Fury Road's Practical FX Myth

https://textualvariations.substack.com/p/fury-fx-furiosa

by georgecmu • 2 years ago

39 61 2 years ago

textualvariations.substack.com

jsheard3• 2 years ago

In the case of Fury Road it was observable before the movie even came out - the very first trailer they released used rough cuts of shots before much of the VFX had been finished.

2014 Comic-Con trailer: https://i.imgur.com/WFUxzgl.png

2015 release trailer: https://i.imgur.com/I9cWFGj.png

Aunche• 2 years ago

The reason why there is so much criticism of VFX is because it is often done without any sort of intent or passion. It seems like the director just give a vague description of what sort of effects they want to the VFX team and just hands it off to them. With practical effects, the director is forced to be more hands on, so this intent shows through with the final product.

pizzaknife• 2 years ago

this is really weird to me. its a fault of the director, if i understand your position on this

Timon3• 2 years ago

That's definitely a big part, but especially recently VFX teams really don't have the option to bring in real intent and passion. Scenes are often changing until a few months or even weeks before release, frequently with very tight deadlines, and after months of crunch. There's no way to deliver a good product under these conditions, just look at many of the recent Marvel movies.

Practical effects are much harder to change later on, so VFX built on top is also more likely to avoid this ever-changing crunch. But that's also why they are being avoided more and more - it increases cost of changes, and studios won't give up late-stage changes.

tonynator• 2 years ago

The recent Planet of the Apes movies show real VFX passion, especially in the CGI faces. You can really tell how much work they poured into them. I would assume they were given adequate time to work!

dblohm7• 2 years ago

ILM Compositor Todd Vaziri talks a lot about stuff like this both on his blog [1] and on X [2]. One of his pet peeves is marketing campaigns claiming mostly practical effects when in fact the opposite is true.

[1]https://fxrant.blogspot.com/

[2]https://x.com/tvaziri

noahtallen• 2 years ago

As the author mentions, the "No CGI is really just invisible CGI" video is a great watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oQ1jV859w)

The TLDR is basically that movie studios, directors, and actors start a hype train early "we haven't used any CGI!" or "it's all practical!" When the reality is that vast amounts of the movie still use CGI on top of the practical effects. It's just a really good marketing ploy, because a lot of people hate overdone VFX movies! So it feels more authentic and artistic to go practical.

But at the end of the day, most of those movies still have a huge amount of VFX. Some of the examples are extremely egregious and dishonest (e.g. the one TV show where the director/studio claims it was all real puppets on real sets, but the VFX studio has videos showing some massive VFX environments for the show instead.)

Others are more of a misunderstanding -- for example, when they claimed the sandworm in Dune 2 was practical... yes, the shot had a ton of practical elements, but of course lots of VFX and compositing was done to achieve the final product. Yes, there was a mechanical portion of a sandworm for the actors to stand on for some of the close-ups, but tons of the sandworm shots are still mostly VFX.

bombcar• 2 years ago

The studios and the viewers know what they mean - if you see a giant explosion, was there a real giant explosion or was it created by CGI?

The links above show that the explosion was real, the side parts were CGI; so we call that "practical" even though much of the scene "by volume" is CGI.

vundercind3• 2 years ago

I think there are degrees.

I don’t think most people who are fans of practical effects get too worked up over painting out wires, or compositing shots with computers, or maybe the odd correction or touch-up to a practical shot, instead of doing those same things with actual film. That probably falls below the level that anyone really minds or regards as substantially altering a “we used lots of practical effects” claim. Usually all that stuff looks pretty good, even seamless, unless it was totally incompetently-realized.

Then there’s having actors interacting with mostly-real sets and props but maybe the farther-away stuff or some backgrounds or whatever is computer art, not even a composited-in real shot, and maybe a few excessively-dangerous sequences are even more CG than that. I think lots of folks who are fans of practical effects are still pretty accepting of this, maybe it’s not “pure” but there’s some effort and it usually shows. Especially when the CG is replacing things that really couldn’t have been done practically (at least not these days).

Then there’s “literally nothing is real, not even that chair the character is sitting on, not that prop they’re holding, nothing, there are no sets or locations to speak of, hell parts of the costumes are CG”. Thor 4, Attack of the Clones, large parts of other Disney Marvel or stuff, among others. These usually look like shit, the actors are often thrown off by the lack of anything real around them, even the damn floor, suspension of disbelief never quite settles in correctly so emotional beats don’t hit right, et c. This is the kind of thing I think even people with only a little investment in practical effects really dislike. Half the time these would have looked better fully-animated rather than even pretending to be “real”.

