14 DAY TRIAL // These days, when moviegoing audiences aren’t complaining about Hollywood having lost all trace of originality, they’re complaining about how CGI (or computer-generated imagery) is ruining movies by dehumanizing the craft.
You can’t talk of an “art” of moviemaking anymore if you have entire universes created at the click of a button, with the help of a soulless computer, can you?
Actually, you can. Today’s Viral of the Day is a lesson into modern cinema from RocketJump Film School, which argues that the only reason bad CGI stands out (and takes the fall for “ruining” movies) is that no one notices the good CGI.
With movies like Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” or Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” or the more recent “Mad Max: Fury Road” from George Miller, there was a lot of attention on the amount of practical effects used in them.
To many, that meant that the movies relied very little, if at all, on CGI, which, as the video below shows, was never the case. These directors, much like the (in)famous Michael Bay, managed to make movies in which you can’t detect bad CGI by knowing exactly how to combine CGI with practical FX.
So, there is no such thing as “bad CGI” to blame for the current state of cinema. The fault with today’s industry isn’t in its use of CGI, but in the movies themselves, in that audiences would most likely overlook lower quality computer imagery if the film were more engaging, better from a storytelling perspective.
