Mistimed Magic - Technical mastery cant fix poor thinking.

We've all seen this, a stunningly rendered movie monster fills the screen, that shot cuts to the next where the actor stumbles back.... and it feels at total odds with the scene in which its placed, the cables on which you suspended you disbelief snap.

In all honesty I could write this post on any from a huge list of films released in the last decade, but in this instance our case study be Jurassic World: Rebirth. (Partly because I've seen it recently), pertinently due to the fact it illustrates my point so very clearly in multiple instances.

We'll start by saying the CGI in this film is not bad, in fact it is rather incredible. The subsurface scattering through the wing membrane of Quetzalcoatls is stunning, with all the individual vessels and veins picked out amongst the leathery shifting wing as the light refracted through it. In the same scene the ambient occlusion is perfect, light is adequately blocked and the creature left to fall off in to darkness when needed.

It goes beyond the rendering though, the compositing of the practical boat elements with the mosasaur and Spinosaurus attack is on par with Avatar for the realistic integration of practical and cgi water. Not to mention the praise the film deserves for the use of a huge practical boat set, water tank, and mechanical rig to aid in motion and therefore the realism of performance.

So what's the catch? We've got the magic, and for the first third of the movie most tricks land on time. But, and those who've seen Rebirth will know where this going, the movie crashed up against serious issues of scale in the second act. This is where we see the issue of mistimed magic become prevalent and the point is illustrated.

Our protagonists enter a valley, chest high elephant grass surrounds them, when suddenly a sauropod of immense size stands up, rising from its hiding place in the grass to dominate the screen and shock our heroes... Now I've spent some time in elephant grass, and as the name implies it grows rather tall, its remarkable how much it obscures your surroundings. The thing is the grass I've spent time was, well, elephant sized, not chest high. Chest high grass wouldn't obscure an elephant laying down, let alone the largest land animal to have ever walked the earth.

Here the wheels are starting to come off, it feels very much like our actors have just walked in front of a green screen with no indication of what would be on it, so great is the disconnect between their performance and the CGI scene built around them.

And I know why.

A number of those scenes amongst the elephant grass were shot on a location, and whilst we all clamour for more sets and a practical effects, if shots aren't properly planned, you end up with this issue.

You have shots you cant afford to or practically manage to reshoot, with fixed lighting, eyelines, and performances, all aiming for a particular sequence and matching CGI performance... and then a studio exec leans over your shoulder and says "hey yeah we don't want them spotting the Dinos from a distance actually, we want it up close to really wow audiences" (i know not quite how it works, but you get the point) Suddenly you're whole teams scrambling, for one thing when your VFX house bid on this project the budget became fixed, reworking an entire shot will mean a lot of unpaid overtime, and that's before we get to the most pressing issue, how do you and the other teams reanimated, composite and re-edit this new sequence without it looking jarring?

Well the simple answer in this case is you cant.

You can try, and there are certainly times when teams succeed, but there's only so much you can do against an impossible ask. At the end of the day we are subconsciously rather good at spotting things which jar against our expectations of reality, and when you have people in a scene providing an anchor for scale, any inconsistencies with the scale of cgi elements is going to become apparent quickly and be nearly impossible to overcome. (as an aside that scene is also cut to hell to compensate for the shift in CGI, one of the calmer scenes in the film and it chops back and forth like a marvel action sequence)

We then see s similar issue of scale play out later with the mutant dinosaurs and the helicopter, and its perhaps even more frustrating there. The climax of the movie, amazing smoke simulations and background modelling, dramatic and fantastically captured red lighting from flares, an ominous swelling score, all set the scene. Then a creature we have a good sense of scale for seems to triple in size in one scene before reducing massively a few moments later when we next see it.

Its not the fault of the CGI artists, the compositors, or the on set talent, its the fault of poor planning, either no one locked in how they were going to destroy the chopper, or they changed it last minute, leaving artists once again scrambling. Facing another impossible ask, have this creature destroy this thing even though it could never reach it, what can they do?

And I want to be clear my issue isn't one of paleo-accuracy or even continuity. You can play with scale for dramatic effect in a movie, you can certainly take liberties with the accuracy of a dinosaurs size (hell at this point its practically a rule of the franchise). My issue is that these issues need not exist. All the component pieces are there, the talent, the tech, the teams desire. All of it, and it is undone by poor planning, a lack of coherent previsualisation, and the oars being stuck in by lesser rowers.

Now i am not an expert in this field, but others who are have surmised it so; In an age of green screen and CGI, the need for in depth story boards and forethought for the set up of each shot has waned in the mind of many, particularly those money men who see previz as an unnecessary expense when they can just "fix it in post". This combined with the crunch created through contracts as VFX teams put in pre-bids for projects results in artists with neither the time nor the quality ingredients needed to achieve the end results they're capable of.

This is how you end up with the lighting for the last battle scene in Shang Chi looking like a 2000 DVD movie (despite the rest of the film being rather stunning) because they shot it in direct sunlight and then decided after that they wanted it to be an overcast evening and smoke filled. Even with the best artists in the world you cant fully hide the suns truth.

The magic tricks arent bad, its just the producers who booked Madison square gardens for a close up card trick, made it appear so.