tipcat wrote:Colonel Panic wrote:[...]your brain instinctively knows it doesn't look quite real. That's when you know they skimped on that shot in the CG budget.
Another, more troubling issue with the heavy use of CG in movies is that the effects tend to drive the entire look and even the plot of the film. This has become de rigeur in Hollywood nowadays and is a much more difficult issue to address because it's an aesthetic issue rather than a technical one. No slick new computer innovation or effects algorithm is going to suddenly imbue Hollywood producers like Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay with good taste.
This is the sort of thing I was getting at when I referred to cinematic "norms." When CGI drives look and feel and even the plot, are we still watching a film? What the fuck are we watching, exactly? And using CGI to skimp on the shot calls into question its validity as a cinematic technique, because it is being used to avoid recourse to the camera. Boo.
Yes, tipcat, rest assured, you are still looking at a film.
FYI, "film" is that long, thin, translucent, windy, plasticy thing with the holes down each side that the projectionist threads into the projector before the lights go down in the theater.
Sorry, I was being a bit facetious there. As to your question from a page 2 regarding cameras in cinema: For purposes of this discussion, let's define a "motion picture camera" as a device for making sequential, 2D representations out of patterns of light onto a strip of movable film stock. Over the 80-some-odd year history of cinematography up to this point, thousands different devices have been designed and built to accomplish this task, but let's group them all into the general category of 'cameras'. So we have a device that renders patterns of light in 3 dimensions onto a 2-dimensional plane, in a linear sequence. Whether that light originates from a studio lamp or the Sun itself, and whether it gets reflected into the camera by an actor's face or an optical animation cel, or it originates from a digital printing apparatus or a laser, for it to become a "film", it must at some point be transferred to motion picture film stock by means of some form of camera.
Regardless of the special effects used in production, all of the imagery has to be printed to film at some point for showing in theaters. Back in the olden days (when I was a kid), special effects teams used to use a variety of objects like little plastic models, colored lights, backdrop paintings on glass, etc to provide the direct or reflected light which was all filmed separately and then composited together in a sophisticated optical printing machine (itself a type of "camera") to commit it to the final film. Nobody back then ever complained that "That background was painted on glass, so it's not a film! We're watching a painting!" Nobody ever made the case that Disney movies "aren't films" because they're entirely comprised of serial flat drawings shown in sequence in an optical printer instead of real-world, live-action elements. In industry parlance, the word "film" has come to generally mean a motion picture that hasn't been rendered entirely on video.
Special effects have been around since the making of the earliest movies. Ever see Georges Méliès' Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon)? That image of the Man in the Moon with a missile stuck in his eye was a drawn backdrop with a made-up actor standing behind of it. The movie industry has always had that goal of wowing audiences with crazy imagery, and the use of CG is just the newest technique in their repertoire.