But look at that picture you just posted. What's the difference? The second one has all the "modules" activated. It has the fake blur, the fake particle generator ... all gimmicky things that are designed to divert the attention from the fact that in essence, it still looks fake as hell.
So, sure, the new Jurrasic movie will run at a higher resolution. There will be more scenes with dinosaurs in it. But they still look fake as hell. Once they move a millimeter it's immediately clear they're just pasted in.
21 years later, and basically almost nothing has improved.
Or rather, they just booted the CGI machines, loaded up the dinosaur models and just went through the motions.
It's not gimmicks, it's basic compositing, which is a core process in integrating layers together in any scene. These same gimmicks were just as essential to the original Jurassic Park.
CG has come incredibly far in 21 years, and this stuff is much more complex than Jurassic Park. Almost every shot in the Jurassic World trailer would have been undoable in 1993 with CG, but they knew they couldn't do it, so they didn't. The close up CG shots with environmental interactions, dynamic particle effects, CG water, refractions through live action elements, complex matting, the CG allows them to do things that the original movie couldn't have done.
Jurassic Park's CG is antiquated by today's standards on a technical level, and when you can see it clearly, some of it is really bad, especially the daytime stuff (the brontosaurus shots near the start are terrible by today's standards, and the pack of whatever they are doesn't look good and relies on the motion blur and fast movement to look passable), but the reason it looks so good overall even today is because they knew how to play to their strengths and downplay their weaknesses. It was incredibly ambitious for the time, and still holds up well today, but there was a very low limit to what they could pull off believably, or even attempt with the computing power at the time.
It's well known that any scene involving close-ups and interactions with characters involved heavy use of animatronics and puppetry, which actually made up the majority of the dinosaur shots, more than most people realize. You won't see too many CG close-ups that let you scrutinize it too closely, and those are the ones that let it down. For most of the CG, they relied on these "gimmicks" to blend it into the scene well. The whole T-rex scene is in the dark fog covered in thick pissing rain. That's not just for mood! I can spot lots of limitations and flaws that would have made that scene look awful if done in daytime lighting, but in that specific situation, they managed to hide those flaws to the point it takes a 3D artist nerd like me to know what to look for. If that scene was done in the daytime without the fog and rain, it would have looked like total crap.
Jurassic Park is a landmark film in CG graphics and cinema in general, and it's unbelievable how well it holds up for its age, but it's because they knew what they couldn't do with the technology, and mostly avoided it. The few parts where the CG was upfront without anything to cover it up is where it doesn't look so great, and wouldn't make the grade of a weekly TV show today.
A lot of Jurassic Park may seem as good as what is being done today, but it's only because they limited themselves severely to what they knew they could do convincingly under very particular circumstances, which is a fraction of what is capable today, and used a lot more puppetry than people realize. We've become indifferent to 3D graphics in the past two decades due to its overuse, but Jurassic World's CG is actually much better than Jurassic Park's. It's less convincing due to excessiveness.
Sorry for the rant, but as a 3D artist, I couldn't help myself.
All of that said, this movie looks lame. The reason the original worked so well is because it teased, and made a spectacle of the dinosaurs. This movie starts off with a level of indifference, which it seems does represent the audience well, but they don't seem to be doing enough to affect that indifference.
They should have taken the Jurassic Park/Godzilla approach, and taken it back to square one, and focused on making it more personal and believable, make a single dinosaur as imposing and impressive as it would be in real life. Focus on quality, not quantity.
Topic: Jurassic World (Read 34004 times)
