When Is CGI too much?

Well, last Thursday. Dinner at Schumann with a friend whom I haven’t seen for a year. The conversation eventually turned to the subject of film, both of us being sort of film buffs. My friend suggested that modern films relied too heavily on CGI, and had the opinion that an over use of CG led to films looking hokey, and that despite the advancements in CGI that films which use too much CG end up looking even more fake. I vaguely agreed with her opinion, and now that I am languishing in my tower, with little else to do but write and brush my long golden hair, I decided to explore the issue some more.

CGI stands for computer generated imagery; as you very well know, and has been used in mainstream cinema since 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. The process of CGI is much like that of animation, except that things are supposed to look real! There are two main types of CG, Digital matte paintings are non-animated backgrounds used in film. Computer animation refers only to dynamic images that resemble a movie. Computer animation is essentially a digital successor to stop motion animation. George Lucas invented a technique called go-motion. A technique essentially identical to stop motion, except that a long camera exposure is used, and the model is moved slightly during the exposure, adding a slight blur, thus when the images are put together, they appear to have a slight blur, as would an image which has been filmed traditionally, and this saves the jarring, jerky looks seen on many stop motion animation films, and the stop motion animation blends with the live action film more organically. Traditional stop motion was perhaps most famously used on Clash of the Titans, and Go-Motion was first used to animate the AT-AT’s in ‘Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.’ 

The digital soundstage is a term used to describe movies which are made entirely or almost entirely in a computer, filmed against green screen with environments and sometimes even costumes and characters created in a computer. The first mainstream full length film to be created on a digital soundstage was ‘Sky Captains and the World of Tomorrow’. Modern films to use this technique include Alice in Wonderland and Oz The great and Powerful. I have to say that 3D is of great detriment to this technique, and leaves the live action footage feeling out of place. I must say that Alice in Wonderland uses this technique much more successfully than Oz. The root of this success comes from the fact that Alice, manages to successfully blend the characters with the environments. In Alice, we are given three kinds of characters, fully live action characters, of which Alice is really the only example. Characters which are live action but altered with CG, such as the Red Queen, The Mad Hatter and the Knave of Spades, and fully CG characters such as The Cheshire Cat and the Doormouse. This blend of the live action footage and CGI means that the characters truly interact with their environments, and thus the live action elements do not seem like cardboard cutouts. This also explains why 3D is unhelpful in this case, as when live action films are converted to 3D, the foreground elements tend to look like cut-outs. When live action elements are placed in front of computer generated backgrounds they also tend to look like cut-outs. If live action elements are placed in front of CG backgrounds in 3D, the effect is doubled and often jarring, thus only when there is a successful blend between CGI and live action can this effect be successful, and a common criticism of Oz, was that the characters simply looked odd when superimposed upon the backgrounds, and that the characters looked out of proportion with the environments. Digital backlots however are often used when filming TV shows, and where costs must be kept to a minimum, such as in ‘Once Upon A Time’, where the interior of Maleficent’s castle is entirely digital, and in fact only appears on screen for a small amount of time. 

Back to dinner, our conversation turned to The Great Gatsby, and I’m ashamed to say that this will be the 6^th post to feature this movie in some respect. I had just pulled my copy of the novel out of my pocked in as pretentious a fashion as I could manage, when our dialogue instantly steered to the new film. Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, despite being a romantic period drama, uses a much larger quantity of special effects than other films of its kind. The film uses sweeping shots of Manhattan and the valley of ashes, and seeing as the film was made entirely in Australia, the shots of the city were not filmed on location and subsequently edited, and however are entirely digital creations. Locations such as Gatsby’s mansion (based upon Beacon Towers in Rhode Island) and the Buchannan’s house are also almost entirely digital. The use of CGI in the film, in my opinion is deft, and thus one often cannot tell actually how much CG the film uses. The film uses crisp, clean cinematography, like many other 3D movies, and thus the live action film has a shiny glint to it. Only logic can really tell us what is CGI and what is real. The various architecture in the film, such as the Gatsby and Buchannan estates must be CG, as the cost of building such structures would be prohibitive. 

