I love CGI if it's invisible. I don't like it when it's there and obvious.
I think you should be prepared for a green-screen CGI at all times.
You can't just do cheap CGI and think that's going to work. It doesn't.
With some CGI, I think the brain slightly perceives that things aren't real. There's no gravity, the light's not quite real, the shadows aren't quite real.
You know, I gotta be honest. I have not done a lot of CGI work. I just haven't. I mean, there were hundreds of effects in Watchmen, and I probably dealt with almost none of them, because all my stuff was very practical.
As far as CGI and hand-drawn animation, I consider them both nothing more than tools for drawing pictures, the same as crayons or oils. Which is why, to me, the most important thing is what it is you are drawing, and in the themes that I depict, I think hand-drawing is the most effective.
The vast majority of the CGI budget is labor.
Even if I had $200 million, I’m very wary of overusing CGI. I think it’s a great tool and it can be used really effectively, but I feel like it does tend to be overused and especially in sci-fi stuff.
We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn't get it done in time. We couldn't get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn't as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.
I think the difference is that Angelina didn't need any CGI enhancement and I did! You can't really think about some things too much, you just get on with it and do it. It's about the way you move and the way you sound.
I'm a big believer in just using CGI to polish what you get on camera.
Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can't afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters.
The quality of CGI, audiences are now so used to it. They don't know what is CGI and what is real.
When I did Yoda, me and three other people worked our asses off, and I was sweating every single day, it was tough as hell. Now that it's CGI, 24 people work on Yoda, and I get all the credit -- I do nothing.
Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive.
The industry in Japan moving toward CGI is not as severe and extreme as in the U. S. The animation industry in the U. S. is firing 2D animators and closing those studios, but I think it's possibly because the national traits of the U. S. prefer super-realism. Since Japan is a country that prefers plane vision, I don't think we will leave 2D and substitute hand-drawing with CGI entirely.
