>How Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan Created 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'...
...without CGI, thankfully.
It's been more than a decade since Hollywood released a movie with a realistic patina.
For an example, compare the centerpiece truck chase in Crystal Skull with the propeller-dodging fistfight in Raiders. Where's the fullers earth, where's the blood, where's the sweat? Contemporary CGI effects contaminate films with a phony "sheen" which future film historians will no doubt condemn as glaringly phoney.
Likewise, CGI seems to encourage special effects artists to "overload" movie frames, the clutter devolving into little more than a figurative close-up of a child smashing toys together. Was the Tarzan reference really necessary in Crystal Skull's truck chase? Did a kitchen sink really need to float by in Revenge of the Sith?
Further, CGI characters are forgettable. Can filmgoers still see the details of the spheroid attack vehicles from Attack of the Clones in their minds eye? Contrast this with the AT-AT's from Empire Strikes Back. The former CGI props do not ring true to the mind and are thus only imperfectly recalled. The latter physical models are unforgettable. Also see ED209, the stop motion owl from clash of the titans, the terminator skeleton from Terminator 1, etc. Physical models are crude but effective. CGI is nuanced but phoney at a deeper and much more damning level.
The widespread adoption of CGI circa Phantom Menace will likely mark the beginning of a protracted dark age in filmmaking. Who knows when or if there will be a renaissance.
I never understood this view. I think there's so much wonderful CGI its unfair to group the good with the bad. CGI has the same problem AI has - when its unnoticed people don't realize its CGI, the same way people don't consider expert systems, personal assistants, etc AI.
I watched the original Star Wars movies recently. I love the set design and costumes, but my god, the aliens and effects were laughable. I literally laughed at Yoda, who looks like a second hand muppet. There's just no way to think any of that looks remotely realistic or good. The scale models look like... well models. The stop motion animation just looks terrible. It was a fine effort for its time, but today its like watching a horse try to outrun a Ferrari.
I also rewatched Alien, and my god, when they show the whole Alien's body it looks like a guy in a rubber suit. Without CGI, that's the best you can do. A guy in a suit or a crappy puppet.
>Likewise, CGI seems to encourage special effects artists to "overload" movie frames
This seems questionable at best. Art direction is either good or bad. A poor craftsman blames his tools.
>Further, CGI characters are forgettable.
Goto to Disney and watch kids completely lose their shit over CGI characters. Not only are these characters not forgotten, they will be this generation's Luke and Leia. Even an old man like me loves CGI characters like General Grevious.
>protracted dark age in filmmaking.
Ah yes, the traditionalist approach. People said the same thing about talkies and color film. Curmudgeonly old men are rarely good judges of the future or the arts.
> "I also rewatched Alien, and my god, when they show the whole Alien's body it looks like a guy in a rubber suit. Without CGI, that's the best you can do. A guy in a suit or a crappy puppet."
You should compare Alien to its sequel Aliens. It too used people in suits and puppets to portray the xenomorphs, however due to improved creature design I think it looks miles better.
I recommend watching the entire movie instead of clips of the effects, but even on their own I think Aliens's hold up very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp7SNoYOQmY
I think there's just more clever camera work in Aliens. There aren't as many full bodied shots and they spent more time working with puppets than people in suits.
The last scene with Ripley fighting off the Alien in the airlock looks especially terrible. The alien just looks like a pile of latex. Its laughably bad by today's standards.
See the difference in the dystopic visions of the two Total Recall movies. In the original, the slums of Mars felt like slums. They seemed rundown, there was trash everywhere. In the sequel, so much was created in CGI that it had a pristine look to it, even though we were told it was a rundown place.
Also look at how often they switch to CGI for action sequences, or CGI enhancement so they can zoom out and show a whole city block or office floor that never existed in reality. It feels off, the movements aren't based on actual body mechanics anymore. A character jumping from building to building moves in perfect ballistic arcs and rarely stumbles when they're generated in CGI. A real person, even skilled, has a clumsier appearance to their movement. They may not actually err, but the way the body moves varies with each step, they aren't just perfectly recreating the same running stride for the entire distance.
Another big difference between CGI and 'traditional' special FX is that CGI really seems to age worse. The SFX in the Indiana Jones films are dated, but they have aged well, IMO, and are still watchable today. Yet CGI from only a few years back (barring one or two exceptions) somehow manages to look so poor.
