I really thought when he said "Let's look at things around house", that he would reveal that the things around him like his mic, or wall hangings, were CG.
I was a set dresser on The Last of Us Season 1. I personally dressed the exterior sets that Pedro Pascal is talking about when referring to a “dressed downtown Calgary”. His comments are correct but leave out how much work came after because like you said, he couldn’t see any of that work during filming. We dressed every street from the ground to about 30ft up. Everything after that achieved with visual effects and “cgi”. I am incredibly proud of the physical work we did on that show, I’m also proud of the artists that took our work over the top.
By "took our work over the top" you probably mean "put their work atop of ours" :D It's often funny how much effort gets wasted by practical set dressing just to immediately get covered by something CG by the very first Nuke artist that touches the shot :D
@@LudvikKoutnyArt The effort isn't necessarily wasted if it's used as reference or shown in one shot but then replaced in another. The key is practical working together with digital.
@@LudvikKoutnyArt I can assure you that the work that our team did shows through in the final shots. I know there are plenty of shots where the backgrounds were digital manipulated or replaced but there are also shots with absolutely no digital set extensions. I’m over the moon proud of seeing my work show through.
25 years in VFX on my side. People have NO IDEA how much CGI are in movies and TV series. I do. This series was amazing! Thank you so much! I hope studios will not boycott you because of it. :-)
Right? When i would tell people I worked on the VFX for "The Resident", a Fox medical drama, they were confused that there were an average of 80-100 vfx shots in every episode.
"I hope studios will not boycott you because of it" Studios get boycotted. Artists that are good are in demand, especially these days when Hollywood seems intent on burning out every VFX artist by doing no planning before post production and reversing decisions half way through work on shots even though the contract price is fixed and the scheduled release date is relatively near. If Hollywood don't watch out they may eventually be left with no one to do the grunt work that makes their overpaid actors look good.
@@F9109-r1e Raw cinematography is a lost art. Movie makers nowadays NEED cgi to make things look like a movie and not a highschool live cam project made from a phone cam.
"VFX guy, I want the actor to have a hat." "Uhm... sure but... why not have him wear a hat?" "Do you have a hat? I don't have a hat." "Yea, there's a hat right over there." "But it's so far away. I'd have to get up. Let's just film it without the hat and you make a computer hat, that's less effort." "It is probably more eff--" "What was that?" "Nothing." "That's what I thought. Now erase yourself from the B-roll." "Okay."
There's no going back for you dude, you are currently the best VFX related UA-camr and you gotta keep making the best videos on the internet about VFX.
@@kunthukotharibut Corridor have never worked on a high budget big feature film! It is noticeable when they speak about shots from real movies. That’s why they can’t represent all VFX. Only that part which work on UA-cam videos and maybe motion design stuff.
I feel so bad for anyone working in vfx. Imagine putting hours and hours into making a shot just perfect, only for the director and actors to pretend your work doesn't exist and it was all someone else's work that made it look great. Such an underappreciated job..
This is what happens when you are the only part of the filmmaking process that doesn't have a union and is not allowed to partake in any profits from the film. Imagine the studios claiming a major actor, clearly visible in the movie, is not actually in the film and doesn't include their name in the credits list at the end. Happens more than you'd think in vfx.
oh yeah I've been a lead artist on several "No CGI" shows. (Barbie, vikings, a bunch more) It's funny. I just laugh when I hear this stuff. It's not much skin off my back. But I'm very happy with this youtube series. Don't feel too bad for us, we have a lot of fun doing what we do.
I just got into a "comment battle" with someone who jumped on the "all-practical" bandwagon under a promo video for Alien Romulus. It made me rewatch this series of yours. I got a chuckle when you mentioned that movie in this episode, as I completely forgot you included it... It's mind-boggling how easy it is to mislead people to the point that they turn rabid when you debunk the myths they believed.
I mean, I'll say that if corporations are actively lying to people about it, I don't think it's peoples' fault. This video appropriately talks about 'telling people what they want to hear', but this is not an own against people wanting to hear it, it's an own against the marketers who just lie through their teeth to say it. If people want 'no CGI', the responsible thing to do is to take a real position and either tell them "No, that's unreasonable and many of our effects use CGI out of necessity", or actually do practical effects if you can so that you are not committing borderline commercial fraud in your marketing. I think there's something really cool in how CGI can turn 'invisible', but this should be a stage trick, not the basis of actual literal deceit. The difference between a magician wooing everyone and being all coy about his tricks, and unironically telling people he really is magic and they should venerate him for it into becoming a cult leader.
@@Blaze6108 My main issue is with the creators insinuating or downright making the claim that their product is something else than what it actually is, i.e. that it doesn't have CGI when it's actually full of it. That being said, I don't think it's much of an overgeneralisation to say that people are easy to mislead. And that's fine. We've all been mislead at one point, or several. My first comment was about people who vehemently claim the superiority of practical effects while celebrating projects that are filled with visual effects (CGI) that they themselves can't tell apart from the practical effects.
@@khymaaren Oh yeah, people who think CGI = bad automatically are just wrong - you can have an appreciation or even preference for practical, but you can't discount all computer graphics just for that. As you said though, agreed that the fundamental insanity here is the brazen lies. It's kinda crazy just how many lies all sorts of industries tell nowadays, in general. It feels like at some point, either regulatory or consumer oversight (or both) over marketing slipped a lot.
Or that he flew in insectoid squid aliens for District 9, which itself was built off the bones of a cancelled Halo movie. He would've had to find not just 1, but 6 species of aliens that look just like the game aliens.
You are insanely appreciated my guy, believe me when I tell you (a software engineer here).I understand tech and yet what vfx artists have been achieving these last 15 years starting with Pirates is truly mind-blowing: from the insane algorithms that go into render engines and 3d sculpting software to the distribution of all of this so it can be finished quicker to compositing as a whole to eeveryfuuking piece of the puzzle
I did a little bit of it with NUKE in college, from the bottom of my heart I say YOU POOR POOR MAN!! 😅 Seriously it's no cakewalk, keep doing that amazing job.
My favorite part is not knowing I was watching CGI. Like the examples here of adding snow to a scene, or other examples like making a city skyline, or the grass greener of the shot was filed in Autumn. Hats off to all the wizards that make the magic happen. CGI artist should be both represented more and paid more.
I think that's also what people really mean: don't want to notice CGI. It's the most fun watching the VFX reels and realising how much CGI there was in a given movie and not having noticed most of it.
@@marcellkovacs5452absolutely, which is why studios should be celebrating their successful vfx instead of hiding it. When they go down the current path or promotion, people only recognize "CGI" as what they can obviously spot. We also need to stop listening to actors claim they didn't use any digital effects, because they've got no idea what comes next after the shots are filmed.
I want CGI to expand what can be put on screen, an entire fleet of battle ships instead of one shot from different angles, the air armadas of WW2 looking authentic, not one lone spitfire allegedly symbolising something, Paul riding the sandworm, the battle of Waterloo not looking like enthusiastic reenactors on their weekend off. Those will all look CGI because there is no way to create those visuals in reality or with miniatures. I want to know there is CGI and be happy that it is. Gollum looks CGI because what else could he be , that’s not bad it’s the only way possible to do Gollum in a live action movie that doesn’t suck.
@@marcellkovacs5452 Indeed. I like to refer back to the train derailing scene in Lawrence of Arabia. Which was shot for real. In the desert, with a real train. It looks awesome and it is awesome that they went all the way to do this for real. If they can do something like this with CGI and make it look exactly the same way, so that you won't be able to tell the difference, then I'm totally on board with using that technique. But whenever this doesn't work out, I'd rather they demolish a real train, before trying to trick me.
VFX artist here with 9 years in the business. I have been credited directly only 4 times out of more than 100 projects. So when you see the credited VFX folks, that is probably just 10% of the total number of people that have worked on the project. Also the amount of things that get tweaked, removed, replaced or enhanced in a shot is mind boggling, normal movie watchers have no clue that what they are seeing is CGI. The problem is directors not planning for VFX and/or crappy VFX supervisors on set, changing entire storylines, removing entire characters from the movie(A list actor in one instance), and the whole we'll fix it in post mentality. But the biggest problem of all, the deadlines. As a good friend of mine and a beast of a compositor once said: "There is nothing we cant do if they give us enough time".
I was losing my mind seeing that Andor editor talking about removing blinks! And that's barely scratching the surface. VFX is completely bonkers now, I can't imagine where we'll be after studios get over this dumb phase. (They'll get over this dumb phase... right?)
@@PrograError I had a whole long answer but I realized nobody cares about my AI opinions: everyone has one! TLDR: it's already being used in both good ways and bad ways, and people seem to like the good ways and not the bad ways. *So far*, things are looking alright.
As a VFX artist since the 1990s, THANK YOU. I live and work in Finland, where due to small country's budget constrains, the use of CGI (or VFX in general) in movies is generally much less prevalent than in the blockbuster world. That does not mean no CGI though. Vast majority of VFX here are of the invisible variety - set extensions, clean-ups, fixes, etc. In these cases, there usually is just no discussion about CGI at all. Which is fine in a way, it means the work was done well enough. What that means though, is that we VFX artists are also sort of invisible, and there's little public knowledge about what if anything was done digitally in films and TV shows. In the Finnish equivalent of Oscars, "Jussi awards", there still is no category for best effects - be that stunt work, SFX or VFX. Nada. It's a travesty really. There's now a petition to get us finally recognized, and as there is not much info in the public apart from the line in end credits, the petitioners had to call effects houses and freelancers to poll the extent of CGI work in Finnish films, and to ask us which films we had worked on, and what we did on them. There are cases where the CGI is used in more flashy ways, yet it still gets little or no mention - just like Hollywood. I personally have made CGI trains, planes and tanks (no automobiles though, somewhat surprisingly), created buildings that explode or are in fire, digital doubles of boats, birds and crowds of people... and i do not think many people outside the production know. In a few of these cases, there *have* been examples of the no CGI phenomenon even in my little corner of the world. As the first example i remember, in 2006 I worked on a war movie where the press mantra was that they used real tanks and airplanes. Which was true - there were two real tanks on the set, and one airplane which was only used on the ground... but all the rest of the tanks were either comped duplicates or full CGI. And every flying airplane was 100% computer generated. There were about 150 VFX shots I did for the film, plus perhaps roughly the same amount by another vendor. No, we did not make it into the press or BTS materials. Now i need to get back to work, making CGI butterflies for a music video today.
The amount of CGI coming in Beetlejuice 2 will never be entirely disclosed, with artists working once again in the shadows. Thanks a lot for this amazing series of videos, I look forward to see what you have in stock for the future of this great channel!
