There was a lot of CGI work in "The Notebook," but it didn't take away from the movie going experience for me.

It still sucked.

First, to get back up to the top and attach to something before Van Helsing hit the ground, the grappling hook would need to come out of the launcher with a muzzle velocity of several thousand feet per second, about the muzzle velocity of an M-16.

This the error?

Because something fired at that velocity would have acted like jet propulsion, accelerating Van Helsing toward the ground.

(Last post was mine, but I frequently forget to fill out the info and it never seems to save.)

That's not the error I'm thinking of, and I don't think it's even an error. True, shooting a gun produces an equal an opposite force in the direction opposite the bullet; but a bullet is very light, and a man comparatively very heavy. The same force that propells a bullet to the speed of sound doesn't move a man a single inch. Even without friction, VH wouldn't be significantly accelerated by the shot.

The error he commits is much less arguable. One could say he's wrong with mathematical certainty.

I'll look at the math stuff some more (though I assume it's more than taking into account air resistance/friction).

As far as the "jet effect," it would be much more significant under the circumstances than a bullet. When a man fires a bullet, he's planted on the ground, and still there's a kick when the mass is only equal to that of a bullet. (For comparison, stand on roller skates and throw a basketball.)

In the case of someone falling and shooting an object with the mass of a grappling hook and sufficient cable at the velocity described, it would have significant downward thrust, I think.

Nevermind looking at that math. Looks like I made a pretty bad error myself.

Basically, I screwed up and mistakenly thought Easterbrook had forgotten the (* 1/2) part of the falling-distance formula.

But he hadn't, not really. I screwed up part of the calculation itself and my mistaken answer looked like around double Easterbrook's and so I assmed he forgot the (*1/2).

As far as the "jet effect," it would be much more significant under the circumstances than a bullet. When a man fires a bullet, he's planted on the ground, and still there's a kick when the mass is only equal to that of a bullet. (For comparison, stand on roller skates and throw a basketball.)

I mentioned the friction thing. But you're moving someone mere inches per second at best, which is pretty trivial in the context of falling velocity.

In the case of someone falling and shooting an object with the mass of a grappling hook and sufficient cable at the velocity described, it would have significant downward thrust, I think.

Um, yeah, the fact that the cable has so much more mass means that the force would be that much bigger. I guess on that score you're right.

Overall, I don't think the screwed-up physics is what is problematical, otherwise nobody would ever have liked the Roadrunner cartoons. What is lost is the element of suspense. In order to engage the viewer's interest, the movie presents situations that the viewer isn't sure will be resolved. It's OK if the hero in the movie has super-powers, and it's fine if those powers are computer generated, but the viewer has to know what those powers' limits are. If there aren't any limits, then there is never any question in the viewer's mind that things will turn out OK, and therefore the viewer doesn't feel any excitement. If the protagonist can simply wait until the FX people draw the problem out of the scene, the viewer can simply wait for the movie to come out on cable...

Also, you said:

Or unless kids today just "love that CGI," even when it looks like crap. I actually think this might be the case, or at least that producers think that this is the case.

Is that because we're calling it "special effects" when we should be calling it "video game tie-in"?

Didn't you watch the extras on the DVD? Saruman's tower was a model, not CGI. It was 15 feet tall I think, or thereabouts.

But I agree with the spirit of the post. Most recently the first Spider Man movie was particularly unbelievable, when he was swinging between the buildings.

I think it's just become too easy. The easier something is, the more likely you are to overdo it. If it takes weeks or months to set up an effect, you tend to use them sparingly and take special care to do it right. If it's something that's available quickly and with little effort, you'll find yourself throwing it in all over the place. Like the <blink> tag. Ugh.

We find the same thing in music production. Now that Reverb In a Can is so widely available, you find inexperienced engineers slathering it on like there's no tomorrow. And it sounds like crap.

I don't think the screwed-up physics is what is problematical, otherwise nobody would ever have liked the Roadrunner cartoons.

Au contraire. I think this example proves the point. I agree few people will be put off by a mistake here or there--willing suspension of disbelief and all that--but Roadrunner is a cartoon that requires no emotional involvement at all. It's just slapstick, and Looney Tunes in general make no attempt at any realism ever.

The trouble with CGI special effects seems to be that those employing them don't realize we're dealing with drama. There's no drama in Wiley Coyote falling off the cliff, but there should be when Spiderman does. Effects are cool, but realistic effects are much cooler than cartoony effects.

You say suspense, I say drama, so we're in some ways talking about the same thing...I just disagree with your example.

The first film I saw when this hit home was The Twilight Zone movie, in the installment in which which the boy had the power to wish things into whatever shape he wanted. He wanted to live in a cartoon world, giving the director license to go to town with several minutes of live-action cartoon. (If I'm not mistaken, the director of this segment was Joe Dante.) And I just sat there bored and irritated.

