Terrible Visual Effects - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) Discussion

[–] jdp90 10 years ago

I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a visually stunning movie with first-rate CGI. The HFR made everything look cleaner, sharper, and more convincing IMO.

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[–] Incisive 10 years ago

The CGI was just awful.

The goblins did not even look remotely realistic.

This was childish drivel.

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[–] chaotic-zero 10 years ago

Yes, the fantasy creature wasn't realistic. Very good.

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[–] BluthSitwell 9 years ago

is that a legit argument defending bad looking cgi simply because its a fantasy movie? Or are you on purpose playing a complete retard?

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[–] chain-lightning 10 years ago

So, what does a realistic goblin look like?

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[–] !!!deleted!!! (14789810) 10 years ago

like actual flesh as opposed to a cartoon

http://www.imdb.com/list/rJuB9UoASlQ/

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[–] BluthSitwell 9 years ago

Like that they are made from flesh, blood and bone not like artificial computer game npcs put into a frame with green screen in post production.... Stupid question.

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[–] Hecate-3 8 years ago

There are some very good ones in The Two Towers. Have you seen that?

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Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.

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[–] matrixpolaris 7 years ago

Like a guy in prosthetic makeup.

Godzilla for the Win!

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[–] octopusmagnificens 10 years ago

Almost Syfy level to me.

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[–] Tarquin_Q_Zanzibar 10 years ago

"The CGI was just awful.

The goblins did not even look remotely realistic"

I shall push away the impulse to query just what a "realistic" imaginary creature would look like and confine myself to remarking that I have heard similar comments, and I find the notion that the problems people have lies with "bad" GGI quite risible.

The fact is, we know these creatures don't and can't exist, and that is the sole reason that people know them to be CGI creations. That's not to say that CGI can't be done "unrealistically"; There are subtle clues that we may not consciously be aware of but which our minds nevertheless recognise the "wrongness" of, hence the scene of goblins fighting with everything in pin-sharp focus and no distance or motion blur looks more like a computer game, regardless of the photo-realistic renderings.

With mocap, outstanding artistes and CGI I see no issues with the "realism" of the characters, but the complexity of placing CGI characters in a CGI environment are immense, with all the lighting complexities and rendering required. People seem to have taken the excellence of CGI so much for granted that anything less than utter perfection is now being decried as "awful" CGI. The Goblins scenes in particular seem to have attracted much criticism - and I agree, it is pretty bad - but not because the creature CGI is bad; on the contrary, the Goblin King was a masterful creation and anyone who thinks it is "bad CGI" really doesn't have a clue.

I rather suspect that your final comment ("This was childish drivel") is indicative of your more fundamental problem with the film.

"Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw..."

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[–] englisher101 9 years ago

I think you're missing a fundamental point. People's expectations for CG have not really changed that much. A person's sense of judging what seems real and tangible is an innate human instinct built into all of us, just like our ability to recognize a human face. The only time our instincts fail is when we're just amazed and blinded by technical achievement and eye candy.

What's lacking in The Hobbit and LOTR is discretionary use of CG. Look all the way back to 1993 at Jurassic Park. Hardly anyone complains about its use of CG VFX. To the contrary, many people are still amazed by how good it looks compared to something more recent like, say, The Hobbit.

Yet The Hobbit's use of VFX is far more challenging and ambitious than the handful of CG shots created in Alias and SoftImage for Jurassic Park. But therein lies the problem. If you want to have long wide-angle shots of live actors comped over CG worlds flinging hordes of CG creatures 20 feet in the air while they, themselves, are being tossed about like ragdolls, it's going to be difficult even a decade from now to make that look convincing. For a start, the problem is not just CG. It's hard to even get actors to do that kind of wire work and have it look very convincing with those types of shots.

People complain about CG when it starts to take the spotlight, when it draws away from the story and the actual people in the film. This is a very personal view of mine, but I would say that if practical effects ever became so ambitiously and predominantly used in a film to detract from what's going on, then people would also end up complaining about the overuse of practical effects. At some point it starts to be about as interesting as watching a little kid play throwing his toys around if we don't quickly cut back to a real performance.

