Pixel fucked: Inside Hollywood's VFX crisis
&gt; Now, not only were VFX houses responsible for conjuring vast fictional cities, bustling crowds of tens of thousands, and cascading waterfalls, but they would also spend months fixing mistakes: digitally erasing visible wig lines in period dramas, inserting absent props, snipping away errant strands of hair, tucking in double chins.<p>Take with a pinch of salt because I don&#x27;t work in the industry, but I&#x27;m not convinced this &quot;VFX for everything&quot; approach is cheaper or results in better films. I still think a lot of old films blow the modern counterparts out of the water.<p>The very fact that they had to use practical effects and physical film was expensive meant you couldn&#x27;t just shoot unlimited takes without burning through money (unless you were Kubrick who was notorious for doing takes from every angle). The whole &quot;fix it in post&quot; mentality leads to sloppy, rushed work and a lack of thinking and commitment on behalf of the director and producing team. See here[1]:<p>&gt; Even after shots are exhaustively delivered, Marvel is allegedly &quot;infamous&quot; for requesting &quot;tons of different variations&quot; until one earns the green light.<p>and even worse:<p>&gt; We&#x27;ve literally made up entire third acts of a film, a month before release, because the director didn&#x27;t know what they wanted,&quot; one source said about Marvel in general.<p>You would never have had this back in the day. You planned out your big set piece in advance and you shot it, and you better get it fucking right because your head was on the chopping block if you didn&#x27;t. Instead, the directors and producers are now offloading their responsibility to get things right on to the VFX artists. Maybe the demands of HD and 4K means that such work is necessary compared to back in the old days because stuff like wig lines and errant hairs wouldn&#x27;t be visible due to the resolution. But some of me wonders if it is overproduction, which I think a lot of contemporary music nowadays also suffers from.<p>Another evil is film companies refusing to create a &quot;everything-in-one-place&quot; content model like the music industry has done with Spotify, with the end result being an endless churn of content in an attempt to justify the subscription over their rivals. I imagine this is a contributing factor to the rushed &quot;fix it in post&quot; mentality but I can&#x27;t see why film would be any different to any other industry - where taking your time to get it right the first time ends up being faster over the long run.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;marvels-vfx-artists-are-suffering-now-theyre-speaking-out&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;marvels-vfx-artis...</a>