While the CGI Quality Was Very Good Even in Movies 20 Years Ago, Why Is It All About Instagram Filters Nowadays?

Terminator 2 is considered one of the few film franchises whose second was better than the first. One of the main reasons for this situation is shown to be the mastery in the use of CGI technology. The android named T-1000 is seen behind bars in one scene. The audience, who until then had been accustomed to characters smashing or bending the bars like Cüneyt Arkın, were horrified when the T-1000 almost liquefied and passed through the bars. This is something no one has ever seen before.

Afterwards, Jurassic Park, Avatar, and perhaps the series in which CGI was most successful, The Lord of the Rings, showed us the full capacity of CGI. Afterwards, things got worse and we started to encounter worse and worse visuals. Even fan edits overshadow some of the CGI. Since CGI is not going anywhere, it is necessary to talk about the problems of CGI.

First of all, what is this CGI?

CGI is a technology that stands for Computer Generated Imagery. In Turkish, it is Computer Generated Imaging. It is basically based on combining computer-generated images with real images. In a sense, we can say that it is an advanced version of green screen technology.

CGI technology basically has three important advantages. First, it can reduce costs considerably. Secondly, it makes it possible to do things that we cannot see under normal conditions. Thirdly, it can be used at any point desired.

Despite these advantages, CGI is one of the most frequently discussed or criticized topics recently. The reason for this is not so much the CGI technology itself but how it is used. CGI is a tool at the end of the day, and like all tools it serves the purposes of its user.

The first reason is studios wanting to make more money with cheaper labor.

Experts or the most talented people in not only CGI, but in general all branches of visual effects, moved to the USA and the EU due to the demand of these technologies. After more people trained themselves in this field, studios began to outsource technologies such as CGI to countries such as China, Taiwan and India in order to benefit from various incentives and pay less money. Visuals created by teams that are not skilled or experienced enough cannot exceed a certain level.

The importance of CGI in productions has changed.

While some films are starting to become completely CGI festivals, CGI technology is now generally considered among the main components in productions. Even what we think of as a normal cafe can now be built with CGI, and no set can be built.

The situation was different when CGI technology first appeared, CGI had very serious limitations. If we take Jurassic Park as an example, dinosaurs were running around thanks to CGI, but animatronic robots were used in close-up shots. CGI was used to support the image that the dinosaurs we see are not just robots.

Nobody takes the laws of physics seriously.

The Matrix. The legendary film, in which it was logical that the laws of physics could be bent and CGI was used only as a complement for this purpose, showed how the rules of physics could be broken. In the films that followed, CGI started to touch almost everything.

As a result, films began to appear that did not care about concepts such as inertia, action-reaction, and resonance. If the movie we are watching is not a production like The Matrix, which clearly shows that it is different from the rules of our world, the audience started to say, “No way, it can’t do that anymore.”

Because a person changing magazines in the air while jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper does not exist in our world. (By the way, the scene in the Fast and Furious movie is not CGI.)

The increase in image quality makes the CGI poorer.

When CGI technology first came out, technologies such as 4K and HFR did not exist. Today, as image quality increases, the problems in CGI become more clearly evident. When this includes teams that don’t know how to write CGI, things can get even more complicated.

Under normal circumstances, you want to keep the CGI technology. For example, you use CGI in low-light scenes, foggy scenes, or rainy scenes so that the visuals appear so artificial that they are not obvious. As resolution increases, CGI lags behind.

The color tones of the movies also do not help CGI technology at all.

Movies have a color palette, and they should. If we consider that the narrative has a certain visual language and the color palette is a part of it, we see that color palettes are important.

In productions that focus too much on certain tones and are far from natural light, CGI becomes even more glaring because we add artificial color tones and lights to an already artificial visual. Double artificiality also looks lower quality. The color palette of many lazy movies is Pumpkin Spice Latte colors… No joke, one of the color palettes above belongs to The Hunger Games and the other one belongs to Pumpkin Spice Latte.

If I’m going to eat rice pudding, I like to sprinkle cinnamon on it. If there is too much cinnamon, the taste of rice pudding becomes bad. It’s not about rice pudding here, you get the idea.

We can understand that we are in the “Uncanny Valley”.

There is a concept called Uncanny Valley, or if you think it’s cooler to use the English word in a sentence. Basically, this is the name given to the fact that we feel uncomfortable when we see things that look very human but are not human.

For example, we have no problem with the robot Babür, because we can clearly see that he is a robot. On the other hand, in the movie Simone, Cameron Diaz is not a real person either, but no one is disturbed by her. Also think about the animatronics in the Hazelnut Museum in Giresun. This uncanny valley is why they sound like something out of a horror movie.

The same thing happens in cinema and we are disturbed by things that look like reality but we feel are not real. This discomfort increases even more in films where CGI is produced with lower quality and used with weaker techniques. We attribute this to bad CGI.

Yes, audiences love to see CGI, but what they want to see is quality CGI. Better scripts, better used CGI, better narration will be more helpful in keeping cinema the entertainment we love, rather than overloading on CGI just because the audience wants it. Otherwise, Sir Ian McKellen, who had to act with cardboard dwarfs in front of a green screen on the Hobbit set, will not be the only one crying about the state of cinema.