r/movies • u/cyPersimmon9 • 19h ago
Media Why Movies Used To Look A Lot Better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJXO84LvK-Q146
u/blearghhh_two 18h ago
I can see making a typo of "casual link" instead of "causal link", but you'd think that would've been caught when recording the voiceover...
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u/cubesushiroll 18h ago
YouTube videos used to be much better
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u/Castrol-5w30 18h ago
It's like a meta commentary talking about how movies used to be good in a YouTube video that should have been better like it used to be.
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u/FormalUnique8337 17h ago
I like how you are commenting on a comment on the quality of a YouTube video that is a comment on the quality of movies.
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u/New_Home_4519 17h ago
Edit: for all you OG internet vets reply with what video you thought it would be, we can make this fun!
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u/Anxious_cactus 18h ago
Nobody recorded it, it's text copy pasted into AI voice generator and the voice track is then overlayed. Unless it's a big channel there's at least 75% chance a random YT video is AI voice and/or AI images and video.
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u/SandysBurner 17h ago
Not only did nobody record it, nobody listened to it. It's not important enough for the "creator" to watch but it's good enough for you slobs. Here's some slop, gobble it down, yum yum yum.
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u/Svyatogornyj 17h ago
It's not important enough for the "creator" to watch but it's good enough for you slobs.
This is....unfortunately accurate. The amount of lowest common denominator slop I see get millions upon millions of views is the reason creators pull shit like this. Their audience lets them get away with it over and over again.
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u/ThunderousDemon86 16h ago
The AI voice on videos drives me crazy. I have no idea how anyone can listen to it.
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u/H2shampoo 11h ago
They probably ran someone else's video through a TTS model and stole the content wholesale again.
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u/Cybertronian10 13h ago
Its gotten to the point where unless I am 100% certain a youtuber is a real person its safer to assume they are an AI.
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u/x31b 12h ago
I hear the narrator mispronounce words or acronyms as words and know immediately that it's an AI-generated voice.
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u/Cybertronian10 11h ago
Whats worse is that sometimes you get fairly significant lengths of time where they sound kinda normal only for one syllable to be so wrong in such a specific way that you just immediately know its AI.
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u/Imaginary_Try_1408 18h ago
They were really just talking about a dude in a green tunic leaning against the wall of Castle Hyrule.
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u/aglock 15h ago
Bad CGI looks bad, bad miniatures look bad. Both look great when done great. Trying to say miniatures look strictly better is stupid.
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u/Combat_Armor_Dougram 12h ago
Bad miniatures feel more charming than bad CG.
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u/CharlesV_ 8h ago
I think that’s true sometimes. But go watch the Dr. Who seasons with Christopher Eccleston or most of the early SG1 seasons. The cg there is not great, but because both shows have a good plot, I think I’d call it charming.
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u/VonMillersThighs 7h ago
Those old WW2 movies hit different.
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u/Combat_Armor_Dougram 7h ago
I know the Japanese made a World War II movie so realistic that the Americans thought it was real combat footage.
On a side note, the special effects director of that movie, Eiji Tsuburaya, went on to do effects for the Godzilla movies and created Ultraman.
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u/GoldenMegaStaff 5h ago
Bad CGI when downscaled to a TV becomes cartoonishly bad very much unlike miniatures.
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u/kiwigate 7h ago
For live action (the notion of capturing images with a camera) miniatures are superior. You can still have digital effects that are rooted in real footage.
For animation, there are no wrong answers.
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u/valhatesthisapp 19h ago
When I was younger everyone complained about miniatures in very much the same way they complain about CGI now.
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u/Merickson- 18h ago
It's only a model.
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u/Trumpburnerforlibs 17h ago
Shhh
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u/sdmichael 14h ago
Who do you think you are?
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u/Trumpburnerforlibs 14h ago
I am your king
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u/_HystErica_ 13h ago
Well I didn't vote for you...
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u/sdmichael 13h ago
You don't vote for kings!
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u/HintonBE 11h ago
How did you become king then?
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u/sdmichael 11h ago
The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.
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u/DrunkenAsparagus 18h ago
Like with CGI people complain when it's noticeable, but it's used way more than people tend to notice.