Again, no one complains about the use of CG in Game of Thrones: http://vimeo.com/100095868 in spite of major portions of the series being covered with digital comps and VFX work. The reason: people don't notice it. It doesn't detract from the story or the actual human performances, and arguably enhances it. Yet the technical difficulty of the CG work in GoT is nowhere near as high as the Hobbit. It doesn't have to be, since it has what The Hobbit lacks: discretion and tasteful use of VFX -- no more than what they can afford to use without breaking the illusion.

The Hobbit happily breaks the illusion -- the technical and artistic achievements are amazing, but it breaks the illusion very quickly. This is what's being lost a lot these days, the illusion. Hollywood magic decades ago was obsessed with the illusion, and recognized it as such. Take the vine-swinging tarzan scene in Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That is an incredibly challenging shot requiring the greatest technical and artistic skill to pull off. Yet it breaks the illusion immediately, so most people see it as bad CG even though it required exponentially more skill to pull off than anything in Game of Thrones or Jurassic Park.

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[–] rooee 9 years ago

These threads always amuse me because it seems like some people are trying to pass off the original trilogy as some kind of quaint, independent movie built solely from hand-crafted models. But the fact is the LotR films used stacks of CGI, some of which (I'm looking at you, Moria) looked - to put it kindly - a bit dodgy. That's okay; it doesn't detract from the films.

Perhaps the Hobbit movies do rely on more CGI, but I'm only aware of this because I'm informed through threads like this. I honestly can't tell where the modelwork/makeup ends and the CGI starts in The Hobbit. It's cutting edge, as far as my eyes are concerned!

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[–] BluthSitwell 9 years ago



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[–] Hecate-3 8 years ago

Even though I knew about it before I watched The Return of the King, it wasn't until the movie ended and I started thinking back on it that I finally remembered that Gollum had been a CGI creation. I don't know whether it was because the technical aspects of the CGI were handled better, because Andy Serkis gave such a brilliant performance, or because I was too wrapped up in the story to think about it, but while I was watching the movie, I accepted Gollum as real.

I never forgot for a second that Azog was a CGI creation. Never once through all three extended editions.

_____
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.

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[–] lysergic-acid 9 years ago

I agree that the CGI in the film definitely takes a huge team with a lot of expertise and skill to create.

However, just because goblins/orcs aren't real, that doesn't mean they're necessarily CGI. Animatronics, prosthetics and other practical effects can, and have, been used to create fictional creatures in the past.

Additionally, I think there's legitimate reason to criticize the quality of the CGI in this film. It's not the case that, just because it takes a lot of skill and work, we're not allowed to offer a critique from the audience's perspective.

At the end of the day, it's the realism and emotional impact of the end result that matters, not the underlying implementation. I don't care if you chose to go the practical effects route or CGI route. It should look good and convincing. If that can't be done with CGI, don't use CGI. If it can't be done with practical effects, don't use practical effects. Sure, some leeway can be given for low budget films (though there are some surprisingly well crafted VFX in indie films these days), but this is a film with an enormous budget. It's perfectly reasonable to demand absolutely convincing CGI in a post-LOTR Peter Jackson megablockbuster. We've seen such perfection in the past on his films as well as those by other big name directors. It's not as if we're judging an 80s film by standards that were impossible to achieve at the time of its filming.

I.e. just because it takes an incredible amount of work and technical proficiency (in engineering, in manufacturing process design, in modern QA processes, etc.) just to produce a modern car with mediocre reliability, that doesn't mean we can't be disappointed with a car that doesn't have the best reliability by contemporary standards, especially if it's a top-of-the-line luxury car.

In the case of the Hobbit, my only real complaint is against the way Azog was rendered. LOTR had us accustomed to much more realistic-looking orcs (possibly because the closeups were all done with actors wearing prosthetics in that trilogy), and it seems like well lit white-skinned orcs are particularly hard to render realistically in CGI. I found the unconvincing rendering quite distracting for much of the film.

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[–] Hecate-3 8 years ago

Well said. I would like to say that I thought Smaug looked excellent. Jackson made a fool out of him unnecessarily, but in terms of pure appearance, I thought he was spot on.