Yuck, but it was silly and awful.

Didn't you watch the extras on the DVD? Saruman's tower was a model, not CGI. It was 15 feet tall I think, or thereabouts.

I am referring to the zooming-camera sequence which goes up the tower, then plunges down into the fiery pits, through the pits, around catwalks and ladders, etc. This isn't the first or second time you see the tower; this is after Saruman has torn down the forest and has a medieval factory cranking out Uruk-Hai in the caves beneath the earth.

There may have been a model tower. This shot, however, was all CGI. The tower model was scanned into a computer and then the CGI camera zoomed and pushed and flew all over it.

You can't do those kinds of swoops and flying zooms with a real camera, not even a computer-controlled miniature camera. Even if you could, I can't see then how the fiery pits -- with hundreds of laboring orcs -- could have been anything other than CGI.

If this shot was all somehow done with conventional modelwork -- which I doubt -- then I'm wrong about why I don't like it, but I stil don't like it.

Saruman's tower looked fine as a model-- in the first several shots, when they filmed it as they usually film models (or real buildings, for that matter) . My specific problem is with the Zoom & Doom shot.

The first film I saw when this hit home was The Twilight Zone movie, in the installment in which which the boy had the power to wish things into whatever shape he wanted. He wanted to live in a cartoon world, giving the director license to go to town with several minutes of live-action cartoon. (If I'm not mistaken, the director of this segment was Joe Dante.) And I just sat there bored and irritated.

It was Dante. I actually liked this bit-- I always found cartoons a little creepy -- and I especially liked the sister who'd had her mouth taken away.

That said, I've grown to like this segment, since most of the movie outright sucks. Basically it's got a cool little teaser and then a huge suckfest until the cartoon part, and then the only unambiguously good part, the airplane sequence. When I first saw the cartoon sequence, my impression was more like yours -- "What the hell is this crap?"

The recoil from grappling hook shooter would have been a bitch. Accelerating the hook and part of the line to 3000fps in one or two feet without the benefit of a large mass--say a fat little cannon--doesn't leave one with much protection. Parts of you might accelerate downward but other parts would stay the same speed.

Stop-action and Godzilla type effects are the best!

Occasionally, I'll be reading an article and it will seem obvious that the author has been reading and borrowing from comments at the Fray, Mote, whatever. This time it's not so obvious, but I get a mild intuition that Easterbrook has been reading the General Movie Discussion and Movie Cliches threads at TPW.

Fans of stop-action should look at the new biography of Ray Harryhausen, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0823084027

As for CGI, for some reason I get turned off looking at crowds of digital figures surging across a landscape. The spacing is too perfect; I can tell it's not real. Hard to imagine that CGI has gone from cutting edge to punchline in such a short time.

"True, shooting a gun produces an equal an opposite force in the direction opposite the bullet; but a bullet is very light, and a man comparatively very heavy. The same force that propells a bullet to the speed of sound doesn't move a man a single inch. Even without friction, VH wouldn't be significantly accelerated by the shot."

Ace,

What's your background anyway where you know this shit? Golden Boy scratch nuts now.

I'm a blogger. They ask these questions on the licensing exam.

I don't want to be nit-picky, but Saruman's tower WASNT CGI. It was a minature that was filmed by a camera way up close. You have to watch alot of the Extended Edition extras to learn this, but it is true.

I think part of the problem with the CGI stuff is that it's not quit perfected. Surfaces still look a little translucent, like soap, even when they are textured.

Move a camera past a model, and millions of little changes in lighting occur on all the intricate little surfaces. Since there are usually raised surfaces on models--pipes, gadgets, gizmos, doodads, etc.--there is plenty of motion parallax on a flyby shot. CGI lighting always stays pretty much the same. They don't have time to code for intricate detail, I suppose.

I'd bet real money CGI guys couldn't render the Vger ship in the original Trek movie with nearly as much realism.

It's interesting that Easterbrook uses the Hippogriff in the new Harry Potter movie as a rare example of believable CGI, when it's believable because they were careful not to overuse CGI for it.

When they shot the scenes on the ground, they used a real horse and then just painted it over on the computer. And for close-ups they used a life size mechanical head with moving feathers. So it's actually an example of budgeting the computer stuff in a case where it had to be used (there aren't many real life specimens around).

I think that's where CGI is used to best effect-- to hide the signs of fakery, or mixed in with real stuff.

The jet/alien battle at the end of Indpendence Day was pretty good looking. It was a mix of model airplanes in the foreground, CGI planes in the midground, and then CGI background sky.

