Prosthetics vs CGI

A

Allanon

The Shire
I recently watched TLOTR trilogy again and the orcs and goblins look perfect being played by actors wearing prosthetics. Having seen numerous trailers, clips and TV spots, the CGI orcs and goblins look incredibly poor in comparison. Does anyone else agree?
 
They are both worthy designs and executions for the Middle-earth saga. It will be fun to see what the use of CGI will add to the characters abilities etc.
 
But a lot of the Misty Mountain goblins are actually actors in costumes. Are you sure they're CGI?

I prefer the FOTR goblins anyway. A far superior design - they simply match my image of goblins.
 
yes i'm really noticing this. look at he clip here

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=97704

i'm really getting a bad impression from the CGI orcs. it feels very fake when compared to moria. first big worry for me.
 
I loved Lurtz, Gothmog, Shagrat, Grishnak and all the others and liked the bugeyed creepyness of the Moria goblins.
What I have seen so far from Goblintown is certainly a different experience, but I reserve judgement until after I have gotten a clearer look. I don't find it that difficult to believe that the goblins of Moria and the Misty Mountain ones are different races, same as the stone trolls. I think that we will also see a lot of prosthetic wearing orcs in the later films and we certainly have seen a lot of CGI ones in the LOTR films as well (all the MASSIVE battle scenes and also the wall climbers in Moria). Let's wait and see and judge ourselves...
 
I don't prefer either one and enjoy them both.

It may have something to do with growing up in the 80's when movies really did have bad special effects. A lot of what I see today is very good.

If anyone is setting themselves up for perfection, they will always be disappointed.
 
For myself I tend to be in one of two camps when it comes to effects - either an effect is spectacular, in the sense that it visually shows me something I have never imagined, or I am relatively happy with effects as symbols and signifiers.

I grew up enjoying programmes such as Box of Delights, where the special effects for a giant rat consisted of a man with some bits of fur glued to his face. There was no question of me "believing" that he was a grant rat but I was quite happy to accept him in that roll and emote accordingly.

And for me, however effects are achieved, they work in the same way. However an Orc looks, I don't "believe" what I'm seeing is an Orc because Orcs don't exist. Similarly if someone is swinging from webs across a city I know that that isn't real however the effects are acheived.

So for me the fine distinctions of Orcs as men in masks vs orcs as computer models are generally not at issue. The CGI goblins here look very similar to me to the actor-goblins of FOTR - though obviously I don't believe either are real goblins!

There is an exception to this which strikes me however. In this clip you can seen the goblins performing actions and being thrown around in ways which one could not see with an actor, although one presumably could with "real" goblins. So there is a strange little contradiction in the sense that such motions are flagged as "fake" in some sense because we know they aren't being faked by actors. Odd.

LR
 
I love good cgi. But if there's too much of it, the eye catches on and you lose contact with the physical world. Trolls, Balrogs, Fell Beasts, Oliphants... those are great. Far off armies of orcs... great too. But up close interactions and battle with goblins? You need real actors there for the main characters to interact with. You just can't fake it. Not yet anyway. I thought they were on the right track with digital head replacement on the goblins, but it seems they thought otherwise and pushed it too far. I hope it's not too distracting. Because too much of this sort of thing (and another cgi bugaboo, cartoon physics) really sucks the tension out of scenes, and keeps the audience from having any real stakes in the characters and the story.
 
I wonder if it was scrapped in favour of cg?,personally I like a blend of the two,close ups work better with real creature work and scenes from a distance work better in cg imo
 
I recently watched TLOTR trilogy again and the orcs and goblins look perfect being played by actors wearing prosthetics. Having seen numerous trailers, clips and TV spots, the CGI orcs and goblins look incredibly poor in comparison. Does anyone else agree?
Click to expand...

I'm agreeing at the moment. But really most of the bad CGI is coming from quick stunt type movements which probably would have been done with CGI on LOTR anyway.

With that said I much prefer prosthetics to CGI. And for some reason these action sequences feel over the top to me so that kind of makes it less real to me. But that's only from clips. I haven't seen the movie yet.
 
Are well done visually but the problem I see is they just seem weightless, when the dwarves just push through then like they were not even there,I think a lot of cg stuff suffers this problem
 
Are well done visually but the problem I see is they just seem weightless, when the dwarves just push through then like they were not even there,I think a lot of cg stuff suffers this problem
Click to expand...

That's part of the problem. Actually, as you mentioned I think the CGI does in fact look good on most of the goblins when they aren't getting bulldozed. But it just seems a combination of a bunch of wrong and bad elements when they are getting easily crushed.

There doesn't seem to be any sense of danger or threat to it.
 
If you compare the fight against the goblins in Moria to the clips of the fight in goblin town the difference is obvious.

The Moria fight felt much more real, violent and in your face. The CGI goblin town fight looks like a video game.
 
... Bilbo & Co have gone to the Rivendell Arcade and are actually playing a video game at that point, I doubt it will look that much better in the context of the movie. [tongue]

Like the Star Wars franchise I think Moria v Goblin Town may be an example of technical restrictions on what a director can achieve actually making a film better.
 
With Moria, you have several settings. When they are cornered in a room, that fight is obviously claustrophobic. Then when they're running from the Balrog, it turns into the same kinda fight we see in Goblintown.

Goblintown appropriately takes in account its space. There are open places to fall into. There are rickety wooden constructs. The camera is given great freedom to put us into the action and it does so well in the small scene I've seen. I don't notice this "weightlessness" that others have mentioned. It doesn't look like a video game, it looks like we're able to see much of what is going on from various clever angles and perspectives instead of the "same old, same old" that some of the fight in Moria was.
 
And I could name many other movies with this problem,so its nothing new.

The thing with lotr is I felt that world could have existed sometime someplace,as to me it was steeped in realism, I know that sounds silly when you consider balrogs and orcs but it was the way it was portrayed,I just worry that Hobbit will be a bit to whimsical, basically to much CGI will take me out of the movie,I hope this isn't the case however,I look forward to finding out :)
 
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