_____
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.

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[–] BluthSitwell 9 years ago

you are completly wrong, gollum and smaug was well made, most if not everything else was mediocre... Why? Because of three things, firstly it simply looked fake and artificial... The goblins looks like computer animated beings, not like flesh and bone... secondly, there was SO much of it. If you need to use cgi then stil today you have to be smart about it, if everything is oversaturated with computer generated images then everything just starts to look like a Cartoon.
Thirdly... The combination of 48 fps and cgi was a very, very bad idea... Because Jackson is a technically very lazy director, he is not the man with the creativity and respect for the genre to experiment with 48 fps... Especially not with an already established and loved Universe...

The cgi wasnt "bad" it was just overused, lazy and mixed with the aweful cinematopgraphy and constant use if green screen landscapes just gave one of the overall most fake and artifial movie experiances on my life.
Almost every frame in lotr felt like a fantastical but nonetheless a real place, almost NONE of the frames in the hobbit looked like it was real.

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[–] Tarquin_Q_Zanzibar 9 years ago

"The goblins looks like computer animated beings, not like flesh and bone"

Well it's hard not to take that view. When did you last see a flesh and blood Goblin? I believe I can be so presumptuous as to take your answer to that question as read; you, like all of us, have never seen a Flesh-and-Blood Goblin. And therein lies the problem; any Goblin that looks like something that most of us (I suspect) would imagine one to look like would have to be CGI, and we would know it was CGI, no matter how well done. Because the only way to simulate a "Flesh-and-Blood" Goblin would be to have actors in heavy prosthetics, various extensions etc, and you would be hard pressed to find enough actors or extras whose natural proportions are extreme enough to pass for "Goblin" - hence, we will always know when something is actually a human in disguise, no matter how well done.

So essentially, we end up in a situation where we cannot help but recognise that Goblin X is CGI and that Goblin Y is a person in prosthetics/make-up, no matter how well either is done. Personally, I cannot help but feel that this makes it very difficult to be completely objective about the standard of reality - the very fact that we know something does not and cannot exists tilts one's perception from the start. Some are more willing, others less so, to engage in some suspension of disbelief in these matters.

"secondly, there was SO much of it"

The Goblins in particular seem to have attracted more derision regarding the CGI than anything else, and I suspect that your comment gets to the heart of it. I don't see anything much wrong with the rendering of the individual Goblins, but that whole underground sequence really come across like a scene from a Video game - with all the graphics settings on Ultra! Peter Jackson loves his long swooping diving, constantly moving tracking action shots, but since camera-work cues, by the risky trick of allowing the viewer to see that they are watching a "film", can actually heighten the impression of reality (think camera shake when a heavy beast passes, deliberately out-of focus backgrounds simulating telephoto lens, blood spattering on the lens etc) perhaps "documentary-style" hand-held camera simulation - as indeed Jackson did to some extent with the fight against the Troll in Moria in the first LOTR movie - may have served a great deal better, were the aim realism.

But I suspect that Jackson simply indulged himself in the Goblin routine, thus everything is so over the top that the whole scene, the whole sequence screams artificiality.

I though Azok the Defiler was great though.

"Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw..."

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[–] detroit-velvet-smooth 9 years ago

When did you last see a flesh and blood Goblin?

The Lord of the Rings movies where they were people in suits. They looked real because they were real, as in real physical outfits. Its the same reason that the zombies in the Walking Dead look so good, because they're real people with real make up and effects on them. They also get away with using lots of clever CGI in that show because the real actors make it blend better, something the LOTR did really well.

This is a really simple first year film school concept, that the human eye is exceptional at picking out the artificial over the real, including the artificial fantasy versus the practical effect fantasy.

Its not about whether goblins and orcs exist, its about whether the human brain accepts that it looks like its real. The goblins from LOTR look like they could be real, as in someone says they discovered an enormous mine in the earth and it turned out there was this horde of goblins inside. Meanwhile the ones in The Hobbit don't look like they could exist in our world. They look like CGI characters.

