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What old movies hold up because of a lack of special effects or because clever use of effects? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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What older movies made a good use of either side stepping special effects or have effects that somehow still hold up today? Why are they good movies?

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[–] 75 points 11 months ago (17 children)

Lord of the Rings effects still hold up, in my opinion at least. The Balrog uses a lot of "hidden" information with the use of blackness to cover up bad cgi. Horse charges are zoomed out far enough to disguise how few horses are actually there. Most of the movies use practical effects though.

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  • [–] 52 points 11 months ago

    There is an enormous amount of CGI in Lord of the Rings that you don’t really notice. Yes they used lots of miniatures and other practical effects, but that only takes you so far. The extended DVDs are full of some of the really cool ways they combined digital and practical. They show PJ “filming” at one point with a block of wood with a mocap ball on it.

    They invented an entire new software just to make the huge battle scenes good. That software, Massive, is still used today to simulate giant crowds.

    Gollum hasn’t aged perfectly, but pretty well for an entirely CGI character from the early 2000s.

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  • [–] 35 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    old movies

    Lord of the Rings

    💀

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Especially when you compare the effects in Lord of the Rings to the Hobbit. You can really see when the studio is overworked and underpaid, even when it's a studio as good as weta.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    Yeah, I was racking my brain to find a major movie filmed in the last decade without digital effects so that I could induce a recognition of the passage of time, and I couldn’t manage it. Covid started more than half a decade ago, and modern movies rarely use solely practical effects

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    Fury Road was almost all practical effects

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

    There is a LOT of CGI in Fury Road.

    They did lots of practical stunts, yeah, but each of those shots is then supplemented with CGI. Extra vehicles and scenery and whatnot.

    There’s this weird thing where filmmakers like to pretend they don’t use CGI and it makes us as viewers think that CGI is somehow worse.

    Edit: Bonus, check out the episode of It Was a Shit Show about Fury Road. It’s fascinating.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    They’ve even started adding NFC to behind the scenes footage to make it seem as if something that was CGI actually wasn’t. Someone linked the corridor crew playlist above. They talk about this when they cover Barbie.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    What’s NFC in this context? I only know it as Near Field Communication.

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