This video essay series is like hitting the jackpot in a desert of shallow movie talks. You know what's the best part? When I stumble upon those comment sections full of clueless folks blabbering about "practical filmmaking" (like, seriously, I genuinely have not gotten a single person to give me a cohesive definition of that the hell they even mean when the say that), I just drop them the link to this series. Saves me from banging my head against the wall trying to explain stuff to people who've never even set foot behind the scenes. So yeah, goodbye to those exhausting arguments with the clueless. This series should be mandatory viewing for anyone who utters the term "CGI" I cannot express how thankful I am for this series. You have saved me thousands of headaches. Your work is seriously a lifesaver.
@@TheMovieRabbitHole Great video, but sorry I have to disagree with the last point. I can always tell when it's CGi, even when it's "invisible" CGi like in Scorsese movies. Those cows looked fake, not to mention eye-soring CGI in Wolf Of Wall street, especially in prison scene and on the boat.
@@JoeBlac which makes it funnier when they absolutely CGI'd GT7 half of the reference gameplay shoots for the movie. and it's extremely blatant the *moment* you see a robust car customization (not to be confused with livery editor) or the vast majority of menu navigation, *which does not exist in Gran Turismo 7* as of this writing.
I paid little attention to GT when it came out. Had no idea Niel Blomkamp, known CG FX wizard, directed the movie and tried to lie about it having no CG. What a fucking sellout.
As a military aviation nerd it was so funny to keep seeing people talking about the no CGI thing in Top Gun: Maverick. Yeah I‘m pretty sure the filmmakers didn’t go to Iran to get some of the last flightworthy F-14 Tomcats for some movie. And I‘m also pretty sure the Russians didn’t give them their most advanced fighter jet just so someone could brag about not using CGI lol.
Also my Dad is a pilot so even before that whole sequence he spotted that no plane could go that close to the ground without crashing. I wonder if the cinematographer was lying when he said “We never filmed an empty sky”
Also there are a lot of really recognizable 3D assets, like the SAMs not only don't look particularly good they make absolutely no sense since it's just random BUK launchers without any of the support infrastructure needed placed in nonsensical locations. Then there's also a lot of the maneuvers that often wouldn't be possible at the speeds they're supposedly happening at, and also usually make no sense. Like the fights do not feel slightly grounded whatsoever, they feel incredibly silly and it makes it kinda boring when they literally stole the entire mission from an Ace Combat game but then for some reason didn't steal that series dedication to over the top arcade nonsense.
I believe one of the underlying goals of this "NO CGI" propaganda from the studios is to demoralize the CG Artists as a way to help crush any talk of unionizing. CGI VFX Artists have worked w/o union protections for years, making them the most easily exploited workforce in the entertainment industry. This exploitation has a negative effect on wages and benefits, but also manifests itself in Credits and Awards; the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has greatly truncated it list of awards for VFX, and often for smaller VFX houses the credit for a film or episode will be little more than a nod to the company in total. By constantly bad-mouthing the work of CGI Artists, it appears to rob the discipline of its value (despite the fact that there is almost no production that completes without using their talents), making the Artist less likely to make a stink when they are forced to work long hours for diminished wages under impossible deadlines for demanding and unreasonable clients.
Throwing my two cents in here, I imagine that lying about how "no CGI" was used in films could also be by design... when REALLY GOOD CGI is employed, and the normal Joe can't tell the difference between reality and illusion, it could possibly lead to the employment of CG artists to create propaganda and shop actual footage. Some governments were brazen enough to attempt faking actual combat scenarios by recording footage in ARMA 3, for example. Imagine what these same governments could do if they had talented CG artists on their payroll to doctor ACTUAL FOOTAGE. They could gaslight the masses into thinking something didn't happen when it did, or stir up a national emergency out of a nothingburger.
@@glennac truly. If anything, the entire LOTR trilogy was a demo for Weta Digital and Massive, the software that they developed to create the CGI armies in the films.
@@SpydeyDanright? I mean am I going crazy or did we all not flock to the cinemas to see all the awesome incredible stuff they did with LOTR and The Matrix? I still remember my jaw dropping when I saw that army.
It's like going to see a stage magician and they pitch the show as, "No tricks, illusions, slight of hand, or prestidigitation! We use 100% *real* Wizardry to perform the feats you will witness on stage!"
"I can always tell when there's CGI".... I mean, Dante's Peak with the mountain back drop, and The Equalizer during the café scenes had me fooled, until I watched the Behind The Scenes footage and saw the VFX artistry involved. The best CGI/VFX are the subtle and well hidden ones where you wouldn't imagine there'd be any.
As the average viewer who would never know, your first video on this is when I suddenly realized why so often I had looked at "practical no CGI shots" and kept wondering "but how did they do it?" Because so many shots advertised this way aren't physically possible. They have things like holes in people, hundreds of tendrils moving in a way that can't be done with hydraulics or wires or whatever.. and I just kept wondering "but how?" And it never occurred to me they were just lying. Every piece of evidence that it was a lie I filed away as "well they weren't talking about THAT shot". I kinda forgot about that first video and UA-cam didn't recommend the others to me until just now, so I missed seeing them as they were published, but I'm glad to get to the end of it now and finally finish making that connection.
As a 20+ year experience vfx artist, thank you for helping people understand our work, and how important it is to the modern movies and tv series. Its still a bit it sad that all this extremely hard work is not acknowledged by anyone, and despite the quality that is constantly improving, still gets negative comments from just about anyone involved with movies. But like many superheroes that we helped make come to life, we don’t mind keeping our identity kept “secret”. We can still get some satisfaction from people thinking its not CGI. This means its job well done. So you could also have named your series “NO CGI”. Is really just very good CGI.
You touch on a great point here that I think is often missed in these conversations. As a director, a bad VFX shot being in a final cut of a film is as much your responsibility as a bad costume, bad performance or poor lighting. People rag on VFX artists who are often overworked and underpaid without ever stopping to think why the person in charge of the production would make choices that lead to bad outcomes. Whether it's a lack of understanding of how VFX work is done, or just poor general direction, more blame has to be on directors (or producers in cases where a studio has more control than a director which frequently happens) for these decisions. Plenty of movies have thousands of VFX shots that look fantastic, and plenty have very few that look bad. If I were directing a movie in the 60's and decide to cut to a bad looking matte painting, that decision is on me. I think so much of the negative backlash against CG comes from directors who are overly reliant on it and think of it as a short cut to get wherever they want with no restraints.
That's part of it, certainly. Everyone goes on about how incredible the VFX is in the latest Avatar, but that's not because the people at (e.g. - they weren't the only house) Weta who created them are somehow that much more talented than those who work on other films. Because they do work on other, "lesser" films. And it's not purely because Cameron can direct VFX better. What makes the difference between an amazing Avatar 2 shot and the mediocre ones people complain about in recent Marvel films (for instance) is that they've been given the time and money to work on it until it's right.
Either you speak up to those tyrants or you don't complain at all. Hollywood have been rotten to the core since it's inception. If everyone speak up they can't silence it all. That's how the internet works
yeah, its almost always been the case that 90% of the shots with "bad cgi" didn't have "bad cgi" they had bad compositing, which is done in the edit. and honestly, alot of bad vfx in general, even pre-dvfx, are owed to that.
I was a CG artist and that's honestly my only complaint with VFX. I think the art style nowadays is to put so much stuff on the screen that it gets overwhelming but that's not the artist's decision. Like in Ready Player One when they threw in every WB franchise to remind the viewer that they owned a lot of IP. It's a dumb decision. Artistically it is interesting but as a film decision the constant reminders that the films are being crafted by giant corporations take me out way more than the VFX.
"Whether it's a lack of understanding of how VFX work is done, or just poor general direction, more blame has to be on directors (or producers in cases where a studio has more control than a director which frequently happens) for these decisions" It's studios and their predatory fixed price VFX contracts too. They set a fixed price and the VFX studio has to stick to it, even when the director changes their mind halfway through work on a shot and asks them to do it all again. Because of that VFX studios literally keep going bankrupt because they have to pay their artists more than the contract was worth. At this point I can only assume that the more successful, long running studios purposefully overcharge up front to avoid these problems.
The biggest embarrassment about directors lying about the use of CGI is the erasure of just how good the VFX teams have gotten. Plan your filming around VFX, pay the VFX teams a fair wage, give them recognition for their successes, and you get a good result that most audience don't even notice aren't practical. Skimp out on any of those, and you get The Flash. I think you might still have some legs for future videos diving into subtle CGI work. I mean, I watch Corridor every weekend for a neat VFX breakdown, and CD when he remembers to exist, but I'm pretty sure there's room for more if you wanted to keep the channel going and build an audience even more.
I was 12 when the Phantom Menace came out. I didn't notice the "bad CGI" at the time. After I learned what "bad CGI" looks like, I felt like it was distracting. It never occurred to me that "practical" was better - just "I wish I hadn't noticed". Also, I have a huge respect for digital artists, who represent multitudes of highly creative and talented people who's work we might never have enjoyed were it not for modern digital tools. My hat is off to those people, and to you for shining light on their incredible contributions to cinema!
You should definitely check this out. They also have a print issue. And it's not just CG, it's all the wonderful tricks of movie magic. beforesandafters.com/
I came to the comments section just now to make a comment about the late, great Cinefex magazine. To me, it feels like this current 'no CGI' obsession began around the time that Cinefex stopped publishing. Also, around the same time that physical media started dying out...and for the few who are still buying blu-rays, their 'special features' went from huge behind-the-scenes documentaries to two minute press kits and a blooper reel.
This biggest thing I take from this is that the studio and fan efforts to claim that any given movie doesn't, and shouldn't, have CGI are deeply disrespectful to the CG artists.
the problem is CGI is expensive, and studios want you to see the money they spent, like when 3d movies were a thing so EVERY effect was literally in your face constantly. the amazing people who did district 9 forced themselves to not follow that by adding random set dressing digitally, like a cup in the blurry background for example. i wish more studios would stop going "HEY LOOK AT THIS VFX SHOT!!!!"
@@vanillaicecream2385 That's not even remotely true, CGI is often the cheapest option these days and that's why it gets used, I mean in general VFX have always been used because they're cheaper than doing the real thing.
@@hedgehog3180 because its easier, its very hard to setup a real car crash for a movie, just do it in post digitally its so cheap nowdays compared to what it used to be is because companies squeeze their artists for all they're worth, you work overtime after overtime for weeks with little pay
The tiger in Life of Pi is so well made, that people cannot see the difference between the scenes where a real tiger were used, and when they used a digital tiger.
