The Thing (2011)

[Pyroxian]

Forgive me, but...I don't see how that effect is 'shonky'.

IIRC it looks a bit pants when in motion.

[Emperor]

OK, I'll set myself up for a kicking, but as much as I am a fan of practical effects, and how much I love the Thing, I'd be the first to say that some of the original looks a bit shonky these days...

e.g.

I've rewatched it a number of times over the years and what always strikes me is how well the effects have stood the test of time, which is down to their using models and prosthetics (the same way Alien still works). If it had been filmed later they might have been tempted to go digital and those kinds of effects tend not to age well at all.

[Steve Green]

That in particular is not puppeteered very well compared to the spiderhead bit, and I'm not keen on the sculpt either.

Doing something practically doesn't mean that you're immune from technological advances either, silicone trumps latex in look for example.

TBH I'd argue the alien looks a bit comical when it's dangling outside the lifeboat as well, it worked much better when you didn't see all of it.  I'm not going to put on rose-tinted glasses and say something looks better just because it was done practically

The whole practical = good, CGI = bad, irritates me - there's good and bad in both - Yoda in the Phantom Menace being a prime example.

[Emperor]

The whole practical = good, CGI = bad, irritates me - there's good and bad in both - Yoda in the Phantom Menace being a prime example.

Well that isn't what I was arguing, nowadays you can pull of pretty decent CGI with virtually no budget* (and I'd argue that Babylon 5 did impressive things with the kind of computing power kids have on their phones these days) but even up to a few years using CGI instead of physical effects on lower budget films just looks bad - I'm thinking of CGI headshots and blood spray in some horror movies (compare the odd CGI headshots on Wild Zero with those in Bad Taste, for example). It'd be unwise to extrapolate that kind of thing blanket "practical = good, CGI = bad" argument.

* Somehow the Syfy channel seem to be the exception to this rule with their own films

[Teivion]

' A poor workman blames his tools'

Back in 1982-ish, most effects were practical- in front of camera. The people handling these effects were classed as 'technicians'. Jim Hensons crew in The Dark Crystal consisted of many different types of artists- engineers, sculptors, dental technicians, seamstresses etc. Most had probably not even heard of SFX before taking on the job. Back then, they probably all had come from hands on, traditional artistic training (life drawing for instance) As a result, they would know how to make something look real . They knew the little subtleties something would need to make it look 'right'. Phil Tippett as a good example of a hands on guy. He was the fellow who animated the AT-AT's in Empire, and built and puppeteered the Rancor in Jedi, Robocop's ED209, etc etc..

Now, its done with CGI. Its basically a technical program which needs to be learnt, a physics engine. To me, the result is that now its not always 'Artists' handling the effects anymore, its people who know how to use a certain program.
Its a bloody difficult program, and takes a great deal of dedication to learn, but I wonder how many of them have studied the human form and drawn it nicely, been taught how to mix colours, what the Golden Section is, etc. Sculpting something in clay will take a totally different direction if its sculpted digitally, its a totally different thought and design process. You cant compare the two, so you cant expect the same results.
I'm not saying VFX people have no talent, far from it, I'm just saying that at the moment the way its able to be taught lets people skip the artistic foundations and go straight to blowing stuff up.
This is what makes a 'bad' CG artist. Not forgetting poor visual story telling too, of course, so you cant always blame the CG.

Going back to Phil Tippett, he now runs an amazing VFX studio. All of the work his team outputs looks fantastic because at the core of the studio and signing off the work is someone who is 'old school' and knows how to make something look right. That can't be taught when learning a program, it can only be learned from experience and an artistic talent that comes from studying life itself, and not a manual.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing The Thing, whether its done using rubber or digital fx ;-)

[Steve Green]

Well, I'd agree on the Syfy bit.

But the budget thing is not really to do with whether one is better than the other, it's more a case of accessibility and how easy it is to do it. It's a lot easier on a shoot to say they'll do it in post, rather than the messiness of a practical effect, sculpting, casting, setting it up, shooting it, cleaning it up if it didn't go quite right, and balancing that against whether the budget justifies doing it digitally.

I've only just had a look at the Wild Zero trailer on youtube which isn't great quality, but the headshots don't look particularly bad.

[von Boom]

The only criteria I use to judge fx are: one) do they make be believe what is happening is real, and two) are they relevant to the story.

I think the fx in Carpenter's Thing still do that in spades (especially the scene when the thing takes off the arms of Cooper). So, for me anyway, they are still a win.

JvB

[TordelBack]

Some fascinating points here.

As a non-artistic layman/consumer, one of the key benefits of practical over CGI for me is that no matter how bad your model/prosthetic at least it exists in real space - it's an actual thing that's been made, and it actually moves (or not), and can be appreciated (or denigrated) as such.  It doesn't have to convince you that it's real, just that it is what it purports to be.  Taking CGI on board requires a whole additional step of believing the thing exists in the real world, before you can even consider its successes or failures as a representation of something.  With my ageing eyes I can see that the AT-ATs are very obviously stop-motion models in some shots, but what beautiful real things they are.     

