Is anyone else amazed by the level of realism in special effects?... (1 Viewer)

[Inspector Hammer!]

Okay, Steve, your entitled to your opinion, but still, I find it difficult to believe that one could honestly say that the visual effects in the original The Poseidon Adventure are better than the new film.

And with regards to Titanic, if all the visuals in that film did was invoke the '"look what we can do" reaction in you, than you missed the point completely of what Cameron was trying to show you.

Final word and then i'll shut up about it I promise, ANTR showed me a model sinking in a swimming pool, in long shot with empty decks, inaccurate physics and a romanticised final plunge, Titanic showed me in no uncertain terms the horror of an ocean liner, a 70,000 ton machine, sinking into the ocean, tearing itself apart under the feet of it's passengers, pressure changing and air escaping causing massive eruptions of water with thousands of people, some falling and cracking their head's open on equipment, desperately hanging on and trapped on a creaking, rumbling, machine that's taking them to their cold deaths.

That's not an amusment park ride depiction of TITANIC's sinking, that's the reality of a sinking ship, that's what it was like and that is simply what Cameron showed.

ANTR has the upper hand in terms of facts, but in terms of visuals and hitting the tragedy home with utter realism, Titanic has no equal IMO.

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

I should clarify, I detest most shakey cam, especially when it is used ad nauseum or poorly. See The Bourne Supremacy and 10.5 Apocalypse. What I'm more interested in is 'steadycam' and matching with that. Think the scene with Gollum at the end of The Two Towers. The link Charles CB posted is about the most 'shakey' I can take, but they 100% sell their location with it. Had they not shown the greenscreen sections, I probably never would have guessed. There were only a few shots that looked 'off' and most of those were in the car.

But back in terms of special effects, it shows how far we have come. Matching backgrounds and digital characters/props to a moving image, especially one that isn't shot based on computer track motion is still amazing to me. Especially when you and I can use the same $300 software that they used on King Kong to accomplish some of the shots.

I'll add that in a recent commercial I did the complete opposite. We had handheld footage of a car accident that wasn't 'shakey' but you could tell it was handheld. I wanted to put an greenscreened actor infront of it and do a push as well. So I used trackmotion to solve the scene, and then I used that to actually lock it down to remove all shakiness. Dropped in my actor and it looks like a locked down shot. So you can use this tech to fix all that shakey stuff.

 

[SteveJKo]

John, since James Cameron seems no less interested in the Titanic than he was a decade ago, perhaps we could convince him to remake A NIGHT TO REMEMBER and have the best of both worlds?

Okay I'm covering me head now to protect myself from the projectiles being hurled in my direction.

 

[Francois Caron]

You've redeemed yourself Jason.

I'm not dissing your accomplishments, Jason. In fact, I'm often impressed by how good the effects are becoming. My main issue with today's movies however is the amount of money that's now being spent to create these virtual worlds when it's often possible to create the same thing in the real world on a smaller budget with proper preparation, using digital effects only to fill in the gaps.

Here's an example. The setting for the last Doctor Who episode which aired in the U.K. (I LOVE this series!) was a space station located on an airless planet orbiting a black hole. The production team didn't spend a fortune for the planetscape scenes because they used the age-old setting for a Doctor Who alien planet: a quarry located just outside of Cardiff. And for much of the scenes, the quarry was filmed at night in its native state with "the farm" adding digital effects only where necessary to complete the illusion. Even one of the space station interior scenes was filmed in an actual factory which was perfect for the intended scene.

The reason I'm thinking like this is because one day I may jump into the movie business, possibly as a producer of independent films. And I'd hate to open the books and find out that a scene that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete could have been made at a fraction of the cost with a single camera crew and a city permit.

 

[Chuck Anstey]

While speed of gravity is definitely a non-technical term, it does have its place. If I said the force of gravity then I would need to go into the fact that it depends on the mass of the object as in Force = mass * acceleration, where acceleration is the gravitational constant 9.81 meters / second / second. From there you can see that the FOG (force of gravity) on Longbottom will be larger than on Harry, but if they both fell off their brooms, they would fall with the same acceleration. That is until they approach terminal velocity, the point at which the force of the oncoming air pushing against the falling object equals the FOG on the object. It should be clear from the context that I was not discussing the speed at which gravitational waves propagate when a mass changes and is a cheap way to say they both fall at the same rate. Again we are talking laymen.

Full velocity is simple enough as an alias for maximum velocity that Longbottom falls on screen, not to be confused with terminal velocity, which is around ~120mph and takes a much larger fall distance. Now given that acceleration is change in velocity over time, Longbottom's acceleration is (V(fall) - 0(start veloctity) / 0.000 seconds, which gives an acceleration of infinity. Now one could argue that since movies are shot a 24fps he really accelerated at (V(fall) - 0(start veloctity) / 0.041667 seconds, but that is still very high.