Well, CGI is good for that, and dinosaurs, of course.

It's weird, but Juraissic Park came out, what, 11 years ago? You'd think that CGI should be markedly improved since then.

I still remember JP as having terrific special effects, while I routinely cringe at the crappiness of CGI in recent releases.

Sort of related : Why realistic video game graphics make humans look creepy

Ever watch the recent SciFi channel crop of films? The amazingly horrible CGI is beyond unbearable. It looks like they farmed it out to a beginners design class. I could do better special effects - and I can't even draw a damn circle!

BTW - rdbrewer nails it on the head as far as my opinion goes.

Hrm. Easterbrook's got some good points and Ace is right-on, but the original article (by Easterbrook) is too pissy for my tastes.

Why waste time doing paragraphs full of mathematical calculations just to prove what we already knew-- that Van Helsing and Charlie's Angels 2 were lame? Come on. I know that the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy is an overused reference, but that's the way Gregg was really coming across there.

And if I'm not mistaken, that scene towards the end of the first Spider-Man... wasn't it in slow-motion? I know that it wasn't terribly realistic anyway, but 15 seconds in slow-motion is not quite the same as 15 seconds in real life. Does Easterbrook know what frame rate they were using and go from there, or what?

And do not, DO NOT be one of those chumps who hates on Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. "How ridiculous, human beings cannot run sideways up walls." I wonder what other trips to the theater have been like for Easterbrook, e.g., "Pfft! Children cannot fly merely by sprinkling some dust on themselves and thinking happy thoughts!" or "That's ridiculous-- 'the Force' isn't real and it doesn't allow you to aim proton torpedoes with your mind!" CTHD is a FANTASY, and it had fantasy rules.

Besides, for a guy who's whining a good bit about how CGI requires no effort, you'd think he'd be applauding the work of the cast and crew of CTHD. Actors went through tons of grueling martial arts training and rehearsal, then had to literally put their lives in the hands of experienced people who were literally pulling them around on wires attached through a harness. The only digital effects the movie had were the erasing of said wires.

Oh, and that new King Arthur movie's marketing IS totally ass. "The true story behind the legend"-- spare me. At the video store I work at I've had about a dozen people now under the serious impression that the new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" film is, as the previews exaggerated, "based on a true story". As opposed to "a remake of 1970s film whose principal villain was loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein, and only in so much as Leatherface liked to cut off and wear his victims' skins a la Gein." But I guess that that doesn't fit on a poster quite as well.

I'm still waiting for an accurate rendering of a large scale CGI battle between massed armies that doesn't look like just mob on mob, like LOR or Troy.

I think most of Peter Jackson's CGI stuff has been good.

The worst example of this, in my opinion, is the new Yoda. We loved the puppet Yoda. The puppet was real. Now we have to endure gratuitous (and I mean gratuitous) CGI shots of Yoda furrowing his brow, etc. Totally ruined Yoda for me.

As for the virtual camera concept, I actually think this is a step forward. Of course the camera is not real, but that's the whole point. It is not inhibited by booms and cables and hydraulics.

This is actually the way the mind sees things. It moves around, zooming and panning, at unrealistic speeds (think about the trip between where you are and the closest Starbucks). Virtual cameras are simply a CGI incarnation of that.

"The worst example of this, in my opinion, is the new Yoda. We loved the puppet Yoda."

Amen.

Although the Yoda lightsaber fight with Christopher Lee was pretty cool. But god how lame are the new set of Star Wars movies anyway.

Ace:

CGI is cheaper than traditional model and matte effects. This partially has to do with the fact that the old-school (i.e., first Star Wars trilogy) approach required the use of motion control on multiple levels, and then a very complicated matting process and negative line up. With CGI, mattes are created electronically and SFX can be inserted electronically, without the need for motion control and multiple negatives.

My problem with CGI is that their use has become so easy that they allow directors to be lazy. Take the large battle scenes in the LOTR trilogy, for example. Peter Jackson was able to use CGI to create the illusion of massed armies clashing, but this seemed to divert his attention from using the proper dramatic focus. It struck me that he was constantly cutting away to his CGI master shots at moments where a more attuned action filmmaker would have gone in closer. Put another way, his impulse to show the course of the battle in big, CGI-generated master shots tended to make the action less personal, and therefore less believable.

The first time that I remember pinpointing what bugged me about CGI was during Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones. Specifically, it was during the asteroid scene. I was watching the ship zip in and out of asteroids at physically impossible speeds, and instead of thinking "cool, they just avoided an asteroid", I was thinking "hey, wait a minute, even if the ship could pull those kind of G-forces, the humans inside it would be liquefied." A that point, the suspension of disbelief was unsustainable, and the scene was ruined.

