Smoke and Mir­rors – Why the bat­tle between prac­ti­cal effects and CGI isn’t as real as you think

It seems as though in recent years the pen­du­lum has swung away from dig­i­tal effects, with audi­ences increas­ing­ly reject­ing CGI in favour of more tra­di­tion­al, prac­ti­cal spe­cial effects. Not accord­ing to Bryan Cur­tis, who argued in the New York­er last year that the main rea­son why prac­ti­cal effects are sud­den­ly hip again is also the grub­bi­est: ​“They’re a piece of the swag we call ​‘fan service’.”

Accord­ing to Cur­tis, while many direc­tors still pre­fer prac­ti­cal effects, they have effec­tive­ly become a way to lure audi­ences in by appeal­ing to their sense of cin­e­mat­ic nos­tal­gia. ​“At one time,” he says, ​“the stark light­ing effects of the Ger­man Expres­sion­ists were the visu­al rage. Lat­er, it was the heli­copter shot or the zoom. Any new tool, once used promis­cu­ous­ly, becomes a cliché. As time goes by, a direc­tor redis­cov­ers the tool, and what was once cliché becomes an homage to a dis­tant and more cul­tured time.”

Before we go any fur­ther, let’s clar­i­fy a few terms:

Spe­cial effects (SFX) hap­pen on set dur­ing prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy in real-time, or dur­ing pro­duc­tion and include things like smoke, wind, make-up and blood effects.

Visu­al effects (VFX) are shot sep­a­rate­ly then added in post-pro­duc­tion where they are com­pos­it­ed or edit­ed in to the film lat­er and include things like minia­tures, explo­sions and green-screen.

Prac­ti­cal effects can be con­sid­ered SFX or VFX, and are when the effects are made using real life mate­ri­als like rub­ber, wood, steel and smoke.

Dig­i­tal effects can only be con­sid­ered VFX as they occur dur­ing post-production.

VFX pro­duc­er and indus­try vet­er­an Tom Hor­ton, who most recent­ly worked on the NBC series Emer­ald City believes that, ​“all this talk about going back to prac­ti­cal effects is just PR – we’ve always used prac­ti­cal effects.” Hor­ton says that while dig­i­tal effects are con­stant­ly evolv­ing, they remain expen­sive and time-con­sum­ing to per­fect, and that a com­bi­na­tion of the old and new tricks will often yield the most impres­sive results.

For almost 40 years, Leigh Took has been burn­ing down minia­ture land­marks, cre­at­ing won­drous sets and crea­tures at Mattes & Minia­tures, work­ing on every­thing from Bat­man to Band of Broth­ers. ​“Our over­ar­ch­ing approach to visu­al effects hasn’t changed” says Took, ​“it’s still about using the right tools and tech­niques to achieve the director’s vision, to cre­ate real­is­tic, con­vinc­ing effects in a cost-effec­tive way, whether these tech­niques are tra­di­tion­al and in-cam­era [such as minia­tures and prac­ti­cal effects], or dig­i­tal.” The dif­fer­ence, then, is that now there are sim­ply more and bet­ter tools avail­able, and indeed the best results often come from util­is­ing both methods.

Of course, tech­nol­o­gy is not the only thing that’s con­stant­ly evolv­ing. Audi­ence demand and engage­ment lev­els change all the time. For Hor­ton, how­ev­er, it’s the approach to cin­e­mat­ic sto­ry­telling that’s see­ing the biggest change. While it’s tempt­ing to explore new pos­si­bil­i­ties, he feels that over­ly dynam­ic cam­er­a­work is mak­ing cer­tain films dif­fi­cult for view­ers to engage with and ulti­mate­ly believe in. ​“I found X‑Men Apoc­a­lypse just too much,” he says. ​“There were some incred­i­bly inno­v­a­tive sequences, but I found myself over­whelmed by some of the big­ger destruc­tion sequences, and so a lit­tle dis­con­nect­ed from the characters.”

These days, pro­duc­ers are tak­ing more care to ensure that most of what we see on screen is actu­al­ly filmable. Hor­ton explains: ​“We’re mind­ful that while we can shoot some­thing fast, excit­ing or oth­er­world­ly, we have to shoot with a real­is­tic, plau­si­ble cam­era per­spec­tive.” So while com­put­ers can help make the impos­si­ble seem pos­si­ble, it’s still best to stick with a prac­ti­cal approach when it comes to shoot­ing things like explo­sions, fires and even archi­tec­ture – and it all comes down to a phe­nom­e­non that you can’t even touch: light.

Took agrees: ​“The way light rays hit and inter­act with sur­faces is incred­i­bly com­pli­cat­ed. Authen­tic light­ing is sim­ple to achieve in nature.” While work­ing on 2014’s The Mon­u­ments Men, Took used a 1:8 scale minia­ture of the build­ings so that his team could posi­tion the mod­els at the cor­rect angle to the sun, thus match­ing the live action. ​“The action and minia­ture back­grounds are then com­pos­it­ed togeth­er, with the matched nat­ur­al light­ing to cre­ate stun­ning­ly real­is­tic back­grounds the audi­ence doesn’t even ques­tion. Real flames are acci­den­tal in nature – using CGI to cre­ate a sim­i­lar effect can take a huge amount of resources. There are so many oppor­tu­ni­ties to get hung up on a cer­tain flame lick not look­ing organ­ic enough, and it eas­i­ly can look not quite right because the shot has been so overworked.”

