Special Effects

I also prefer practical effects.

Good point.

I actually agree with you. The old practical effects bring so much more realism to a film. If CGI were only used to clean up the special effects shots than modern movies wouldn't look so dang fake.

I watched the film for the first time last night, and I specifically watched it to check out the effects. It was recommended after getting into a discussion on the Clash of the Titans board regarding the effects in Clash.

I agree that the effects are pretty good. I like that it's a mix of animatronics and other practicals, stop-motion, and traditional animation. I think the biggest downfall with the modern era of effects is that things like miniatures, animatronics, puppets etc have been largely replaced by CGI. (Just look at the destruction scenes in Independence Day and compare them to Independence Day: Resurgence to see why this is a poor idea.)

That said, one problem that I have with the dragon in Dragonslayer is that in the stop-motion shots, especially when the dragon is close, he doesn't look like he inhabits the same 3D space as everything else in the frame but rather looks superimposed on top of it. Also, I will say that CGI has progressed today to the point where in the very best examples, it can look very real and tangible.

I think that CGI is good and useful, but I think that in many cases practicals will render superior results and in those cases practical effects should be used. Always go with whatever technique will look best on screen. If only studios/producers/directors would always follow this rule then modern movies would be better for sure.

Believe it or not, there was a technique used in the 1990s that made it so that films with CGI look very realistic, even more realistic than what we see on tv/movies today. Part of that was because they combined actual models, miniatures, and mock-ups with CGI, so that the object or creature you were looking at truly did look real enough so that in your mind, you keep wondering what it would feel like to touch it, or truly believe it might be "real." In fact, in the first two Hellboy films (which came out in the early/mid-2000s) Guillermo del Toro did as little CGI as he could get away with, and used practical effects as much as possible.

That is why films like "Jurassic Park," "Independence Day," and a number of other films from the 90s and earl/mid-2000s hold up so well; combining practical effects with CGI.

In the case of "Dragonslayer," the effects, despite being dated, and the crappy stop-motion animation for the times the dragon was flying, actually are very good, even by 2020s standards. There were moments when the humans are doing up-close interactions with Vermithrax that feel very real. The best scene (if you're going by realistic special-effects) is when Galen first meets the dragon face-to-face, and in that moment, you truly can believe the dragon looks very real.

Movie studios these days have gotten extremely lazy with the CGI, often to the point that it not only doesn't look real anymore, but resembles a computer game more so than reality. I've also heard talk about framerates, where cameras film at a specific framerate imitating what the human eye can interpret so the pacing and movements in the feature look realistic. Sadly, far too many studios ignore this standard (20 frames per minute) in favor of really fast framerates, which also contribute to films looking more like computer games than realistic.

The problem is CGI isn't advanced enough to do certain things. You can do good inanimate objects like robots or rockets because they are relatively simple in terms of what is required to represent them and how they have very simple movement... but when you start going for living breathing animals or monsters you start throwing in lots of things that can't easily be represented by a mathematical formula. The dragon breathing with a model can be done by having air bladders in the puppet that actual inflate and deflate from a pump moving the stretched skin, easy to do with a puppet... now try and do that with a computer model and the problems start showing up because you would need to write the code for the complex movement of the skin on the outside moving from the air in the theoretical lungs. And that's just for one tiny little think like breathing... Now throw in things like water dripping on an animal/dragon or whatever and you need to use the computer to simulate thousands of randomly sized water drop hitting the object and interacting with the other water already there.. Not hard when you can just use a spray hose and real water but difficult to do convincingly with CGI...

But the biggest problem of all is that doing any of the CGI work requires a dedicated artist that spends enough time on the effect and most movies don't allocate enough money or time for really great CGI effect they just go with whatever will be passable in a shitty theater with a sub par projector which is what they expect their movie to be presented in.... It's also the reason some movie look so good in a theater but look like total shit when you see them on TV. They were never really great effects just passable for the shitty theater screen.

Seems that a mix of the two produce the best outcomes.