I wonder if this trend will continue, or will CGI manage to become 'good enough' so that the effects can stand the test of time. It's weird looking back at old movies and being disappointed at the computer effects, yet when I watched them the first time around I thought they were fine.
Or maybe this is just nostalgia, a sign of me getting old, and how "everything was better in the old days" :)
Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts were both stop-motion animations for much of their effects. The artifice is obvious but ages well.
Forbidden Planet uses a mix of practical effects, mattes, and hand-drawn animations (the monsters of the Id). Again, fairly obvious, but all told, ages fairly well.
And 2001: A Space Odyssey, only ten years later, has effects many of which could be contemporary. Shots of Discovery in particular are near perfect, and I found the effects in the 1984 sequel, 2010 to be worse in regards -- the sagging of a supposedly zero-G bridge was one that still registers with me.
But there are also lots of bad examples. Many of the James Bond franchise sequences involving flight or spaceflight are pretty obviously cheesy. The effects from Superman are hit-or-miss. Rear and front-projection effects, especially in automobile scenes, where auto occupants clearly aren't in the same physics as the vehicle, are quite distracting to me (and date to the 1930s).
The thing about practicals -- model effects especially -- is that you've got a real physical object at play, and that's going to have depth and other elements which are still hard to capture in CGI. Though blends of CGI with live-action (the epiphany for me was True Lies which pioneered much of this) can be highly convincing. The key is subtlety.
This is definitely a problem in comparing current productions (movie, music, book, whatever) to older productions. A lot of modern science fiction is crap, IMO. But so was a lot of the stuff in the 1950s or any other decade. But if you go back to read 1950s scifi you find a great collection of books and stories because they're the ones that survived.
The challenge, then, when considering movies is to see who seems to be doing it well in the modern CGI-era. IMHO, Neill Blomkamp seems to be doing a good job in his movies. At least in the context of visual production. And then we can also find examples of bad or excessive CGI (Michael Bay, Peter Jackson in the Hobbit trilogy). It's probable that there are a large number of modern (say 2000 forward) movies with effective use of CGI that'll age very well, but we have to sift through the crap first.
It's also likely that there are a lot of narratively good movies that are going to age poorly because of poor CGI.
EDIT: Don't let me comment sleep deprived. I've cleaned up the language in the second paragraph.
You have a point, of course. Also the whole "everything old was better" effect, to which I'll admit I'm prone.
However, I think part of the problem with today's CGI is not only that it's so often badly done; I think the main problem is the excessive application of it.
CGI can be used tastefully or poorly; here Sturgeon's law applies. The thing is, nowadays CGI (especially when badly done) is more convenient than the traditional ways of old movies. Note I'm not arguing using them isn't a trade-off; just that they are way more convenient than traditional SFX. You can do lots of CGI in your movie, especially if it's the cheap kind and you don't have any good taste. I'm no film-maker, but I guess in the past, even bad SFX directors were constrained in what they could do, and how much they could do. You wouldn't have been able to sprinkle your movie with that many poor effects, simply because even bad effects were expensive and hard to do. And this applied even more to good effects!
With decent film-makers, the "let's try to do the best with limited resources" effect kicked in, and I think it's one of the best and most motivating effects for artists, whether they want to admit it or not.
Take a look at the classic example of George Lucas' Tattooine and Mos Eisley. In the original, because budget was limited and SFX harder to do, it looked like a desolate Western-inspired town in a barren desert planet. You can just picture the tumbleweed rolling by, a few strangers in the streets eyeing each other, the silhouette of the occasional monstrous beast of burden in the distance.
After SFX became more practical, and Lucas retooled the scene, almost everyone who isn't him agreed it was worsened instead of improved. Because now he had the budget and the tools to "improve" the scene, he added buildings, lens flare, lots of fake-looking computerized beasts everywhere (where before, the obviously fake-looking rubber beasts were used sparingly because they were expensive AND fake), robots, until every feature of the SFX toolset had been used at least once. The effect of a barren, desolate desert town was lost because access to easier CGI was available and George Lucas knew no restraints.
I think George Lucas didn't change; what changed was his budget and access to better tools. In a way, worse tools made him a better film-maker.
