Why most visual effects suck--but some don't | Wren Weichman | TEDxPenn

Computer-generated imagery, or CGI, has allowed a huge variety of new stories to be told through movies and television shows. Black holes. Dragons. Superheros. Oh my god, I used to think that CGI is

some

kind of mysterious nerd magic that can only be achieved with

some

powerful. supercomputer in a Hollywood studio I began my own journey in

visual

effects

when I discovered that this was not the case. This is a real career path for thousands of artists around the world. Now I work for a small production studio called digital broker and we use images.

effects

to help tell really fun stories, make fun short films on YouTube and, man, I've been able to make some cool things I think, like a Nerf gun turret made from Nerf guns because why not? or the

most

intense fidget action scene in the world.

Spinners, we even imagined what it would look like if you vaped so hard that you became a VAP. I love bringing things to life that didn't exist before and, ultimately, for me, our

visual

effects. I'm a big fan, now not everyone shares my excitement and I understand that's okay because sometimes the effects

suck

, sometimes you notice bad CGI and it takes you out of the movie because you go to the movies to enjoy the stories and when you take that out it

suck

s the Last summer, for example, I came out of At the theater I just saw Black Panther and I really enjoyed this movie.

I did it, it gave me the coolest comic book movie villain I had ever seen, but the effects let me down with something like this from a Marvel movie and particularly in the final fight scene. So now he wasn't alone either. I left it for some examples of movies with bad CGI and they responded overwhelmingly with Black Panther, so yeah, I hesitate to know, I just openly criticize a movie's effects because there's a lot of hard work. the artists helped create them and I think about those artists a lot, but you know who doesn't think about those artists, basically everyone else, you see, there is a misconception about how CGI is created, people tend to think that they are made by computers and not real.

People like it to be a Snapchat filter, something we press a button and make magic with the movie, Hollywood VFX channel, however it is really complicated, first you need to have a proper startup data acquisition to send to the Camera Tracking Department so that a group of sculptors can build complicated 3D models. to send texture artists to make them look real and once the lighting is set up you have render farms managed 24 hours a day to spit out clean looking CGI only to land on the desk of a composer making video Photoshop so everything looks good and if you didn't understand all of that, that's okay, just understand that each of those steps can only begin once the previous steps have been completed and if any of those steps break, your left is polishing a Shit, like I said in the industry, I still promise the effects.

They have become so ubiquitous these days that they no longer captivated us and we have become desensitized, well, not everyone is an artist, everyone is a judge or critic, as they say, if something is a little off, the audience can tell that it is false and may not be. They realize what it is like, but they can tell it, so what the first telltale sign tells us is that it's just not real and what I mean by that is that the lighting and materials are not realistic enough to represent reality. , it's a simple idea, but it's a pretty difficult task and quite unfair to be completely honest.

I mean, we all have a lot of experience with reality, we see it every waking moment. Everything you see right now has an associated material property that identifies how the observation reacts to light and therefore how you react. look at it, things like color, reflectivity, texture, transparency, skin, for example, is slightly transparent and absorbs and scatters the light that hits it. You don't realize it, but you know exactly what all these properties are without having to think about it, so every time they appear. It's wrong, you can tell, but it's not just about how the CGI looks, it's also about how it moves.

You can see that bad CGI can often look photorealistic when paused, but in motion it looks bad and there are three main ways we actually create motion in digital. Firstly there is animation where the movement is designed from scratch, secondly we have simulation which is simply putting some rules into a program and then letting it decide where things fall and lastly we have motion capture that records an actor's movements in order. to more accurately replicate the subtle ways that we move like this and this is actually a great example of how those three techniques can be used together.

Motion capture provides the core movement of the skeleton and faces something that is quite difficult to replicate without reference. I want to say that these gray skin suits are not just fashion statements because, if we add to this, we simulate muscles and hair so that they can react to the movement of the artist and, although this seems more natural, that does not mean that there are Generally, animators without human intervention have to come in and alter things to make sure everything works together and nowadays CGI is good enough that you know it passes initial inspection. We've gotten good enough at rendering and moving things that aren't good enough.

It's a big deal, but there is one area of ​​scrutiny where only absolute perfection is acceptable. Realistic human faces. People can scrutinize faces to an incredible degree. I mean, it's the defining characteristic of how we differentiate ourselves. We have even developed the ability to say yes. Someone is sick just by looking at them because anything with a normal face tends to be disconcerting, so when we try to create faces we can experience what is called the uncanny valley and this graph plots the emotional response to the realism of a fake character. and on the far left we have characters that are obviously not real and there is an emotional disconnect there, but as they start to become more realistic you start to connect more Gollum from The Lord of the Rings for example, he is incredibly realistic and I think even We connect with him as a person, yet his proportions are wrong, so you're never fooled into thinking he's actually human, the familiarity isn't totally there, it's the same reason we enjoy movies like The Incredibles but we're We feel disturbed when we look.

Polar Express, you see something strange happening when the characters start to become so realistic when they fall into the uncanny valley and we start to have an adverse reaction. Do you think this is cute? No, I bet not, because yes, we can identify this monster as the rock, but everything seems wrong and there are many examples in movies these days that have this thing where we try to create CGI characters as humans, but we just get likes to aim for it and fail, and if anything, artists are still struggling. Nowadays, even the Star Wars rogue, which has some of the

most

realistic looking digital characters ever created, failed to be absolutely perfect, we could still say they weren't real people.

