Why Is CGI Quality So Good 20 Years Ago, But It’s Bad Now?

Terminator 2, is considered one of the few film franchises whose second was better than the first. One of the main reasons for this situation is shown to be the mastery in the use of CGI technology. T-1000 The android named is seen behind bars in one scene. The audience, who until then had been accustomed to characters smashing or bending the bars like Cüneyt Arkın, were horrified when the T-1000 almost liquefied and passed through the bars. This is something no one has ever seen before.

After that Jurassic Park, Avatar Then, perhaps the series in which CGI was most successful, Lord of the Rings, showed us the full capabilities of CGI. Afterwards, things got worse and we started to encounter worse and worse visuals. Even fan edits overshadow some of the CGI. Since CGI is not going anywhere, it is necessary to talk about the problems of CGI.

First of all, what is this CGI?

CGI, Computer Generated Imagery A technology that has an expansion like: In Turkish, it is Computer Generated Imaging. It is basically based on combining computer-generated images with real images. In a sense, we can say that it is an advanced version of green screen technology.

CGI technology is basically three important advantages is available. First, it can reduce costs considerably. Secondly, it makes it possible to do things that we cannot see under normal conditions. Thirdly, it can be used at any point desired.

Despite these advantages, CGI is one of the most frequently discussed or criticized topics recently. This is more because of the CGI technology itself. how it is used stands out as. CGI is a tool at the end of the day, and like all tools it serves the purposes of its user.

The first reason is studios wanting to make more money with cheaper labor.

Experts or the most talented people in not only CGI, but in general all branches of visual effects, moved to the USA and the EU due to the demand of these technologies. Later, after more people trained themselves in this field, studios started to benefit from various incentives and to pay less money Technologies such as CGI started to be produced in countries such as China, Taiwan and India. Visuals created by teams that are not skilled or experienced enough cannot exceed a certain level.

The importance of CGI in productions has changed.

Some movies are completely CGI festival CGI technology is now generally considered among the main components in productions. Even what we think of as a normal cafe can now be built with CGI, and no set can be built.

The situation was different when CGI technology first appeared, CGI is very serious to limitations had. Taking Jurassic Park as an example, dinosaurs were running around thanks to CGI, but in close-up animatronic robots was being used. CGI was used to support the image that the dinosaurs we see are not just robots.

Nobody takes the laws of physics seriously.

The Matrix. The legendary film, in which it was logical that the laws of physics could be bent and CGI was used only as a complement for this purpose, showed how the rules of physics could be broken. In the movies that followed to almost everything The CGI touch has begun.

As a result, films began to appear that did not care about concepts such as inertia, action-reaction, and resonance. If the movie we are watching is not a production like The Matrix, which clearly shows that it is different from the rules of our world, the audience started to say, “No way, it can’t do that anymore.”

Because a person changing magazines in the air while jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper does not exist in our world. (Meanwhile The scene in the Fast and Furious movie is not CGI.)

The increase in image quality makes the CGI poorer.

That’s how CGI technology first came out 4K, HFR Technologies like this were not around. Today, as image quality increases, the problems in CGI become more clearly evident. When this includes teams that don’t know how to write CGI, things can get even more complicated.

Under normal circumstances, CGI technology you want to keep. For example, you use CGI in low-light scenes, foggy scenes, or rainy scenes so that the visuals appear so artificial that they are not obvious. As resolution increases, CGI lags behind.

The color tones of the movies also do not help CGI technology at all.

One of the movies color palette It happens, it should happen anyway. If we consider that the narrative has a certain visual language and the color palette is a part of it, we see that color palettes are important.

In productions that focus too much on certain tones and are far from natural light, CGI becomes even more glaring because we add artificial color tones and lights to an already artificial visual. double artificiality It also seems to be of poorer quality. The color palette of many lazy movies is Pumpkin Spice Latte colors… No joke, one of the color palettes above belongs to The Hunger Games and the other one belongs to Pumpkin Spice Latte.

If I’m going to eat rice pudding, I like to sprinkle cinnamon on it. If there is too much cinnamon, the taste of rice pudding becomes bad. It’s not about rice pudding here, you get the idea.

We can understand that we are in the “Uncanny Valley”.

Uncanny Valley Or if you think it’s cooler to use English in a sentence, there is a concept called Uncanny Valley. Basically, this is the name given to the fact that we feel uncomfortable when we see things that look very human but are not human.

For example, robot Mughal We have no problem with it, because we can clearly see that it is a robot. On the other hand, in the movie Simone Cameron Diaz He is not a real person, but no one is bothered by him. Also think about the animatronics in the Hazelnut Museum in Giresun. This uncanny valley is why they sound like something out of a horror movie.

The same thing happens in cinema and we see things that look like reality but that we feel is not real We get disturbed by things. This discomfort increases even more in films where CGI is produced with lower quality and used with weaker techniques. We attribute this to bad CGI.

Yes, audiences love to see CGI, but what they want to see is quality CGI. Better scripts, better used CGI, better narration will be more helpful in keeping cinema the entertainment we love, rather than overloading on CGI just because the audience wants it. Otherwise, Sir Ian McKellen, who had to act with cardboard dwarfs in front of a green screen on the Hobbit set, will not be the only one crying about the state of cinema.