 Welcome to the Adam Does Movies podcast. I'm your host Adam Olinger and today's topic CGI. Computer generated imagery. We see it often. We see it a lot. We hear about it even more. The word CGI has taken an ugly turn over the years. What used to be an exciting prospect has become this awful, quick, easy way to turn a buck, which is of course not the case. The animators behind the CGI that you see in popular movies, big franchises like Marvel and DCU, they're putting pain, staking hours and time and energy into these renders, into these models. The problem is they don't have enough time. They don't have enough budget, but they have deadlines they have to hit and those deadlines are getting pushed up further and further. The crunch is real for these individuals and it sucks. It really sucks because it's coming through in the final product. I've been watching a lot of older films lately and by older I mean like early 2000s, even 2012, 2014 that's older now which is a sad thing to say. And you look at movies like Pirates of the Caribbean or even the Michael Bay Transformers. The CG used in those films is absolutely beautiful. Now the design of the character is that's another story when it comes to transformers but the way they utilize the effects, it's top notch. And we're going to get into that more in a little bit and the reason for it and why it suffered so much lately which I already kind of touched upon but we'll dig in a little deeper. What really sparked this is not so much the fact that CGI is being used as a buzz term to hit everything from deep fake technology to actual uses of CGI which is anything from creating fake versions of an Iron Man who's flying around taking out drones to fully rendered feature length films from Dreamworks or Pixar or whatever. That's all CGI. It's all animators behind a computer making these 3D worlds come to life. 3D objects using different lighting, different filters. I don't claim to be an expert on it. I just know the bare bones. I myself have never actually gone into one of these programs and messed around although there are plenty available for regular common folk to get their hands dirty and people have made incredible things in the department of CGI, in the department of 3D animation which is what I'm referring to when I say CGI. The word has kind of lost all meaning. It spans beyond just what normal people would say when they think of it. It kind of touches everything even if it isn't actually the proper use of the word. But what I know, the first time, let me go back to the first time I really recall seeing a fully rendered CG item, an object on the screen and if we're not counting Aliens 3 which I don't think we do. I don't think that was fully created on a computer from scratch. I think that there was some modeling done for the terrible Xenomorph crawling on the ceiling. Something didn't look right with that at all. But the first time I really recall it being used is in a movie called Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was one of his kind of B movies that he would come out with, not up to the standards of Conan the Barbarian or a Terminator or a Total Recall. This is the B list. This is the collateral of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anyway, there's a scene towards the end where he's having a shoot up in an aquarium. By the way, this is a pretty solid movie or in a zoo I guess he's at. And they take out a tank that's housing some crocodiles, possibly alligators. My brain's a little foggy on that. These things look atrocious. I remember seeing that as a kid and going, what the, those look terrible. And I can only imagine how awful they hold up today. Our brain, man, our eyes and our brains are crazy when it comes to visual communication. For 2D stuff, you look at something like Mario on the Nintendo, that 8-bit graphic, you look at that today. It looks pretty much the same. But if you look at video games or even movies, such as Toy Story 1, at the time they were groundbreaking, state-of-the-art, amazing visuals that you thought, man, they are never going to top this. It can't get much better than what I'm playing right now on a PlayStation 2. Good luck getting better graphics. And now you jump to a PS5. And now you jump to a modern Pixar movie. And it's just jaw-dropping, how different they look, how far they've come. But the eyes, they deceive, don't they? There was a time when Toy Story 1 and 2 specifically looked just incredible. And now they're very dated. Sometimes hard to watch because they don't look very good compared to Toy Story 3 or 4. And even those are paling in comparison to what's coming out now. And that's a problem with CGI. When you have matte paintings on a background, they look how they look. There's no real eye trickery going on. But for some reason, I don't know, I'm sure scientists and smarter people than myself can tell me exactly why. Something convincing today won't be convincing five years down the road when it comes to these