BEHIND THE CAMERA
CGI, or computer-generated imagery, is a composition made using computer technology. End products are still or moving pictures which are used pretty much everywhere. Today, CGI has permeated our lives so much that it is difficult to avoid. Our television, film and video game industries rely heavily on CGI’s capabilities to execute their goals. Think of the latest blockbuster film or trending online game – it’s likely made possible by CGI. Currently, entertainment and advertising are two of the main users of this technology, but there are many more on the rise. Companies use CGI to depict things that are either impossible, like filming the landscape in 2015’s The Martian, or too impractical (e.g. unsafe, expensive, etc). Either way, CGI provides a cost-effective way to infinitely expand our horizons.
CGI in film dates back to the late 50s, with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) renowned as one of the movies to incorporate a VFX shot. Fastforward through the 60s, which had many notable developments in technology, and we get the glorious age for VFX in film – the late 70s and 80s. The first 3D animation was 1972’s aptly-named “A computer animated hand” by Catmull and Parke. They used software to painstakingly build a hand in motion. Then, a couple of Star Wars films skyrocketed the interest in VFX, aided by 1982’s Tron. The growing intrigue translated into more and more advancements in technology and software. This snowball effect led to the first fully computer-animated movie in 1995: Pixar’s Toy Story. This film was a landmark in digital-based movie making and helped to shape the industry as we know it today.
Modern CGI consists of many fields and departments working together towards one goal. The art department turns the ideas of a director or a script into visual concepts like storyboards and landscape art. Next, the asset department works to fabricate the digital objects - like a bus that will crash or a robotic limb on the antagonist - and the animated characters. Whether working with objects or characters, the result is often a compilation of effort from modeling artists, texture developers and riggers (who rig animated characters for their range of motion). Animators turn these static objects into film by determining movement. The introduction of space and time makes animation a key part of filmmaking. In modern cinema, motion trackers allow 3D movement in reality to be applied to animation (more in What is Motion Capture?). There’s also the contributions of simulation artists, specifically using procedural, dynamic and particle systems, to create complex effects like the flow of water or smoke in the air. Much of this process is done using software and algorithms. Additionally, there are also lighting artists which aid the rendering of CGI, and matte painters, who create beautiful stills that are often used for green screen backgrounds. Lastly, there are the compositors who are tasked with combining layers of film and CGI into one seamless shot. Compositing incorporates many concepts, most notably chroma keying (more in How do Green Screens work?) and rotoscoping (the act of manually tracing objects to move/layer them in a shot). And under it all, there are researchers and developers who create the algorithms and software used throughout the industry.
Altogether, these fields make up the world of modern film-CGI. It takes many people and many hours to create VFX – often much more than we, the audience, realize. Movies like 2012’s The Avengers and 2009’s Avatar are a cumulation of many decades of technological advancements. Now that CGI can arguably create shots so real that we can’t tell the difference, it’s tough to speculate about the future. Maybe we’ll continue to develop and create cinematic masterpieces that wouldn’t be otherwise possible. Or, maybe, the negative use of CGI will create deep fakes and fuel conspiracies that render the technology illegal. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Check out this post on CGI from Andrew McDonald, a former CG Supervisor at the renowned Industrial Light & Magic: What is CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) & how does it work?