Other parts of the film are more ambiguous, for instance the foyer-cum-ballroom of Gatsby’s mansion, looks for the most part to be real, yet the grandeur of the room suggests that the cost of building it for real would be extortionate. One really cannot tell if the room is entirely CG, which seems highly unlikely, or, slightly more likely, if the room is partially a set, and partially CGI, with perhaps the first thirty feet being a set, with the Wurlitzer being built on a separate set, and the celling being entirely CG, this would be more logical as one doubts whether it would be even possible to find a sound stage large enough to accommodate such a set. This process of using separate sets and topping up with CG has been used on numerous other films, such as Phantom of the Opera and many Harry Potter scenes taking place in The Great Hall.

My friend felt that the use of CG in this film was of detriment to the source material, and that it made everything look really really fake. With all due respect, I disagree. I feel that in his novel, Fitzgerald creates a kind of mystical reality, a world which is real, yet at the same time which may vanish in an instant. He creates a sense that although all the objects and the places shown in the book are real, that they are as thin as smoke, and thus not truly real. Luhrmann creates a world that, despite being real, is not really grounded in reality. In his novel Fitzgerald describes a world in which everything appears to be perfect, the lawns are always cut and weeded, the swimming pool is always clean and the drapes are a perfect clean white, this kind of perfect reality translates perfectly to glossy, clean CG, and to filming the movie entirely on a soundstage.

Next, our conversation turned to The Hobbit Trilogy. We’re both huge Lord of the Rings fans, and were awaiting this film with much expectation. The Hobbit is a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and uses much of the same crew and cast as the original trilogy. The series is adapted in three parts from one film, and it is a little ironic that the original novel is shorter than any of the Lord of the Rings books, yet it is being stretched out into a three part epic, with the help of JRR Tolkien’s notes. The filmmakers are adding an entire subplot to the story, involving Gandalf, the white council, and a mysterious figure known as The Necromancer. 

The original trilogy, despite containing more visual effects shots than possibly any other film in history, was revolutionary for its use of miniatures, which helped to create a grounded visual environment, which was possibly lacking in The Great Gatsby. The use of miniatures involved creating infinitely detailed models, some of which were absolutely huge (the model of the city of Minas Tirith was seven meters wide) and filming them with tiny ‘lipstick cameras’ which could actually ‘walk’ along the streets of the cities, and look inside the doors and windows, the live action footage could then be digitally composited onto the miniature footage. Miniatures had never been used in film to this extent, and it was unfortunate that the dawn of miniatures came at the same time as the dawn of CG, and that many directors decided to use CG, which despite being a perfectly good technique, doesn’t create the grounded environment that miniatures would. In The Hobbit, all of the architecture is computer generated. This was done due to the film being filmed in 3D, as the miniature ‘lipstick cameras’, do not film in 3D, and it would be difficult or even impossible to integrate the live action 3D footage with the 2D miniature footage. On The Lord of the Rings, characters such as Orcs and Urak-Hai were created with the use of prosthetics, on The Hobbit; all of the Orcs were CGI. This really is a shame; the use of prosthetics gave the characters a realness and a grounding. One could see the glisten, and the moisture of the orcs skin. However the new films use CGI orcs, Jackson explained during an interview that he felt that when using prosthetics to create the orcs, that one became hampered by the fact that the eyes must always be the same distance apart, and the nose must always be a certain size, in short, one must follow the proportions of the human face. I don’t really follow his logic here, it is stated in The Lord of the Rings, that the orcs were originally elves, who became tainted by the dark power of Sauron, and whose skin became mottled and ugly, and whose blood turned black. Thus his logic makes little sense, as elves have a similar physical appearance to humans, and much is lost by using CG orcs.

Overall one may say that the best films are those which use as little CG as possible, and that using prosthetics and miniatures help create a world which is fantastic yet grounded. In the case of The Great Gatsby, the use of CG works to the advantage of the story and atmosphere of the film. The use of digital backlots is tricky, and without proper integration between live action footage and CG environments, such as in Alice in Wonderland, the footage can look out of proportion relative to the environment, such as in Oz. 3D is also a hindrance here, as it can make the live action footage look overly super-imposed on the backgrounds, already an issue with 2D films. Overall CGI should be used as little as possible, and as efficiently as possible, and real practical effects should be used wherever possible, in order to create a film which is as grounded and as real as possible.