I mean, just look at it! Well, it has got some pretty good CGI in the trailers but I noticed some poor ones too. Like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnapHA2OCoU Check out this video's 1.58 mark and the rest of the scenes. It's not terrible... But it's just poor to me.
The Occamy looks pretty cartoon-y, with its large eyes and bright colors.
shareThe CGI is in tone with the Harry Potter movies. It looks the same to me.
shareThe CGI in the Harry Potter movies was always pretty hit-and-miss IMO. Always state of the art, of course, but never game changing or anything. Just about everything they did, I felt like I'd seen better and I'd seen worse.
I'm not somebody who fetishizes practical effects or anything, I love seeing new innovations in CGI but Harry Potter was never really that groundbreaking and so sometimes the abundance of mostly standard CG effects just takes away the magic for me. One of the things that I liked about the third film was that they seemed to resort to it less often. I mean, there is obviously a ton of CGI in that movie, but stuff like Lupin's suitcase packing itself up, the guy spinning the spoon in the Leaky Cauldron, the chairs organizing themselves and the waiter's sleight of hand making the bottle disappear in the rag, and of course the animatronic shrunken heads....all practical and right up front where you could see their tangibility.
In the Yates movies, it felt like those little magical effects were more often done in the computer. Like all the objects flying around in Slughorn's house, the books floating in the library, Dumbledore's will unfolding itself. This looks like more of the same, with the CG plates flying around in a static shot. Hopefully it's more charming in the film but whenever that sequence shows up in the trailers it looks pretty bland to me. I look at that effect of the apple floating and something invisible eating it up and I mean...I guess it's okay. Doesn't wow me or anything, but it also doesn't blend in. Yates is a very conservative filmmaker and while in one sense that's a good thing because he doesn't blow things up all out of proportion, I also sometimes wish he was a little weirder and more distinctive or "handmade" in his approach to the magic. Maybe compositing in a real apple in stop-motion or time-lapse photography or something. Could have made for a funnier, quirkier, more amusing effect. You'd still know it was fake, but it'd be more interesting to look at than yet another slick-looking CG effect out of a million. I hope the film has some nice surprises.
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
"I look at that effect of the apple floating and something invisible eating it up and I mean...I guess it's okay"
It looks like a deliberate homage to the scene in PoA with the floating lollipop. I mean, Yates loves PoA.
Chamber of Secrets had ground breakibg CGI. Dobby, the flying car an basilisk. That movie came out in 2002. and dobby looked better there than in DH part 1 which came out in 2010.
shareHe looked better on DH, actually...
For me, the best CGI in the series is a tie between Prisoner and Prince. Both flawless in my eyes. The deathly hallows movies look great too, but some parts look rushed, like the whole fiend fire scene.
HBP had the advantage of being delayed for 8 months. I think that helped a bit to give it such a polished look. Deathly Hallows part 2, in contrast, needed some more work, particularly the scene you mentioned.
I think Goblet has pretty impressive CGI too. I always loved that dragon.
I don't agree. The basilisk looks worse in close ups. And Dobby is more refined in DH, although Kreacher looks even better.
shareAgree about Kreacher in DH1, technically probably the best creature effect they had IMO.
Don't agree about the Basilisk at all, personally, the close-ups still look fantastic to me precisely because they went with an animatronic instead of trying to pull it off with CG (though I think the animation is still quite good on it). I like Fawkes as well, both the puppet and CGI. The Aragog animatronic is less convincing, but somehow works for me in sort of a schlocky monster movie way and I like the animation on the CG spiders.
I don't know if I can go along with namik's idea that anything in COS was so groundbreaking, though, compared to what Spielberg, Lucas, Emmerich, Cameron etc were already up to. I can't say there's much difference there, it's just an extension of the developments in the 90s. How is the flying car sequence any more impressive or visually distinctive than the chase through Coruscant or Spider-Man's web-slinging or the chases in Minority Report? And I don't see how Dobby could be so groundbreaking in 2002 when he's not much (or any?) better looking than Jar Jar from three years prior or Yoda from earlier that year, and all were certainly less impressive than the Jurassic Park dinos. Then a month after COS's release Gollum completely blew the animation and rendering on Dobz out of the water anyway and represented a true next step in believable character animation and live-action compositing.
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
Rewatch Chamber of Secrets. The flying car is better than anything in Minority Report or the web slinging in Spider-Man which didn't age well. And Dobby is absolutelly on par with 2002 Gollum from The Two Towers.