[Steve Green]

Most studio level effects artists would certainly encourage life drawing classes etc. and there will be a focus on traditional knowledge.

For example, Pixar asked Roger Deakins to give them direction on Wall E, he's a traditional DP but ran courses so they could accurately make something look as if it were shot with a real camera, and it certainly shows on the Earthbound scenes.

That said, since effects tasks are compartmentalised, there's not much use for a modeler to know colour theory to use in their day-to-day tasks (although it won't harm them learning it), and likewise a knowledge of anatomy is not going to help so much for a lighting guy.

It certainly used to be the case that focus was on art talent, as teaching the software was easier - maybe that has changed, although I find it unlikely.

I would argue it was more a case of technicians without art training in the early days, purely because it was so niche and expensive and came from the geekier coding background - these days it's more a case of having plenty of people with cracked software who will just dive in and start animating without a foundation, in the same way digital cameras means that everyone's a photographer, or music software makes everyone a musician... except it never works that way.

[Spikes]

As a non-artistic layman/consumer, one of the key benefits of practical over CGI for me is that no matter how bad your model/prosthetic at least it exists in real space - it's an actual thing that's been made, and it actually moves (or not), and can be appreciated (or denigrated) as such.  It doesn't have to convince you that it's real, just that it is what it purports to be.  Taking CGI on board requires a whole additional step of believing the thing exists in the real world, before you can even consider its successes or failures as a representation of something.  With my ageing eyes I can see that the AT-ATs are very obviously stop-motion models in some shots, but what beautiful real things they are.   

to all of the above.

[Steve Green]

It's not something that's really bothered me, having that extra hurdle of having to look real, in fact it makes me appreciate CGI even more when they get it right.

[Spikes]

Caught the film last night and what a load of rubbish. Cheap and unimaginative film making, im just suprised they managed to resist the temptation to copy n paste the "you got to be fuckin kidding" line from Carp's version into the prequel at some point. ...and what was with those FX'S? Im not anti-GCI  as such, but those FX'S were like summat from the early 90's. 
At one point, near the end i did think [spoiler] when they got inside the Alien's craft, we might have found out something about its true nature, or maybe the Kate Lloyd character, and the Thing could have conversed, now that the pretence was over, again to learn something new about exactly what this "thing" really is but what happened? It went on a shapeshifting killcrazy dumb-brute rampage and smashed its own craft up. Nice.[/spoiler]

[Eric Plumrose]

Didn't have any real issue with the quality of the CGI, more its over-use for the kind of film this is. Carpenter's film relies as much on atmosphere as it does viscera; the premake, however, just wants to be an in-yer-face-monster movie. As for the CGI debate, I find practical effects often work more convincingly because they seem . . . more weighted, perhaps? Obvious matte-work notwithstanding, the best big-screen dragon for me is still that in DRAGONSLAYER.

THE THING premake anyhow is pretty uninspired stuff. There's no real attempt at creating any sense of isolation, something that's undermined by the team comprising not only Norwegian nationals but also American, French, and English; compounded further by having two female team members (although I wouldn't be surprised if there's some bullshit artistic justification for it 'cuz the Hawks film had a brassiere quota). There's also a wearisome suspicion of and animosity towards anything that isn't American. Brilliantly, it's the English fella's nice teeth that make him suspect!

Someone on the Byrne Board (Greg Kirkman, I think) suggested a low-budget arthouse prequel with an all-male Norwegian cast might have been interesting, assuming another film really had to be made. I agree.

[Mangamax]

Just a bit more from me.
Setting the CGI/actual prop thing aside, the prequel is just so badly made. Especially compared to Carpenter's.
Take the bloke who wanders down to look at the Thing still in the block of ice - we get a POV shot of someone watching him, a cheap obvious "jump" as the watcher scares him, the watcher leaves and we cut back to the bloke walking towards us in a wide shot, with the block of ice visible in the background, with plenty of space above it.
As soon as we have the fake "scare" we know another proper one is on the way as, hey, that's how its done right? And as soon as we see the guy in the wide shot we KNOW the Thing is just to burst out. Which it does.
All very predictable.
Its obvious they studied Carpenters to get the sets and creature designs right but. after seeing the true shock moments of the likes of:
the chest opening up,
the blood test,
the dog head splitting ,
which had no telegraphing of what was about to happen (well, apart from Kurt blinking like made just before the blood erupts), they still chose to do the above?

[von Boom]

Yeah, it was a pretty weak offering all-in-all. No real tension, and not much in the way of originality. My disappointment in this is only overshadowed by my complete disgust at Conan.

JvB