yES although all the exterior shots in Hunt for Red October, which I finally watched in [looks at calendar] 2025 a few days ago, were all EXTREMELY good and terrifying and claustrophobic, I think this is a case of practical effects just being overwhelmingly Better
Oh, I definitely don't think these are bad as shots. There is just something uncaptured about the fact that even the half dozen people who DO see instrumentation, have at best a mental picture of what's outside. And if you need to use that picture to make choices that could get everyone killed
yeah!! yeah that's fundamentally a huge part of what's compelling to me about the narrative.
Exactly, and I want to see someone go all in on the moment when "you are wrong" about what's going on outside but it doesn't cut out to show us the audience. Instead we're stuck inside as tensions raise and the stakes mount
I think that everything from the early 90s looks more real than anything before or after in SFX I know this is probably just "because I grew up with it" but, it's what I stand by
Look how cool the xenonorph looked in 1979. ♥️
I’m watching the new Alien Earth tv show and it’s amazing how much juice that show gets just from having that amazing alien design
HRG was truly goated
Practical effects are very good, and there’s a reason movies are re-incorporating them.
youtu.be/0fM5QX8TlYs?...
no i think this is Objectively Correct in a way that matters, there's a level of realism that you *can achieve via tactical suspension of disbelief with skilled practical effects* that if you try to achieve via CGI you just fall not into the uncanny valley with but off an uncanny cliff into an abyss
this kinda floats into one my og crank opinions, even back in high school, that a marionette in the hands of a skilled performer can approach verisimilitude far more than a computer approximation, because human feelings and rhythms are really hard to mimic through CAD art.
but also my non-crank opinion that Jim Henson and Frank Oz were/are gods of an art form that we definitely took for granted as kids, and that stuff like the TMNT movies were truly awe-inspiring works of puppetry
yeah the old puppets from movies like Neverending Story or the old Star Wars look so much more convincing to me than CGI monsters do, no matter how much effort they put into "look, the fur is realistic now!" I can't be sure it's not just childhood nostalgia, but it sure feels like it
at least when it comes to the folk entertainment arts (bands, circuses, puppets, theater, etc) I think a lot of our world tends to imagine that the old forms were mediocre or drab compared to modern electric media (film, recorded music etc). I'm p certain old artists had skills that would boggle.
even something like "shadow puppets" sounds pathetic or uncompelling in our age, but I can assure all of us that a Balinese shadow drama in the 15th century didn't hit much different than a great television drama now.
i have experienced skilled Balinese shadow theatre *in the 21st century* and i am thrilled to report that it still actually rules ass, yeah
but i can only imagine how that shit would have hit in its original social and technological context
My brother used to work for probably the elite "live entertainment" company on earth, does everything from Beyonce tours to the invisible wires for Cirque to wiring shots for greenscreens in Hollywood. It's some of the most futuristic shit I know. And it's still kinda "puppets rock" at it's core.
They're also not exactly trying to convince you that it's a real, like, THING. you know you're watching a movie but it's real in the context of the experience.
conveying "a fake thing that is Real" is wildly different from conveying "a real thing"
and we're getting really, really good at the latter, but also there's a reason that human mocap and *puppet* mocap is such a big deal - we've had either 'centuries' or 'our entire lives as a species' to get good at it, depending, not, like, a few decades
This is almost always the case, but for some reason even though we've had 20+ years of CGI advancement, Bill Nighy in the Pirates movies still looks *amazing*. Other CG from those movies you can see the seams, but Davy Jones just looks like an octopus guy.
there's some early CGI that looks frankly incredibly good but i think people have chased a desire to be brighter and clearer and Show More, Not Less, And At A Higher Framerate in ways that have been really detrimental; earlier CGI you had to -hide- the seams in a way that felt movielike
now the CGI is so good that you do not have to hide the seams, you can in fact shine a bright spotlight ON where the seams should be and there are no visible seams there, and it's gee-whiz COOL that you can do that and I frankly enjoy it as spectacle, but it's often bad *filmmaking*
Part of this is just, like, the death of shot composition, I think. There's a similar effect in animation, where older less fluid stuff often feels more dynamic simply because it was storyboarded better and with a greater sense of motion.
I kind of suspect that's a huge part of it, is that early CGI was likely handled with something along the lines of "film the rendering on physical film and smudge the lens some" or whatever, and so you get things that look more genuine than when the animators have full confidence in it
That was a really cool era for special effects, when there were so many practical effects crews still involved and collaborating with the new computer guys. When it worked it was amazing, when it missed it was terrible.
One of the coolest was how they used computers on Star Trek First Contact to change how they shot spaceships. They locked miniatures in place and put the camera on computer controlled robot arms, and swooped the camera past the ships over and over, doing multiple exposures on the same film.
And they would change the lighting and effects on the ship, so the way the engine glowed and the way light reflected on the miniatures looked nothing like a little model
I can’t find the behind the scenes video of them filming the ships, but I found this behind the scenes of the borg queen using the same computer controlled camera rig, and it turns out for this shot they used a fake head and a real actor’s body, the exact opposite of what I would have imagined.
Also found this clip that shows the incredible lighting effects on all those models, plus baby Adam Scott saying “sir, it’s the Enterprise!”
So that's what's called Motion Controlled Photography & it's actually much older than ST:FC. They were doing it as far back as the 60s for movies like 2001, but it really came into it's own with Star Wars.
I think first contact was using some cutting edge software to design those shots, though. The way they were taking separate shots of each miniature separately, with camera and lighting moves that worked together when they composited it all together to make sense in 3D space
I forget where I heard about this, possibly dvd special features, so it might not be the most unbiased source about how groundbreaking it was
Yeah the separate lighting passes (one with the model lit, & a bunch of other ones with it dark but the lighty bits of the model turned on) dates back to Star Wars.
George Lucas' most valuable contribution to film as a medium is (almost certainly) special effects. ILM is still doing cutting-edge work to this day: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industr...
They did make some improvements with it in First Contact, by among other things, doing CGI touch-up passes after filming the miniatures.
You still get that stuff, though mostly on lower budget stuff. The high budget movies tend to go "yeah we'll just make the scene in CG", where low budget stuff uses a bare minimum. Upgrade ends up looking far better than Venom
I really should rewatch Upgrade. I remember it as an absolutely awesome action movie, and We Have Tom Hardy At Home is a really fun actor.
yeah that makes sense. You do a lot of things that are not intended to be comprehensive, but to hint at what's going on
with more CGI, it gets more removed from the director's immediate scene work and there's more pressure to just put in everything.
There is something to just "this looks like how I know movies look" even more than "this looks like real"
one of the things that gets me about HUNT is that the red route one scene is basically just a stage play in a single room, plus a little bit of music and sound effects and it is THE TENSEST FUCKING THING
GOD YES i spent the entire time just like. curled up against my partner and Vibrating Nervously it was great haha
he was like "i have watched this movie 74759845856 times why is it giving me the jibblies /this time/" and i was like "because you are watching it with someone for whom one of their principal joys in life is marking out super hard on scary shit, hi, hello, you wanted this"
<3
I'm glad ya'll had a good time
you don't need a big cgi spectacle to make people start gripping the edge of their seats!
you can get a lot of tension in stage plays anyway!
I've routinely noted that Phonebooth would make an excellent stage drama with fairly minimal effects (a few squibs and lighting honestly).