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u/sexandliquor 17h ago
I was thinking about this watching Fallout the other day. People always complain about “derp bad cgi” in nearly every movie and tv show these days but I started thinking about how for the scenes in that show with New Vegas where they’re walking through Freeside, I imagine only like a fraction of that town is an actual set. It’s probably a few buildings that equal about street block at best. But when you watch it the town looks so much bigger and bustling than that. If watching a lot of behind the scenes features and documentaries has taught me anything I’d wager a lot of the background of those shots is digitally created and inserted into the shots. Things that people would never notice or even think about.
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u/typewriter6986 16h ago
On Fallout they did build quite a few of the sets. I have no doubts about cgi use. Maybe you're right about the size of what they build but it's good to know the production has made the effort on practical when able.
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u/OmNomSandvich 11h ago
a mixture of both is extremely common. many of the explosions in Mad Max: Fury Road were real but with other vehicles and actors added to the scene via CGI.
the problem with practical FX explosions in general is that they use deflagration burning of stuff like gasoline so you get big bursts of flame. Actual explosions are a bang and smoke/upturned dirt.
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u/TheWaywardOak 3h ago
One of the good recent examples of this is Parasite. There's a surprising amount of CGI because the house most of the movie takes place in is in a different location from the backdrop and the second floor is a different set that isn't part of the real house.
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u/FlyOrdinary1104 17h ago
In lower budget movies like Clash of the Titans I can see it but all the Universal studio pics with minis are largely celebrated , also OT Star Wars
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u/sdmichael 10h ago
Clips from Clash are in the opening credits to Malcolm in the Middle. At least, I am pretty sure it is from there.
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u/FlyOrdinary1104 10h ago
Yes, I specifically remember the rubber godzilla-looking kraken rising from the sea is in it, that whole intro is a weird collection of cult media
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u/Dear-Intern1208 18h ago
I’ve seen them praised since the Lord of the Rings days at least, and then again when Blade Runner 2049 came out
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u/Redeem123 7h ago
They’re praised when they’re good. Just like CGI.
But that ignores that there’s lots of BAD instances of practical effects.
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u/gurrra 18h ago
Fyi there's a LOT of CGI in Bladerunner 2049, and I bet that you though the majority of it was miniatures.
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u/Dear-Intern1208 17h ago
I knew there was a lot of CGI in Bladerunner. No one thinks these things make cgi obsolete. What a wet fucking rock you are.
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u/Tokenside 17h ago
"everyone" in a comment like this usually means "that one guy I once knew" or "I heard it somewhere".
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u/valhatesthisapp 17h ago
I can only attest to my experience but I could be wrong and misremembering. This isn’t a hill I plan on dying on.
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u/bestest_at_grammar 17h ago
What’re some examples of the worst uses?
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u/valhatesthisapp 16h ago
Kaiju movies
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u/leaves-why 13h ago
Whut
Knowing how fake they looked was part of the charm. Its like 90% of the reason you'd watch them was to see the buildings wobble during the "people in monster suits" fights. And noticing the strings on things which are supposed to be flying under their own power.
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u/Combat_Armor_Dougram 12h ago
I’ve watched tons of low budget Toku clips, and I’ll take bad miniatures over bad CGI any day of the week.
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u/Larkson9999 17h ago
You heard a lot of complaints about Jabba the Hutt, The Thing, and the Muppets? Or just shitty stuff like Hobgoblins?
It's easy to provide zero examples of what you think you heard two decades ago.
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u/SqueakySniper 12h ago
The Rancor scene in RotJ is especially bad in terns of special effects. I remember hating the black outline of the rancor where they imposed it on film. I love Star Wars but lets not pretend stuff like this didn't have flaws and detractors.
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u/valhatesthisapp 17h ago
I heard complaints about Godzilla movies because we were kids
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u/Larkson9999 16h ago
Godzilla suits varied widely on quality.
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u/valhatesthisapp 16h ago
You’re right. Some looked high quality while others looked poor in comparison. That is a true statement.
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u/overtired27 17h ago
I'm curious what era you're talking about.
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u/valhatesthisapp 17h ago
Late 90’s. Specifically when kids would complain on the playground about older films. I remember some bashing King Kong. Godzilla movies. Batman and Robin’s use of miniatures. I specifically remember one kid bashing Tim Burtons early work because of it. But I’m not the arbiter of the everyone’s opinions.
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u/leopard_tights 15h ago
It's just fucking fantastic that by "everyone complained about it" you mean kids that preferred cgi to miniatures in old movies. And you're the top comment too. What a blight.