visuals. I just, I can't put my finger on it. It's a remarkable thing. What's less remarkable is how bad modern CGI is being put into practice. We look at early Marvel movies, for instance. Iron Man 1, groundbreaking stuff. Movie itself is solid, for sure. I'd say the third act is pretty weak with the reveal of the giant Iron Man bad guy. Not great. But man, leading up to that, very compelling stuff. We got a solid narrative here. And I think what really drives it and what really sells it is that awesome design they have on the Iron Man suit and how they utilized both practical effects with the suit and some CG mixed in. And that's really the best. It's best to have a blend of both worlds, right? Get us a physical look at the object. Get us a physical suit that we can attach to with our eyes and our brain and then start tricking us later. Convince me that I'm still looking at the same thing. Plus it's easier for the animators when they have something that's basically one to one. Something they can take, put into the computer and just map all those effects to all those colors, all those imperfections, the light source. All that will help convince you that what you're seeing is in fact something worth believing. Modern movies aren't doing that anymore. Because of the crunch I mentioned. I did a quick Google search and found an article which means it's true because it's on the internet. This is from the fandom warrior. I'm just going to read this verbatim. Marvel Studios has produced several blockbuster movies over the past decade and are continuing to make first class superhero movies. By the way, this is an article by Rajeeb Majundar. I probably said that. I butchered that name. I apologize. We're going to keep going. Behind the scene, behind all this fame, fan following, and money are the visual artists who work day and night to make such extraordinary visual effects. And you know what? He might be using Chad GTP for all I know. So maybe the credit goes to Chad GTP. While Marvel is known for their superhero movies and extraordinary plot designs, did he say extraordinary twice? Okay. All right. Credits completely shot at this point. Listen, you can't go from one sentence where you say make such extraordinary visual effects to the next sentence while Marvel is known for their superhero movies and extraordinary plot designs, plot designs. Why did I bring up this article? This is completely off the rails. Let me just scroll down because this is garbage and find out. Okay, here we go. The VFX artists, visual, whatever, visual artists, visual effects artists are in the industry being paid 20% less than the normal industry standard. There were also talks that the artists were overworked and understaffed to complete their tasks within the given time. Well, this is not the first time Marvel Studios has come under speculation for their treatment of their artists. Back in July of 2022, a VFX artist who has worked on two MCU movies previously said that he suffered under the company's pressure. He tweeted, working on Marvel shows is what pushed me to leave the VFX industry. They're a horrible client. And I've seen way too many colleagues break down after being overworked while Marvel tightens the purse strings. In a recent report made by an unknown artist at Vulture while working for Marvel Studios revealed that they were forced to work four times than they were compensated for. The artist further added the minute I deliver movie is redacted. I'm never coming back. So due to these multiple allegations, Marvel Studios are now creating its own VFX studio house. Oh, that's nice. So now they can work their own people to the bone. But Marvel has officially not confirmed this decision or they denied anything about this. Now phase five is recently starting and the VFX house will play the biggest role in these movies becoming top grossing record breaking movies. Oh my God, this has to be a written by chat GTP. They said movies within six words. Now phase five is recently starting and the VFX houses will play the biggest role in these movies becoming top grossing record breaking movies. Come on. We're going to go to one more quote. I'm going to walk away from this trash article. The worst was when event this is a quote. The worst was when Avengers Infinity War and Endgame were coming out. They actually bumped up that release by a month, but they hadn't told us. I remember being on the floor with my team and one of my artists comes to me and says, Hey, you see this. And he shows me the article saying Marvel bumped the release date up a month. The studio claimed that they forgot to mention to their VFX team that they had moved up the release date by a whole month. Since the next movies will heavily rely on the artists, they will need to treat their artists right. They are not a team of four or five, but rather dozens of them work on the same project. The writing's just, I gotta, I gotta walk away. The writing's terrible. Wow. Okay. Quality is out the window. And