[Stumptown]

Originally Posted by zamler

You've likely watched many movies and saw digital effects but did not even realize they were there.

I'm fully aware of the fact that there are digital effects in almost every single shot of any high-budget film made in the last 15 years or so. Most of the time it is totally obvious because digital effects are very hard to match to the reality they're inserted into: lighting/shadows, color, texture, focal depth, physics. When an object is really there you don't have to calculate any of that and don't run the risk of getting it wrong. It's like watching something where the audio is ever so slightly out of synch, and it's jarring. That's why I don't mind so much when something is completely computer animated, because at least then there is internal consistency. It's mixing the two techniques that becomes a real problem (see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow).

Originally Posted by zamler

And to say that "a guy in a rubber suit, it will always look more real" is interesting, because unless you want to always see a character that can be played by a guy in a rubber suit, other methods are necessary.

What about puppets, animatronics, stop-motion models? They're real objects, they behave like real objects, and can do just about everything that computer animation can do.

Originally Posted by zamler

Movie making is about advancing, moving forward with new ways to tell a story. You can tell a bad story using special effects, you can tell a bad story using visual effects. Or you can tell a great story using whatever is available to you.

You can also ruin an otherwise perfectly good movie with bad effects, whether they're digital or not, especially when the central premise of the movie IS the effects, which it appears to be in the case of Avatar. It's easy to overlook one short effect that isn't quite right in a 2 hour film, but when more than an hour of it is entirely effects-driven, if anything in those effects is not 100% correct (and really, it can't be, no matter how great the technology is) that's a lot of disconcerting moments that add up to an unenjoyable movie experience.

Originally Posted by zamler

And remember with Gollum, the acting you see in the character is the performance of Andy Serkis, the digital imagery is not there just for the sake of using digital effects. The tech that was jused to capture the performance for Gollum has been taken about 20 steps further in Avatar. The digital characters are an extremely accurate representation of the actual performances by the actors. So even if the digital images are not perfect, the performances will be true to the original actors.

I was actually going to point this out. The reason Gollum works is because there is a real actor behind just about every aspect of the character. But through the entire film(s), and especially after watching the "making of" specials, I really think it would have been better if they'd just let Andy Sirkis do it in makeup. If the effects are, as you say "an extremely accurate representation of the actual performances by the actors" why do they even need to be "representations?" Can't they just be the actual performances? Wouldn't that be better? Am I getting too post-modern?