@@Durwood71 yeah, and during the Oscar acceptance speech, Ang Lee basically thanked everybody that helped making the film, and then some. All except the people that made the visual effects. This is what caused that major outcry from visual artists in 2013. And still today we have this BS in the industry. I'm so fed up with it.
It's a strange bit of human factors. The best I can think of is, they struggle with computers themselves, not realising that among the vast panoply of commands, is one that solves their current problem. Then when the nearest nerd tells them, they imagine this expands to *all* problems, even ones that can't be done automatically.
@@Kythyria It sounds a lot like the oft-echoed "Dunning-Kruger effect" to me. This is a specialized knowledge area where most people default to knowing exactly zero things about the field, let's say image generation. Then they learn about a simplified thing, such as talking to a Discord bot to generate AI images. Which tells them that it's not really all that hard to get already impressive results. And so how hard can the rest of it be if they're already that competent at making images? Anyone who has ever stumbled upon a computer / film / tech related channel is automatically being pushed over that confidence spike, realizing there's a vast amount of stuff they don't know. "Oh wow, I never thought of that. Wonder what else I've never thought of."
You are a gem for making this, and I salute you -- one filmmaker to another. James Cameron said something I adored in Side by Side (which was about a different issue: Film vs. Digital; but still applies) "When was it EVER real?"
Cameron started as a concept artist and visual effects supervisor. He knows nooks and cranny of visual effects. Every interview, even going back to T2 he talked about how you can't make T2 without CGI. He has tremendous respect for the VFX artists and gives them time they need(Avatar 3 was shot in 2017, it won't even release until 2025!!!). And then you have Christopher Nolan.
But at least in the case of Black Panther they were very clear about it afterwards that the shots look so bad because the Effects Studios were completely overworked and had not enough time to finish the shots. CGI is the one branch where nothing hurts the result more than time and money constraints.
He says the jets are CGI but all I can find is they did actually pay a lot of money to use real jets. So is this such a large scale lie or did they use a combination? I'm so confused.
I came here via corridor crew. FANTASTIC SERIES!! Thank you so much for all the hard work that went into this, and the clear, concise story-telling that makes it easy to follow. I'm a long-time movie fanatic (all sorts) and some of this I already knew - especially about matte paintings; big Ellenshaw fan - but the amount of detail you provide is on a whole 'nother level. Again, thank you, and I look forward to your next series. Editing might be a good next subject. In a film class once, we were shown a sequence which added a few black frames between each edit, which revealed just how many edits you really don't notice when the film is flowing past you.
You mentioned it in a previous video, but the biggest problem with the "no CGI" lie is that it's erasing the hard work of thousands of artists that deserve to be recognized for their work. And, more importantly, they deserve to get PAID for their work. But if the general population doesn't know how much VFX work goes into these films then it's a lot easier to underpay the people that make them so great.
I'm guessing that those people typically don't sit through the credits for very long, or they'd see the endless quadruple columns of digital artists from vendor after vendor on these movies with allegedly no CGI. Do they think all those people are there because they did the credits and titles?
@@Corn_Pone_Flicks Not just that but in the credits the companies and people who do the CGI are usually credited as Visual Effects which most people probably think is the one set effects and such and not CGI effects. Since Effects and VFX are the same thing but one is done on set and the other is done in post.
@@ErikWerlin Special effects or special mechanical fx means on set. Vfx has never meant onset. With the possible exception of glass and hanging mattes. And while special fx used to also be used as the catch-all, it hasn't been that way in the industry for decades. Same with the appellation SFX, which used to be used mainly by people not in the industry to mean special effects. But within it's a shortening of sound fx, vor many decades now. These things change and slide around a bit. And Jonas already went into how bad cgi as a catchall term is. because 3d animation, digital compositing colour grading and so on are not the same or all just "CGI". And he talked about how "CGI/Computer Generated Imagery" is a misnomer. On that note John Lasseter of Pixar said the computers no more create the imagery than a pencil creates pencil/2d animation.
@@halfvader8015 I'm well aware of all of that. I was a VFX comp artist for 10 years. If you read what I wrote again you'll see I was talking about the general public and how the average person don't know the difference. The AVERAGE person probable thinks VFX and on set FX are the same thing.
If the general audience realised how little work actors and even the general film crew put in vs VFX teams they wouldn't get paid nearly as well as they are. Could you imagine if instead of plastering WILL SMITH or CHRIS PRATT on the posters they had FRAMESTORE instead? This is why though actors/directors will occasionally praise the work of the VFX artists, they won't ever go overboard - and indeed it seems like these days they have moved to either gaslighting us about the VFX existing at all, or worse actually badmouthing them as with Taika Waititi and Tessa Thompson during the Thor 4 PR.
Now that this saga is complete I would love to see a video of you talking about some of the vfx achievements we got to see over the last couple of decades and talk some more about the directors that are actively proud of the vfx used in their movie.
David Fincher is an obvious candidate for that. He's always been open about the amount of effects he uses, probably because he started as an effects guy. He knows how important they are.
Man, so many of these "no CGI" claims in promotional materials are so blatant I'm amazed it's not false advertising! How does that get past consumer protection laws? That said, I think when most people say they "hate CGI" what they actually mean is they hate when an effect is so noticeable that it takes them out if the experience. They aren't thinking of the invisible set extensions in Wolf of Wall Street, they're thinking of the scorpion king from The Mummy Returns (although I remember getting distracted quite often in all The Mummy movies honestly as they used the CG in ways that it wasn't really ready for at the time).
Sir, my most sincere congratulations. I've learned more about cinematography throughout these series than reading/watching anything else in my entire life. They should be compulsory for anyone interested in the art of crafting cinema
As a vfx artist, I hope that this four part series is just the beginning for the channel. Absolutely impeccable work and easily some of the best coverage of VFX I have seen. Also anyone interested in checking out more like this series with deep dives into vfx I highly recommend the vfx notes podcast that Hugo Guerra does.
I've always thought this was the end goal: Where "No CGI" meant "you can't see we used CGI." So this explains my confusion at people saying they loved such and such because it didn't have CGI, while that thing is horrible because it obviously does. This is something I learned back with The Polar Express. We got a copy on DVD while we were still using a CRT purchased when Star Wars 2 came to VHS. So we genuinely had arguments with people over whether or not it was live action. Imagine our collective embarassment when we watch it on a plasma screen and the MoCap CGI was all the more obvious. Even more hilarious when some of the siblings never got around to watching the behind the scenes to break down how the MoCap worked.
Just wanted to say you do a great job of using example shots of whatever you're talking about. Too many 'essay' type channels don't show an example of what they're talking about or just use generalized stock footage. It's been real nice to see.
I figured out much of what you were saying just by being on the ASD spectrum and by thinking about what my eyeballs are seeing throughout my teenage years, and even I have learned a lot from this series. Thank you so so much. It's really eye opening how producers can just lie to large amounts of people in an active effort to discredit the hard work of the very talented VFX artists who made most of what we see in most of the movies we watch. Imagine working for years to make a beautiful movie and your boss pretends that if you even 'existed, it would be a bad thing. VFX artists need to be brought to the forefront and get the credit they deserve. I've shown this series to quite a few people. It's very clear to me that most people dislike CGI because it's so good that they think most of the movie they are watching is what the camera saw (never mind the fact that that's not been the case for decades due to color grading, but whatever).
Part 4 was as good as part 1. So thank youfor this quality ! :D It was a really good serie, can't wait to see other essay from you ! No yelling, no surface level of knowledge, just a good, insightfull video that is well made. The CGI vs Practical useless converssation in theaters/online is so stupid. You showed really well how every good movies now HAS to have CGI & good compositing.
This series has been amazing. I am admittedly not a cinema "nerd", and have never understood the anti-CGI comments from Hollywood. There are scenes that even a child can comprehend are not real. Movie goers are buying the tickets regardless, why the need to lie to us? With the incredible amount of work that goes into making a movie, the work should be celebrated. It is still someone's art on the screen, regardless if they used technology, or matte painting, or whatever other tool was used. Liked and subscribed! Keep up the great work.
I feel like the use of CGI for my short Acéré was pretty invisible, but I was so proud just to get the chance to use it! It elevated what I was able to do practically, since I could paint out wound FX until the blood gag had to activate, and it absolutely improved the film. In my making of released same day as the short I went to great lengths to show how it was done. This series has been eye opening to just how much that is not the regular case, but I genuinely believe many industry figures will see this, as they apparently did with my work on how to shoot action, and it should lead to some embarrassment and therefore, change.
I haven't even worked on any of those movies (I wish I did) and I'm always very pissed with all the lies all those actors, producers and even directors say. Throwing under the bus a huge amount of amazing artists that worked their asses off for their vision. I can't imagine how much more pissed the artists that worked on those movies feel.
@@PrograError that could be coming in the distant future. More realistic in the near future could be they change the "no CG" to "no AI" (a lot of both were used)
I have a vague memory of a documentary or maybe a feature during a British film review program that went into a fair bit of detail. There were obvious shots like the fall from the building and then a million others that I never would have guessed. I wonder how they hold up now..!
Thank you. This series is so well done. I wrote my bachelor thesis on this topic and my test group couldn't tell the difference between CGI, miniature and practical shots. I would have loved to incorporate your work into my studies, but it came 3 months too late. Thank you for these fantastic 4 parts of entertaining education and information.
Thoroughly entertaining series, well done! For me the eye opener about this whole practical > CGI, no CGI, CGI bad, stuff was watching behind the scenes footage from the Wolf of Wallstreet years back, and realising just how much of the sets and backrounds and all that were entirely computer generated, which I could have never guessed. It was that moment that I realised that it's not about what you use to make your movie, but about how you use it. People came to hate CGI because big CGI spectacles came to replace good story telling, believable characters and immersive environments, camera angles/movements as well as authentic settings. But that wasn't the fault of the tool, rather than of those deciding how to use it.
I absolutely adore this four-part series you've put together, and I cannot thank you enough for the hard work, research, and commitment you've clearly poured into doing this topic real justice.
FUN FACT: "The Phantom Menace" had more practical models built for it than the entire OT. "The Force Awakens" on the other hand actually had more VFX shots than "The Phantom Menace".
That Star Wars 365 days by John Knoll (yes that John Knoll) is a fantastic book not many seem to know about and extensively documents the miniature builds!
