OPINION: Don't Knock CGI: It's Everywhere – You Just Don't Notice It

The following is an article written by Oscar Nominee Andrew Whitehurst, who worked on the Visual Effects department for 'Ex Machina'. I'm not in the habit of re-posting content from other sites, but this is an exception. This is a first-hand perspective that would lose it's impact if re-written by a third party. Here it is.

Originally posted to The Guardian.

Andrew Whitehurst

Friday 26 February 2016

I’m nominated for an Oscar for Ex Machina’s visual effects, but the increasing sophistication and falling costs of CGI means almost all movies feature it – and it’s no longer the scapegoat for shoddy work elsewhere.

‘No longer are they committed to choices made on a rainy location; with CGI it can all be altered at a later date’

Visual effects are not new. They’ve been integral to cinema from the start, from Georges Méliès’s 1902 film A Trip to the Moon to Citizen Kane; from Star Wars to, well, Star Wars again. But unlike other departments such as costume design or sound mixing, the technology that drives VFX advances quickly. This innovation is directly reflected on screen, and when a film seems shoddy, it’s the new and unfamiliar which are often blamed.

Computer-generated imagery has been the technology pushing change in VFX for the past 20 years. The term is something of a misnomer: these effects are no more created by a computer than Microsoft Word creates the modern novel. Its popularity with film-makers stems from its ability to allow directors and producers to defer making creative decisions until post-production. No longer are they committed to choices made on a rainy location; with CGI it can all be altered at a later date. The temptation, irresistible to some, then becomes to create and tweak as much of a film as possible in post-production.

The anti-CGI backlash, which is really a reaction against poorly conceived CGI, rather than the form itself, stems from such overuse and misapplication. No one complains about the mountain of well-planned and well-executed CGI, because no one’s attention was drawn to the fact that it was CGI in the first place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the studios’ publicists are now frequently keen to emphasise how much of a film was shot “for real”, and play down the use of CGI on a production. A cursory glance through the credits of the film will tell you how true those claims are.

This year, though, is a little different. The blockbusters are bigger than ever, but smaller films are now also beginning to make extensive and innovative use of VFX. The Oscar VFX nominees this year are a bleak existential western, a British indie about the nature of consciousness, a pop-art feminist action road movie, a science-fiction adventure that’s heavy on the science and Star Wars (again).

Three factors have facilitated the change: film-makers are increasingly comfortable working with VFX, computers and software are increasingly sophisticated and costs are coming down. The first computer I used professionally, in 1996, had a processor eight times slower than my phone has now, and cost $10,000. We have come a long way. Today’s artists have grown alongside the technology, and experience in making good decisions means fewer expensive repairs late in post-production. Not only has the place of VFX in film production become ever more central, so has its global footprint expanded.

Double Negative, the company for which I work, had around 60 employees in 2002 when I joined. It now has more than 1,000 – in London, Vancouver and Singapore. Most other large VFX companies have seen similar increases in scale and expansion around the globe. Overseas offices become increasingly necessary when differing tax breaks worldwide require post-production work to be located advantageously to the production’s balance sheet.

The demand for spectacle-heavy franchise movies shows no sign of diminishing, and that work will continue to require huge numbers of people, many of whom will increasingly be in the newer tech economies. At the same time, the greater adoption of VFX by more modest films, often with innovative creative or technical requirements, suggests that its established centres – such as the US and UK – will continue to grow.

When Star Wars wins the best visual effects Oscar on Sunday, it will look to the casual observer as if it is business as usual: huge-budget blockbusters continue to dominate VFX. The truth is now a little more interesting.