VFX: Cinema from the computer

Luca Fontana

10.8.2018

Translation: machine translated

125 years after the invention of cinema, VFX studios are creating films and series in which digital and analogue images seem to merge seamlessly. Time to take a look at the role of visual effects.

Frodo Baggins stands on the precipice. Deep below, the lava flows just as hot as it did on the day the Ring of Power was created. Samwise Gamdschie, his faithful friend, calls out:

"Throw him into the fire!"

Desperation. He senses that something is wrong. The order the two of them have received from Elrond's council is unmistakable: go to Mount Doom and throw the ring into its fire. For the Ring of Power can only be destroyed in the place where it was created. But Frodo hesitates. Has the one ring corrupted him after all?

Tears well up in Sam's eyes. Anger, frustration and powerlessness threaten to overwhelm him.

"Just let him go..."

He has no idea that Gollum, a creature corrupted by the Ring, is approaching from behind and is about to make things even worse.

The showdown of the great fantasy trilogy is perfect. The reason: visual effects (VFX). A similar scene would only have looked better if the actors had been placed in a real volcano. The film crew could perhaps have built the threatening abyss within the caldera. But the poisonous vapours that cling to the rock faces would have etched the protagonists' faces from their bones. Visual effects are there to solve problems that can't be solved with real, practical effects.

Today, they are indispensable.

Directors tell their stories with visual effects in a way they never thought possible. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the perfect example. To understand the importance of visual effects for modern cinema - and what the dark side of the coin looks like - it's worth taking a look back at the beginnings of digital trickery.

Before the magic happens: The role of pre-visualisation

The shooting of a Hollywood blockbuster usually consists of the following three phases:

1. Phase: The pre-production
2. Phase: The film shoot
3. Phase: The post-production

The bigger the budget of the film, the higher the risk for the film studio. In 1963, for example, "Cleopatra" cost 44 million dollars - an enormous sum by the standards of the time. Today, the amount corresponds to 340 million dollars adjusted for inflation, which would make "Cleopatra" the most expensive film of all time.

Long story short: the film - now a cult hit - flopped and almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

Back then, it was the film sets that sent production costs through the roof. Today, it's the visual effects that come from the computer - namely CGI, or "Computer Generated Images". In short: not all visual effects are computer effects - such as filmed models like the Hogwarts castle from "Harry Potter" - but all computer effects count as visual effects, as they are only added to the film after shooting, i.e. in the post-production phase.

Special effects, on the other hand, are realised during filming, unlike visual effects. These are mechanical or chemical effects, such as a robot dinosaur or a large explosion, the results of which the director can check on set.

For the VFX supervisors in charge, pre-production serves to plan ahead for the visual effects that will be created during the film's post-production. They want the best possible conditions for the effects-heavy scenes on the film set. Together with the director, they work out camera angles, set design, lighting and the look of the film itself.

Conceptual drawings, storyboards and pre-visualisations are common for planning. This means that storyboard artists create a kind of "comic" for the film under the supervision of the director and based on the script. Studio bosses and the film crew get a rough idea of the end product, and the director gets a plan of how he wants to capture his story on film.

In the meantime, the obsession with detail has gone so far that storyboards are pre-visualised on the computer using simple 3D graphics. They serve as a basis for discussion between the director and VFX supervisor and help to develop images and ideas.

The importance of pre-visualisations has increased significantly in film production. The special effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) started using them during pre-production for the first Star Wars prequel. Peter Jackson went one better with "Lord of the Rings". After Star Wars producer Rick McCallum told him about computer-animated pre-visualisations, Jackson visited the effects company ILM in California. Afterwards, the New Zealander was so enthusiastic that he not only pre-visualised the effects-heavy action scenes in his own trilogy, but the entire trilogy.

At the time, the New Zealander said:

The people who create the visual effects only come into play after filming - during post-production. They are called VFX artists, or simply: Artists. VFX artists use their programming tools like a bricklayer uses his trowel and Indiana Jones his whip. The maturing of these tools has laid the foundation for computer effects that are almost indistinguishable from reality.

Jurassic Park - The beginning of the CGI boom

In 1973, "Westworld" was the first cinema film to use computer-generated effects. The world as seen through the eyes of the Gunslinger is VFX in this scene

Further experiments with CGI and 3D computer graphics in films followed. The effects are good by the standards of the time, but they don't convince anyone that they are actually real.

In 1993, the marketing department Universal Pictures launches the trailer for a new Steven Spielberg film entitled "Jurassic Park", and wisely leaves out its main attraction - the dinosaurs - almost completely.

Curious viewers around the world sit in their cinema seats, unsuspecting what they are about to see. Then comes the scene in which a 56-tonne Brachiosaurus stomps into the frame and actor Richard Attenborough, in his role as John Hammond, accompanied by John Williams' iconic score, says the famous words:

"Welcome to Jurassic Park."

The cinema audience is at least as stunned as the characters themselves at the sight of the dinosaur, which has been extinct for 65 million years but still comfortably plucks its leaves from the trees. Never before have computer effects been created that blend analogue film footage so seamlessly with digital creatures. It is the birth of what we understand by visual effects today.

And the rest is history.

