A visual effects artist has revealed the reason why special effects in movies are so much “worse” now.
Fans have long lamented the declining quality of computer-generated imagery (CGI) as a seemingly increasing number of blunders are picked up by eagle-eyed viewers upon almost every big release.
From movies such as Cats, Hulk and Aladdin to Avengers: Infinity War and the latest Mad Max instalment, Furiosa, on-screen glitches and some low-quality visuals have been jarring for moviegoers. The phenomenon is now so ubiquitous that flaws are apparent even in trailers for unreleased movies, such as the forthcoming remake of The Crow.
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“VFX artist here, heres what happened,” he began. “Clients continually change the brief. Shot design and planning are no longer a priority, and we have a lot more work to get through in a shorter amount of time.
“We have and can create work better than back in the day, it just needs the right leadership team, planning, and time to make sure it happens.”
Edji explained that the average film now changes a lot more during postproduction than it used to, adding, “This means new work gets added to our plate and work we’ve already started (and sometimes even finished) gets scrapped. The ‘fix it in post’ mentality also doesn’t help.”
He implored people to not blame VFX artists, saying: “It’s almost always the studio/leadership team who is responsible for when things don’t get done up to scratch and never the actual artists’ fault.”
I watched Godzilla Minus One a couple of days ago. It was made by a small VFX team, tiny budget, and a director who planned it all out in advance and the results were really impressive.
Two more examples: Dredd and Ex Machina.
Love those movies. Everything Everywhere All At Once had a team of 4 VFX people, IIRC.
I’ve heard it had a small budget. For some reason, I had in mind $35 million and the result was impressive for that budget. Turns out it was $15 million!
Great movie overall elevated even more with fantastic VFX work to boot. Reminds me of old classics like Terminator 1 with a then unproven director James Cameron flexing his VFX background to achieve his big vision on screen stretching a relatively small budget (albeit T1 had his budget increased during production).