Now, all of this is not really necessary to the laymen except they should notice that his fall is not natural because they did not model the physics of gravity correctly.

 

[Andy Sheets]

Heh, that reminds me of something I read about Neil Gaiman's involvement on Robert Zemekis's version of Beowulf, which is being filmed like Polar Express. Something about how Gaiman had a concern that something he wrote might be too expensive to film and Zemekis just shrugged it off, telling Gaiman that there's nothing he can write that can't be filmed for a million bucks a minute.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

lol, I seriously doubt that Cameron would want to relive the experience of making that movie again. The end result is one of the great disaster tales of our time, but making it was a major bitch!

 

[Jeffrey Nelson]

At least the ship in the infinitely superior A NIGHT TO REMEMBER didn't have obviously computer-generated videogame people walking across the deck.

 

[Robert Anthony]

Double post.

 

[Robert Anthony]

The "video game" cliche is SOOOOOOOO Tired. Honestly. Unrealistic is fine. Unnatural is fine. Lightweight, Shoddy, Iffy--all those are fine. Those seem to have a basis in reality and honest opinion. but that "video game" cliche has always been so far removed from any reality that it renders the opinion largely suspect, to me, especially since it became a cliche during the days of Playstation 1, and I guarantee you, even in the wonkiest, goofiest Sci-Fi channel FX extravaganza, the CG work never looked like a video game. Hell, even with the Xbox 360, you're still struggling to get to your basic film CGI during the game. maybe by next year, it'll be close, but by then, the video games will be almost neck and neck with CGI for photorealism, and it's getting there rather quickly.

Hell, the last time CGI looked like a video game was Last Starfighter--and that was based AROUND a videogame. And made in 1984.

And the digital doubles in Titanic most certainly DID NOT look like any video game that was around in 96/97, and video games now are just barely catching up with that level of FX now.

The comparison always has, and for the near future, always will ring false and empty. It's better to be more specific and less snarky/repetitive when trotting that old chestnut out.

 

[ZackR]

I've always attributed the realism of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park at least partially to the fact the Spielberg retained Stan Winston to supervise a lot of the work. Winston had a career of creating authentic creatures with via modeling, stop-motion, etc under his belt. CGI was just another tool with which to do that. Just my two cents.

 

[Steve Christou]

Funny thing about the Jurassic Park movies, and this is where I differ from the CG haters here, whenever a scene cuts to Stan Winston's beautifully crafted animatronic puppets it takes me straight out of the movie because that's exactly what they look like to me, animatronic puppets. The cut from smooth life-like movements of a CG dinosaur to an on set puppet jerkily moving it's head this way and that, never looked remotely real to me.

The CG dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park trilogy have never been bettered, in an interview with Total Film WETA supremo Richard Taylor admitted that they couldn't top ILM's dinos for Peter Jackson's King Kong and so went and did their own thing.

And strange how people who hate Jim Cameron's Titanic also like to take potshots at the Oscar Winning visual effects. Reminds me of a post I read here once from a member who actively disliked the Star Wars prequels, he also couldn't understand why everyone was going gaga over the 'subpar' visual effects in the films. I wouldn't be surprised if he was sticking out his tongue and rudely gesturing at the screen after submitting his post.

 

[ThomasC]

JP used both CG and puppets? I'm guessing if there were puppets, one of them (can't remember the species name) killed Nedry?

 

[SteveJKo]

Robert I totally agree with you, except for when CGI FX are so bad they look like, er....well, video games.

 

[TravisR]

Yeah, video games that would be on the PS7 or PS8.

 

[Vader]

Yeah, that reminds me of Jumanji, which used CGI to simulate real animals and looked really goofy compared to Jurassic Park.[/i]

In Jumanji, as I remember the animals were supposed to look "plastic" and a little off, to reinforce the idea that they were from a game. They never were supposed to be photo-realistic...

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

Came across a good recent example of fx that most probably never knew was there.

From the DaVinci Code:

 

[Robert Anthony]

That's a frame from the Xbox game, isn't it. Jesus. So bad.

 

[RickER]

Look at the wall on the right of the picture above. It looks like it is hanging in space. It only took about 3 seconds of looking at it to notice. Not 1/2 hour to TRY and find an imperfection, as you might think. To tell you the truth i was more impressed in the old style of matt painting on a piece of glass.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

My guess is that you only noticed it because you knew ahead of time to look for the FX work in that frame. I was never a fan of glass matte painting, digital mattes are far superior IMO and that shot from The Davinci Code looks fine to me.

Just goes to show you that opinions on visual FX are, like anythng else, subjective.