What makes a movie's special effects look fake?

G W Zipper

G W Zipper

Well-Known Member
Of course, you always need to suspend disbelief to some degree when watching a sci-fi movie, but what in particular takes you "out of the moment"?

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When something is made up of many many tiny grey bits, like it was designed by a moron who does not know a thing about structural integrity, wind resistance or function.

Unrealistic lighting or colours (teal and orange or unsaturated) or too much contrast on a cloudy day.

Unrealistic movement: things accelerate too fast, as if it does not have mass or gravity does not exist.
 
There's occasionally some bad blue/green screen where the cut and paste looks obvious between actors in the foreground vs backgrounds with completely different lighting.

This always screams a bad pick-up shot or they were too budget constrained to film on real sets or locations.

There's a lot of good blue/green screen work also where you can't tell.

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Impossible camera angles and or movements. If the event depicted were actually happening and being filmed, the camera would only be able to move or record it in so many ways. Often times the virtual camera in CGI work does the impossible, a dead giveaway that what we're watching is fake.
 
Visible matte lines and no motion blur in stop-motion-animation. Both were a necessary evil in "the old days". There are ways to make them less visible but without digital imagery and compositing you are unable to completely avoid it. HOWEVER, I really appreciate these flaws because of its visibility. It shows that what you see was created by a group of talented and creative people who tried their best to make the illusion work (more or less, of course ;) ). It's kinda charming. :)
 
One movie that has a lot of these issues talked about is Ghostbusters. Like the demon dog running around. Bad lighting, compositing and physics. Yet, the movie is so great, its easy to look past it. What can really bring out bad effects are when they are really bad AND the movie itself is just plain bad.
 
Impossible camera angles and/or movement and bad physics, especially a lack of mass and momentum.
 
Continuity. Example, back in 1977 Star Wars designed their spaceship physics around WW2 airplanes. Atmospheric flight characteristics in space is kind of silly when you think about it, but it works because it was done well. Battlestar uses a different model, more realistic thrust vectoring. It works too, because they started with it and stuck with it.
Everything is becoming more of a video game these days. The action has to be more intense, more flamboyant, until they violate the continuity set up earlier.

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The worst CGI I have seen is in Blade II when the vampires come to talk to him and they start with a fight. Both Blade and the vampires are CGI in most of it and they just don't move like a person. Yeah I know vampires move faster, but it looks fakey even for that.
 
Nowadays, for me, it's got to be over-dressing. For all the press now that these big movies get for using practical effects, much of the shots are so gussed up, I can't tell if it's practical or not and it just gets lumped under "another CG effect", which I don't know says more about me or the state of films.

Recently, I found out that a few of cityscape shots in 2049 were actually huge, practical miniatures and they're actually really impressive under natural lighting conditions. When I saw them in the film, I just thought it was all CG because everything else in the film was heavily saturated and covered in CG "clean up" work. That, I find, more a shame than anything else.
 
When they make digital skin look wet or oily, Tarkin in R1 for example. To contrast, they de-aged RDJ great in Cap3. Skin looked more matte and natural.

Digital objects can tend to lack surface detail. When it gets right down to it, they overuse digital nowadays. Things that could look great as real models.
 
I see several responses of "physics". Especially in this digital SFX age, wouldn't that be easy to check? I mean, a director could set limits to what's possible in universe, and those specifications could be used to set limits. I would think a digital asset could be directly interrogated for mass, forces, loads, stress/strain, etc.

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