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Posted: |
Aug 15, 2014 - 3:23 AM
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By: |
CinemaScope
(Member)
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The Film Program on BBC Radio Four yesterday afternoon (repeated 11pm Sunday) was very interesting. Nearly half of it was about the state of special effects companies. It seem that in L.A. special effects (CGI) are in meltdown, companies closing, lots of people losing their job. The company that won the Oscar for the effects on Life Of Pi went bankrupt (before the award), the guy picking up the award tried to say something, but was drowned out with music (Jaws!). London is now the place, but everyone agreed that can & will change (Canada, India). One of the big problems is the way effects are priced, a company can work a month on a shot, only to have it rejected for some reason, & they have to re-do it, but don't get paid again. I thought it was of some interest because 1/ Nearly every big film is chock full of effects & 2/ It goes to show how world-wide a lot of aspects of film making are these days. That happened decades ago with film music recording, when L.A. musicians priced themselves out of the market.
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It's how the free market economy works and has always worked.
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Thank you, solium, for posting that riveting documentary.
Two years ago I read an interview with James Cameron. The questioning led him to expound on the VFX biz, and he said then that it was the very worst business to be in. He went on to detail every single problem that the video "LIFE AFTER PI" explains.
As a life-long lover of movie effects, I find it totally fascinating that all of these amazing CGI empires with hundreds of employees have folded, while Ray Harryhausen, an effects pioneer who did the great majority of effects work in his films all by himself, managed to prosper.
Technological progress does not necessarily equal financial prosperity.
This is a tragic state of affairs for many VFX artists.
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Posted: |
Aug 18, 2014 - 11:10 AM
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By: |
Ado
(Member)
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Discostu has a point, physical effects were a craft, and they were not always done by highly educated and training people, and not computer programmers. They were craft people and inventors before, creating impressive things out of everyday objects and oddities. Like Doug Trumbull lighting the Enterprise in TMP with hundreds of dental mirrors. Doug and Bran Ferren and Dysktra are indeed pretty smart guys, and pretty educated as well, but it was ingenuity and invention that made Star Wars early movies work, and early Star Trek.
When physical effects are imperfect you are still left with the impression of the marvel of it's effort and ingenuity. Whereas a CGI effect imperfectly rendered reminds you that nothing was every real about that spaceship, torpedo or whatever you are looking at, not even a model, nothing physical at all.
When I saw Captain America 2 and they were supposedly standing inside the large underground hanger on a bridge and talking in front of a supposed giant airship I was instantly aware and annoyed that it was so obviously a digital object that never existed at all. For all the intelligence in the programmers and the money spent digital objects remain basically unpersuasive and lack depth, gravity and proper texture. Interestingly, animators have been dealing with these issues over the years, so that digitally animated movies look better than ever, with the side benefit that we never consciously expect animated images to look 'real'.
The great potential and downfall of CG for live action directors is the seduction of creating images and worlds that were "impossible" before. The problem is that the liberty to create anything becomes pretty much the end, not the means.
The effects business is computer science and programming now. And anyone and everyone in computer science is almost always replaceable by the lowest bidder unless they are some kind of genius. London should not expect the effects work remain for long.
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