TBH I think the Prequels are the last few films when the old age is merged with the new age CGI… IIRC some of the ILM staff calls the converts “going to the dark side”
@@halfvader8015 Everybody thinks Lucas demanded CGI, but the truth is, he told his effects team the end result he wanted, and they decided on the best way to achieve it, which most of the time included a mixture of models, sets, matte paintings, and CGI.
@@Durwood71 Preaching to the converted dude. Hence my mentioning the SW 365 book. Although he did ask for some super weirdo stuff the supes scratched their heads about!!
Thanks for setting the record straight! The hundreds of digital artists in the end credits of, well, most productions, should be recognized for their work. Not quite on this topic, but last week I saw a US TV network news story on the discovery of the original 3-foot 1960s USS Enterprise model. It got SO many facts wrong, it was cringey for a Trek nerd like me. I'm reminded again how inaccurate entertainment / feature news coverage can be. So thanks for tweaking the noses of bad and/or lazy entertainment 'journalism.'
Hi there, I'm a former student at Exceptional Minds. I don't work in VFX (I received my certificate in Animation and Motion Graphics) but I am glad that you have debunked so many of the misconceptions about CG and its place in the entertainment industry. There aren't a lot of UA-cam essayists and content creators that I think are great these days (or even well-informed) but you have clearly done your research and your videos are wonderfully informative. Hopefully these videos can reach more people in the future so we can inform others about how the VFX/3D industry works!
10+ year vfx veteran here. Thank you so much for this extensive series! It means so much that I have somewhere to point people who make those nonsense claims, and to point people who simply want to understand what I do.
I came in already agreeing with your central premise, and you have still blown my brain and altered how I think about film (and many film makers). Terrific stuff.
You knocked it out of the park 4 out of 4 times Jonas! I really like your circular feedback loop explanation. Great way to visually represent the issue in a way anyone can understand, whether they work in the film industry or not.
This was a really cool series. I know a little bit about some of the processes here but this really blew my mind especially the historical use of sfx. Looking forward to seeing more from the channel.
Already a thing. Cameron started using AI for his recent remasters to save a buck and ruined the Aliens remaster. People are already wanting "no AI" in future remasters and to stick with the tried and true methods of remastering films directly from the original film stock. You can't just give a cheap DVD to AI and have it clean up the image by inventing data that isn't there, no matter how much cheaper that would be for the studio.
People just don't realize that in the end what counts is the resulting composition. A good film does not depend solely on "no CGI" or "good CGI". Heck, there are even great films that don't "look good" at all. These usually come packed with awesome artistry in other fields. So just embrace CG/VFX as one pillar (albeit a massive one, that is often hidden) of a good film, not the end (or the start) of it.
thank you for this awesome series! as a film student, this really opened my eyes to the bias i had begun to hold against CGI because of the marketing done by studios in recent years. as i watch older films, i’ve really enjoyed trying to think about how matte paintings may have been used in some of my favourite shots. thanks for highlighting the under appreciated and often hidden work of these visual effects artists!
This really opened my eyes to how bad CGI artist get it nowadays, they're already thrown under the bus for shows with bad effects when studios can't give them anything to work with, but when they actually do make something incredible the credit is taken away from them. The Demonization of Computer effects isn't gonna make movie look better, it's just gonna make studios have a stronger grasp on over controlling their artists.
I find it quite sad honestly. Because seeing the behind the scenes of my favourite movies when I was a kid was what got me into acting, movies and art. Seeing how both prcactical and CGI worked was basically just as good as the movie to me. And now to see studios lying in thare own behind the scenes really just makes me sad.
Honestly, I've been waiting for part 4 for so long. One of the best series I've ever watched on UA-cam. Great videos, dry delivery, and so many real world examples it's insane anyone can get away with the rigmarole of pretending they haven't used digital VFX.
Anyone claiming it's CGI that makes a movie bad needs to be removed from the gene pool. The problem with an overwhelming number of movies today is that they ONLY care about impact, not about how good the movie is. If impact to them (and the audience) means big explosions, practical or not, then that's the movie you are going to get. If it means having superstar actors speaking sassy lines, that is what you are going to get. And so on, it doesn't make a good movie. It just means the movie makers are catering to the lowest goals possible. Practical or CGI does NOT apply. That being said, of course BAD CGI can take you completely out of a movie. But only if the movie isn't exceptionally good to begin with. If all it takes is a poorly animated CGI character to take you out of the movie experience then the MOVIE as a WHOLE is BAD. If instead of focusing their efforts on "no CGI is used now suck my toes" they should focus on "the movie is so good that you won't even care if it's CGI".
As someone who does a lot of thankless computer work, I really appreciate this series! I absolutely cannot wait to see what you come up with in the future. These VFX/CG guys need the credit. It's an awe inspiring amount of work to make today's media what it is, and, dammit, these guys need some time in the spotlight! I caught that little bit of Birdemic. I most definitely watched that for the VFX! 🤣
I live all visual effects lol. I dont understand hating vfx or practical. That movie "FX" was my jam 😂! I also watched the Terminator 2, behind the scenes, and Tom Saveigney "Scream Greats". It's all so cool!!
Audiences are just tired of rushed work, bad planning and low budgets. But the studios found something to push their blame away: CGI. Cool. That's their scapegoat now. But it's fair to say VFX used to be more reality-based. Camera projections, live-texture captures for 3D humans, science-based shaders and matte paintings used to rule the VFX industry in the late 90's - early 2000's. Today there's too much trust that anything CGI can have a pass just because they through a bunch of detail at it.
I always hate that particular phrasing...it's as if they think someone picks up a microphone and says "Hello, computer. Could you give me a big fight scene with spaceships and such? I'm going to go take a walk." If it's a miniature, someone had to make it, and if it's a CG model, someone had to make that, too.
It's been said a million times, but this series really is the absolute best take on this issue ever put to screen. Looking forward to more amazing videos from you in the future!
Thank you for making this fantastic series. It changed the way how I watch movies and series and even made me wonder if I want to work in the industry as vfx artist.
Celebrate artists regardless of the medium. The idea that directors or producers think some artists are more valuable than others is no great surprise. Screw those people. Call them out whenever possible. This is the most wonderful series and I would really love to see more.
This series (and channel) is a blessing. Thank you for the amazing videos!
Quite a few CGI UA-cam stars in the comments here.
Same goes for you guys
Love your channel too. Especially love your videos when you talk with industry veterans
We all love you guys too now get this man on the couch please!! 🙏🙏🙏
Now kiss ❤
I was waiting for you to say "I've been CGI this whole time"
That would have been a real Game Changer
I really thought when he said "Let's look at things around house", that he would reveal that the things around him like his mic, or wall hangings, were CG.
That would be a Captain Disillusion stunt
Hahahahhahajajahahaha
@@whaleguy OH. I hadn't thought of that. :D
I was a set dresser on The Last of Us Season 1. I personally dressed the exterior sets that Pedro Pascal is talking about when referring to a “dressed downtown Calgary”.
His comments are correct but leave out how much work came after because like you said, he couldn’t see any of that work during filming.
We dressed every street from the ground to about 30ft up. Everything after that achieved with visual effects and “cgi”.
I am incredibly proud of the physical work we did on that show, I’m also proud of the artists that took our work over the top.
By "took our work over the top" you probably mean "put their work atop of ours" :D It's often funny how much effort gets wasted by practical set dressing just to immediately get covered by something CG by the very first Nuke artist that touches the shot :D
Whats a guy gotta do to get on the next project with you?
@@LudvikKoutnyArt The effort isn't necessarily wasted if it's used as reference or shown in one shot but then replaced in another. The key is practical working together with digital.
@@LudvikKoutnyArt I can assure you that the work that our team did shows through in the final shots.
I know there are plenty of shots where the backgrounds were digital manipulated or replaced but there are also shots with absolutely no digital set extensions. I’m over the moon proud of seeing my work show through.
@@troublewithweebles apply to work as a permitee with the local film union in the Set Dec department.
25 years in VFX on my side. People have NO IDEA how much CGI are in movies and TV series. I do. This series was amazing! Thank you so much! I hope studios will not boycott you because of it. :-)
That kind of talk is what giving them power, you're not supposed to just take it and shut up. You're creating tyrants
Right? When i would tell people I worked on the VFX for "The Resident", a Fox medical drama, they were confused that there were an average of 80-100 vfx shots in every episode.
"I hope studios will not boycott you because of it"
Studios get boycotted.
Artists that are good are in demand, especially these days when Hollywood seems intent on burning out every VFX artist by doing no planning before post production and reversing decisions half way through work on shots even though the contract price is fixed and the scheduled release date is relatively near.
If Hollywood don't watch out they may eventually be left with no one to do the grunt work that makes their overpaid actors look good.
@@msteelefinleyF***ing why though? Why do you need all that for live action drama? Just film the damn thing.
@@F9109-r1e Raw cinematography is a lost art. Movie makers nowadays NEED cgi to make things look like a movie and not a highschool live cam project made from a phone cam.
Gotta admit, "this hat is CGI" got me. No one expects them to CGI a hat lol.
"VFX guy, I want the actor to have a hat."
"Uhm... sure but... why not have him wear a hat?"
"Do you have a hat? I don't have a hat."
"Yea, there's a hat right over there."
"But it's so far away. I'd have to get up. Let's just film it without the hat and you make a computer hat, that's less effort."
"It is probably more eff--"
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
"That's what I thought. Now erase yourself from the B-roll."
"Okay."
many ppl forget that Scorsese use VFX too in his movies
@@thezplayer3002 yep. Wasn’t one of Scorsese’s most recent films using a ton of de-aging effects?
@@adrianporter5749 The Irishman
There's no going back for you dude, you are currently the best VFX related UA-camr and you gotta keep making the best videos on the internet about VFX.
I wish he hadn't limited this series to 4. I hope he creates a new series with a new name that's almost exactly like this one, just with less detail.
his videos are really good but i think corridor crew has the best VFX related youtube content
You're God damn right!@@kunthukothari
Corridor brought me here, what an amazing channel this is
@@kunthukotharibut Corridor have never worked on a high budget big feature film! It is noticeable when they speak about shots from real movies. That’s why they can’t represent all VFX. Only that part which work on UA-cam videos and maybe motion design stuff.
I feel so bad for anyone working in vfx. Imagine putting hours and hours into making a shot just perfect, only for the director and actors to pretend your work doesn't exist and it was all someone else's work that made it look great. Such an underappreciated job..