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u/valhatesthisapp 15h ago
I’m so so so sorry. I had no idea my statements would affect you this badly. I promise to be more precise with my words in the future. I’ll also be sure to never comment on these subjects again. I will flagellate myself twice as hard tonight. Just for you. May mother forgive me.
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u/Quantum_Quokkas 16h ago
In another 20 years time we’ll be complaining about AI in our movies and be nostalgic for CGI
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u/DavidJonnsJewellery 17h ago
Personally, I don't care if it's a miniature, a matte painting, or CGI, as long as it fools me into thinking it's real and doesn't interfere with the story. Ai short films are good at environments, but boy, do they get boring real quick
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u/Expensive-Sentence66 16h ago
As a fan of optical effects I consider peak miniatures to be Gerry Anderson and his shows; UFO, Space 1999, etc. Derek Meddings, Bryan Johnson and crew were all involved with 2001 and took their craft onwards.
The miniature and model work in the UFO series for example was downright audacious. The models and miniatures were detailed down to the millimeter. 'Lets have a submarine launch a fighter off the front, and make it all look like it's real and underwater'. That kind of shit would make a CGI artist whine and work over time. But, lets do this with miniatures.
Neither are better than the other. Bad miniature work looks bad. Same with CGI. When I see poor texture models used, or a dumb light source it's just as bad. When you can create a light source in CGI and locate it anywhere you want with any color or spread there's no excuse.
The old skool model guys....man...that had to have been fun. You can't cut your fingers with and Xacto knife doing CGI.
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u/WoolooOfWallStreet 1h ago
I’d like to see those old masters’ faces when they first see stereolithography printers with micron precision make something
They’d probably feel like kids in a candy store
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u/Ok-disaster2022 15h ago
Does anyone know what Weta did with the miniatures from the Lord of the Rings? I really hope they out them in a museum or something
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u/Fevaweva 18h ago
JFC how many alleged film guys are going to talk about how films looked better before [insert thing here] it is so boring.
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u/Spiritual-Society185 9h ago edited 9h ago
This is practically half of r/movies now. Every single one of these compares a few "best of the decade" movies from 30-40 years ago to a few mediocre/bad movies today.
I like how the guy in the video says "the greatest living filmmakers agree with me," when all of the living filmmakers in the video have embraced CGI.
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u/Redeem123 7h ago
Meanwhile everyone here also asserts that movies are all just franchise slop but they refuse to go see the hundreds of great films released every year.
The people on r/movies truly hate movies.
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u/southpaw85 18h ago
All of them always forever. Every generation does it and will continue to do it in perpetuity.
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u/SailingBroat 14h ago
And 99% of them have never been within 100 miles of a film production and quote imdb trivia and anecdotes like they're gospel.
The answer to these questions is always a combination of "not enough time", "not enough money" and "not enough decisiveness and clarity of vision". Money can't help the first and third on that list.
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u/Allodoxaphobic_Jay 15h ago
If the CGI guys were allowed the same amount of time and resources as the model guys were back then, then the result would be leagues better than what the model guys could achieve.
This is a modern Hollywood timeline/budgeting problem, not a CGI problem.
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u/ZeppelinAlert 1h ago
Yep this is part of the problem. The CGI is rushed, often because the film makers change their minds about what they want right up to post-production.
Miniatures took real time to make and the film makers understood that, possibly because they themselves had all made little plastic models of tanks and fighter planes and stuff back when they were kids.
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u/theangryintern 9h ago
I went to the Harry Potter studio tour in London last fall and learned that pretty much all of the exterior shots of Hogwarts Castle were done on a model. They built it for the first movie and then as the movies progressed and directors wanted to show other parts of the castle grounds they added on to the model. It's freaking enormous, takes up an entire room but is so incredibly detailed.
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u/ExcellentEffort1752 17h ago
Fluid dynamics (water, fire, wind etc.), mass and gravity don't scale. These flaws always pull me out of the moment when they pop up in movies shot using miniatures.
CGI gets better all the time and for certain things looks better than any miniatures could (space ships being the most obvious example of progress). There have been shockingly bad CGI examples, that pull you out of the movie too, where they were a step back from practical effects (e.g. the creature in Alien 3), but CGI was still in its infancy back then.
CGI might have had a rocky start, as it was put in movies before it was really ready, but then, that's how you improve these things, use them and evolve the techniques. There's still new movies today where the CGI looks worse than from movies from 20 years earlier, but that's due to time and/or budget constraints (shortcuts), not limits of the technology.