Saying that Dobby looked like Jar Jar or that ugly CGI Yoda is a slap jn the face to the people who made the CGI in Chamber of Secrets. In my opinion, fhe special effects in Chamber of Secrets are ground breaking for it's time, and that scene with the Car and Basilisk are almost photot realistic.
And Dobby is absolutelly on par with 2002 Gollum from The Two Towers.
Yes :)
shareI second that. Hell no.
shareThan rewatch Harry Pottet and the Chamber of Secrets and The Two Towers.
shareI've seen both plenty of times, and I'm with the others, hell to the no
When you and your mom share the same memories of the backseat of your dad's impala...
Obviously, The Two Towers wins in this regard (and it is a much better movie too!)
It is pretty difficult to top Gollum in The Two Towers.... so, add another no.
shareI didnt say that dobby tops gollum, I just said these two cgi characters are on par
shareExcept they are not on par. The CGI in The Two Towers makes Columbus' (dull) Potter films look at least 5 years older by comparison.
shareExactly.... the first two HP had horrible CGI, even for the era. It was ridiculously poor, for such expensive films.
shareI dont know are you two trolls or haters, because chamber of secrets DID NOT have bad cgi. That movie had incredible CGI, go watch it again
shareI have watched CoS several times, the CGI (while a great improvement over SS/PS) was not very good. It is part of the reason, the props department has to built the basilisk, to be a mostly practical effect. There is a reason the HP him series has never been nominated in any of the technical categories. For a film series with a virtually unlimited budget, it have incredibly subpar CGI. Even in HBP and DH, it was still noticeable that the brooms were green-screen.
shareWhat are you talking about, almost every Harry Potter movie was nominated for best special effects, and Half Blood Prince was even nominated for cinematography
shareYou're both a little off in regards to Oscars...only POA and the DH movies were nominated for effects, but as you say HP was also nominated for other tech categories. I think modmazza is probably thinking of the fact that they never won.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for COS, I certainly wouldn't say the effects are horrible like others have said, but IMO you're overstating its achievements a bit. In 2002, even critics who absolutely loved the film criticized the CGI and particularly Dobby. Seem to remember Roeper calling him "waxy and herky-jerky" while giving the film a big thumbs-up. I mean, I think it's great that you admire the work on Dobby so much, I think he's pretty adorable and works well for the film, but to me he's pretty plastic-looking and the design leans more on the side of cartoon than a real creature. He's a lovely and fun creation, just not extraordinary and nothing really that new at the time. At best I would say his animation was about at the level of a Pixar character circa Monsters Inc. and the compositing in his scenes with Harry is about what I would have expected at that time.
I can't presume to know how well you remember 2002 or if you were active in film discussion, if so then surely you know how monumental it was when Gollum came on the scene. It was a shock wave through the industry, media, mainstream public attention, everybody instantly recognized that what WETA had done was seriously important work. Not the case with Dobby and personally I don't find it hard to see why watching the film and aware of everything else that had come before.
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
Sure I remember 2002. Especially because Lord of the Rings trilogy is my favorite film franchise of all time. But i rewatched all the Harry Potter movies like a week ago, and man the CGI in 3 scenes got me, the flying car, dobby and the basilisk. I really was shocked how good it looks 14 years later.
Just saw that Goblet of Fire was nominated for best art direction, can't believe that this movie was not nominated for CGI honestly.
Just went to Rotten Tomatoes to find someone who talks about the CGI in this movie, and after only 10 seconds I found this
Chamber Of Secrets is funnier and more exciting than the first Harry Potter movie, and adorned with some of the most stunning special effects ever.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-147569/Harry-Potter-And-The-Chamber-Of-Secrets-Cert-PG.html
Point taken! There's more praise than I suggested but I still take issue with the idea that the effects were groundbreaking in any way, especially compared to what LOTR was doing at the same time. What I'm getting at is that some movies are just in a category of their own, technically, whereas Potter always felt to me like even at its most complex it was working solidly and expertly within familiar parameters. Sometimes they would stumble with a mediocre effect like Grawp, sometimes they would be around the best version of something I had seen before like a dragon or a firestorm, but I can't recall a time where they made me think "Whoa, how did they do that??" aside from some of the intricate practical effects. There's probably a few CG things but it wasn't an ongoing trait of the films to really boldly push the technical envelope. Sometimes I wished it had been more often.
