What makes a movie's special effects look fake?

[Toadmeister]

Just got back from Justice League. Primary villain looked like a video game...

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[Miker]

When the effect doesn’t fit the story or its environment.

 

[batguy]

I see several responses of "physics". Especially in this digital SFX age, wouldn't that be easy to check? I mean, a director could set limits to what's possible in universe, and those specifications could be used to set limits. I would think a digital asset could be directly interrogated for mass, forces, loads, stress/strain, etc.

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It shouldn't be so hard to get some things right in theory.

But sometimes directors are wanting shots that aren't feasible to begin with, which is why they were done with CGI. How do you make a realistic shot of a human actor (superhero character) falling hundreds of feet down to the ground & impacting, and not getting splattered? There is no real-life version of the event to mimic. It doesn't work in real life.

A lot of it is because CGI actions are basically being hand-animated by people. How heavy is a car? How much resistance does that building's concrete & steel wall put up when a bus hits it? These things are too far from everyday human experience for most people to visualize very well.

I don't think modern CGI animators are making more mistakes than traditional 2D line-drawing animators did. We just notice it more when the end result is intended to be photorealistic.

 

[KojiroVance]

Shots that are planned out, look beautiful, but have basic physics or reality ignored. E.g. in Game Of Thrones when a dragon that big lands, the ground should shake, people should react, but no one flinches. Did no one say, a big lizard the size of a 747 will land right here, so you would probably flinch and step back. Same when one took off, no reaction from the actors at all. It’s as if the effect was shoehorned in later but wasn’t planned. (Star Wars SE had much of this, didn’t it?)

I’ve seen some space movies where a helmet or something retracts and stores in a space that couldn’t hold it. Like the physical object just disappeared.

Comes down to bad thinking and forethought, poor design, and reliance on effects boffins that dress up their work rather than making it small and easily overlooked. Back in the day, 50% of ILM’s work was secretly removing skin blemishes and things from actors, no one ever knew they were doing it. Brilliant.

 

[MrSouthpaw]

When something is flying and the direction it is pointed is different than the direction it is going. Even just a degree or two off and it looks wrong.

 

[Mr Mold Maker]

Bad edges on a makeup take me out every time. There was a beautiful makeup done for Star Trek beyond, but it was never really intended for a close up. Well, they shot one anyways and the crows feet from the makeup were a quarter inch off from the actors real eye corner.

A bad thing about working in the film industry is sometimes you get to see these things up close and even work on them. The 2018 Predators movie for example? All I am going to be able to see is where they were constantly touching up the cracking paint on the suits.

 

[Megamicrofish]

CGI bullet hits, muzzle flash,sparks and blood (Walking dead being a recent bad example)

 

[NormanF]

Something I saw in a training video at work recently was that the camera used to film the "live" actors was sometimes at a different angle than the camera used to film the material used for the green screen background.

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[hansicle]

Bad CGI, mainly the stiffness in faces, unrealistic human movement, etc. It's really funny how you can unconsciously pick up that something is fake. There's an artist named Daniel Simon. He has done concept art for a number of movies and several books, which many of them I own. His CGI work is flawless, to the point that it's hard to believe his cars and other vehicles aren't real. In one of his books, there was a photo of a car with a person standing next to it with their hand on the fender. The car looks real, the person is real, but there was something odd with the picture I could sense, but couldn't point out. I showed it to a friend, and mentioned the anomaly. After looking at it for some time, he pointed out that a shadow was missing. The person in the picture had his hand on the car's fender, and just above it was a side mirror. The side mirror cast a shadow on the car, but not across his hand. That subtle mistake was enough to trigger my mind into seeing a mistake.

We've lived our entire lives slowly learning how to interpret what we see, and it's very hard to trick it into seeing something that isn't "real" ....

 

[G W Zipper]

Did anybody see the new live action Beauty and the Beast? Forget how awful the beast looked; there was just something wrong about that whole movie, like it was shot on an iPhone or something. Every scene, SFX or not. Can anybody identify what it was that caused this?

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[batguy]

I didn't see BatB remake. From the trailers it looked like they didn't throw enough resolution & fine tuning at the beast in general. Top-notch work for 15 years ago but mediocre today.

In a 100% digital video game world it would have been fine. But it falls short when there are live actors in the frame with it.

 

[G W Zipper]

I didn't see BatB remake. From the trailers it looked like they didn't throw enough resolution & fine tuning at the beast in general. Top-notch work for 15 years ago but mediocre today.

In a 100% digital video game world it would have been fine. But it falls short when there are live actors in the frame with it.

I'm talking about the 2017 version starring Emma Watson. Maybe it's lacking depth of field? Everything is in super sharp focus - very disconcerting. Then you throw CGI characters on top of that and all the obvious texture mapping.
But, I'm seeing something else there that is really troublesome to the eye. Whatever it is, that same thing has been cropping up in recent sci fi, to a lesser degree.

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[batguy]

Yeah I realize the remake came out this year. I'm just saying it would have been called top-notch work if it had come out 15 years ago. Today it looks like good work for a video game where they aren't quite aiming for true photorealism.

 

[G W Zipper]

Yeah I realize the remake came out this year. I'm just saying it would have been called top-notch work if it had come out 15 years ago. Today it looks like good work for a video game where they aren't quite aiming for true photorealism.

But, I'm not even talking about the CGI. The rest of it - even the live action stuff -something is very wrong.

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[Nismo]

one thing for me is the illumination of CGI Humans eyes... a regular filmed humans eyes don't pop like that and it looks odd.

also with the rogue one Tarkin - the CGI version is more fluid and almost more expressive ...when the real guy was more stoic and snappy with his movements..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsuvXHGCVXE

 

[J EM]

When it comes to cgi, for me it's definitely the lighting of it. I can suspend disbelief fine enough but when it comes to lighting, it immediately takes me out of the movie. It's often too bright with much contrast in comparison to the surrounding. Another is the color saturation. Again, often it's too much. Things aren't as bright, saturated, and vibrant in real life. Life is rather drab. To express my disdain for badly lit cgi, I'll use one of the worst movies I've seen as an example. In the Hobbit, there were times where Azog the pale orc looked radiant. It may seem an exaggeration but I swear that's how I remember him looking like when I saw the movie in that imax 48 fps. And I hated every frame of it. I know it's been said many times but Gollum in LotR was done much better. Looks drab.

Another thing would be the lack of detail. Sometimes it's just not there, not sharp enough. It ends up looking as if it's unfinished, imo. And lastly with cgi, it'd have to be the way movement of certain things is animated. Of course, there's always Syfy quality cgi which we're supposed to overlook, but most of it still looks terrible to me.

When it comes to practical effects, it's bad when it's Terminator self healing scene bad.

 

[Laspector]

I would have loved to have had this conversation forty years ago. "What makes stop-motion look real or fake to you?"

 

[batguy]

What confuses me is that the CGI world goes through enormous trouble to duplicate the nuances of real human skin. Surface sheen, light-scatter, etc. But real humans onscreen are normally wearing heavy makeup.

 

[StevenBills]

This is certainly an interesting topic, and there's not one thing that you can nail down to answer this question of a movie's special effects "looking fake". There are many, many steps in the visual effects pipeline, and anything could go wrong in any one of those steps. Rigging CG characters, lighting those CG characters, compositing those CG characters onto match-moved backgrounds, etc etc... If one of those artists gets it even slightly "wrong," then the whole thing looks off.

And speaking of CG characters, anybody see this awesome VFX breakdown from Logan?

Now tell me you knew they were CG characters when you saw the film the first time.

SB

 

[Axlotl]

^ That's remarkable.