I mean, maybe it was the lighting or the eyes, maybe it was the lip movement I honestly don't know, I can only think of two examples where we really managed to get out of the uncanny valley. look at the shot from the movie Logan. Now you're probably thinking that this young Wolverine is just a result. from a simple digital makeup, no, they actually recreated Hugh Jackman's face completely in CGI and this blows my mind because there are dozens of examples like this throughout the entire movie, but no one could tell the other examples from Blade Runner 2049 and Rachel's character is actually. in the first film but CGI her in the sequel and took the effects team over a year to perfect and the results were so convincing that I had no idea she wasn't real.

Well, I haven't actually seen the first movie, so maybe that's why. I didn't realize the fact that she hadn't aged today in 37 years, Blade Runner 2049 won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2018 and at first I was a little disappointed because, you see, I felt the war. Because Planet of the Apes deserved the Oscar, it was an incredible technical achievement to create an entire cast of realistic digital characters, but here's what great visual effects are about more than just technical skill: they're also about artistic expression and that's something which 2049 had in spades. that movie had an aesthetic Academy voters were carried away by the technique and artistry of that movie and apparently some of the older voters thought the Apes were real and wondered how they got them to behave so well on camera.

Remember the magic of the movie, but for Although they are real, these movies push the boundaries of technology to do one very important thing and that is create the ability to tell better stories because, at the end of the day, that is the most important aspect of the visual effects they need to serve the story when the effects of their movies are flashy just for the sake of flashiness, they serve no purpose other than simply making a spectacle of an event and I don't want to say that these movies are bad, but you know how what I mean, Transformers movies, disaster movies, monster movies.

Justice League, more movies are relying on CGI to hide a weak plot and audiences are reacting accordingly, despising it. They want movies with real practical effects and I understand that knowing that what you're seeing is real and tangible can be exciting, but I think what audiences really crave is simply suspending disbelief when they notice the CGI, the illusion is shattered and the audience He just wants less of it. Christopher Nolan is actually a Riis with that sentiment, so he strives to capture as much as possible on camera while he can and even claims that he only uses CGI as a last resort, however, I don't really think that's the case, oh, I have no doubt that if I could have dropped a Hathaway into a wormhole or burned Aaron Eckhart's face, I would have. known, oh, he just knows that CGI is a tool and he knows exactly how to use that tool to make you forget that you're watching a movie.

I mean, it's the same with Jurassic Park, that was the magic of this movie coming out 26. years ago and the effects still hold up today, but do you really notice anything strange about this shot, like maybe a Velociraptor is missing in a frame? This is actually in the movie, by the way, but if you actually go back and look at the Jurassic Park effects, while they were super innovative for the time, I don't think they hold up today, it just doesn't matter because they were used so creatively. that, for the first time, you actually believed that dinosaurs were real and that's something that I think the recent sequels fail to do on a technical level.

The world of clothing has far superior CGI, but it's never really based in reality. I just feel like maybe they were too worried about whether or not they could use CGI. They didn't stop to think if they normally should, although you only really notice the CGI when it's bad, the vast majority of the time the effects are invisible so you never notice them, David Fincher for example is a perfectionist to begin with. when it comes to creative control over his films to the point that he'd rather create digital blood than deal with all the variables of using fake blood on set and leave it up to chance.

His team is so good that you never noticed. Did you know that his movie The Social Network has a thousand visual effects shots that are more than all of Godzilla's shots combined and that's because turning a person into two twins who interact with each other is really hard technical work and took a lot of time. hundreds of artists to do it. I'm sure you wouldn't notice because if they hadn't worked hard you would have known that there is one last factor here that really affects the quality of effects in movies these days and that is that the biggest problem with CGI is not the talent of the artist it is. the time needed to create those effects;

However, after all, making movies is a business and more time means more money. Release dates are incredibly important to the end result of a film and as projects are rushed to try to meet deadlines, they can become rushed and this was ultimately the problem with Black Panther now important to keep in mind. Note that the vast majority of the shots in this film are excellent but there were also 2,500 and although the work was divided between 13 different studios, they did not have enough time to complete everything to the best of their ability. They were filling in this final fight scene in October, but the movie still had to come out in February, leaving only a few weeks to do all the effects and the crew that stepped up to do everything. those effects have even won the Oscar for visual effects for the fourmovies, they obviously have the skill, it just goes to show that you can't rush great CGI and like all art forms, quality is just a mix of time and skill, the greatest Renaissance.

It took painters years to complete their paintings, but if you tried to paint something great, it wouldn't matter how much time you put in because you lacked the skill. It's the same reason you'd probably find Michelangelo making a pretty weird statue if you just did it. I had a week to complete it. I'm being honest, so in the film industry, where time is finite, artists have to strike a balance. No movie is ever finished, it's just released, so the next time you watch a summer blockbuster and even if the pictures flop, just take a moment to appreciate all the hard work that went unnoticed.

VFX artists are artists after all, they pour their blood, sweat, and tears into these stories that capture our imaginations, and sometimes even their best work may have been invisible all along. you