Today, while audi­ences crave more ​‘real­is­tic’ crea­tures, visu­al effects and cin­e­matog­ra­phy, direc­tors and pro­duc­ers are demand­ing more and more from dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. ​“It’s the unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions of CGI that caus­es the most prob­lems,” insists Hor­ton. ​“We build the real world in our com­put­ers. We com­mit as much time and effort as a prac­ti­cal spe­cial­ist does to their mod­els, or a cos­tumer design­er to the wardrobe and yet pro­duc­ers think it’s some­how eas­i­er to make changes digitally.”

Some­times it just doesn’t make sense to go hi-tech. Hor­ton also believes that the overuse of green-screen isn’t serv­ing the indus­try well: ​“Light­ing is prob­a­bly the most crit­i­cal and com­plex process when cre­at­ing a pho­to­re­al­is­tic CGI envi­ron­ment. In the real world, the way the light from a win­dow or a bulb bounces and reflects off the var­i­ous sur­faces in the room has an impact on the over­all ambi­ence. It’s very dif­fi­cult and time-con­sum­ing repli­cate that with CGI. Also, green-screen sets are impos­si­ble to light sub­tly as the green needs to be lit with a bright, flat light. While it is pos­si­ble to sim­u­late envi­ron­men­tal light sources on a green screen set, unless you’re metic­u­lous, the live action mate­r­i­al will be miss­ing a lot of sub­tle inter­ac­tiv­i­ty that light caus­es in reality.”

Mau­rice Patel at Autodesk argues that ​“we are very, very far from being able to just cre­ate effects at the push of a but­ton. New for­mats and medi­ums are hit­ting the mar­ket all the time.” He’s par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the direc­tion that vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty is tak­ing as part of the enter­tain­ment expe­ri­ence. Patel agrees that demand is spi­ralling from both the pro­duc­ers and con­sumers of enter­tain­ment: ​“Pro­duc­tion process­es are high­ly labour inten­sive and cost­ly, and com­plex­i­ty con­tin­ues to increase as con­sumer demands con­tin­ue to raise the bar­ri­er on what is required.”

Dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy is evolv­ing faster than ever, but prac­ti­cal meth­ods are catch­ing up. Devel­op­ments in tech­niques like laser cut­ting and 3D print­ing mean that mock­ing up a mod­el is now much quick­er and cheap­er, while also afford­ing the direc­tor more oppor­tu­ni­ty to play. ​“In my expe­ri­ence, direc­tors gen­uine­ly love work­ing with phys­i­cal mod­els,” says Took. ​“There’s more free­dom to exper­i­ment with shots, moves, angles on the mod­els. With a phys­i­cal mod­el to play with you inevitably stum­ble upon ​‘hap­py acci­dents’ – beau­ti­ful shots that haven’t been sto­ry­board­ed in advance.”

Anoth­er tech­nique called pho­togram­me­try is also being used in minia­tures to cre­ate more organ­ic tex­tures. For 2015’s Vic­tor Franken­stein, Took built 1:36 scale minia­ture steam cranes, carts, rail­way tracks and roads focus­ing on organ­ic tex­tures such as wood, sand and dirt. They then took a series of hi-res images of the mod­els in bright, even light­ing from mul­ti­ple angles. Spe­cial soft­ware stitch­es these images togeth­er to recon­struct the object shape for manip­u­la­tion in post-pro­duc­tion. This, Took says, ​“gives 3D artists objects and tex­tures to play with instead of start­ing from scratch.”

Black buck is anoth­er exam­ple of hybrid effects, where a scaled struc­ture is built and paint­ed black and then be used to inter­act organ­i­cal­ly with nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non like dust and debris. Hor­ton says that prac­ti­cal ele­ments will always be used because, ​“while you can trick the eye momen­tar­i­ly with com­put­er effects, you can’t fool the audi­ence for longer shots of more than say sev­en to 10 sec­onds.” For a film with extend­ed dig­i­tal scenes the effects, tex­tures, imagery and sim­u­la­tions have to be pho­to-real. Hor­ton notes that Disney’s 2016 film The Jun­gle Book fea­tures, ​“some stun­ning crea­ture, foliage, water inter­ac­tion and gen­er­al organ­ic CGI. There was nowhere for the CGI to hide as there was very lit­tle live action in the movie.”

So, will the mar­riage of prac­ti­cal and dig­i­tal effects con­tin­ue to pro­duce beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered, believ­able char­ac­ters and set­tings, or will the rise of unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions and itchy click-fin­gers con­tin­ue to get in the way of good sto­ry­telling? Patel doesn’t see the down­side of dig­i­tal – he believes the future is bright: ​“Print­ing changed the nature of sto­ry­telling by expand­ing its scope out­side of direct human inter­ac­tion but it did not make it less ​‘human’. Dig­i­tal effects behave in a very sim­i­lar way.” It’s very unlike­ly that dig­i­tal effects will com­plete­ly negate the human aspect of sto­ry­telling, but ​“nei­ther will [they] save us from bad sto­ries,” Patel warns, ​“even though [they] can make great sto­ries even greater and give the sto­ry­tellers more freedom.”

Those work­ing across the VFX indus­tries under­stand the lim­i­ta­tions of keep­ing them sep­a­rate from each oth­er. Indeed, they are increas­ing­ly work­ing togeth­er, pool­ing their resources and com­bin­ing their exper­tise to cre­ate a whole new world of pos­si­bil­i­ties. The most imme­di­ate and per­haps great­est threat to film and tele­vi­sion are the unre­lent­ing, unre­al­is­tic demands of the mar­ket­ing jug­ger­naut, with Hol­ly­wood now in the game of mak­ing promis­es it sim­ply can­not con­sis­tent­ly deliv­er on.