This is what happens when you are the only part of the filmmaking process that doesn't have a union and is not allowed to partake in any profits from the film. Imagine the studios claiming a major actor, clearly visible in the movie, is not actually in the film and doesn't include their name in the credits list at the end. Happens more than you'd think in vfx.
oh yeah I've been a lead artist on several "No CGI" shows. (Barbie, vikings, a bunch more)
It's funny. I just laugh when I hear this stuff. It's not much skin off my back. But I'm very happy with this youtube series. Don't feel too bad for us, we have a lot of fun doing what we do.
@@funnyberries4017 no you haven't
Well at least they get paid well /s
I dont't feel bad actually, if no one spot that your shot is a CGI shot it means that you mande an amazing job
I cant believe these Videos took NO CGI
Technically… The text he uses is computer generated.
@@TacoBel 😱
@@TacoBel How can you tell?
I thought the big reveal was going to be his hair and glasses were all CGI the whole time. 😊
Plot twist: the host is CGI!
I just got into a "comment battle" with someone who jumped on the "all-practical" bandwagon under a promo video for Alien Romulus. It made me rewatch this series of yours. I got a chuckle when you mentioned that movie in this episode, as I completely forgot you included it... It's mind-boggling how easy it is to mislead people to the point that they turn rabid when you debunk the myths they believed.
I mean, I'll say that if corporations are actively lying to people about it, I don't think it's peoples' fault. This video appropriately talks about 'telling people what they want to hear', but this is not an own against people wanting to hear it, it's an own against the marketers who just lie through their teeth to say it. If people want 'no CGI', the responsible thing to do is to take a real position and either tell them "No, that's unreasonable and many of our effects use CGI out of necessity", or actually do practical effects if you can so that you are not committing borderline commercial fraud in your marketing.
I think there's something really cool in how CGI can turn 'invisible', but this should be a stage trick, not the basis of actual literal deceit. The difference between a magician wooing everyone and being all coy about his tricks, and unironically telling people he really is magic and they should venerate him for it into becoming a cult leader.
@@Blaze6108 My main issue is with the creators insinuating or downright making the claim that their product is something else than what it actually is, i.e. that it doesn't have CGI when it's actually full of it.
That being said, I don't think it's much of an overgeneralisation to say that people are easy to mislead. And that's fine. We've all been mislead at one point, or several.
My first comment was about people who vehemently claim the superiority of practical effects while celebrating projects that are filled with visual effects (CGI) that they themselves can't tell apart from the practical effects.
@@khymaaren Oh yeah, people who think CGI = bad automatically are just wrong - you can have an appreciation or even preference for practical, but you can't discount all computer graphics just for that. As you said though, agreed that the fundamental insanity here is the brazen lies.
It's kinda crazy just how many lies all sorts of industries tell nowadays, in general. It feels like at some point, either regulatory or consumer oversight (or both) over marketing slipped a lot.
Gotta respect Neill Blomkamp's dedication to practical. Couldn't believe he made an actual sentient robot for Chappie
Or that he flew in insectoid squid aliens for District 9, which itself was built off the bones of a cancelled Halo movie. He would've had to find not just 1, but 6 species of aliens that look just like the game aliens.
VFX compositor here... THANK YOU.
Thank you for your job!
You are insanely appreciated my guy, believe me when I tell you (a software engineer here).I understand tech and yet what vfx artists have been achieving these last 15 years starting with Pirates is truly mind-blowing: from the insane algorithms that go into render engines and 3d sculpting software to the distribution of all of this so it can be finished quicker to compositing as a whole to eeveryfuuking piece of the puzzle
What compositors have achieved in the last twenty years has completely transformed film and TV. Just unbelievable (and believable). Huge respect.
I did a little bit of it with NUKE in college, from the bottom of my heart I say YOU POOR POOR MAN!! 😅
Seriously it's no cakewalk, keep doing that amazing job.
Props to you man, you often have the hardest job to make everything feel coherent and part of the same scene - Real unsung heroes 😘
My favorite part is not knowing I was watching CGI. Like the examples here of adding snow to a scene, or other examples like making a city skyline, or the grass greener of the shot was filed in Autumn.
Hats off to all the wizards that make the magic happen. CGI artist should be both represented more and paid more.
I think that's also what people really mean: don't want to notice CGI. It's the most fun watching the VFX reels and realising how much CGI there was in a given movie and not having noticed most of it.
If the magician was successful, you never even know a trick happened.
@@marcellkovacs5452absolutely, which is why studios should be celebrating their successful vfx instead of hiding it. When they go down the current path or promotion, people only recognize "CGI" as what they can obviously spot. We also need to stop listening to actors claim they didn't use any digital effects, because they've got no idea what comes next after the shots are filmed.
I want CGI to expand what can be put on screen, an entire fleet of battle ships instead of one shot from different angles, the air armadas of WW2 looking authentic, not one lone spitfire allegedly symbolising something, Paul riding the sandworm, the battle of Waterloo not looking like enthusiastic reenactors on their weekend off. Those will all look CGI because there is no way to create those visuals in reality or with miniatures. I want to know there is CGI and be happy that it is. Gollum looks CGI because what else could he be , that’s not bad it’s the only way possible to do Gollum in a live action movie that doesn’t suck.
@@marcellkovacs5452 Indeed. I like to refer back to the train derailing scene in Lawrence of Arabia. Which was shot for real. In the desert, with a real train.
It looks awesome and it is awesome that they went all the way to do this for real.
If they can do something like this with CGI and make it look exactly the same way, so that you won't be able to tell the difference, then I'm totally on board with using that technique.
But whenever this doesn't work out, I'd rather they demolish a real train, before trying to trick me.
VFX artist here with 9 years in the business. I have been credited directly only 4 times out of more than 100 projects.
So when you see the credited VFX folks, that is probably just 10% of the total number of people that have worked on the project. Also the amount of things that get tweaked, removed, replaced or enhanced in a shot is mind boggling, normal movie watchers have no clue that what they are seeing is CGI.
The problem is directors not planning for VFX and/or crappy VFX supervisors on set, changing entire storylines, removing entire characters from the movie(A list actor in one instance), and the whole we'll fix it in post mentality.
But the biggest problem of all, the deadlines. As a good friend of mine and a beast of a compositor once said: "There is nothing we cant do if they give us enough time".
As someone once said, unlimited time plus unlimited resources equals a perfect result.
I was losing my mind seeing that Andor editor talking about removing blinks! And that's barely scratching the surface. VFX is completely bonkers now, I can't imagine where we'll be after studios get over this dumb phase. (They'll get over this dumb phase... right?)
@@SimonBuchanNz just wait till the studio go all in on AI…
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
*death Straight face *
@@PrograError I had a whole long answer but I realized nobody cares about my AI opinions: everyone has one!
TLDR: it's already being used in both good ways and bad ways, and people seem to like the good ways and not the bad ways. *So far*, things are looking alright.
Generating a few shitty pictures is not using it good.
As a VFX artist since the 1990s, THANK YOU.
I live and work in Finland, where due to small country's budget constrains, the use of CGI (or VFX in general) in movies is generally much less prevalent than in the blockbuster world. That does not mean no CGI though.
Vast majority of VFX here are of the invisible variety - set extensions, clean-ups, fixes, etc. In these cases, there usually is just no discussion about CGI at all. Which is fine in a way, it means the work was done well enough. What that means though, is that we VFX artists are also sort of invisible, and there's little public knowledge about what if anything was done digitally in films and TV shows.
In the Finnish equivalent of Oscars, "Jussi awards", there still is no category for best effects - be that stunt work, SFX or VFX. Nada. It's a travesty really. There's now a petition to get us finally recognized, and as there is not much info in the public apart from the line in end credits, the petitioners had to call effects houses and freelancers to poll the extent of CGI work in Finnish films, and to ask us which films we had worked on, and what we did on them.
There are cases where the CGI is used in more flashy ways, yet it still gets little or no mention - just like Hollywood. I personally have made CGI trains, planes and tanks (no automobiles though, somewhat surprisingly), created buildings that explode or are in fire, digital doubles of boats, birds and crowds of people... and i do not think many people outside the production know.
In a few of these cases, there *have* been examples of the no CGI phenomenon even in my little corner of the world. As the first example i remember, in 2006 I worked on a war movie where the press mantra was that they used real tanks and airplanes. Which was true - there were two real tanks on the set, and one airplane which was only used on the ground... but all the rest of the tanks were either comped duplicates or full CGI. And every flying airplane was 100% computer generated. There were about 150 VFX shots I did for the film, plus perhaps roughly the same amount by another vendor. No, we did not make it into the press or BTS materials.
Now i need to get back to work, making CGI butterflies for a music video today.
The amount of CGI coming in Beetlejuice 2 will never be entirely disclosed, with artists working once again in the shadows.
Thanks a lot for this amazing series of videos, I look forward to see what you have in stock for the future of this great channel!
This video essay series is like hitting the jackpot in a desert of shallow movie talks. You know what's the best part? When I stumble upon those comment sections full of clueless folks blabbering about "practical filmmaking" (like, seriously, I genuinely have not gotten a single person to give me a cohesive definition of that the hell they even mean when the say that), I just drop them the link to this series. Saves me from banging my head against the wall trying to explain stuff to people who've never even set foot behind the scenes. So yeah, goodbye to those exhausting arguments with the clueless.
This series should be mandatory viewing for anyone who utters the term "CGI"
I cannot express how thankful I am for this series. You have saved me thousands of headaches. Your work is seriously a lifesaver.
Thank you! That use is, literally, the main hope for this series. Please keep it up.
Completely agree with everything you said.
@@TheMovieRabbitHole Great video, but sorry I have to disagree with the last point. I can always tell when it's CGi, even when it's "invisible" CGi like in Scorsese movies. Those cows looked fake, not to mention eye-soring CGI in Wolf Of Wall street, especially in prison scene and on the boat.
@@arsenymun2028what about the cowboy hat and the barbie dress???
@@DeletedDevilDeletedAngel Watched in theatre. It looked CGI, also blood looked fake on the dude's face.
I laughed having seen Gran Turismo and their "no CGI" having seen it and then going back and reading their claims afterwards
The best part of playing the Gran Turismo video games is that they're all real, absolutely no CGI!
@@JoeBlac which makes it funnier when they absolutely CGI'd GT7 half of the reference gameplay shoots for the movie. and it's extremely blatant the *moment* you see a robust car customization (not to be confused with livery editor) or the vast majority of menu navigation, *which does not exist in Gran Turismo 7* as of this writing.
Funny yeah but it's pretty shameful how they tried to mislead people.
I paid little attention to GT when it came out. Had no idea Niel Blomkamp, known CG FX wizard, directed the movie and tried to lie about it having no CG. What a fucking sellout.
I'm glad I saw the movie without being subjected to such a lie. The CGI was reasonably convincing when it needed to be, at least.