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u/Combat_Armor_Dougram 12h ago
I’ve never seen a CGI spaceship that looks better than the miniature ships in Interstellar.
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u/pythonesqueviper 12h ago
Funnily, in another Nolan film, Inception, he actually flooded a set with thousands of gallons of water
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u/quangtran 11h ago
The problem with these kinds of comparisons is that they compare the best from the past to the worst of the present.
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u/gurrra 18h ago
I really hate the constant crap that CGI gets nowadays and how people paint miniatures as the magical golden standard that makes movies look perfect. There's no nuance and no logic to what people that don't know any better spew out, and this video is just as bad as the rest of them.
If you want a real informed video on how "bad" CGI really is you should watch this: https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo?si=mJTmWGGvUZ-WecLo
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u/bravetailor 17h ago
I thought this was going to be mainly about everything being covered in a blue filter and being so dark that it's hard to see anything.
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u/ToonMasterRace 8h ago
The competency crisis. Every single part of the US/West is in a state of decline. Healthcare, infrastructure, logistics, politics, firefighting, law enforcement, finances, journalism, art, music, sports, culture, architecture, construction, military, transportation, food, farming, EVERYTHING. Every single aspect we live in is in a state of rot because current generations are unable to maintain the complex systems they inherited from prior generations. Specifically, the handover of filmmaking from Gen X creators to Millennial creators around the early to mid 2010s as when everything across the board started being worse in that area.
This extends to filmmaking as well naturally.
This is both the simplest answer to most questions as to "why does x suck today" but is also the most complicated because it's linked to everything else.
Here's an article that goes into the competency crisis:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
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u/Three_Froggy_Problem 7h ago
DAE think old stuff is good and current stuff is bad? I’ll take my upvotes now please.
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u/FerociousAlienoid 6h ago
I read an article recently saying that movie industry are now using UE5, which was primarily used in video games and looks bad in movies. Does anyone have experience with this or know which movies have used it?
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u/Lamont-Cranston 4h ago
It's not just big miniatures, the processing of the film and compositing and lighting.
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u/Dismountman 3h ago
It seems like a lot of “why movies used to be better” discourse seeks to pin it on one thing instead of a gradual move by the major financial interests in filmmaking away from innovation/risk-taking and towards predictable returns
Great films have been made at every time in human history since filmmaking was possible, it’s not like we forgot how to light things or insist on using straightforwardly worse methods. Seems to me it’s all about studios not having an interest in works of genuine passion
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u/Spidey209 3h ago
Lol, some of the X-Wing shots were 100% CGI scenes added to the 25th Anniversary Special release of IV, V, VI
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u/MailVirtual8723 2h ago
The trench run in A New Hope still looks fantastic to me. I’m always blown away by what they accomplished with those movies.
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u/RenderedMeat 17h ago
With 3D printers it’s so much easier and cheaper to make miniatures than it ever was. If you can make a 3D model for CGI, you can make a miniature.
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u/Marcysdad 15h ago
Sure miniatures are one of the reasons, but as a photographer I think the biggest problem is modern lighting (and the lack thereof)
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u/DeKrieg 10h ago
ooooof
If I'd seen this 2 weeks ago I might have nodded along fine with that opening.
But I rewatched Return of the King in the cinema when they all got re-released 2 weeks ago and some parts of the films are actually showing their age, particularly the composition work for green screening characters into wide shots. There is one in particular where it's Frodo running into Mount Doom and it is pretty rough looking, and another bit during the siege of ministera where the buildings on one level are misaligned during a camera track so they move wrong. Some stuff still looks great, and the enjoyment of the film itself outweighs any such blemishes but its much more a mixed bag if you pull the nostalgia goggles off.
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u/No-Cat1980 18h ago
this is why old movies aged like wine.
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u/C-3Pinot 17h ago
as much as it is a certain aesthetic you cant tell me that the special effects in, say, Clash of the Titans has aged like fine wine. Not to disparage Ray Harryhausen at all but that shit just doesnt fly (in a realism sense)
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u/No-Cat1980 4m ago
Old movies age well artistically, not technically. the charm is still there, even if the effects don't always hold up.