Another example - think about two scenes from Vin Diesel's XXX. The scene parachuting out of the car works, the snowboard scene looks fake. Special effects can only push against reality so far before they tear you away from the movie.

My personal least favorite is the punch that causes a person to fly backwards for the length of the room. Calculate the force required to do that, divide it into the mass of a fist, determine the required velocity, and figure out what that would do to your sternum.

If you think about it, the understanding of physics is deeply ingrained, partially hardwired into our brains. You don't have to think to track an object. You run under a fly ball on instinct. Even if you try, your brain will just reject this stuff.

Get this meme out there!

"Greeg Easterbrook comments on one of my three cinematic pet peeves: as special effects have become "better," they've actually become far worse. Model-work and bluescreening and matte-painting have their limitations, of course. But while the old-school special effects would often thrill (even as you caught telltale signs of the fakery), the theoretically visually-perfect CGI effects in recent movies are rather blah."

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

I'm gratified not to be the only one.

My personal least favorite is the punch that causes a person to fly backwards for the length of the room. Calculate the force required to do that, divide it into the mass of a fist, determine the required velocity, and figure out what that would do to your sternum.

I don't mind this -- in moderation, and in a superhero/super martial-arts kind of movie.

Another bit of Hollywood fakery which I can live with is the "shotgun blast that blows you off your feet and sends you flying."

I've read several articles claiming this is totally fake. If the shotgun blast actually had the kinetic energy required to lift a man off his feet and send him flying, then the very same blast should have similarly caused the shooter to go flying in the opposite direction (equal and opposite force and such).

The "feet bracing against the blast" argument doesn't fly, because the guy you're shooting also had his feet planted firmly on the ground.

The weird thing is that there are actually documented cases of people "flying" in response to being shot. There's no good explanation for this -- at least none that satisfy me. Physicists will tell you it's impossible, and yet people claim they've seen it happen. One very unsatisfying explanation is that people think they're supposed to fly back when they're shot -- because they've seen it movies -- and thus semi-involunatarily jump back when they've been hit, creating the illusion the bullet is propelling them backwards.

That seems like a, what's the word?, fucking stupid explanation to me, but what do I know.

Fake or not, I kind of like seeing people blown back by bullets (in movies, of course). Open Range had a lot of bodies flying due to bullet or shotgun-blast impact, and I dug that.

The worst-looking and also stupidest/most impossible recent CGI effect I can remember was the hysterically-bad "tidal wave/para-surfing" sequence in the James Bond abortion Die Another Day.

What. Were. They. Thinking.

The worst one I've seen is Neo fighting the Smiths on the playground in the second Matrix movie. At one point, he jumps into the air and floats there as the camera moves around him. He looks like bad cartoon.

Some explanations for people flying backward when they're shot:

1) Sometimes they try to jump out of the way or backward at the last moment just out of instinct, then pain. Like if you saw a fireball coming at you and felt something really hot.

2) Sometimes people are conflating seeing someone shot with someone blown up or shot by something bigger than a regular bullet.

3) Sometimes the people fall backward off something.

I think you're probably right that a regular guy standing on the street doesn't get blown through the air very often by a conventional weapon. Didn't use to happen in gunfights in the old Westerns. Comparing with case 1, those victims weren't trying to jump out of the way, but trying to shoot the other guy.

OK - I only saw Hulk on trailers and one, without the sound, trying to ignore it on an airplane flight, but I still feel qualified to vote it one of the worst offenders in this category of all time.

Yes, I will stipulate that:
1) It was a MOVIE
2) It was a movie based on a comic book
3) As a grown man, I really shouldn't care about this, it's geekiness cubed.

Still, when you see the Hulk jump, it looks ridiculous in a way that does not come across in comics. When he grabs a tank by the gun, you don't have to know anything about inertia or metal tensile strength to call bogus.

I've got nothing against this medium. I just think that if it is used while simultaneously divorcing from all physical laws, it makes for a less-involving movie experience.

When he grabs a tank by the gun, you don't have to know anything about inertia or metal tensile strength to call bogus.

Yeah, that was the kicker. The jumping I didn't mind so much. But swinging the tank around by the gun, without the turret simply ripping free of the tank-- that's absurd.

That's why he's . . . incredible.

I read an article somewhere that did some rough calculations on the tank throw. To accelerate 60 tons in 2-3 seconds to a speed of about 200 miles per hour, the Hulk would have needed about 100,000 horsepower, enough to power an ocean liner.

It might have been 280,000 horsepower, because I think I remember an aircraft carrier comparison.

Correction on my Neo comment. I loved that scene. Lot's of beatings. Nothing better than a good beating. It was just in one or two spots where the CGI was so bad I cringed.