I am really not following the point the author is trying to make. Fury Road clearly uses practical effects and real actors/sets throughout.
Yes they did a bunch of image composition and post-processing, but that doesn't change the point of practical effects. The actor was directing real people doing real stunts, and was finding ways of putting things into film. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Compare it to the average Marvel sequence now where glassy, unconvincing scenes are computer generated from scratch and it's night and day. It doesn't matter that both spent time on a computer when one actually starts with something real.
It would be like saying Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't have practical effects because it was a cartoon.
Just watch the "No CGI is Just Invisible CGI" Youtube series linked towards the end of the article, it makes the same points much more cogently (and in fact covers Roger Rabbit in depth). The point is more that the studios are pushing this idea that the two are mutually exclusive as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films to make that "grounded" aesthetic possible.
>as a marketing angle, which is disrespectful to the huge amount of work VFX artists put into these films
Fury Road literally hired Cirque de Soleil performers to design, choreograph, and perform actual death defying stunts in the movie. It's not just made-up marketing just because someone on the internet pointed out the images were color corrected.
If anything, it's much more disrespectful to the hundreds of people who went to the Namibian desert and actually pulled of these stunts by denying they mattered at all!
Again, I am referring to the argument made in Jonas Ussing's video series, which is not focused on Fury Road. He is not arguing stunt people don't deserve recognition, just that VFX artists do too, particularly for the work they do to make those practical effects work.
In every example given in the "No CGI is Just Invisible CGI" series I knew, irrefutably, that every single example they gave was CGI prior to watching the video explaining to me that "no dummy you were hoodwinked those are really cgi!" because what was being represented on screen is impossible without the use of CGI-- and everyone else knew it too.
Except, of course, the people who believe that it is possible to drive a car down the side of a dam while it is on fire.
My favorite thing about the entire series were the many times when the host kept saying "this is REALLY the result of lots of outstanding effort by many different dedicated artists" (although I seem to remember that he calls them "vendors" instead of "artists" which seems... degrading?) while showing a scene that objectively looks terrible.
When people say "fury road was practical" they don't care that a VFX artist deleted a safety line because the only part that matters is the dude jumping from one actual car to another. VFX in that case is just makeup, filling in the wrinkles and adding some pop to the cheekbones. What they mean is that "a dude jumped from one car to another instead of jumping from one blue-tarp-covered-box-maybe-on-hydraulics to another inside a soundstage".
Really? You could tell the planes in Top Gun: Maverick were all CGI over reference footage? You could tell the Barbie movie car sequences were shot in front of a green screen (as opposed to a matte painting, which is how it appears)? You could tell that almost all the racing shots in Gran Turismo were CGI?
This wasn't an example given in the video series but what about a movie like Brokeback Mountain? Can you tell which of the sheep or which of the mountaintops are CGI? If you can, that's absolutely shocking to me.
>Really? You could tell the planes in Top Gun: Maverick were all CGI over reference footage?
Yes. The Darkstar doesn't exist and it is impossible to photograph a flying F-14 without the permission of the Islamic Republic of Iran-- which is unlikely to give it.
I 100%, irrefutably, unquestionably, knew that every single frame of every single second of those scenes were 100% cgi. I also knew that most of the F/A-18 scenes were CGI because Tom Cruise is not an F/A-18 pilot so he must have sat in the rear seat of a two-seater version and they edited out the front pilot and changed the rear seats to look like the front seat.
You didn't know that? Curious.
>You could tell that almost all the racing shots in Gran Turismo were CGI?
Yes, because they looked like shit.
I have not seen Barbie. From what I've seen it looks like it was shot in that fancy new rear projection setup various projects are using.
It sounds like you’re saying you knew the Top Gun Maverick shots were CGI because you know a lot about planes, not because the footage looks wrong.
Barbie was chroma keyed - they discuss it in the aforementioned YouTube videos.
And, yes,I know blue aliens don’t exist. But parts of that movie are composited mixtures of CGI and humans in body paint. The point is that you can’t distinguish the digital from the physical.
Yes they did a bunch of image composition and post-processing, but that doesn't change the point of practical effects. The actor was directing real people doing real stunts, and was finding ways of putting things into film. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Compare it to the average Marvel sequence now where glassy, unconvincing scenes are computer generated from scratch and it's night and day. It doesn't matter that both spent time on a computer when one actually starts with something real.
It would be like saying Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn't have practical effects because it was a cartoon.