Cinematic (and TV, What the Hell) Pet Peeves

[number8]

I'm thinking that part of it is that CGI emphasizes movement when they want to convey impact. Even something simple as a car hitting something, they make the car do a little bounce in the back, the whole body of it denting, little nuts and bolts flying off, and dust and smoke whirling around it. It's very influenced by animation, which has to do those things to contrast with the usually static background.

But I rewatched Jackie Chan's Police Story for the whatever-th time a couple of months ago. There's a pile-up scene in it where several dozen cars just comically keep ramming into a car mountain, and it struck me how real cars just stop dead on impact. Even when they fly into the air, when they hit the ground it just plops down rather than doing twirls.

[Wryan]

Thought Pacific Rim got the weight thing pretty right.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I think part of this too is that computer animation is interpolated between keyframes, so the motion often comes off as too-smooth or too-weightless because it's very hard to successfully simulate the hard stops, hitches, and hesitancies that you find in real-life motion when you say, "Here's point A and point Z, now the computer takes us from one to the other."

Motion-capture helps quite a bit, but that "swimmy" movement can still be there.

[Sycophant]

Thought Pacific Rim got the weight thing pretty right.

I think it can be done well, but it just usually isn't.

Completely different but not all that different: in the recent titiles in the Gundam anime superseries, you get giant robot animation that comes in two main different varieties: hand-drawn and computer-generated animation. The hand-drawn stuff builds on a half-century tradition of hand-drawn giant robot animation and has particular techniques for animating movement and weight.

Within the CG stuff, there's--I would say--two basic strategies. One really seeks to emulate the techniques cultivated in pre-digital Gundam series, including more static camera angles and less sweeping pans that emphasize the dimensionality and highlight the planarity of the 3D models. This can be seen in the Unicorn OVA series. In fact, Unicorn uses both hand-drawn and CG robots and there are times where the difference is almost seamless.

The other moves the 3D models for the giant robots snappily and fluidly, animated at a much higher frame rate, as seen in the recent THE ORIGIN OVA series. The effect, honestly, tends to look almost indistinguishable from a video game character. They also tend to pan and whip the virtual camera around the model fluidly and quickly. The framerate moves faster than the character animation. The models look weightless. For me, they leave me absolutely cold, with none of the affective response or technical marvel of the classic stuff. It pulls me out of it in much the same way as sore-thumb CG in a so-called live-action movie.

Anyway, this post was mostly for myself. Have a good day.

[Dukefrukem]

Thought Pacific Rim got the weight thing pretty right.

And pretty wrong as it looks in the sequel. They look like they move more like transformers.

[Dukefrukem]

Every new Spielberg film

[Philip J. Fry]

Or are you suggesting they send a Assistant director out to film a REAL sunset and green-screen it in?

Well, if you pre plan the camera angle of your shot (or film the sunset from multiple angles) and adjust your lightning in front of the green screen accordingly, it could theoretically work.