that, you know what? That's a perfect example actually of what I'm talking about when it comes to the VFX department. It's not just the VFX teams that are feeling the crunch. It's across the entire board when it comes to the movie industry. This fandom wire article, for instance, probably wanted to get this thing out right away before the competition got it out, before they had something to say, Hey, what's trending this week? Oh, people are mad at Disney because they're underpaying their artists. Let's get something out yesterday. So they quickly throw this thing into a program. It spits out a bunch of googly gook. They clean it up a little bit and they throw it out on the site because they have a deadline. They got dozens of these things to get out every single day, to get into the algorithm, to get into Google, to get higher in the ranking, higher in the search engine. And it's sad. I even feel it myself from time to time, although I've paired back because on YouTube you're rewarded for quantity, not quality. Of course, there is a balance. You need to find it and it needs to be healthy on your end because you can burn out fast, trying to compete with others, trying to get your face out there in a world that's oceans filled with content. TikTok's a complete shit show. You want to get known on TikTok? You got to put out like three videos daily and you got to hop on trends. I don't do any of that. I am on TikTok. You can follow me there if you want. Basically it's the same YouTube shorts that I have here, which is another thing. YouTube shorts are huge. Okay, I'm spinning out. Let me focus. The point is Marvel and Disney are in the business of making money and they are not treating the VFX teams with respect. And they're not that many. There's Weta. There's a couple other big ones out there in that space, the VFX team space. But if Marvel is taking a lot of their time working on a Black Panther sequel, that's time that they can't spend working on some smaller movies or another company like Universal or Paramount or whatnot. And so it's felt across the board and we're seeing it. So the other thing that I find interesting about this is it's not new when it comes to the video game space. Video games have been having a major problem when it comes to this as well, putting the teams under massive pressure, taxing them to the brink of depression and to the brink of quitting. They're undercompensated, overworked and very much underappreciated. So when it comes to video games, yeah, this is not a new thing. This is common practice. This is the trend. And now that movies are essentially blending into video games more, there's this parody that's happening because movies are becoming more cartoonish. They're more over the top. They're more bombastic. They certainly cost way more money, which I'm going to talk about next week on the podcast. So please subscribe if you're on YouTube or follow or pin or push or pop or poll or jerk or squeeze or whatever you have to do on Spotify and Apple Music or wherever you're listening to this. I'd love to have more people listen. See, I said listen twice there within the course of a sentence or two. That's just bad practice. And I'm not editing this. So that's how it is. Look at Fast 10 that just came out. You could convince someone that this is a PS5 game, that this is a new Xbox release and not even a movie. The thing costs $300 plus million to make, stupidly expensive, and it's mostly a cartoon with iffy effects that definitely could use more polish. And yeah, there's going to be crunch there to get all of those shots done of cars exploding, of Hoover dams breaking, of Vin Diesel having some sort of charisma anymore. This stuff all takes time and energy and a team of people to work on. I also read that what used to be smaller groups of say three people to work on one visual effects shot are now being minimized down to one. So one dude or one woman is doing the job that used to be three. And it's showing up all over. Let's look at recent examples. Indiana Jones 5, The Dial of Destiny. There's a fact, there's effects all over that film. The problem I have with that is that it doesn't really feel like an Indiana Jones movie at that point. Of course, the older movies had effects, especially Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but a lot of people disown that one as well. I tolerate Crystal Skull, but I don't really see it as a companion to Indiana Jones 1 through 3. It's more of an ugly stepchild that I'll put on from time to time, but I don't need to 1 through 3 is all I need. Those originals were known for their set pieces, for the cinematography, for the over the top action, and for the great stunt work stunts were king in that film. Practical effects were king in that film. There's mad paintings, there's of course a little bit of CG, but for the most part, they're practically done. So when you jump to 5, and a lot of it feels fake and shot in front of a green screen, or digital effects are added