Thank you for this wonderful series, Jonas!
We all thank you for bringing this to the public's attention. 🙏🏻🙇🏻♀️
Hi Ami. I didn't expect to see you here. But thinking about it now... of course you would be! haha!
@@mochigirl8055 With no CGI, she wouldnt exist!
Waiting for the big reveal on Ami's channel "Jonas was all CGI and was secretly Ami!"
We're all CGI now 🤗
Wow, you're still around. I had forgotten you existed.
As a military aviation nerd it was so funny to keep seeing people talking about the no CGI thing in Top Gun: Maverick.
Yeah I‘m pretty sure the filmmakers didn’t go to Iran to get some of the last flightworthy F-14 Tomcats for some movie. And I‘m also pretty sure the Russians didn’t give them their most advanced fighter jet just so someone could brag about not using CGI lol.
Also my Dad is a pilot so even before that whole sequence he spotted that no plane could go that close to the ground without crashing. I wonder if the cinematographer was lying when he said “We never filmed an empty sky”
@@tylerjames805 which specific scene are you talking about?
Also there are a lot of really recognizable 3D assets, like the SAMs not only don't look particularly good they make absolutely no sense since it's just random BUK launchers without any of the support infrastructure needed placed in nonsensical locations.
Then there's also a lot of the maneuvers that often wouldn't be possible at the speeds they're supposedly happening at, and also usually make no sense. Like the fights do not feel slightly grounded whatsoever, they feel incredibly silly and it makes it kinda boring when they literally stole the entire mission from an Ace Combat game but then for some reason didn't steal that series dedication to over the top arcade nonsense.
@@kre4ture218I think it was during the big wide shot where Miles Teller’s character starts to go down during the training scene.
as a person who googles stuff. that's basically what you said
I believe one of the underlying goals of this "NO CGI" propaganda from the studios is to demoralize the CG Artists as a way to help crush any talk of unionizing. CGI VFX Artists have worked w/o union protections for years, making them the most easily exploited workforce in the entertainment industry. This exploitation has a negative effect on wages and benefits, but also manifests itself in Credits and Awards; the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has greatly truncated it list of awards for VFX, and often for smaller VFX houses the credit for a film or episode will be little more than a nod to the company in total. By constantly bad-mouthing the work of CGI Artists, it appears to rob the discipline of its value (despite the fact that there is almost no production that completes without using their talents), making the Artist less likely to make a stink when they are forced to work long hours for diminished wages under impossible deadlines for demanding and unreasonable clients.
Throwing my two cents in here, I imagine that lying about how "no CGI" was used in films could also be by design... when REALLY GOOD CGI is employed, and the normal Joe can't tell the difference between reality and illusion, it could possibly lead to the employment of CG artists to create propaganda and shop actual footage.
Some governments were brazen enough to attempt faking actual combat scenarios by recording footage in ARMA 3, for example. Imagine what these same governments could do if they had talented CG artists on their payroll to doctor ACTUAL FOOTAGE. They could gaslight the masses into thinking something didn't happen when it did, or stir up a national emergency out of a nothingburger.
The Return of the King
Same level of hype actually.
What about it? The BluRay Extras are up front about all the CGI in the movie. No one has claimed otherwise. 🤔
@@glennac truly. If anything, the entire LOTR trilogy was a demo for Weta Digital and Massive, the software that they developed to create the CGI armies in the films.
@@SpydeyDanright? I mean am I going crazy or did we all not flock to the cinemas to see all the awesome incredible stuff they did with LOTR and The Matrix? I still remember my jaw dropping when I saw that army.
What the fuck are you talking about Jesse @@glennac
I'm a VFX lead animator and I thank you for these videos. Great job.
hearing all practical effects in movie promos gives me same vibes as when companies talk about how they are carbon neutral lol.
oh... 😅
Akin to greenwashing, practicalwashing is a thing nowadays.
Same with actors "doing their own stunts" and "improvising lines"
Nailed it.
It's like going to see a stage magician and they pitch the show as, "No tricks, illusions, slight of hand, or prestidigitation! We use 100% *real* Wizardry to perform the feats you will witness on stage!"
"I can always tell when there's CGI".... I mean, Dante's Peak with the mountain back drop, and The Equalizer during the café scenes had me fooled, until I watched the Behind The Scenes footage and saw the VFX artistry involved. The best CGI/VFX are the subtle and well hidden ones where you wouldn't imagine there'd be any.
As the average viewer who would never know, your first video on this is when I suddenly realized why so often I had looked at "practical no CGI shots" and kept wondering "but how did they do it?"
Because so many shots advertised this way aren't physically possible. They have things like holes in people, hundreds of tendrils moving in a way that can't be done with hydraulics or wires or whatever.. and I just kept wondering "but how?" And it never occurred to me they were just lying. Every piece of evidence that it was a lie I filed away as "well they weren't talking about THAT shot".
I kinda forgot about that first video and UA-cam didn't recommend the others to me until just now, so I missed seeing them as they were published, but I'm glad to get to the end of it now and finally finish making that connection.
As a 20+ year experience vfx artist, thank you for helping people understand our work, and how important it is to the modern movies and tv series.
Its still a bit it sad that all this extremely hard work is not acknowledged by anyone, and despite the quality that is constantly improving, still gets negative comments from just about anyone involved with movies. But like many superheroes that we helped make come to life, we don’t mind keeping our identity kept “secret”. We can still get some satisfaction from people thinking its not CGI. This means its job well done. So you could also have named your series “NO CGI”. Is really just very good CGI.
You touch on a great point here that I think is often missed in these conversations. As a director, a bad VFX shot being in a final cut of a film is as much your responsibility as a bad costume, bad performance or poor lighting. People rag on VFX artists who are often overworked and underpaid without ever stopping to think why the person in charge of the production would make choices that lead to bad outcomes. Whether it's a lack of understanding of how VFX work is done, or just poor general direction, more blame has to be on directors (or producers in cases where a studio has more control than a director which frequently happens) for these decisions. Plenty of movies have thousands of VFX shots that look fantastic, and plenty have very few that look bad. If I were directing a movie in the 60's and decide to cut to a bad looking matte painting, that decision is on me. I think so much of the negative backlash against CG comes from directors who are overly reliant on it and think of it as a short cut to get wherever they want with no restraints.
That's part of it, certainly. Everyone goes on about how incredible the VFX is in the latest Avatar, but that's not because the people at (e.g. - they weren't the only house) Weta who created them are somehow that much more talented than those who work on other films. Because they do work on other, "lesser" films. And it's not purely because Cameron can direct VFX better. What makes the difference between an amazing Avatar 2 shot and the mediocre ones people complain about in recent Marvel films (for instance) is that they've been given the time and money to work on it until it's right.
Either you speak up to those tyrants or you don't complain at all. Hollywood have been rotten to the core since it's inception. If everyone speak up they can't silence it all. That's how the internet works
yeah, its almost always been the case that 90% of the shots with "bad cgi" didn't have "bad cgi" they had bad compositing, which is done in the edit. and honestly, alot of bad vfx in general, even pre-dvfx, are owed to that.
I was a CG artist and that's honestly my only complaint with VFX. I think the art style nowadays is to put so much stuff on the screen that it gets overwhelming but that's not the artist's decision. Like in Ready Player One when they threw in every WB franchise to remind the viewer that they owned a lot of IP. It's a dumb decision. Artistically it is interesting but as a film decision the constant reminders that the films are being crafted by giant corporations take me out way more than the VFX.
"Whether it's a lack of understanding of how VFX work is done, or just poor general direction, more blame has to be on directors (or producers in cases where a studio has more control than a director which frequently happens) for these decisions"
It's studios and their predatory fixed price VFX contracts too.
They set a fixed price and the VFX studio has to stick to it, even when the director changes their mind halfway through work on a shot and asks them to do it all again.
Because of that VFX studios literally keep going bankrupt because they have to pay their artists more than the contract was worth.
At this point I can only assume that the more successful, long running studios purposefully overcharge up front to avoid these problems.
The biggest embarrassment about directors lying about the use of CGI is the erasure of just how good the VFX teams have gotten. Plan your filming around VFX, pay the VFX teams a fair wage, give them recognition for their successes, and you get a good result that most audience don't even notice aren't practical. Skimp out on any of those, and you get The Flash.
I think you might still have some legs for future videos diving into subtle CGI work. I mean, I watch Corridor every weekend for a neat VFX breakdown, and CD when he remembers to exist, but I'm pretty sure there's room for more if you wanted to keep the channel going and build an audience even more.
That shot from Jurassic Park was the perfect way to end this series! Thank you for the great work, Jonas!
Was it a CGI pile of sh!t or a real one, though?
@@ErebosGR Back then, they still used authentic dinosaur feces that were collected over months.
I was 12 when the Phantom Menace came out. I didn't notice the "bad CGI" at the time. After I learned what "bad CGI" looks like, I felt like it was distracting. It never occurred to me that "practical" was better - just "I wish I hadn't noticed". Also, I have a huge respect for digital artists, who represent multitudes of highly creative and talented people who's work we might never have enjoyed were it not for modern digital tools. My hat is off to those people, and to you for shining light on their incredible contributions to cinema!
This channel feels like Cinefx magazine but on the web. I needs more. The world is missing such seriously great content.
You should definitely check this out. They also have a print issue. And it's not just CG, it's all the wonderful tricks of movie magic. beforesandafters.com/
I really miss Cinefex...
I came to the comments section just now to make a comment about the late, great Cinefex magazine. To me, it feels like this current 'no CGI' obsession began around the time that Cinefex stopped publishing. Also, around the same time that physical media started dying out...and for the few who are still buying blu-rays, their 'special features' went from huge behind-the-scenes documentaries to two minute press kits and a blooper reel.
@@seanmontgomery9066It's not current, they have been putting CGI in everything since long ago try documentaries try the news
This biggest thing I take from this is that the studio and fan efforts to claim that any given movie doesn't, and shouldn't, have CGI are deeply disrespectful to the CG artists.
This!
the problem is CGI is expensive, and studios want you to see the money they spent, like when 3d movies were a thing so EVERY effect was literally in your face constantly.
the amazing people who did district 9 forced themselves to not follow that by adding random set dressing digitally, like a cup in the blurry background for example.
i wish more studios would stop going "HEY LOOK AT THIS VFX SHOT!!!!"
If someone said that it shouldn't have CGI, their beef isn't with the CG artists, it's with the director.
@@vanillaicecream2385 That's not even remotely true, CGI is often the cheapest option these days and that's why it gets used, I mean in general VFX have always been used because they're cheaper than doing the real thing.