I suspect a similar effect applies to many modern CGI-fests: they probably wouldn't be superb movies anyway, but they are made even worse by unrestrained access to CGI tools.
Absolutely. If you look at the Phantom Menace today, the CGI looks like a bad video game. The "real" Star Wars trilogy aged fantastically; the stuff done as miniatures looks miles more convincing than the best CGI on offer in 1999.
I bet we'll get to "good enough" CGI someday given the amount of money and effort being dumped into it, but it might take a long time. The details are going to be the hardest part for sure.
I'd actually disagree with this. A lot of what is remembered about the first SW trilogy is sanitized a lot by the many re-releases Lucas has made over the years.
Off the top of my head, for example, in the original original trilogy, R2D2's color panels switched from blue to black on the shots where he was seen in space so as to not conflict with the chromakey color used to shoot the space background. I'd argue something like that is much worse than bad CGI: even though the shots looked plausible visually, it actually made me wonder if R2D2 was still on the ground and we were looking at a different R2 unit (or, in other words, actually injected some uncertainty into the story the filmmaker was attempting to tell).
I think there is also an element of how we watch movie scenes today, compared with how it was done in the past.
For instance, if you want to see the ending of Terminator with the stop-motion animation, today you'd just go to youtube and watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KeniFoiT-0
It looks pretty decent, but that's not really terrifying anymore like people remember it.
In the past though, if you wanted to see that scene, you probably sat through the entire movie. When you do that, I think the effects in that scene work much better. That is because the rest of the movie was conditioning you, getting you excited. Setting the stage for how things in that universe work and look. Seen within the full context of their movies, old special effects hold up much better IMHO.
Another movie where I think this is in strong effect is the original Robocop. ED-209 in the boardroom is much more effective after sitting through the opening of the film.
See, it's funny, because I actually got to see Jurassic Park again recently on a big screen.
On the one hand, I certainly found it immersive as a piece of storytelling, but I could also clearly see the transition between CGI dinosaurs and puppet ones. The flipping between methods didn't trick me as well as it has sometimes in the past.
Probably the best practical SFX I've ever seen would have to be John Carpenter's The Thing. The way the monsters worked--goddamn, shivers up my spine. Also, one of the tightest and suspenseful movies there is, even after the first viewing.
I'd add the vivid and memorable CGI characters of Gollum and the T-1000. Also, many Pixar and post-merger Disney creations, though maybe a different standard applies there.
This is precisely why the first film in the series (Raiders of the Lost Ark) was by far my fave. It's just so gritty and realistic—comparatively speaking, of course—to the sequels. It's almost a perfect action/adventure movie. You can feel the love and physical attention to detail that Spielberg poured into every frame.
A lot of this thread, to me, has analogies to modern music. Its WAY easier to record music these days than it was 30-40 years ago (20 even?) but progressively, the easier it has become to record music through the use of technology the less interesting music has become overall.
As is the case with CGI. The easier it is to render a scene the less interesting that scene seems to become in many cases.
At least with the film industry, they tend to overuse new technologies/techniques until they learn how to use it properly and then it just becomes another tool in the film makers toolkit.
The prelogy was as much badly done than badly timed, they were still trying to go over using the technology[1] for the sake of it, nowadays you see people using CGI to help the experience more often.
People will probably realize that all of this is unnecessary. There was a video on youtube showing how much CGI there was even in a movie like The wolf of Wall Street. It's incredible how everything is faked (scenery, mood, ...), you end up wondering how people did make movies at all before. Well they did it pretty well.
CGI characters and stage are bad because they lack .. depth. I watch Alien often and only a few seconds of it sucks you into the ship. Same for Blade Runner, the guys are walking in an actual street, it probably embeds the whole crew a lot more, giving realism that can't be achieved in green rooms (Star Wars < 4 shined in this department, it was as bad a Soap Operas).
All of this require good sense and good sense of measure. Terminator 2 SFX very pretty crude in retrospect, but the editing made them blend perfectly. If you do frame by frame you'll laugh as some shots were really bad, but in real time, it never shows, the pace, framing, action compels your mind to think about the story, not the pixels.
[1] which makes the original trilogy even more impressive, most was invented on the spot yet it wasn't detrimental to the story.
> It's incredible how everything is faked (scenery, mood, ...), you end up wondering how people did make movies at all before. Well they did it pretty well.
