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Everything you say here is 100% accurate. I agree on the real sets. Please EON, I beg you!
Must admit I haven't met anyone who has mentioned CGI. It may be my age but I noticed non of it, afraid I agree with @Gerard. However I am filled with admiration for those he pick these things out. I don't mean that sarcastically either.
But I'm interested, did the scenes in the island convey the feeling it was a large place to you ? I don't mean it looked like something from a BBC studio, but well, to me it's something totally different from the opening's use of a real location for instance : you felt it was quite "real" to say the least when they were on top of that train. There were still some CGI on top of the train (removal of safety wires obviously for a start) but it was not I think "major" CGI like the short fall on the bus in QOS.
CGI is Computer Generated Imagary: I don't think editing something digitally that was filmed with a digital camera (ie the whole film!) would count as CGI. Things that were created from scratch in the computer would include parts of Silva's distorted face, the scorpion, the Komodo dragons, and these are noticeable as they are all quite out of the ordinary and the camera lingers on them - I'm sure there were dozens of examples of other little tricks we didn't notice as they were so glossed over - people added to crowds, bullet holes, rubble, sparks, skylines, smoke, gun muzzle flashes, explosions, lens flares or enlarging sets for example. After Effects can be very useful!
Except that the island for instance was also modified/reconstructed for the few plans we talk about (removal of the wild plants at least), it's not the real thing, it's probably not real at all I think.
The irony is that because of budget concern, most of these plans are static, which make indeed look them a bit like the old projection method (in theses cases, with the true location on film, or a model). Green/Blue screen, theoretically, offer the possibility to move the camera a lot, something very limited with the old method.
Well, they took photos and videos of real scorpions and real Komodo dragons to reconstruct them with CGI, a bit like the above...
Btw, the walk on the Komodo dragon is for many a reference to LALD's scene. But while the latter scene is now a very well known scene in Bond history, do you think the same will be said for this Skyfall scene ?
There are 500 CGI shots according to some newspaper. And actually I think a lot of them are for removing things from the screen, not adding them (safety wires, safety pads, etc).
The problem I have, and I seem not to be alone, is when CGI meets iconic parts of the franchise. The CGI large sets that are not so large anymore, and that LALD tribute that replaces incredible real danger with zero danger, are two good examples.
It's like a car jump : we know the beginning, the middle, and the end of a car jump are often three different takes, but yet the danger is still there. In one Besson movie with the Julienne team, a real car jump went so bad (death of a cameraman) that they ended with a CGI car in the movie for that scene, and it was alas a failure of DAD proportion (and not even funny to laugh at when you knew the reason). But when CGI will be good enough to make convincing CGI cars for a movie stunt, will the real stunts continue and be so remembered ? Does anyone remember action scenes from videogame cinematics frankly ?
I didn't notice it, or don't remember noticing it as CGI. Something different happened to me: when I saw the trailer, I thought Bond jumping in the train after breaiking it open looked quite fake, but in the movie I thought it looked real. Not even sure if it changed or if was just my state of mind that made me buy it in cinema,
http://www.awn.com/articles/visual-effects/bond-gets-cg-komodo-dragon-skyfall
Most of the external wide angle train shots in the chase scene are CGI. It's quite obvious that the plates have been shot on a Helicopter or Drone and the train, VW's, Jeep and JCB have been imposed in.
Also.
Spoiler Alert:
Malorey is a double agent.
Obviously he's not. Look, don't spread such silly theories please, as we all understand from SF that Mallory is perfectly clean. There's nothing iffy about him being the next M.
Well, that's a.......curious theory.
Sigh.
'A double agent?
Well, that's a.......curious theory.'
Actually, what happened after Bond heard the news on the TV is only him dreaming of what would happen if he came back to MI6 (notice he's teleporting himself to London with no one detecting he's still alive).
If you want to speak about film theory, notice the color "organic green" totally disappears in any scene once we're within his dream (while it's everywhere in the train scene). Even the nature around Skyfall does not mean "life". Skyfall is actually "Bond meets Tartovski's Stalker".
Hey, it's easy to read too much :)
STALKER is a goddamn masterpiece, whereas SKYFALL is just like CR, a smokescreen that has suckered half the planet into suspending all critical faculties.
While I don't think SF is God's gift to Bond fans, there IS a danger of swinging too far in the other direction, which judging by the words you choose to describe it here, I feel that you have. Just because people are falling all over themselves to praise it doesn't mean you can't enjoy it as the good movie that it is.
I remember when GE came out, and people around me were saying IT was God's gift... I enjoyed it IMMENSELY, but I still saw some of the flaws that made it less than perfect.