Its really simple. And the reason everyone gets so bent out of shape over the CGI goblins is because the entire LOTR trilogy had almost entirely practical effect goblins and orcs, and they might just have been all practical effects.

Look at these two pictures:

The Hobbit (2012): http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/12/124575/2802512-Azogcloseup.jpg

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): http://www.whoateallthepies.tv/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/uruk-hai.jpg

If you claim you can't tell which one is a real person in a real outfit you're lying.

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[–] Tarquin_Q_Zanzibar 9 years ago

"If you claim you can't tell which one is a real person in a real outfit you're lying"

It seems that you have either responded to the wrong person or you just didn't understand anything I wrote. I was quite explicit in asserting that one always knows when it's just a person in a suit. Clearly a 9 foot blue ogre with a sword for an arm and eyes a yard apart is NOT a guy in a suit and the best CGI in the world can't make one believe it is.

"Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw..."

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[–] BluthSitwell 9 years ago

Then youre either not creative enough or youre extremly uncritical.

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[–] Tarquin_Q_Zanzibar 9 years ago

What a curious non sequitur. But do you have anything to say?

"Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw..."

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[–] BluthSitwell 9 years ago

Nope, because what Detroit-velvet-smooth advocate is a proven scientific fact... Google "uncanny valley effect".

Besides saying that a 9 foot tall orc has to be created with cgi proves that your either uncritical or uncreative.

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[–] Tarquin_Q_Zanzibar 9 years ago

Saying that "Besides saying that a 9 foot tall orc has to be created with cgi proves that your either uncritical or uncreative" is deceptive. Because ofc I said no such thing. Og course you can have a 9 foot Orc played by a human with limb extensions and prosthetics. But if you imagine that such a construct could fulfil the exact role the CGI version does with greater realism, then it's not that you lack imagination, but have rather too much of it.

And thanks for the tip, but I am already aware of the nature of "the Uncanny Valley". I'm not quite sure how relevant the concept is when it comes to the creation of creatures that are not actually supposed to represent any real life form though.

"Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw..."

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[–] BluthSitwell 9 years ago

You seem unable to understand this, i have wasted enough time on dense imdb board members, take some time to educate yourself.
Laters bro.

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[–] Hecate-3 8 years ago

The goblin king looked ridiculous because his design was horrible. Whether done as CGI or prosthetics, that design was going to reek.

Prosthetics can work great. The goblins of Moria looked fantastic. They looked real.

CGI can also work great. Gollum in The Lord of the Rings looked so real I completely forgot that he wasn't until after the credits rolled. Smaug looked equally real.

Azog looked CGI. The goblin king looked like he was designed and modeled by a legally blind child with cerebral palsy and the IQ of a turnip. The utter lack of realism in the action sequences was just icing on the cake.

_____
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.

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[–] maxconran 9 years ago

I think they went for the philosophy of CGI>Makeup. I'd agree in saying we just aren't there yet with the CGI to pull it off, give it maybe 3 more years I reckon

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[–] Tenakoto 9 years ago

They looked amazing.

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[–] Drevnibor 10 years ago

I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a visually stunning movie with first-rate CGI. The HFR made everything look cleaner, sharper, and more convincing IMO.

Stunning CGI?
Like this ''stunning'' CGI horses that didn't need to be CGI anyway?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/board/nest/224264107 i3_zpsef8a8d17.png

Underrated films:
http://www.imdb.com/list/OpdE-nAVa5k/

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[–] Meats_Of_Evil 10 years ago

It ruined the experience for me. Considering the amount of detail that went into every LOTR film, the extensive use of marvelous makeup and realtime locations, this film didn't felt immersive at all. Clearly fake CGI dwarves in the beginning, the freaking bad guys looked ridiculously fake... It just dragged my experience down way too much.

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[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]

[–] DrakulaVG 10 years ago

Azog looked awesome

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[–] darkzero 10 years ago

I thought some of the CGI was impressive (namely the Mountain Trolls and Gollum) while some of it was Sy-Fy Channel-caliber (the Wargs and rabbits, for instance). Azog would have been more convincing played by a human actor in makeup. (E.g. Lurtz in FOTR.) The worst and most distracting part, however, was the excessive use of CGI backgrounds. Overall, I thought the effects were average.