in because Harrison Ford is freaking 80 years old, he's not gonna be jumping around like he's 30 still. Yeah, you gotta put a lot more work into it. And it doesn't hit the same when you do that. There's a charm to believing what you're seeing. That's half the battle with film, right? To convince the audience what they're looking at is real. That's gone away in the last 5 to 8 years. Studios decided, eh, people know it's fake anyways, so why try to convince them? Why try to pretend the otherwise? That's what separates a brilliant film from just an okay movie ride, which is what a lot of these are. These newer blockbusters are nothing more than popcorn fare where you get on the ride, you go on the roller coaster for a couple hours, you get off, and you really don't care afterwards. You look at something like Mad Max Fury Road, which is chock full of CGI. The movie's insanely full of it, blended seamlessly with practical effects, and that's the difference. That's the payoff. Because I was genuinely convinced this team of psychopaths was actually driving through a desert with these giant mountain ranges around them with a freaking sandstorm blowing around. None of it was real. The sandstorm, yes, of course. But the mountains? They painted the mountains? Come on. It's boggers. You look at the behind the scenes on that, it's incredible what they were able to do, how they were able to convince us what we were looking at was real. You pair that with something like Thor, Love and Thunder, or Ant-Man in the Wasp, Quantum Shittia, and you see the difference. It's night and day. Now, of course, people will say, well, Adam, they're going to a quantum, you know, a quantum realm. Thor is off in the different space, different galaxies, fighting on different planets. You can't make that look real. Well, tell that to Dune. Tell that to the OG Star Wars films. And yes, I know the OG Star Wars movies are very dated. The effects work is very shoddy, but the planets themselves are practical. They're shot in different parts of Earth, which is our planet that we're on, of Earth. You can make a quantum realm using set pieces. These, this is the thing that I feel like studios forgot exist anymore. You can actually build set pieces. Look at Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Those actors weren't in front of green screens, and then plants and giant CG snakes and shit were put in the background. No, no, no, no, they built out sets. They built out giant mushrooms and little leaf slides and whatnot. And it feels so much more, I don't even want to say believable. It just feels more inviting. It feels more real, more raw. And even though the flash bangery of Ant-Man and the Wasp might seem okay from a distance, you're watching, you're like, wow, a lot's going on. You become desensitized so fast. There's no wonder to any of it anymore. There's no, oh, wow. Now they're jumping over here and oh, wow, look it. Now they're running in place again. And another flying things going at them and another explosion. And wow, look at how much they're running in place. It's so lame. There's such a lack of creativity on display, even if those animators are doing their damnness in the background, which they are, to try to make it fun and different. It all feels the same. It's too bad. Another example I often point out is Jurassic Park. The original from the 90s, 94, 96, something like that. One of my favorite movies of all time. Of course, it hasn't aged perfectly, but it's doing a damn good job still. And it's because of the animatronics on the dinosaurs. It's because of that, again, marrying of the two different effects, the practical and the special effect. You have the physical dinosaurs actually there that people are interacting with, such as a triceratops that stomach is moving up and down to a giant t-rex that at one moment is a massive built piece of property that's coming down and smashing through a car to the next shot being fully rendered. Fully 3D CGI, coming at the camera, knocking over trees. They keep it in the shadows. They keep it hidden. They mask the fact that this is very new special effects work. Terminator 2, the T-1000, the liquid metal, one of the very early uses of that technology again. James Cameron wisely knows how to use this by using a property, by using an element that's already very reflective and very surreal looking, not something we see in our day-to-day. It's easier to convince us that this is something that the person's really interacting with. Jurassic World, by contrast, gets rid of almost all animatronic versions of the dinosaurs, goes all in on CG. It's apparent. I still like Jurassic World, but I'm not believing anymore that there's any real threat from these creatures because I don't feel their presence. It looks like Owen is hiding from nothing. I picture a guy in a green suit, like going rah rah, kind of jumping in the background. He's got the little balls all over his suit so that the computer can pick up his tracking, his