Channel Awesome
It’s everywhere everyday, but does it need to be? Has CGI gone too far?
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First of all, I want to preface what I’m going to say by saying that Doug is absolutely right about the need for mixing different styles and effects and how a movie that’s overly reliant on CGI is noticeably bad. That being said, I still personally believe that Doug is too harsh on CGI much of the time. This is partially because I believe Doug is actually far more adept at spotting it than most other people and he doesn’t seem to know that but more importantly because, like many illusions, it suffers from a tragically inherent flaw in public perception. When it’s done well, you won’t notice. When it’s done poorly, it’s painfully obvious. This means all we ever really notice is the bad side of CGI. He lists some examples of very good CGI in this video, but we only ever think of it as CGI after the fact. When we’re watching the movie, we don’t think of good CGI as CGI because we believe the illusion, so we don’t remember it as CGI, we remember it as whatever they wanted us to. It actually reminds me of Doug’s video about nitpicking and how we’re far more prone to point out the mistakes a movie makes if we’re not being drawn into the story. Similarly, we’re far more prone to spot the bad CGI if we’re not already being drawn into the illusion as a whole, further compounding the problem. Once we’ve disbelieved something, it’s very hard to draw us back in.