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Yeah. I don't know. I didn't like the film in general, so it's difficult to get too worked up over the CGI. I don't like it in a Bond movie as it gives scenes an unreal cartoon quality.
They were shot on location in Turkey, with the island added in post.
My least favourite shot in the film is the establishing shot as the set foot on the island. I do hope they avoid moments like this in SP by endeavouring to shoot on location; which seems to be the case.
Yes, the boat was clearly not shot in a green screen studio...
Take heart from the photos from spectre that the stunt work looks to be being done
For real and hopefully the CGI will be only used to remove safety wires and improve
The odd explosion etc.
1. the famous bike face shot and Omega shot. Obvious CGI for me
2. The fight atop the train and the fall
3. the casino distance shot of Craig on the boat. That was CGI enhanced as well
My view - drop the darn CGI and get some more stunt men to do a better job until the technology catches up (which it is likely to do by B25).
Hmm.. easily ?
Or have very strict rules about how it's used. I think there's an argument you just use digital effects to clean up what's on the screen - remove safety wires perhaps. I don't want to see any CGI at all really in Bond. It would impose a real discipline on the directors and mean they can't go for cheap tacky action sequences like the awful plane disintegration in QoS - I hate that whole sequence.
It would force the directors to focus on story and old-fashioned, well correographed fight and action sequences.
Having said that, I don´t have any qualms with the CGI in SF. Yet.
Imaginations. ;)
With inventive new camera angles or reviving old film techniques, to get
Round their budgetary problems, I.e. using infrared lighting to show
Make up not seen under ordinary light. That sort of thing. :)
Interesting. I would have thought that soon it will be the other way around. CGI will be far cheaper than doing things 'for real'. Isn't that one reason SF used more CGI than QoS - they couldn't afford the real locations and sets?
Will Bond be dropping the Omega, for a Pulsar ? ;)
Well I think the low-low budget movies won't be able to afford the kind of CGI people want to see - unless the movie is a showreel for the VFX artist obviously. And then in this case it turns out it's very often genre movies : CGI that wants to be seen. Like for instance :
.. 2 years of ongoing work for half a million $ (he planned a shorter version for 200.000$ but the crowdfunding worked well so he went for a longer movie)
But the 'low' budget movies (that are nevertheless in the 2-5M$ range) will use the CGI more and more I guess - this time the kind of CGI you don't want to notice. Like for set virtual extensions in particular. No avatar to model etc. But the TV is also using CGI (like the Walking Dead for instance, lots of CGI there). And movie features will want more and more not to look like TV I guess. So no room for cheap CGI...
I felt that as an action sequence it was too OTT. No one would survive that. Just absurd. That's one of the problems wit CGI - directors are tempted to go too far.
A different story would be for instance the white Ork in The Hobbit. You could see lots of texture on his skin and such details, but still he seemed too virtual to really relate to.
Fair enough if you thought it over the top, but that they survived hasn´t got anything to do with CGI.
My point is that the availability of the CGI seduced the director into doing an action sequence that is frankly absurb. And that makes their survival all the less plausible.
Had the plane simply broken down in mid and and they'd bailed out as it was hurtling towards the ground I might have bought it. But the CGI OTT sillyness makes it almost as bad as the kite surfing in DAD IMO. Incidentally, the kite surfing and the plane disintegration in DAD are further examples of totally implausible sequences from which no one would ever survice.
So instead of seeing a stuntman that is definitely not the actor when you pause the movie (like the parachute stunt in Moonraker), now you see it's "him" :
- by using green screen and a close shot (the SF bike), or
- face replacement on a stuntman (the ideal solution if it worked, but it does not really work - the silhouette fighting in SF was optimal face replacement, you can't do that every time)
- or a full 3D avatar (the QoS parachute scene, the SF elevator scene).
The elevator scene in SF is a good summary of CG in movie nowadays :
- Craig really runs and jumps to catch the elevator : probably CG is used to hide protection so he doesn't get hurt, etc. Perfect
- 3D Craig avatar under the elevator in a virtual building : IMO, meh. It's too close to a video game.
- green screen to see Craig hanging with a problem in one arm : well, if it had been Roger, it would have been more criticized...
Compare this to the Rick Silvester fall from FYEO : it's impressive and memorable. But it's a double, it's not Roger, the camera could not do a close shot. I'm afraid these days are over, Hollywood thinks the star must be in every frame...
However, for those who have seen the Kassovitz making of of Babylon AD, you can hear a stunt coordinator from Hollywood in it, talking about the French Yamakazi stuntmen Kassovitz brought with him: he explains he would never be allowed to do what the Yamakazi stuntmen were doing (and well, when they hire Damien Walters in Skyfall, that's "just" to double for Patrice during fights).
And, finally, to continue with the fact that IMO, stuntmen are "hidden" from the audience now, for instance, who knows that one of Harry Potter's stunt double is now stuck in a wheelchair ?
Take humans out of the loop.
[-(
That's what they got paid for and that's why some of them are legends - for risking life and limb.
Would F1 drivers get the kudos and money they receive if they just drove virtual cars on PS4?
People are paying their ticket to see spectacle and that means people doing something dangerous, albeit with as much safety around them as possible. But there comes a point in every stunt where you've put in all the safety mesasures you can and the stuntman just has to go for it. Gary Powell rolling the boat in the TWINE PTS is a good example. Had he got that wrong it would've been very nasty but they just went for it because they were making a Bond film. Nowadays you wonder if that would actually have been done for real anymore?
If people were unwilling to be stuntmen then we'd have no choice but to use CGI but while the market demands stunts and there are people willing to meet that demand why are directors and producers so keen to send us down the depressing CGI route?
I'd be interested to hear from people in the stunt industry whether or not they consider that CGI is putting them out of work?
When we have a whole genre that pretty much is reliant on CGI, seriously that same year SF was released their was very successful film that summer that for last 40 minutes (at least to these eyes) was practically all CG and my god was I bored (yes I do mean Avengers). Also Man of Steel as well, last 30 minutes just a barrage of it.
Skyfall in comparison was a breath of fresh air and I'm afraid it's just part of the process these days but Bond uses this sparingly compared to other films. If you really want stuntmen risking themselves for the sake of a film where it can be done with effects, I do have to ask where your priorities lie? Have we become that much a selfish species that now we demand people take risks for the sake of a bloody film?
However, I can still tell CGI and it takes me out of the experience, not in a good way.
As an example, CR's crane sequence was amazing and kept me in the sequence from start to end. The collapsing house at the end did not. QoS's fight scene in the tower at Siena did not. Same with SF's bike ride and train sequence.
Cruise does it best these days (MI4 in Dubai was outstanding). Bourne was also very good (particularly Bourne Ultimatum's jumping through buildings in Tangiers)
I'm not saying the use of CGI in Bond is terrible. Not by any means. However, I can still tell the difference (it was more apparent in SF on the bike than when fighting on the train because the bike was a closeup that we could have done without imo). There's something about the granularity of it that is clearly different. For example, when you see the CR crane sequence or the MI4 Burj Dubai sequence all the scenes are extremely clear - since it's being done for real. There is no granularity whatsoever.