Movies are looking more and more like video games. I think the reason much of today's audience are excepting of excessive use of digital effects, is because they have grown up on video games and CGI-laden movies, and, subconsciously, have become acclimated to it. They have been bombarded with such a steady diet of digital imagery, that it has become "real" to them, and they have lost touch with what true realism actually looks like.

To see the only real monster, one must only look in the mirror.

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[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]

[–] superlustfulamanda94 10 years ago

...
This was beautiful I gotta say.

I could never have said it better.

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[–] mike_elston 9 years ago

Movies are looking more and more like video games.

My feelings exactly. Worst of all was the escape from the hall of the Goblin King. The FX were more like an over-the-top video game than a film purporting to be a serious fantasy movie, more like someone let a child play with a new toy than a serious director trying to help us believe what we were seeing.

Throughout the LOTR trilogy, the FX were superb, the make-up entirely credible. Not so here. Part of the problem is that too many episodes didn't have Tolkien's great story-telling to rely on and rein in the screenwriters' overheated imaginations. They were wild invention to spin out his little story of The Hobbit into a Lord-Of-The-Rings-style epic. It was never so.

Saddest thing is, it could still have been ok if the screenwriters hadn't let their enthusiasm for the medium run away with them.

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[–] UncriticallyAcclaimed 10 years ago

Yeah very bad CG for a movie with a budget this big. Prometheus had amazing CG and a lower budget. I also didn't like how cliche The Hobbit was. It was like, too cliche.

http://uncriticallyacclaimed.blogspot.com

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[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]

[–] UncriticallyAcclaimed 10 years ago

Literally EVERYTHING. The way everything happened, from dialogue to story direction. Interactions. Editing. Directing.

http://uncriticallyacclaimed.blogspot.com

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[–] EnglishSummer 10 years ago

I do not see any examples in this post of terrible visual effects.

I see movies.

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[–] UncriticallyAcclaimed 10 years ago

Did you watch the movie? They are pretty apparent throughout.

http://uncriticallyacclaimed.blogspot.com

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[–] marousha_n 10 years ago

I felt exactly the same way, the dwarves looked horribly fake, so did the monsters. This happens when you stop using awesome makeup and use cheap CGI. I hope the next one will be better.

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[–] MattGuyOR 10 years ago

Just re-watched the extended edition blu-ray on my 10 foot screen and although I agree that I miss the LOTR realism, I thought it looked great. I never saw it in the 48 frames version.

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[–] By-TorX-1 10 years ago

The OP is totally right and I don't understand why The Lord of the Rings still looks so much more visually impressive than The Hobbit given its age, but it does. In The Hobbit the scenes with the rabbit-drawn chariot look totally fake, as do the Dwarves' noses - you can see that they are clearly prosthetics.

I sleep now.

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[–] uncreativeperson7 9 years ago

The dwarfs were done with makeup and prosthetics, but please do continue on about the filmmakers using "cheap CGI" to create them. I'd appreciate a good laugh.

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[–] kamps89 10 years ago

How are the visuals bad...? Are you *beep* blind?
Yes 48 fps is terrible, but watch the 24 fps Bluray version and say again the visuals are bad.

This movie is enchanting, and has excellent visuals.

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[–] AndromedaRoach 10 years ago

The CG characters would look great in a completely fake setting like Avatar, but not here. We've been waiting a long time for a non-cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit, and now we're still waiting.

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[–] Drevnibor 10 years ago

What?
Like this?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/board/nest/224264107

Underrated films:
http://www.imdb.com/list/OpdE-nAVa5k/

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[–] diablogtr7 10 years ago

Dude, watching it on Blu Ray I was literally STUNNED at how good the CGI was.

Especially the most subtle facial expressions on Azog and Gollum, I was stunned, and I don't impress easily.

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[–] UncriticallyAcclaimed 10 years ago

I watched the blu ray version and was still unimpressed. You should watch Prometheus if you thought The Hobbit was good, Diablogtr7.

http://uncriticallyacclaimed.blogspot.com