And there some steps in between those, but my point is there’s a spectrum at play.

ephimetheus• 2 years ago

As others in this thread have already pointed out: look at Top Gun Maverick, or the latest Mission Impossible.

In the former case, they filmed jets and jet cockpits, but all of the jets and cockpits are replaced by CG ones, only the actors remain if they are visible.

In the latter, in the motorcycle chase scene and when Tom jumps over the edge, aside from him and the bike, basically everything else is digital, e.g. digital train, terrain, trees, ground and everything.

They jumped the train off a bridge FOR REAL at the end of the chase, but then paint it over completely with a digital train. The only thing that stayed is some water splashes, that’s it.

This is intentionally concealed by the studio marketing saying it “was practical”. Yes they did do it “for real”, but it erases the work done on all of the digital effects that end up making up the majority of what you see in the movie.

That’s just dishonest, and what people are upset about.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

Uh, no - THIS is practical special effects: https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/those-bullet-effects-in-term...

bmitc2• 2 years ago

https://youtu.be/yKAHGwCyamc

brookst2• 2 years ago

This seems like a really elaborate takedown of language ambiguity at best and an outright strawman at worst. The whole thing hinges on:

If the film 90 percent practical special effects aka SFX, then that would suggest only about 10 percent were DVFX/CGI.

But... is that true? If a real live stuntperson jumps from a real live car to another real live car, but a safety wire is digitally removed and mountains are added in the background, is that a practical effect or a digital one? The article insists it's a binary choice, and seems to say this should not be considered a practical effect at all. And the author's definition of digital effects really is that expansive:

The film’s color grading process entailed using DVFX to modify certain pre-existing recorded elements within the frame, such as the skies and background environments.

Later in the article a bit of nuance appears:

What Jackson and the article make evident then is that Fury Road actually had a LOT of CGI quite literally on top of the practical SFX and stunt sequences, which were often enhanced, revised, transformed, augmented, supplanted, etc. through DVFX manipulation. Such changes were, for the most part, microscopic yet their scope was considerably larger than audiences were led to believe.

There are some rhetorical devices that should raise flags, especially the odd "microscopic yet... considerably larger" construction.

Ultimately, when I hear that "80 to 90 percent of the effects were practical", I take it to mean the cars were real and not CGI, the people swinging on poles were real and not CGI, etc. No complaints if the author wants to construct definitions that make those shots no longer "practical", but I don't think many people ever interpreted the claims to mean there was zero color grading or background replacement for continuity.

vile_wretch• 2 years ago

Any time someone talks about how films look better when sets and effects are practical someone chimes in to let them know how actually the horizon was composited or they added CGI sand in this sandstorm scene that would be extremely dangerous to film in if it were real. Just internet pedants who take everything way too literally.

TheGRS• 2 years ago

Bigger tendency of discourse to draw quick association lines instead of looking at the product holistically.

A handful of bad video games released with poor micro-transactions, so micro-transactions leads to bad games. A lot of bad movies released with over-reliance on poor CGI, so CGI leads to bad movies. But in both of those cases I can see where the underlying methods could be a net positive for the product - if implemented well and with good intent.

In the case of Fury Road, tons of great choices that are a net positive on the product. Including practical stunts and CGI and lots of artfully done color saturation. A lesser movie will try to ape everything Fury Road did just to make a quick buck on its success, but not really taking into account how the color saturation or the stunts enhanced parts of the story and theme.

People with an opinion on a piece of work: judge it how it should be judged on the whole! These little shortcuts in discourse are boring and tiresome.

babypuncher• 2 years ago

Strictly speaking, your example qualifies as a VFX shot.

However the line between practical and VFX/CGI can still feel very fuzzy. Top Gun Maverick was marketed as having filmed all the jet sequences "practically". And while it is true that nearly every shot of a jet started life as a shot of a real jet, the jets themselves were replaced with CGI in the final product. You couldn't tell, of course, because CGI has gotten very good, and the actual shot composition is still grounded in the reality of shooting with a physical camera looking at a real airplane.

This approach happens a ton in the industry, where they film a "practical" effect, then replace it with CGI. The benefit to this is that you get an exceptional reference for the lighting and physics of the effect. When executed well, nobody can tell the difference. In Top Gun's case, they were able to shoot scenes with real fighter jets you can fly today, then replace those jets with whatever fictional or historical jet they really wanted for the scene.

aidenn0• 2 years ago

By your definition is a fully rotoscoped scene SFX or VFX? I.e. there were real people and real cars at some point, but they got fully painted over.

brookst2• 2 years ago

Oh I have no idea. Taxonomies just lead to hair splitting.