movements. It's not the same. It's not the same. Transformers I brought up briefly earlier, the way that they interact on the highway, for instance, in those chase scenes, they're smashing through cars, bays blowing crap up left and right, and you really can't tell sometimes what vehicles were put in there with 3D rendering or were actually there being blown up. He does a damn good job with these. And then you look at the recent Transformers, they lost like 20% of their, I don't even know what, something's missing. They look more fake. They look less believable. Maybe it's because there's more of it going on, but I think it's because of the time. I think it's because of the lack of focus on really making these things believable. The lack of care, really. Like, hey, we have a year to shit this thing out. Let's get it done. We already have an idea of how to model these Transformers. Let's just push some buttons, get this thing out the door, call it a day. We're going to make a new trilogy. We don't have time to focus on the nuance, on how light is reflecting off of things and reflecting off of different arm pieces or how water is playing onto the sides of the character's body out of the chassis. We don't need to worry about how the thing actually looks as it's transforming. Let's just be done with it. It's a shame. And of course, modern MCU I brought up, Night and Day, that Iron Man 1, even the Avengers movies look pretty damn good. And then you have shots in Endgame that are just, they feel rushed, they feel cheap. And again, that doesn't mean these movies are bad. I'm just pointing out that they could be better. And yeah, you could say every movie can be better, but it can be better based on what they did six years ago is what I'm saying. They already had it figured out and now they're cutting corners at the expense of the audience. I noted a couple more great examples of CG. I mentioned Mad Max, I mentioned Pirates of the Caribbean, those Pirates movies, man. Davey Jones, that squid creature, seriously one of the best 3D modeled characters I've ever seen in a feature length film. The dude is phenomenal. Planet of the Apes, the new Planet of the Apes trilogy. It's not new anymore, but Rise of the Planet of the Apes, War, Dawn, the weird ass titling they did was just terrible. But those damn apes looked gold. They looked really good. And of course, it's the eye thing again. I feel like in five years from now, looking back on it, they're probably going to look a lot worse. But at the time they released, and at least still today, they hold up very well. It's because time was taken. You can see it in the behind the scenes, all the work that went into it, all the motion capture from Andy Serkis and the different actors that were doing this really put in the work. And they gave them the time they needed to breathe. They gave the animators proper time. Cloverfield, the shaky cam film, Blair Witch-esque, going through the city, stuff's breaking. You have that giant Statue of Liberty head smashing into the city. Love that. Another earlier use of CG blended in really well with the real world environment. And then District 9. This one, I haven't brought this movie up in a long time, but District 9 truly a gem of a film. If you haven't seen it, highly recommend this alien story. It takes place in Africa, very impoverished area, and aliens, the Thrawn, I think they're called something like that, are being treated like the lowest common denominator. It's a heartbreaking, tough film to watch for sure. And that's mainly because of the work the animators did on this with those 3D models of the aliens. So much beauty in that. You really have to tip the hat at the job they did on these models and making the eyes really come through, really bring that performance out of the model of the character. And then there's Christopher Nolan, everybody's favorite, the director that really leans heavy on practical effects whenever possible. But of course you shots and inception where buildings are rolling over themselves. And even an interstellar when there's space and time, you know, kind of blending together. And then there's a, there's 3D space that has to be somehow visually mapped out so the audience can understand what's going on within a black hole. These things all are done with painstaking care. And they feel like they're part of the movie. They don't take you out of the moment. Christopher Nolan, he gets it. He really does. And there's other directors, of course, they do this as well. David Fincher is another one that comes to mind. I always get amazed when I see some of the behind the scenes stuff and find out what actually was done with CGI, such as some of the shots where he'll take a camera through some railings and you find out that, oh my god, those two railings were real, but the ones in the middle where the camera went between, those were faked. Those were faked out with 3D railings that they just plopped in place after they took the camera through