pros and cons of cgi

CGI in movies
The Pros and Cons

Hello this article is going to be about how CGI both helps and hurts movies today. But before I begin I’d like to say I’m not an expert, I’m not a film student nor am I involved in the making of movies in anyway, I am simply a fan of movies I watch a lot I own over 700 and I’m old enough to remember when CGI broke into the mainstream. So what follows is simply my opinion coupled with a bit of personal experience and some research so I hope you enjoy.

Before I get to the meat of this article I’d like to give u some history on CGI a very brief history. First off CGI stands for computer generated imagery and first appeared in 3d in a movie called Future world where a face and hand where animated. Star wars also used wireframe CGI for the scene with the death star hologram and the targeting computer.

The first movie to use mostly CGI was Tron. In Tron the hover tanks, the light cycles and of course Bit the floating polyhedron where all CGI. Two years later a movie called the last star fighter came out which also used heavy amounts of CGI. Both movies where failures although both have a cult following now and Disney is working on a sequel to Tron.

The failure of these movies caused directors to shy away from CGI unless using it for objects that were supposed to look computer created. That is until of course a movie called the abyss came out and won an award for best special effects for industrial light and magic which has been involved in some of the biggest movies to date.

The next big movie to successfully use CGI was terminator 2 where all the t-1000 morphing effects where done in CGI. This was followed by Jurassic park where all the dinosaurs where done in CGI. Then in 95 we got the first fully computer generated film Toy Story witch unlike Tron did incredibly well at the box office.
Movies continued to use variations of CGI effects then around 1999 – 2000 CGI became the primary application of special effects. So now that you have a brief history on the use of CGI in movies I’d like to go right into how it can help a movie and how it can hurt a movie.

The first major benefit of CGI is that it’s a lot cheaper than physical special effects and can be produced with relative ease, this also unfortunately is also its biggest downfall. Because it’s so cheap a lot more independent films with horribly cheap and bad looking CGI have hit the rental and store shelves.
Now I have absolutely nothing against independent films most original ideas come from them and they can be wonderful. What I do have a problem with are these movie companies that make these b-movie rip offs of popular movies and I believe it’s because CGI is so easy and cheap to produce that they can make these movies in abundance.

One company specifically, the asylum, is notorious for this making such horrible rip offs as alien vs. hunter (alien vs. predator), the day the earth stopped (the day the earth stood still), I am omega (I am legend) and the list goes on just IMDB there name and you will see what I’m talking about.

CGI when used to enhance already present physical special effects is great. Also when used to stylize some scenes or inanimate objects is also good and works well. For example in the first matrix CGI was used to create the bullets and bullet effects for the famous bullet dodging scene however Keanu reeves was actually being held up by wires and photographed this is a good use of CGI. Now in the matrix reloaded during the neo vs. lots of smith fights there’s a part where neo kicks one smith then jumps off of him and kicks a smith behind him neo is made in CGI at this point which seems unnecessary and kind of ruins the moment.

It’s my belief that unless the whole movie is done in CGI that humans should never be produced in whole using CGI it just looks to fake. Inanimate objects such as bullets and cars and such things look decent enough that it doesn’t ruin the movie if they are done in CGI for action scenes.

In a movie like transformers it is only because of CGI that the movie was possible and the animators worked painstakingly on the robots. They had so much detail it took 24 hours to animate 1 second of movement. However this amount of care is not always used and can make production crews lazy.
A good example of this is in 2 fast 2 furious when the cars are drag racing the camera switches to a CGI view of the car’s tires side by side. They could have easily mounted a camera and gotten a much cooler shot of the real cars.

One of the most famous over and more often then not unnecessary uses of CGI was the special editions of the original star wars trilogy. I loved being able to see these movies in theaters since I wasn’t born when they originally where. But all the additions are mostly unnecessary. There’s dancing creatures that do nothing for the story as well as other small things. There is however one great scene between Jaba and Han that was originally cut and added to the special editions. This scene is a good use of CGI.

Other bad uses include the scene in spider man where peter is jumping from roof to roof for the first time. The roof tops are CGI and so is peter until he leaps and his face is real close to the camera. Harry potters Quidich matches are mostly CGI and the characters look fake during them. I could go on forever listing bad uses of CGI but I digress.

It’s not only action movies that have gotten lazy and use CGI horror movies witch traditionally have a history of really cool special effects done by hand through either puppets or animatronics have gone the CGI route and are now even using CGI for blood. I think that with horror movies it should be half and half. One of the more recent horror movies I watched used fake blood and CGI combined nicely. The CGI was used for stylized shot like an eyeball flying at the camera in slow motion. (The movie was midnight meat train).

Usually combos like this work out well but when CGI is relied upon to heavily it takes away from the movie and end up disconnecting u as a viewer. CGI is making huge leaps towards being able to produce a life like human. If u want to see what I mean go to YouTube and watch the “Emily” video the entire video is a tech demo for a technology called image metrics. It is my belief that if this technology is developed further then obviously CGI effects would be a thing of the past.

So those are my feelings on the bad uses of CGI so how about we switch to a more positive view and talk about good uses. First there’s the stuff I already mentioned, bullet time, transformers and the scene with Han and Jaba. There is also the artistic uses of CGI which are used to show a view of something that would normally be unattainable the eye scene I mentioned in midnight meat train is one example.

CGI is also safer then physical effects as no one has ever been killed by a computer image before with CGI u can surround your actor in shattering glass without worrying about him/her getting cut. Fire, explosions, projectiles, bullets and energy effects are all things that I feel have benefited from CGI.

Ok I feel as if I may be rambling now so to sum it all up CGI is good for inanimate objects and partial human parts as well as getting angles not easily obtained with a regular camera. On the other hand CGI is bad when trying to recreate a full on human body in a live action movie and replacing physical effects that are already known how to do.