Sometimes, just as films now are sometimes done well; just as often as now, they did it poorly, too...and, in any case, almost as much was faked even when CGI wasn't the tool used to fake it.
> CGI characters and stage are bad because they lack .. depth.
CGI characters and stage are sometimes good because, compared to alternative special effects techniques, they have depth and realism.
Sometimes not. Like any other technique in cinema, the art is in how it is used as much as whether it is used.
Maybe I'm biased by my love of minimalism (making a good movie without tech appeals to me) but also by the fact that movies are overblown these days. They're higher resolution but on the wrong dimensions, more backstory details, more detailed background decorum, more background characters. CGI lowered the threshold too much, and now movies are out of low-hanging fruits. I agree with you about the 'how' and that's what I tried to show before, back in the days the cost forced people to weight carefully how shots were to be made; not anymore.
The movie Coraline (2009) is entirely stop motion. It's a beautiful -- a technical marvel. Every object on screen was specifically made for the film. The crew used three 3D printing systems in the development and production of the film, but no CGI.
There's also something about the sound effects in the modern Star Wars films that sound so fake & made up. There was a post on HN a few weeks ago about how the Millenium Falcon's hyperdrive sound was a mashup of actual sound recordings.
Filmmaking is all an illusion. Go back to any heyday of films and you'll spot plenty of issues with effects. Even when I was younger movies like Indiana Jones had obvious rear screen projection. I didn't know what it was, but I knew it just looked off. And for whatever number of seconds I was thinking about it, I certainly wasn't immersed in the movie for those scenes.
Hate digital effects. Watch indie dramas.
CGI characters are kinda of dumb, although I have to say that Pirates of the Caribbean movies did them really well for the time. If you hate CGI and desire some catharsis, definitely watch the red letter media reviews of star wars.
OTOH, if you look at the iconic boulder scene [1], it's laughably obvious that the boulder is made from foam. CGI would be able to give the boulder weight and momentum and make that scene far more menacing.
Raiders has long been one of my favorite movies. For me it represents an era of filmmaking (the 1980's) when filmmakers relied on strong characters and stories more than familiar sequels and over-the-top special effects.
If Indiana Jones or Raiders seem cliche, it's only because they were instant classics created by brilliant filmmakers at the peak of their craft.
Remember when people used to clap or cheer at the movies??The don't make 'em like they used to. Even with its moments of campiness, there's a certain authenticity, even nobility to Raiders. To this day when I watch the ark-opening sequence I get chills, in no small part due to John William's masterful soundtrack.
Here's an article talking about it from 2009. I like this article better because it talks a little more of Indy's background and history, especially with Marion.
I like how this article talks about how you make someone more likeable having things happen off screen.
Although this is a little more disturbing because Lucas wanted Marion to be 11-15 when she had her affair with Indy.
Check out Jamie Benning's filmumentaries on this film[1] and the original Star Wars trilogy and Jaws. Great fan produced pieces with making of info and interviews with cast and crew. Throw him a tip if you enjoy them too :)
...without CGI, thankfully.
It's been more than a decade since Hollywood released a movie with a realistic patina.
For an example, compare the centerpiece truck chase in Crystal Skull with the propeller-dodging fistfight in Raiders. Where's the fullers earth, where's the blood, where's the sweat? Contemporary CGI effects contaminate films with a phony "sheen" which future film historians will no doubt condemn as glaringly phoney.
Likewise, CGI seems to encourage special effects artists to "overload" movie frames, the clutter devolving into little more than a figurative close-up of a child smashing toys together. Was the Tarzan reference really necessary in Crystal Skull's truck chase? Did a kitchen sink really need to float by in Revenge of the Sith?
Further, CGI characters are forgettable. Can filmgoers still see the details of the spheroid attack vehicles from Attack of the Clones in their minds eye? Contrast this with the AT-AT's from Empire Strikes Back. The former CGI props do not ring true to the mind and are thus only imperfectly recalled. The latter physical models are unforgettable. Also see ED209, the stop motion owl from clash of the titans, the terminator skeleton from Terminator 1, etc. Physical models are crude but effective. CGI is nuanced but phoney at a deeper and much more damning level.
The widespread adoption of CGI circa Phantom Menace will likely mark the beginning of a protracted dark age in filmmaking. Who knows when or if there will be a renaissance.