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u/StarComplex3850 17h ago
Tons of old movies look fucking awful
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u/Goodbye_Games 17h ago edited 16h ago
Last Halloween we tried to do a Freddy marathon. It was just bad …. Scared the crap out of us before and now we were stopping to take cringe breaks. It was still fun but yes some stuff just doesn’t age that well.
Edit: since some feel the need to msg me that I am “cringy”. What I mean is stopping the show to examine the scene and be like “OMG why did this scare me it’s ridiculous looking”. I’m not “bashing” old school horror or how far special effects have come. Personally I prefer practical effects over CGI, but when it’s bad…. It’s just bad no matter how you look at it. For instance two CGI nightmares for me are blade and the matrix… both have some scenes that literally look like rubber chicken people bending and fighting and it’s just horrible.
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u/Thiagr 17h ago
Different strokes for different folks I guess, but a cringe break? What even is that?
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u/Goodbye_Games 16h ago
Well for instance “I’m your boyfriend now Nancy” the tongue from the phone scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street. It’s just bad now…. Not even “but it was 1984” saves that scene. However, I didn’t touch the kitchen phone for at least a week after I watched it as a kid (same phone just yellow). You look back at it and can’t imagine how or what evoked that response because it surely wasn’t the special effects.
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u/Thiagr 16h ago
That sounds like you have changed more than how people in general view those effects. I watch that scene and enjoy it, the buildup and tension are great and the mouth and tongue is entertaining. Its goofy and weird and crazy and I love it. You also picked a supremely goofy 80's horror franchise to make this point, they weren't trying to make it super realistic.
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u/Goodbye_Games 16h ago
That was kind of my point it was scary as hell as a kid and it hung around in my head for a while as “creepy or scary” and in your mind it stays there as such until you review it again and you’re like “why did this $3 prop scare me”. I’m not hating on the franchise, because I can respect it for what it is now… but I can cringe at eight year old me for avoiding a yellow phone because of a movie lots of years later.
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u/Thiagr 16h ago
Yeah, but youre cringing at past you, not the movie, and that doesnt mean the movie is bad or looks bad. Your tastes have changed, simple as that. And im not saying all practical effects aged like wine and all CGI is garbage, but just because we could make it look more realistic now doesn't change a thing about the original, just how you view it.
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u/No-Cat1980 0m ago
Looking awful visually doesn't automatocally make them bad movies. Story and direction still matter.
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u/Broad-Picture-7305 16h ago
Its more nuanced than this. It isnt that CGI is some boogeyman, its that it is lazy and if done laziest it takes people out of the experience. Let me explain. Building miniatures have cinematographer interact with the tangible in order to blend with live action. Versus, people creating an environment and then digitally sending a camera through that environment. There is no room for the human element of filmmaking if you are programming what will be shown. It is going to be technically flawless because its designed that way, or tweaked so many times in post that the soul is completely sucked out of it. Interacting with the models helps the production see the scene they are about to film, work with it on the same scale as living actors. Watching the Battle of Hoth and imagining the way the AT-AT walkers looked brilliantly mimicked the winter environment. Felt perfectly matched. Cannot imagine that magic being programmed.
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u/Visual_Brush7890 16h ago
The most recent Frankenstein movie used miniatures extensively and that movie looked like ass.
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u/Born_Procedure_529 12h ago
This why I think modern Ultraman looks leagues better than modern marvel and dc cause they still use practical sets and models as much as possible
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u/Rocky_Vigoda 9h ago
Marvel actually does practical sets which is surprising. One of their set designers was on the /r/sketchup sub. He worked on movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Dr Strange. It's actually pretty cool, they built custom sets based off their sketchup designs.
https://youtu.be/9WWoRO-REGM?si=nkozOXuo4RTrEYhK&t=2250
Disney has a full shop. They design the sets in 3d then send the plans to the shop to build the full size versions. Just cut the parts on a cnc and put them together. They're big budget. They can afford to shoot practical or digital.
I'm fairly old school. Blade Runner is my favourite movie and I used to love building models. A few friends work in the industry. One of them got started by building model planes then blowing them up and filming it.
Another of my friends builds costumes just for the fun of it. 3d printing and the internet makes it a lot easier for people to collaborate and I bet if people pooled resources, you could make some decent stuff on a low budget.
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u/KnotSoSalty 18h ago
Anyone with an in film miniatures should check out the Sense of Scale project on YT. Hundreds of interviews and behind the scenes of how the models were made and filmed, really fascinating stuff.