"Avatar" experiences the blue CGI miracle

Films such as "Titanic", "Gladiator" and the first two Harry Potter adaptations have continued to push the boundaries of computer animation in the years since "Jurassic Park". But it is the Lord of the Rings creature Gollum that has caused the biggest outcry since Spielberg's dinosaur film.

Motion capture technology was used to transfer the movements and rough facial features of actor Andy Serkis directly onto a computer model. Gollum looked so real to audiences at the time that all you had to do was croak "my darling" in a hoarse voice and everyone knew who was meant.

It was allegedly precisely this performance that persuaded James Cameron to realise his childhood dream of "Avatar" six years later. Thanks to films such as "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2", Cameron is considered one of the most influential directors of our time in the visual effects scene. With Avatar, he was to live up to his reputation for developing new animation techniques or at least massively advancing their further development. First and foremost the already well-known motion capture.

For "Avatar", he developed a state-of-the-art motion capture stage that is six times larger than anything ever seen before. Not only can he film entire groups of actors at the same time, he can also view footage created in the virtual world of Pandora on a separate screen and in real time - thanks to simple 3D graphics. Filmed material can be checked immediately before the effects studio starts producing the actual effects: a huge simplification for the visual effects industry when filming with motion capture technology.

However, Cameron has also further developed motion capture technology on other fronts: whereas previously it was mainly the actors' body movements that were recorded, detailed facial features were added with "Avatar". Crucially, even the unconscious, nuanced movements of the actors' pupils are tracked with pinpoint accuracy and transferred to the computer model. This is one of the main reasons why Zoe Saldana's portrayal of the Na'vi woman Neytiri feels much more vivid and real than the Gollum previously presented as the measure of all things.

Increasing importance of visual effects - and their downside

Today, almost 25 years after Spielberg's T-Rex revolutionised the cinema landscape, almost all of the 15 most financially successful films of all time rely on visual effects - or were created entirely on computers. And what's even more impressive: 14 of them were made in the last ten years alone.

Along with the increasing importance of visual effects comes the accusation that CGI-dependent films often appear overly artificial or soulless. This is because computer effects were only used 25 years ago when there was no other option.

Today, the increasing computing power of modern computers ensures much faster results in post-production. Time is no longer necessarily a finite resource, and filmmakers can easily outsource problems to the VFX studio.

However, visual effects work like crowd pullers. "Pacific Rim: Uprising", "Tomb Raider" or "Rampage" - to name just a few blockbusters released in 2018 - will certainly not be remembered for their clever dialogue or well thought-out plots. But bombastic effects in elaborately staged trailers have nevertheless ensured that audiences are flocking to cinemas en masse: together they have raised almost a billion dollars at the box office.

What does Hollywood learn from this? The quality of the screenplay, direction and acting plays a rather subordinate role as long as elaborate computer effects hide the fact. And these are much easier to produce "on a conveyor belt" than creative and surprising stories that are truly captivating.

Then there are the films that simply have inexcusably bad CGI despite having a reasonable budget

In 2001, the makers of "The Mummy Returns" managed to make Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson look even worse as the Scorpion King than the mummy in "The Mummy", which had been released two years earlier. So much for: "Computer effects are getting better and better."

Two years later, the Wachowski siblings realised a fight scene between the chosen one Neo and a hundred Agent Smiths in "The Matrix Reloaded" with a lot of CGI. The scene is still cited today whenever bad CGI in big-budget films is mentioned.

But even in the recent past, there are examples of atrocious CGI. For example, when Legolas breaks the laws of physics in "The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies".

Despite all the criticism, it's only thanks to visual effects that you can explore exciting and exotic worlds that you would otherwise never have seen: the flora and fauna of Pandora from "Avatar" still take many people's breath away. And sometimes VFX is simply unavoidable in order to tell a story the way the director intended.

Or how else would the backwards-ageing Brad Pitt from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" have been realised?

VFX: It certainly won't be less

"Jurassic Park" not only inspired the VFX artists of today's generation as children, but also proved that nothing is too big, fantastic or overwhelming not to be captured on the big screen - as long as there are talented programmers who continue to push the development of visual effects.

Because visual effects in cinema films or series will not become less. One argument against this is that thanks to VFX, directors can tell stories that they wouldn't be able to tell the way they want to without it. However, the argument that effects-heavy films attract more audiences to cinemas than sophisticated dramas such as "Sicario 2" is much more pragmatic.

The zenith of what is possible has not yet been reached. The industry is consistently working on maturing various VFX technologies. It is helping to ensure that one day feature films will be made entirely on computers - without the audience realising it.

Sound terrible? Maybe it does. But VFX has earned and deserved its place in film, despite the many black sheep that gnaw at its reputation. A look at the last 25 years reveals: the creatures, horrors and worlds on the big screen - many of them would not exist without VFX. Not in this form. And that would be a shame.

Luca Fontana

Senior Editor

Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.ch

I'm an outdoorsy guy and enjoy sports that push me to the limit – now that’s what I call comfort zone! But I'm also about curling up in an armchair with books about ugly intrigue and sinister kingkillers. Being an avid cinema-goer, I’ve been known to rave about film scores for hours on end. I’ve always wanted to say: «I am Groot.» more

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