@@hedgehog3180 because its easier, its very hard to setup a real car crash for a movie, just do it in post digitally
its so cheap nowdays compared to what it used to be is because companies squeeze their artists for all they're worth, you work overtime after overtime for weeks with little pay
The tiger in Life of Pi is so well made, that people cannot see the difference between the scenes where a real tiger were used, and when they used a digital tiger.
i didn't even know there WAS a real tiger! I just assumed it was all cgi, it all looked the same, that's some damn good cgi
Too bad the company that did all the visual effects in that movie went bankrupt shortly afterwards.
@@nugget3687 It's one of the all time greatest achievements in visual effects. It's mind blowing how well made that tiger is.
@@Durwood71 yeah, and during the Oscar acceptance speech, Ang Lee basically thanked everybody that helped making the film, and then some. All except the people that made the visual effects. This is what caused that major outcry from visual artists in 2013. And still today we have this BS in the industry. I'm so fed up with it.
@@FabledGentleman Not just the tiger. Everything in _The Life of Pi_ was a visual triumph for the effects artists.
This series was a refreshingly honest take on VFX in general, and Hollywood's attitude in particular. Great work, thanks for enlightening us all!
"You're just pressing a button and the computer does the rest" Is the worst one IMHO.
As a fellow 3d modeling and rendering artist, I feel for you.
It's a strange bit of human factors. The best I can think of is, they struggle with computers themselves, not realising that among the vast panoply of commands, is one that solves their current problem. Then when the nearest nerd tells them, they imagine this expands to *all* problems, even ones that can't be done automatically.
@@Kythyria It sounds a lot like the oft-echoed "Dunning-Kruger effect" to me. This is a specialized knowledge area where most people default to knowing exactly zero things about the field, let's say image generation. Then they learn about a simplified thing, such as talking to a Discord bot to generate AI images. Which tells them that it's not really all that hard to get already impressive results. And so how hard can the rest of it be if they're already that competent at making images?
Anyone who has ever stumbled upon a computer / film / tech related channel is automatically being pushed over that confidence spike, realizing there's a vast amount of stuff they don't know. "Oh wow, I never thought of that. Wonder what else I've never thought of."
You gotto get on the VFX artist reacts-coach! Would love to see you and the corridor guys discuss this topic!
I think Wren has referenced this series before so they know who he is
@@jasonthesnow I think it was Jordan that referenced his video in the barbie behind the scenes video
@@jasonthesnow yeah, they mentioned it once in their react video
@@jasonthesnow It's a match made in VFX heaven
And it should be a CGI coach
Gonna need a 5/4 or another vfx series! These videos are fantastic!
You are a gem for making this, and I salute you -- one filmmaker to another.
James Cameron said something I adored in Side by Side (which was about a different issue: Film vs. Digital; but still applies)
"When was it EVER real?"
Cameron started as a concept artist and visual effects supervisor. He knows nooks and cranny of visual effects. Every interview, even going back to T2 he talked about how you can't make T2 without CGI. He has tremendous respect for the VFX artists and gives them time they need(Avatar 3 was shot in 2017, it won't even release until 2025!!!). And then you have Christopher Nolan.
"Top gun maverick having more vfx shots than Black panther" was epic 😆
But at least in the case of Black Panther they were very clear about it afterwards that the shots look so bad because the Effects Studios were completely overworked and had not enough time to finish the shots.
CGI is the one branch where nothing hurts the result more than time and money constraints.
Wait till you learn Mad Max: Fury Road had more CGI than the first Avengers movie.
He says the jets are CGI but all I can find is they did actually pay a lot of money to use real jets. So is this such a large scale lie or did they use a combination? I'm so confused.
@@VlerkeDamne They filmed it with real Jets and then replaced them with digital models.
@@Quotenwagnerianer Thank you 🙏 Real enough for me to be honest. Just cosmetic changes.
I came here via corridor crew. FANTASTIC SERIES!! Thank you so much for all the hard work that went into this, and the clear, concise story-telling that makes it easy to follow.
I'm a long-time movie fanatic (all sorts) and some of this I already knew - especially about matte paintings; big Ellenshaw fan - but the amount of detail you provide is on a whole 'nother level. Again, thank you, and I look forward to your next series. Editing might be a good next subject. In a film class once, we were shown a sequence which added a few black frames between each edit, which revealed just how many edits you really don't notice when the film is flowing past you.
You mentioned it in a previous video, but the biggest problem with the "no CGI" lie is that it's erasing the hard work of thousands of artists that deserve to be recognized for their work. And, more importantly, they deserve to get PAID for their work. But if the general population doesn't know how much VFX work goes into these films then it's a lot easier to underpay the people that make them so great.
I'm guessing that those people typically don't sit through the credits for very long, or they'd see the endless quadruple columns of digital artists from vendor after vendor on these movies with allegedly no CGI. Do they think all those people are there because they did the credits and titles?
@@Corn_Pone_Flicks Not just that but in the credits the companies and people who do the CGI are usually credited as Visual Effects which most people probably think is the one set effects and such and not CGI effects. Since Effects and VFX are the same thing but one is done on set and the other is done in post.
@@ErikWerlin Special effects or special mechanical fx means on set. Vfx has never meant onset. With the possible exception of glass and hanging mattes. And while special fx used to also be used as the catch-all, it hasn't been that way in the industry for decades. Same with the appellation SFX, which used to be used mainly by people not in the industry to mean special effects. But within it's a shortening of sound fx, vor many decades now. These things change and slide around a bit. And Jonas already went into how bad cgi as a catchall term is. because 3d animation, digital compositing colour grading and so on are not the same or all just "CGI". And he talked about how "CGI/Computer Generated Imagery" is a misnomer. On that note John Lasseter of Pixar said the computers no more create the imagery than a pencil creates pencil/2d animation.
@@halfvader8015 I'm well aware of all of that. I was a VFX comp artist for 10 years. If you read what I wrote again you'll see I was talking about the general public and how the average person don't know the difference. The AVERAGE person probable thinks VFX and on set FX are the same thing.
If the general audience realised how little work actors and even the general film crew put in vs VFX teams they wouldn't get paid nearly as well as they are.
Could you imagine if instead of plastering WILL SMITH or CHRIS PRATT on the posters they had FRAMESTORE instead?
This is why though actors/directors will occasionally praise the work of the VFX artists, they won't ever go overboard - and indeed it seems like these days they have moved to either gaslighting us about the VFX existing at all, or worse actually badmouthing them as with Taika Waititi and Tessa Thompson during the Thor 4 PR.
Now that this saga is complete I would love to see a video of you talking about some of the vfx achievements we got to see over the last couple of decades and talk some more about the directors that are actively proud of the vfx used in their movie.
David Fincher is an obvious candidate for that. He's always been open about the amount of effects he uses, probably because he started as an effects guy. He knows how important they are.
Man, so many of these "no CGI" claims in promotional materials are so blatant I'm amazed it's not false advertising! How does that get past consumer protection laws?
That said, I think when most people say they "hate CGI" what they actually mean is they hate when an effect is so noticeable that it takes them out if the experience. They aren't thinking of the invisible set extensions in Wolf of Wall Street, they're thinking of the scorpion king from The Mummy Returns (although I remember getting distracted quite often in all The Mummy movies honestly as they used the CG in ways that it wasn't really ready for at the time).
Sir, my most sincere congratulations. I've learned more about cinematography throughout these series than reading/watching anything else in my entire life. They should be compulsory for anyone interested in the art of crafting cinema
As a vfx artist, I hope that this four part series is just the beginning for the channel. Absolutely impeccable work and easily some of the best coverage of VFX I have seen. Also anyone interested in checking out more like this series with deep dives into vfx I highly recommend the vfx notes podcast that Hugo Guerra does.
I've always thought this was the end goal: Where "No CGI" meant "you can't see we used CGI." So this explains my confusion at people saying they loved such and such because it didn't have CGI, while that thing is horrible because it obviously does.
This is something I learned back with The Polar Express. We got a copy on DVD while we were still using a CRT purchased when Star Wars 2 came to VHS. So we genuinely had arguments with people over whether or not it was live action.
Imagine our collective embarassment when we watch it on a plasma screen and the MoCap CGI was all the more obvious. Even more hilarious when some of the siblings never got around to watching the behind the scenes to break down how the MoCap worked.
Just wanted to say you do a great job of using example shots of whatever you're talking about. Too many 'essay' type channels don't show an example of what they're talking about or just use generalized stock footage. It's been real nice to see.
I figured out much of what you were saying just by being on the ASD spectrum and by thinking about what my eyeballs are seeing throughout my teenage years, and even I have learned a lot from this series. Thank you so so much. It's really eye opening how producers can just lie to large amounts of people in an active effort to discredit the hard work of the very talented VFX artists who made most of what we see in most of the movies we watch. Imagine working for years to make a beautiful movie and your boss pretends that if you even 'existed, it would be a bad thing. VFX artists need to be brought to the forefront and get the credit they deserve. I've shown this series to quite a few people. It's very clear to me that most people dislike CGI because it's so good that they think most of the movie they are watching is what the camera saw (never mind the fact that that's not been the case for decades due to color grading, but whatever).
One of the best video essays i've seen. Entertaining, informative, well-researched, and providing tons of footage to back up what you say.
VFX Lighting Artist here! 10+ years in the industry, THANK YOU for these videos!
Season Finale of the most exciting TV show of 2024. LET'S GO!!!!
Part 4 was as good as part 1. So thank youfor this quality ! :D
It was a really good serie, can't wait to see other essay from you ! No yelling, no surface level of knowledge, just a good, insightfull video that is well made.
The CGI vs Practical useless converssation in theaters/online is so stupid. You showed really well how every good movies now HAS to have CGI & good compositing.
16:44
16:36 even the cows and THE HAT is CGI😂😂
I lost it when i saw that the HAT was CGI 🤣🤣
This series has been amazing. I am admittedly not a cinema "nerd", and have never understood the anti-CGI comments from Hollywood. There are scenes that even a child can comprehend are not real. Movie goers are buying the tickets regardless, why the need to lie to us? With the incredible amount of work that goes into making a movie, the work should be celebrated. It is still someone's art on the screen, regardless if they used technology, or matte painting, or whatever other tool was used. Liked and subscribed! Keep up the great work.
