Quote:
Originally Posted by Splice
If the audiences can't tell the difference between CGI and a practical effect then it's probably not fair to say that CGI sucks. Rather, people aren't impressed by a movie's special effects anymore because they're no longer limited to big-budget productions. As much as i like practical effects, they have certain limitations that are very hard to overcome. For example if you want to map a human's facial performance to one with different anatomy like say, a lion's, a computer model is going to do a better job capturing subtle nuances compared to a group of puppeteers.
American werewolf in Paris came out in like, 1997. The best graphics workstation you could get at the time was something like the SGI Onyx. |
I really think that there is a small misconception here. When most of us complain about the CGI, it is not because of what can be done with them, but how they are used, mainly because the producers could be good with money issues, but real assholes in terms of creativity, what works and what does not (yes, with the exception of your you-know-who midas-touch bunch ones), and they finally decide to apply CGI in ways that tend to ruin the experience, or simply being stingy.
For me, the paradigmatic example is Bitten. They could have done the best female werewolf transformation ever, and the effects they used (especially in episodes 1 and 5 from the first season) were incredible, to the point that they were almost perfect... but the combination of the scarce resources used by Mr. Sugar, the nudity dodgy Ms. Vandervoort and the children-friendly script by Ms. Fryklind ended up ruining the show in terms of werewolf TFs (the show itself is enterteining, though).
Said all this, the ultimate argument for this is the fact that the TF from AAWIL has not been surpassed... even by Rick Baker himself, mainly because of the constant intromissions from the producers in The Wolfman or in Cursed. Did you see the figures that Mr Baker was supposed to use for Cursed, and what was done afterwards? Simply regrettable.