But I will say that if I saw a scene where a real person jumped a real car over a real canyon, no amount of rotoscoping would make me say that there were no practical effects.

legitster3• 2 years ago

The author is trying to conflate CGI and VFX. But you can absolutely apply visual effects without computer generated imagery.

The sound engineer has a lot of control over how a violin sounds in a recording. But it would be asinine to say that the violin becomes an electrical instrument as soon as it gets recorded, and all of the credit belongs to the sound engineer. But this is essentially the argument OP is making.

Maybe to frame it another way, when George Miller said "90 percent of the movie doesn't have CGI", he's probably framing the total effort and manpower of the movie as an enterprise. It took a team of hundreds of people months to fabricate all of the vehicles, develop the stunts, film the thing etc - all in the Namibian desert. In comparison, it would be very easy to believe that the visual post processing could account for less than 10% of the total effort.

yyyyybb• 2 years ago

A really good composite shot is a practical effect IMO.

legitster3• 2 years ago

I am really not following the point the author is trying to make. Fury Road clearly uses practical effects and real actors/sets throughout.

Yes they did a bunch of image composition and post-processing, but that doesn't change the point of practical effects. The actor was directing real people doing real stunts, and was finding ways of putting things into film. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Compare it to the average Marvel sequence now where glassy, unconvincing scenes are computer generated from scratch and it's night and day. It doesn't matter that both spent time on a computer when one actually starts with something real.

It would be like saying Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't have practical effects because it was a cartoon.

ghostly_s4• 2 years ago

Just watch the "No CGI is Just Invisible CGI" Youtube series linked towards the end of the article, it makes the same points much more cogently (and in fact covers Roger Rabbit in depth). The point is more that the studios are pushing this idea that the two are mutually exclusive as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films to make that "grounded" aesthetic possible.

legitster3• 2 years ago

as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films

Fury Road literally hired Cirque de Soleil performers to design, choreograph, and perform actual death defying stunts in the movie. It's not just made-up marketing just because someone on the internet pointed out the images were color corrected.

If anything, it's much more disrespectful to the hundreds of people who went to the Namibian desert and actually pulled of these stunts by denying they mattered at all!

snakeyjake2• 2 years ago

There is no such thing as invisible CGI.

In every example given in the "No CGI is Just Invisible CGI" series I knew, irrefutably, that every single example they gave was CGI prior to watching the video explaining to me that "no dummy you were hoodwinked those are really cgi!" because what was being represented on screen is impossible without the use of CGI-- and everyone else knew it too.

Except, of course, the people who believe that it is possible to drive a car down the side of a dam while it is on fire.

My favorite thing about the entire series were the many times when the host kept saying "this is REALLY the result of lots of outstanding effort by many different dedicated artists" (although I seem to remember that he calls them "vendors" instead of "artists" which seems... degrading?) while showing a scene that objectively looks terrible.

When people say "fury road was practical" they don't care that a VFX artist deleted a safety line because the only part that matters is the dude jumping from one actual car to another. VFX in that case is just makeup, filling in the wrinkles and adding some pop to the cheekbones. What they mean is that "a dude jumped from one car to another instead of jumping from one blue-tarp-covered-box-maybe-on-hydraulics to another inside a soundstage".

lupusreal3• 2 years ago

So I guess this article is sponsored by the producers of the new movie as damage control?

robxorb• 2 years ago

My first thought too. The articles basic premise is something like:

"People don't like the new film, but the old film may contain more CGI than they thought, so they're wrong."

Who would come up with such a premise unless they were in a corner, and being paid?

lupire3• 2 years ago

On the Internet, pretentious people make ignorant comments all the time, for free. The author of the OP quoted Miller for paragraphs, where Miller explained in detail how he combined practical and computer effects, why he felt the practical effects were valuable because they kept the movie within the bounds of realistic mechanical physics, well, the digital effects improved the overall color and remove small practical objects that are necessary for effects but didn't belong in the fiction. After all that, the OP wrote one sentence completely mischaracterizing the extensive quoting, because the truth didn't fit his thesis. I'll give him credit at least for presenting the evidence that he's trying to ignore.

jrflowers• 2 years ago

TLDR:

The author is thoroughly convinced that Furiosa is getting wildly unfairly judged. Also,

Look, I haven’t seen Furiosa yet.

cjohnson3182• 2 years ago

I didn't really get Fury Road. Why were people spraying silver spray paint in each others' mouths? What was the societal demand that was answered by the heavy metal blitzkrieg of chopped up cars? It was all just a little too much for me. I thought the protagonist was great, it was just all of the extra psychotic flash-bang stuff they added on top that I didn't like.

stnmtn2• 2 years ago

I liked how it wasn't explained because the goal is to make you think about those questions. In a post apocalyptic wasteland where valuable resources are scattered far away in an endless desert, wouldn't cars become an almost mythical and religious item? Without the Chrome Cars, everyone would die as they would be unable to travel and get food/water/etc. So is it any surprise that after generations of living like that, they would worship chrome much in the same way primitive cultures worship the sun/rain/water?

adrianN3• 2 years ago

I don't think the Mad Max world building is sufficiently deep to stand up to scrutiny. For example, cars are extremely dependent on high industry. Without an advanced chemical industry cars are impossible to build. There is no way cars would be around long in a post apocalyptic wasteland of endless desert.

jsheard3• 2 years ago

I didn't really get Fury Road. Why were people spraying silver spray paint in each others' mouths?