I feel like the use of CGI for my short Acéré was pretty invisible, but I was so proud just to get the chance to use it! It elevated what I was able to do practically, since I could paint out wound FX until the blood gag had to activate, and it absolutely improved the film. In my making of released same day as the short I went to great lengths to show how it was done. This series has been eye opening to just how much that is not the regular case, but I genuinely believe many industry figures will see this, as they apparently did with my work on how to shoot action, and it should lead to some embarrassment and therefore, change.
By now I'm just here to see the bits where you go "This is CGI, and this is CGI, and this is CGI and this..."
So many cool vfx shots, so little time
I haven't even worked on any of those movies (I wish I did) and I'm always very pissed with all the lies all those actors, producers and even directors say. Throwing under the bus a huge amount of amazing artists that worked their asses off for their vision. I can't imagine how much more pissed the artists that worked on those movies feel.
Imagine the studio going full AI on it... and say "no CGI"
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@PrograError that could be coming in the distant future. More realistic in the near future could be they change the "no CG" to "no AI" (a lot of both were used)
I think it was The Hudsucker Proxy that first convinced me that I had no clue when I was being fooled by CGI.
Interesting! I should have looked into that. I must admit I know little of what went into that film
I have a vague memory of a documentary or maybe a feature during a British film review program that went into a fair bit of detail.
There were obvious shots like the fall from the building and then a million others that I never would have guessed.
I wonder how they hold up now..!
Good one 🤗
Thank you. This series is so well done. I wrote my bachelor thesis on this topic and my test group couldn't tell the difference between CGI, miniature and practical shots. I would have loved to incorporate your work into my studies, but it came 3 months too late. Thank you for these fantastic 4 parts of entertaining education and information.
Maybe the best series to debut a channel on YT.
I hope you'll continue making videos even though this series is over. Great stuff!
he gave us all hope at the end of the video
I can't even describe just how impeccable this series was. Great work!
Bravo! This 4-part series is just awesome!
Looking forward to what you will bring next to this channel.
Thoroughly entertaining series, well done!
For me the eye opener about this whole practical > CGI, no CGI, CGI bad, stuff was watching behind the scenes footage from the Wolf of Wallstreet years back, and realising just how much of the sets and backrounds and all that were entirely computer generated, which I could have never guessed.
It was that moment that I realised that it's not about what you use to make your movie, but about how you use it. People came to hate CGI because big CGI spectacles came to replace good story telling, believable characters and immersive environments, camera angles/movements as well as authentic settings. But that wasn't the fault of the tool, rather than of those deciding how to use it.
I absolutely adore this four-part series you've put together, and I cannot thank you enough for the hard work, research, and commitment you've clearly poured into doing this topic real justice.
Thanks, Mister Rabbit Hole.
And thanks to Blender Guru and CG Garage for promoting this channel 😊
FUN FACT: "The Phantom Menace" had more practical models built for it than the entire OT.
"The Force Awakens" on the other hand actually had more VFX shots than "The Phantom Menace".
The prequel films are some of the biggest model shows in Hollywood history.
That Star Wars 365 days by John Knoll (yes that John Knoll) is a fantastic book not many seem to know about and extensively documents the miniature builds!
TBH I think the Prequels are the last few films when the old age is merged with the new age CGI… IIRC some of the ILM staff calls the converts “going to the dark side”
@@halfvader8015 Everybody thinks Lucas demanded CGI, but the truth is, he told his effects team the end result he wanted, and they decided on the best way to achieve it, which most of the time included a mixture of models, sets, matte paintings, and CGI.
@@Durwood71 Preaching to the converted dude. Hence my mentioning the SW 365 book. Although he did ask for some super weirdo stuff the supes scratched their heads about!!
Thanks for setting the record straight! The hundreds of digital artists in the end credits of, well, most productions, should be recognized for their work. Not quite on this topic, but last week I saw a US TV network news story on the discovery of the original 3-foot 1960s USS Enterprise model. It got SO many facts wrong, it was cringey for a Trek nerd like me. I'm reminded again how inaccurate entertainment / feature news coverage can be. So thanks for tweaking the noses of bad and/or lazy entertainment 'journalism.'
Hi there, I'm a former student at Exceptional Minds. I don't work in VFX (I received my certificate in Animation and Motion Graphics) but I am glad that you have debunked so many of the misconceptions about CG and its place in the entertainment industry.
There aren't a lot of UA-cam essayists and content creators that I think are great these days (or even well-informed) but you have clearly done your research and your videos are wonderfully informative. Hopefully these videos can reach more people in the future so we can inform others about how the VFX/3D industry works!
10+ year vfx veteran here. Thank you so much for this extensive series! It means so much that I have somewhere to point people who make those nonsense claims, and to point people who simply want to understand what I do.
THE KING IS BACK!
This channel started out on a banger.
Great! I was wondering when the fourth part would drop. Brilliant!
Such an awesome series! Thank you for this work, Jonas! :D
I came in already agreeing with your central premise,
and you have still blown my brain
and altered how I think about film (and many film makers).
Terrific stuff.
Big shout to you for this incredible series.
We’re all fighting the same battle and we need to support each other and the industry!!!
I tried the “take a shot every time he says CGI” drinking game. I died. This is my CGI double typing the comment
TELL ME ABOUT IT
ua-cam.com/video/uGPHy3yWE08/v-deo.html
Thank you for this beautiful series, I’m excited to see what’s coming next!
You knocked it out of the park 4 out of 4 times Jonas!
I really like your circular feedback loop explanation. Great way to visually represent the issue in a way anyone can understand, whether they work in the film industry or not.
Thank you!
This was a really cool series. I know a little bit about some of the processes here but this really blew my mind especially the historical use of sfx.
Looking forward to seeing more from the channel.
That was an eye opening phenomenal series. I hope you come up with more videos. I predict the next buzzphrase: "no AI"
Already a thing. Cameron started using AI for his recent remasters to save a buck and ruined the Aliens remaster. People are already wanting "no AI" in future remasters and to stick with the tried and true methods of remastering films directly from the original film stock. You can't just give a cheap DVD to AI and have it clean up the image by inventing data that isn't there, no matter how much cheaper that would be for the studio.
@@berserkasaurusrex4233 yeah that's truely some bs AI use
I'm a french editor and I thank you for your job and explanations on this subject !
People just don't realize that in the end what counts is the resulting composition. A good film does not depend solely on "no CGI" or "good CGI". Heck, there are even great films that don't "look good" at all. These usually come packed with awesome artistry in other fields. So just embrace CG/VFX as one pillar (albeit a massive one, that is often hidden) of a good film, not the end (or the start) of it.
thank you for this awesome series! as a film student, this really opened my eyes to the bias i had begun to hold against CGI because of the marketing done by studios in recent years. as i watch older films, i’ve really enjoyed trying to think about how matte paintings may have been used in some of my favourite shots. thanks for highlighting the under appreciated and often hidden work of these visual effects artists!
Thank you for the series. I thoroughly enjoyed them and, as an animator, I'm left feeling a little more self-worth for having watched your content.
This really opened my eyes to how bad CGI artist get it nowadays, they're already thrown under the bus for shows with bad effects when studios can't give them anything to work with, but when they actually do make something incredible the credit is taken away from them. The Demonization of Computer effects isn't gonna make movie look better, it's just gonna make studios have a stronger grasp on over controlling their artists.
I find it quite sad honestly. Because seeing the behind the scenes of my favourite movies when I was a kid was what got me into acting, movies and art. Seeing how both prcactical and CGI worked was basically just as good as the movie to me. And now to see studios lying in thare own behind the scenes really just makes me sad.
People need to learn that both CGI and practical are good for movies. Both have thair place and work amazing together
I've been waiting for this video for weeks
Try months!
Honestly, I've been waiting for part 4 for so long. One of the best series I've ever watched on UA-cam. Great videos, dry delivery, and so many real world examples it's insane anyone can get away with the rigmarole of pretending they haven't used digital VFX.
Another brilliant one! Sad that this series is already over, but looking forward to what you create next! 😊
I gotta say thank you to Corridor Crew for pointing us toward your channel. Great work and I can't wait for more from you.
Us? I found it randomly by searching for no cgi shots to show people that they were cgi
Anyone claiming it's CGI that makes a movie bad needs to be removed from the gene pool.
The problem with an overwhelming number of movies today is that they ONLY care about impact, not about how good the movie is.
If impact to them (and the audience) means big explosions, practical or not, then that's the movie you are going to get.
If it means having superstar actors speaking sassy lines, that is what you are going to get.
And so on, it doesn't make a good movie. It just means the movie makers are catering to the lowest goals possible. Practical or CGI does NOT apply.
That being said, of course BAD CGI can take you completely out of a movie. But only if the movie isn't exceptionally good to begin with. If all it takes is a poorly animated CGI character to take you out of the movie experience then the MOVIE as a WHOLE is BAD.
If instead of focusing their efforts on "no CGI is used now suck my toes" they should focus on "the movie is so good that you won't even care if it's CGI".
As someone who does a lot of thankless computer work, I really appreciate this series! I absolutely cannot wait to see what you come up with in the future. These VFX/CG guys need the credit. It's an awe inspiring amount of work to make today's media what it is, and, dammit, these guys need some time in the spotlight!
I caught that little bit of Birdemic. I most definitely watched that for the VFX! 🤣
I live all visual effects lol. I dont understand hating vfx or practical. That movie "FX" was my jam 😂! I also watched the Terminator 2, behind the scenes, and Tom Saveigney "Scream Greats". It's all so cool!!
Audiences are just tired of rushed work, bad planning and low budgets. But the studios found something to push their blame away: CGI. Cool. That's their scapegoat now.
But it's fair to say VFX used to be more reality-based. Camera projections, live-texture captures for 3D humans, science-based shaders and matte paintings used to rule the VFX industry in the late 90's - early 2000's. Today there's too much trust that anything CGI can have a pass just because they through a bunch of detail at it.
Scheduled premiere? He's all grown up four videos in...
Happens when you get one million views with your first video 😂
I can't wait to show that old coworker of mine who said "it spoils the movie when it's all made by computers"
I always hate that particular phrasing...it's as if they think someone picks up a microphone and says "Hello, computer. Could you give me a big fight scene with spaceships and such? I'm going to go take a walk." If it's a miniature, someone had to make it, and if it's a CG model, someone had to make that, too.
It's been said a million times, but this series really is the absolute best take on this issue ever put to screen. Looking forward to more amazing videos from you in the future!
Thank you for making this fantastic series. It changed the way how I watch movies and series and even made me wonder if I want to work in the industry as vfx artist.
Celebrate artists regardless of the medium.
The idea that directors or producers think some artists are more valuable than others is no great surprise. Screw those people. Call them out whenever possible.
This is the most wonderful series and I would really love to see more.