The dangers of relying too heavily on technological shortcuts.
A show called Grimm ran in the 2010s and acquired something of a cult following. I never watched it back then but I've tried giving it a chance these past few weeks. Some good guest stars show up and it was shot in Portland, Oregon, a beautiful city when nihilism tourists aren't setting it on fire. Nonetheless, I can't get into it.
The premise is that there's a kind of enchanted aggregate race called the Wesen, who have mystical animal traits and can transform. Only a few people, called Grimms, can see the Wesen for what they are. The lead character is a Grimm and also a PPD detective.
Every episode has a few sequences where Wesen characters exhibit their true animal faces. The show seems really proud of these scenes, considering them pivotal to the episode. And no, they just don't work for me. With very few exceptions these reveals are done purely with CGI, no practical effects involved. So my eyes tell my brain, "Nothing happened just now. The actors just stood there inert. Some guy at a computer fixed it up a week later." So it kills the whole effect for me.
Of course a lot of the facial designs are kind of silly, too.
2 comments:
To a large extent CGI effects have become so excessive nobody believes what they're seeing at the movies anymore. I mean once you're used to seeing entire cities collapse and super heroes flying around NYC you can be expected to take previously outrageous scenes for granted. What was amazing about the Lord of the Rings was overegged by the time Peter Jackson made The Hobbit.
I looked at a video clip of Grimm and saw what you meant when you described characters having stood inert for long enough to have the face changes happen. Admittedly, a three minute video isn't going to show much but what it did do was to illustrate that using just a little CGI may be worse than using either too much or none at all.
I agree too that the facial designs of the monsters were pretty bad, ugly and uninteresting rather than frightening.
Yes, Portland was once a very pretty town.. nihilism tourists, eh? Good one.
Superhero movies were quite rare at one time. Even at the end of the 90s you still basically just saw one or two big comic book adaptations per year. But the potential was always there, held back only because the necessary VFX were either impossible or too expensive. Now they're commonplace, as is that kind of action in general. Which may have actually left two mediums diminished.
I think the main thing is the way that CGI is utilized. Nobody wants to work with big fires if they don't have to, so I can understand having a digital replacement instead. Beyond that I think it's better that CGI be used to enhance physical action rather than replacing it, which it all too often does.
I don't want to put anyone's work down, but I don't think they nailed how to make fairy tale monsters look scary.
Well it struck me that Antifa and the rest are more willing to destroy some cities because they don't really live there, with some exceptions.
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