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
I personally think, the most effective CGI used in any of the Harry Potter films, was Voldemort's nose. Mainly, because it was so subtle compared to everything else in the series. It was not trying to a showstopper, like the Hungarian Horntail or Dumbledore's Firestorm, and yet it added so much to the character.
shareAgree, that was always such a terrific effect. I've always loved the CG and makeup on Voldemort, gave him such an iconic look without going overboard. He was always completely convincing.
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
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I'm with you there. IMO Order of the Phoenix has maybe the worst CGI besides the first one. There some things that get me wow when I rewatched the series one week ago, and that was the flying car from Chamber of the Secrets, Harry riding the Hipogrif from Prisoner of Azkaban, The dragon chase in Goblet of fire and the quiddich match in The Half Blood Prince. DH has ok CGI but nothing really that special.
shareYeah, the battle is still a little disappointing to me. There was such an opportunity to do so many interesting things there but it feels weirdly limited in scope to me for how big it is. It just kinda boiled down to a lot of pyrotechnics and chaotic computerized spectacle, and mostly all the same types and styles of wand magic that we'd seen. DH2 feels a lot to me like they took all the same effects that we'd seen throughout the series and just put it all in the same movie and that was pretty much the battle. I think the biggest new thing was the freezing/exploding/disintegrating for Bellatrix and Voldemort and I wasn't crazy about how that looked. Oh I like the shield, though, but technically even that we saw in Part 1.
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
Yeah, I agree, I'm also always shocked that Chamber and Phoenix didn't get nominated for Art Direction when some of Stuart Craig's most iconic work was in those two films. Goblet would have been very deserving of a visual effects nomination too, considering the ones that got in that year were King Kong, War of the Worlds, and Narnia which I don't think were wildly more impressive. Kong is such a weird winner to me because the mo-cap is so fantastic yet a lot of the compositing in the action scenes is actually kind of horrendous to look back on...
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
Just saw that Goblet of Fire was nominated for best art direction, can't believe that this movie was not nominated for CGI honestly.
I'd say Goblet deserved the Narnia spot. Seriously, some of the creatures on that movie look like something out of a PS2 game.
All in all, the most impressive CGI on the whole series has to be Prisoner of Azkaban. That movie deserved the award in 2005. Spiderman 2 has impressive effects, but some of the digital models they used in the action scene look pretty bad now, whereas Prisoner of Azkaban has aged gracefully.
I never said that Narnia had good VFX, just that it has more effects shots than GoF.
shareYou can have 3 times more effects in a movie, but that doesn't mean it's better
shareOscars can tend to look at these things in a superficial way, though. It's the common joke that "best" could be replaced with "most" in some categories, the way they award them lol. Most Visual Effects, Most Editing, Most Costume Design.
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If John Williams Scored Harry Potter 4-8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtnLz_q7EfU&list=PL6HqJLDCy3kZodnQ-NNewovSKPU4Q1dm4
That figures how Iñarritu won best director twice in a roll. Take out the long-shot shtick in Birdman, and it's pretty much a movie about a washed up actor rambling about "those damn superhero movies" and other people making obvious commentary on fame, art and life.
And though I liked The Revenant far more, it still had some very questionable direcorial choices.
Come on, Birdman is a masterpiece. Even without the one shot thing, it has a great story, great acting...and it's far more deep than just an actor who tries to be famous again.
shareI think there is always gonna be a risk vs. reward with these kind of films. This film looks like it's gonna have a massive amount of huge and small special affects. Yates is starting to crossover into the JJ Abrams, Michael Bay, Justin Lin, and Christopher Nolan schools of spectacular over substance. If you guys think all of that is gonna come at a cheap price, you're kidding yourselves. Would have thought Yates would have learned his lesson with the massively expensive Tarzan crashing and burning. The first Harry Potter may have lacked some cool CGI affects, but people loved them anyway. And most still were made with a respectable budget anyway. The trailer looks very cool to me considering there are special affects in almost every scene. Unless that was the entire movie shown in it, they'll probably be a lot more.
shareI can't presume to know how well you remember 2002 or if you were active in film discussion, if so then surely you know how monumental it was when Gollum came on the scene. It was a shock wave through the industry, media, mainstream public attention, everybody instantly recognized that what WETA had done was seriously important work. Not the case with Dobby.
I actually prefer Dobby in Chamber of Secrets, than the Dobby and Kreacher from Deathly Hallows. I don't know how to explain it, other than saying that Dobby felt more humanized in Chamber of Secrets. In Deathly Hallows, he looks like he's sickly pale, while I think Kreacher just looked bad.
shareThe CGI in the Harry Potter movies was always pretty hit-and-miss IMO. Always state of the art, of course, but never game changing or anything.
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