Why do some movies still insist there is no CGI in their shots?

From the Barbie producers removing the blue screens used during production from BTS footage to Tom Cruise’s insistence that “There is no CGI on these planes!” on Top Gun: Maverick, CGI denial is endemic...and daft.

It’s also no secret that the waning quality of the CGI in the biggest blockbuster films has generated a lot of fan backlash to CGI and VFX. 

Yet many of these “No CGI here!” films are ones with huge VFX budgets and are even winning Academy awards for their non-existent VFX. Meanwhile, the artists dedicating days and weeks to these work harder than ever before and Hollywood is trying to hide their very existence from their audiences.

How is it possible that “CGI free” movies are doing better than CGI heavy movies, yet sporting enormous VFX budgets and winning awards for their “nonexistent” VFX work?

But CGI looks fake!

Ask most movie watchers that question and almost always the answers will refer to the less than believable CGI that dominates the biggest budget movies – namely the same $300 million lacklustre tentpoles that are losing money hand over fist. Ironically, these films are packed with what looks like cheap, half-assed CG and amateurish animation. It’s also a good bet that a lot of moviegoers will never notice the enormous amount of VFX that are common in pretty much every film and streaming series these days.

VFX covers a wide array of post-production enhancements to footage. It includes little things like removing rogue boom mics and wayward logos. It includes things like removing cameras from the frame, like in Mindhunter and the famous mirror shot in Contact. In Mindhunter the VFX teams turned modern towns into 70’s towns, digitally removing ramps on curbs, removing houses, replacing modern houses with old houses, and so on.

Some VFX are obviously computer generated. As a case point, the Apple TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has a visually impressive sequence with a titan called the Frostvark. Clearly, the giant fictional creature itself is computer generated because no matter how convincingly it’s modelled, animated, textured, and rendered, we know that it doesn’t actually exist.

Ask someone who is not a filmmaker to identify the VFX however, and they will in most cases pick out the obvious things like the Frostvark and Godzilla and miss just about everything else.

For VFX artists, that’s the point. At the end of every single VFX pipeline, for every single shot, there is a Nuke artist compositing and integrating everything together to make sure that the viewers don’t notice that anyone did anything to alter the shot.

The VFX teams who win awards are the ones whose work no one notices.

Why do the VFX for so many big tentpole movies look so fake?

VFX takes time, especially when it includes a large number of CGI. A lot of work goes into preparing digital assets for the animators to work with, some of it pure art like the character designs and textures, and some of it almost completely technical like rigging. After all that the animators do their animating, the lighting artists light the assets, and then the renderfarm crunches away at them for a while to generate a sequence of images that the compositors integrate into the film’s footage. 

What happens when the director decides to change several of the hero character CG designs after six months of work, but the deadline doesn’t change? You get a very expensive film with cheap looking VFX.

This is not due to the VFX artists not being good at their jobs. It’s due to the VFX artists being forced to redo months of work in weeks.

In comparison, just try to find someone who did NOT like the VFX of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies. The blending of practical and digital effects in that was brilliant – we all know that there’s no such thing as a kilometre long sandworm, but in the moment most viewers simply don’t care and even fewer noticed  the boundary between the real and the digital. Timothee Chalamet was riding a 5-meter long section of fake sandworm, and the rest was obviously virtual. But because Timothee Chalamet was riding that stand-in while being blasted with real wind and sand, his performance very authentic. The VFX for that shot combined his performance and the real sand blasting him with digital sand.

In short, no VFX here! Except everything other than the actor, the bit right under his feet, and the sand in his face.

VFX is expensive

Of course it’s expensive. It requires a lot of work from a lot of artists with a lot of skill and talent, and when a typical movie has hundreds if not thousands of VFX shots in it, that adds up very quickly.

Megabudget tentpole lacklusters spend huge amounts of money on VFX – estimates place MCU film VFX budgets at between $100 and $200 million alone.

The VFX budget for The Creator was only $30 million. The Creator got an Oscar nomination.

The artists care about their work regardless of the budget of the project. That’s why they chose to become artists. The directors and producers of the most expensive films apparently don’t. The most brilliant VFX can’t save a lousy film, and most audiences will forgive mediocre VFX for a particularly engaging film.

Invisible VFX

While it’s true that some films use VFX to hide the fact that they have otherwise poor production value,  there are also quite a few films that use VFX to do things that are too dangerous or not feasible to do on set for reasons of cost, time, or both.

Self-proclaimed pundits love to claim that they can spot the VFX in movies, and they can indeed find the obvious VFX like the dragons, space ships, and kaiju because we know that those don’t exist, and therefore can only be VFX. The real artistry in VFX is creating VFX that viewers don’t notice. These enhance the immersion of the film rather than draw attention to themselves.

In most cases, the most effective and least noticable VFX are planned and executed in close collaboration with the production and in particular the special effects teams. Rather than creating the entire effect in post or risking harm to cast and crew, the production SFX teams implement a version of the desired effect and the VFX teams enhance it, turn it up to eleven, and... no one notices.

When done well, the VFX blends in seamlessly with the SFX.

More VFX or less?

In Terminator 2 the ground-breaking VFX of the liquid metal T1000 was hailed as a huge victory for filmmaking. That success drove progress in both art and in technology, and over the years since CG and compositing tools have become so advanced that truly invisible VFX became the norm.

The recent trend in tentpoles looking cheap is not actually a new thing; it’s been going on for quite a while. Directors working on smaller films with limited budgets are far more likely to plan their VFX tasks with care so as to avoid expensive delays or overtime and rush fees, but the directors with the infinite budgets are more likely to adopt a fix it in post mentality simply because they can afford to.

Instead of continuing this trend of pretending that there are no VFX in big-budget films, we should be appreciating the work, the craftsmanship, and the artistry of the many VFX artists that make modern movie making possible.