs trying to make a buck.
Its pretty simple really. There was a downfall in the industry for VFX workers. The companies would bid for a project and it was a giant race to the bottom. These people had no union to rely on for setting boundaries and rules when it comes to labor. Ofen the contracts they would sign with a production came with huge concessions like being willing to make any alterations for free (on the VFX house's dime). The most famous case was Rhythm & Hues Studios that worked on the Life of Pi movie which was about 95% CGI. The director had called for several new shots and edits that weren't part of the original script/plan and it bankrupted the VFX studio. The greatest Irony being that they won the oscar for best VFX after they had just lost their company and jobs. Safe to say that people who worked in that industry started looking for other avenues of work. Pretty much all CGI these days is pushed overseas.
I am not an expert but when you watch a lot of that old behind the scenes stuff it's because they held the practical stuff on set in much higher regard. They'd spend a lot more time lighting and dressing and then create puppets and mockups so the animators would have great reference to work off of
It's the people in the industry, less people care about how it looks and more about the profit it will generate, the soul has left the industry, and now we get a tidal wave of garbage to sort through. Plus they used to follow the practice "As much practical effects as possible before we introduce any CGI"
Disney has unlimited money, and that was one of their top series, so they basically had an unlimited budget and endless crew.
CGI used in a mainline massive Disney movie (large budget even by Disney standards,) is going to look way better than CGI in an indie film in 2026 with the budget of 2 friends savings account...
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