it. Genius. That's the shit that I really, really respect. And that's just, you know, it's really all I wanted to talk about today was just kind of how far computer, how far CGI has come over the years. And then how it's kind of fallen in recent, because money is, of course, king. And studios are realizing they can cut corners and they don't have to make works of art anymore. They can make just small little adjustments, shave some of that budget, shave some of those workers off and get the movie out the door. And yet they still managed to spend $300 million on some of these things. It's absolutely mind boggling what's going on right now. And again, I'm going to focus on that next week. Oh, one other one I wanted to point out, which is kind of interesting. This is an example of, I wouldn't say doing it wrong, but I just kind of scratched my head. And that's the Mission Impossible movies recently. You always, there's always a big set piece, right, or two or three. And Tom Cruise is always doing his stunts. That's the big takeaway from these. In Fallout, he's jumping from, you know, like outside of the Earth's atmosphere. And I think he did it a dozen or a hundred times. I think it was over a hundred times he had to do this freefall from space. And it was such an impressive moment, because they could only get a couple seconds of shots, a couple seconds of footage each time he made this jump. And then they had to piece it together. But it's kind of undercut by the fact that everything around him was then CGI. It was replaced. It was, they added in a digital storm. They added in the entirety of Paris. Because when he was doing the jump, he was over a, you know, an empty field where they could get a permit. So if Tom Cruise is the only real thing in the scene, it again kind of loses that suspension of, you know, disbelief. It kind of removes me believing that he's there. I mean, hell, he was actually doing the jump. But then they faked everything else. I almost feel like at that point, throw him in front of a green screen and have him pretend to jump and then film the Paris shots. I think it's kind of done in reverse. And the same thing with this new movie, there's a shot where he goes over a mountain with a motorcycle. He did this jump, I think I read six or seven times. Looks really cool. In the practice footage, though, it's a ramp that they constructed over the side of this mountain that he jumps off of this tape. There's all sorts of different indicators for him to hit that line, hit that mark. And then the animators have to come in and remove the background and replace the mountain. And it does look kind of fake when you look at the trailer. The mountain does not look very real, very convincing. And so again, it's just, yeah, he did his own stunt, but he did it on top of a, you know, a closed environment where they kind of could set the stage for him to perfectly execute this. So you'll lose the believability again. I still think it's awesome. He does his own stunts. Of course, it's really cool. The final product. However, it's almost like an ego thing at this point because it's not convincing me at the end of the day. Still cool, but not quite, not quite where it should be. Anyway, yeah, a little, little mission impossible rant aside, that comes out as a recording tomorrow. So I'm very excited to go to this movie. I will be reviewing it on my channel, of course. If you like what I'm doing with the podcast and with my channel, Adam does movies, I have a Patreon, patreon.com slash Adam does movies. There's a $1 tier even if you're just like, Hey, Adam, here's a dollar or, you know, 75 cents because patron will take some of it. Or here's five bucks or $30. If you hit me up at 30 bucks a month, and you do that for a year, you get up to four movie requests as well. So you say, Adam, here's 30 bucks. I'd like you to watch this movie from 1972. That's four hours long. And I will say, Hey, maybe pick something else because that doesn't help my channel. And you say, no, I will do that movie. I will give you a shout out. I will tip my hat and I will curse you out inside my head. But yeah, I still appreciate the support regardless. There's also an unobtainium tier at $100 a month. I have a couple people on that one, freaking awesome individuals. They get the four movie requests a year. Plus they get an additional 12 requests a year. So they get 16 total if I did that math right. And that's a little extra special. And you can look at what that entails and sign up if you want. These same perks are available on YouTube via the join button. But yeah, any support you can give is always appreciated. And there you have it. What are your thoughts on VFX nowadays? CGI, the dreaded CGI word that we don't like to use. But it used to be such a fun thing to say. Now you almost feel depressed saying it. Let me know in the comments. Please like, please subscribe, all that crap depending on what platform you're on. And hopefully I'll catch you next time. Take care.