Solvents get you high. They also kill you, but beggars can't be choosers in the post-apocalypse.

People inhale spray paint in real life if they are desperate enough, or just really stupid.

cjohnson3182• 2 years ago

Oh wow, I didn't know people did that.

golergka• 2 years ago

To answer your questions: drugs and warfare.

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool

nameless9122• 2 years ago

The silver spray paint in universe is basically preparing yourself to enter heaven (Valhalla) "all shiny and chrome", implying that being shiny and chrome is a higher state of being than being rusty and covered in dirt, which makes a hell of a lot of sense in universe. This particularly shows up in the difference between the leaders' cars (e.g. Immortan Joe) and the War Boys' cars. The War Boys are essentially on a death clock due to illness, so they act as suicide fighters. The Psychotic flash bang was really effective in communicating the cult of personality that Immortan Joe has cultivated. I really liked it because the world building was incredible IMO.

kilolima• 2 years ago

Mediocre!

ghostly_s4• 2 years ago

"The Psychotic flash bang"?

bmitc2• 2 years ago

It's just lore and world building: sick people getting high and also the worship of cars and "so shiny and chrome".

colechristensen• 2 years ago

It reminds me of those bird species that build and decorate elaborate little shrines and then dance around them to attract a mate. If somebody told you about them you'd say it's unbelievably absurd, of course no animal would build itself a little stage with a pile of shells and brightly colored objects to dance around in... and other birds would come over to steal and sabotage. And yet there it is on video, that exact thing.

Weird cult practices are very human and all over the place, from the outside they don't make sense. Especially in warfare, strange psychotic over the top practices are exemplified many times. "This is a practical and reasonable thing to do" doesn't really come into it. Although, to be fair, getting your warriors in an unhinged altered state of mind is a quite effective way to motivate them to do what you want.

vundercind3• 2 years ago

How do you feel about the film Conan the Barbarian?

lupusreal3• 2 years ago

You'd probably like the original Mad Max (not Road Warrior) a lot more. I do fwiw.

oglop• 2 years ago

Do people think the first movie was not mostly digital? That’s been my impression and it’s not that hard to tell when you watch it.

Furiosa just looks bad though, and I’m a fan of everyone involved in this film. But god damn does it look weird. It’s like Miller gave up trying to hide the digital parts and just leaned into it. Mistake.

vundercind3• 2 years ago

The film’s (Fury Road) promotional material was full of before-and-after shots comparing the real shots with the final with-CG shots. They did that because they were showing off that an absolute ton of what’s on screen was real compared to what most other modern productions would have done with the same sequences, but they didn’t really seem to be trying to hide that they also extensively used CG.

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

I've no opinion on Furiosa, having not yet seen it.

It's hard to argue the pre-CGI footage of Fury Road isn't impressive, though; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3fLazkWCgE

They built functional vehicles and spent months fucking around in the desert, including actual people on the swingy poles and lots of serious stunts. I'm comfortable saying there's a contrast to, say, https://www.businessinsider.com/avengers-endgame-battle-with....

magic_hamster• 2 years ago

This article is heavily, almost solely based on silly things like color grading and sky replacement, which compared to the actual stunts - you know, people hanging on poles from real vehicles in motion - is being very nit-picky.

It also seems there's a good reason for the changes, mentioned in the article itself:

"The world was medieval, in a way, so it had to be grounded, and we had to do as much of it for real. However, there was not one shot in that movie that wasn’t CGI in one way or another. We shot over months, but [the story] was compressed in time over three days. Which meant the skies had to remain consistent, so every shot virtually had a changed sky. If you’re driving vehicles across the desert, you’re doing take after take, you’re doing track after track. You had to erase all but the necessary tracks…. Landscapes you had to change, if there was some greenery in it, and so on, and so on.”

This makes sense to me. I don't really care if the sky was replaced to color match the film. I care about the stunts, cars, trucks, I know that people performing crazy stunts are real, and most of it was captured in camera - more than I realized before watching the "making of" videos.

Fury Road's Practical FX Myth

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