Uniform Two Six wrote:My point is that they're going to be constantly looking for the "cheap" fix, and right now CGI is fairly cheap (especially if it is done quickly and cr@pulently). I'm sure that some CGI will be necessary in Freeborn, but I'm still firmly in the camp that effects should be done physically or in camera whenever possible. Some of my favorite special effects -- and ones that have stood the test of time, by the way -- were not done CGI. My perfect example would be Aliens. Now, granted, Aliens didn't have a "transformation scene" per se, so it's a little apples-to-oranges. Nonetheless, James Cameron was doing an interview and he showed how the special effects for Alien were done, and they're surprisingly simple. Moreover, they were cheap, and they looked good. That sucker was done waaaay back in 1986, and it still looks awesome. Now, some elements of a transformation sequence will defy that approach, so fixating on the shift scene is not helpful, but done correctly, the rest of the movie (or series, or whatever) could probably be done more conventionally (and cheaply). The problem is the same one facing Cameron way back thirty years ago with Aliens: He knew he could pull it off, but the studio execs insisted that he was going to go horrendously over-budget if he tried even a fraction of what he was proposing in his storyboards.
Oh no, I'm agreeing with you. With investors being used to massive production budgets and 3 month production cycles for block-buster titles, they probably aren't used to what Freeborn is going to be. And I'm on board with practical effects too. I was merely pondering other ways around the budgeting problem initially, exactly because dealing with investors under these circumstances
IS going to be a difficult sell for Freeborn, I saw this coming way back when AB signed up at my previous forum haunt back in 2004.
There's a little hindsight here in regards to the exact technical challenges faced such as in the Alien film. We need to be careful not to pull an Underworld and end up over selling what's actually there in any effect, CGI or practical. In Alien (as with video game monsters for example), the monster doesn't have to mimic a human or animal convincingly, which is inordinately tricky to do in either CGI or practical effects. Alien worked because it wasn't trying to be these familiar things. Instead it had anatomy that nobody had ever seen before, and that is a large chunk of why they got away with all the weird shapes and creature concepts like acid blood. All the artists had to do is just make it look beautiful and awesome in its own right, and the audience will buy that, hook line and sinker.
Werewolves specifically though have suffered horribly because of this assumption. The film production crew say "Well it's a monster" and trot out their special case why their crap works so well. But unlike the alien monster (or Transformers, hi Michael Bay *waves*) which has no precedent or anything even approaching a real life equal in most people's mind, we can sit here and contemplate whether werewolves have tails, or appropriate patterns of fur density and coverage, what percentage of human and wolf attributes etc. In production, budget limits end up being the driving force behind a lot of artistic decisions and even story itself, Michael Bay probably took a leaf out of Riddley Scott's book, made smart decisions about their titular monsters and made a killing s a result. whereas Riddley Scott grew from more humble beginnings and made it big, and John Landis made smart decisions in the workshop and ended up with a slow burning fuse as classic genre piece decades later.
All I'm proposing is since we've had this long maturation time of about a decade now, and have all this cinematic wealth to draw from, we are potentially in a unique and enviable position to cherry pick exactly the right things, and that includes the exact use of practical and digital effects. Underworld used both, but were running to a schedule and budget, and in my opinion they suffered. They ended up doing more silly things as time went on. We don't have to do that, we still have time while investors are dilly-dallying to polish the concept, it's why I'm still racking my brain about how to do real bone transformation in real life terms, and get that accurately modeled in a visual effect, instead of a simple morph blend, or goofy bubbling skin effect with practical effects.
I realize I'm rambling on a bit, but I'll drop an example. Bone transformation! I suggested that a realistic bone transform could be done by a real werewolf, by way of partially eroding particles of bone mass in selective areas, making it into a kind of liquid clay (aka "clay slip") like substance, which can be basically pumped around the body to form new bone mass elsewhere (this has the advantage for the werewolf that it doesn't compromise muscle anchorage to bones or overall skeletal integrity). So, for a transformation example: As the soft tissues of the tail stretches and grows out, liquidized bone mass can be slewed off from the pelvis and essentially injection molded into the bone cavities in the soft tissues of the tail as it's growing out, flooding it under mild pressure. This would give the tail a slightly ballooned look till the fluid is drained, which will compact the particulate bone mass into approximate tail vertebrae shape, and the soft tissues of the tail will be layed back into normal position on the newly formed tail bones. The same can be done potentially with the growth of a snout. That right there is simple to simulate and is ripe for implementing in a practical movie effect, and with a little artistic flair and proper anatomical knowledge, it will be cheap and effective, and kick the stuffing out of most CGI attempts at a transformation because it's literally real.
On the other hand, we saw what An Ameican Werewolf in London had to do with hair growth, a small square of rubbery plastic with hair punched in it. It did the job, but had to be crutched around. CGI can pick up the slack by adding and blending more hair, and different growth rates to make it feel more organic, and the rendering quality can be focused on that instead of having to share it for all of the transformation goodness, which should make the CGI work a cheaper component.
Ok I'm going to shut up now
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