In MY opinion, only two Bond movies come near to being worthy of such ridiculous accolades, and both of them star that Welsh actor, what's-his-name.
I don't know if I really need to take snapshots but look at it and look at some real life Hashima island photos one can very easily find on the Internet, it looks similar but there's no way one can make match many, many elements between the movie and reality.
So it is more a Hashma-inspired creation rather than a real shot "cleaned" with CG, IMO. They've added some elements to make it less "boring", a house on rock outside the wall, an entrance for the boat, a large dock, etc (watch out, I'm not used at all to this vocabulary, so I cannot use the most accurate English words...). You can recognize some buildings, etc, but not the overall layout at alll.
On the other hand, when they arrive on the island, the shot is green screen with a CG back-up that is this time heavily based on a real life block there, albeit with more damages and less green life.
Well we're agreed on that last part, to be sure (if you slip FRWL in there, that is.)
I have had terrible (as in angry pissed off) first reactions to Bond movies in the past ... MR, VIEW, TND (which was the first I didn't catch in a cinema, and wound up fastforwarding through), DAD and CR (both of those were skip-in-theater as well) ... but my response on this one was even more negative, because I found at points that it was so wrongheaded that I wasn't even getting upset over it, it was causing that level of detachment. There is plenty that did infuriate, but the fact that I didn't write a 10 page treatise on the ills of SF says it must have really torn it all asunder for me.
I mean, after CR, I was furious about everything (before seeing it I was just angry about the Craig casting, but after seeing it, I found that casting to only be symptomatic of how many things were wrong in and about it.) I thought at least some of the CR worship was just fallout from BOURNE love (which I find nearly as offputting, as Clive Owen was maybe the only decent thing in it.) But the SF appeal is utterly inexplicable to me, given that the movie is, on top of whatever zillion faults I might see in it, also a grind instead of a romp, so any cushion relating to Bond style isn't there either.
I remember as a teen on my first job at a bookstore in 1978 or 1979 talking to some guy in his 40s who had about given up on the Bond on the basis of SPY (a pic I found pretty ridiculous myself, where the work of Meddings and Adam and the 2nd unit are pretty much the only redeeming aspects, even now.) I remember telling him that 'we'd get ours' when WARHEAD popped up and trashed the EonMoore rubbish, a thought that seemed mildly optimistic then, crazily optimistic in retrospect. I don't have those kinds of illusions anymore. TREK is being made by folks raised on STAR WARS, which is akin to having GODFATHER films made by Alan Parker in BUGSY MALONE mode (if you don't recognize the reference, it is painful, and maybe a little funny too.) I don't understand the point of using Fleming stuff and putting it so out of context that it makes no sense, I don't appreciate the reinvention of Bond in the slightest. So I'm not really acting out on this SKYFALL issue, just sick & tired of it.
Look at the helicopter going through the town in TND, now they could have just CGI'd everything in that scene, instead they went practical for all but the blades, and the result was most convincing because we weren't looking primarily at the blades, but at the damage they were causing. CGI can assist in a magic trick, it just shouldn't BE the magic trick.
Silva's denture removal was like reliving Jinx's ocean dive all over again. ~X(
To come back to others about that island - the shot as they approach it on the boat was NOT the real island in Japan, it was a CGI version "based on" that island.
The boat and the shots surrounding it were clearly all shot in a green screen studio, very effectively.
I wish I could see a Making Of with Silva's jaw. That was very creepy.
I've been watching videos online about Green Screen, and you just don't know what is real, and what isn't, but that's the whole point.
For instance, the scene where they get the Aston out of the old garage, could have been easily filmed in a made up garage, greenscreen/cgi surrounding it, and a Pinewood fake road as they drove away. It wasn't. It was all real.
I did read that the shot from behind M's body when they see the MI6 building blown up was her facing a green screen, but it wasn't. They shut that bridge to film it. The CGI was clearly just the explosion which is someone here has said, was flawless. The only reason you know full well it was CGI (or models) was because they couldn't it for real.
However, the dragon and helicopter scenes were well done. I really don't see what's the problem with those two.
But overall, it's not the quality of the CGI that lets SF down - it's the story itself, lacklustre action and some dodgy nostalgic self-indulgence by Mendes.
I sense there were significant budget contstraints at play as well. I appreciate that Mendes wanted to do the tube train crash for 'real' but I'm not sure that scene even adds very much to the movie. Presumably it's part of Silva's plan to sow terror and chaos as a distraction, but you never really get the sense of London being a city under siege. May be that was considered too sensitive an approach to take.