RE: Modern Visual Effects In Film - Is There Too Much Reliance On Computer Generated Imagery (CGI)?
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
Acting in front of a green screen could be similar to acting in the theater if the director were to make use of enough props to help give the actors enough to work with. Sadly that often doesn't seem to be the case much of the time, with actors too often complaining that they had no idea or the setting or situation when they were in front of the green screen.
In theory I have nothing against CGI. Far too often it seems like directors forget about the story and try to explain away everything with CGI or distract us, or they just get so caught up in the CGI that they themselves forget about making the rest of the movie good. But this has been a problem since even the very early days of CGI. Star Trek The Motion Picture, eh?
Great point @dbooster about the parallels with theatre, and yes there is no reason why a decent director can not create that type of working environment for an actor filming a CGI heavy scene. I can imagine that what you say is true in that actors often complain they had no idea of the setting for the CGI scene when filming it, although they should have had a copy of the full script by that stage.
Yes as previously mentioned in my comment to @harbiter directors and producers seem to be less interested these days in storytelling and are too interested in characters and CGI. You're right in that it has been a long standing issue but it has now reached a new height I would say, these days the story seems far less relevant than it should be, which is annoying for us folk who enjoy a good story above anything else.
This is pretty much why my favorite films tend to be 70s films. Before CGI became a buzzword, before the studios started to gobble each other up and enforce their money above all creed, back when daring directors still had control and story was everything.
It's so refreshing to meet other people who know what's going on in this world. You are absolutely right, money now rules everything in our society and not just the film industry. It's a great pity of course, and for me personally it's a tragedy to see the way the film industry has gone. Experimentalism, originality and autonomy is sucked out of the industry when all you now have are global film companies and media giants devouring everything for their own dominance and profit. And with that the once thriving creativity the film industry used to be relied on for is gone. So too are the stories.