Quotes About CG

Visual effects have always been a part of this art form. And CG is simply a tool on the filmmaker's tool belt to tell a story, but when the end result is bad - maybe it's not the tool's fault.

I love hand-drawn animation, but I have to say I have fallen in love with CG animation. What you can do in terms of visuals is pretty stunning, and I think if I did go back and do a hand-drawn animation, I would want to make sure that, from a stylistic standpoint, it would be as beautiful as 'Hunchback of Notre Dame' at least!

'Muppets' was very much an exercise in anti-CG and the anti-effects world. It was very much in camera. We wanted to create a world where tangible puppets walked around and talked to each other. You could touch them. You could meet them.

Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive, such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way, or a film design that is different but expensive.

I'm a 'Clash of the Titans'/'Star Wars' baby. I'm not a new 'Star Wars' baby. I'm not an 'Avatar' baby. That full CG doesn't work for me. I need interactivity. I need to feel the goo. I need to feel people coming out of animatronics and just interacting with props.

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

Certain films, when shot digitally, the detail is like CG: you can't feel the sweat. I feel like digital is alienating. There's something superficial to digital compared to the richness of film.

The monsters and creatures were always scarier when they felt very real and tangible, and there's something about CG that lessens the impact of it.

It's interesting now that basically a CG set is the same cost as a real set. So like if you're going to build a CG house in the suburbs, it costs you $200 000. And if you were going to build it in a computer, it'll cost you $200 000. It's the same... the relationship is exactly the same.

Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive, such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way, or a film design that is different but expensive.

When you're working with a low budget, the most expensive time is the time spent on the set. The words of the day are, 'Get off the set as quickly as possible,' and so CG enables you to do that.

'Smurfs' just seemed like a great way to represent a young father to be, guy in a marriage, work in conflict, and I was really interested in the technical CG side of things. I'd never done a movie that I thought would be so physical and yet so precise. So I was intrigued by all of that.

For me, CG tends to feel watered down and it becomes cold because it's so perfect.

As the CG in motion capture made it look realistic, it put more of an onus on the game makers to make the dialogue they're saying more realistic. It doesn't matter what they say when they're 8-bits, but if they look almost photo-real, it matters. More and more, the games industry is realising that.

The wonderful thing about 48 fps is the integration of live action and CG elements; that is something I learned from 'The Hobbit.' We are so used to 24 fps and the romance of celluloid... but at 48 fps, you cannot deny the existence of these CG creations in the same time frame and space and environment as the live action.

I love CG - it's a great tool. I just don't think you should use it to replace reality; you should use it to augment and enhance. Do matte paintings, do composites, do replications, stuff like that, but you're taking something real and working with that as opposed to trying to fake it from scratch. The human brain can tell the difference.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to paint myself as, you know, the evangelist for practical effects or some sort of anti CG guy because it's really a tool. Like filmmaking is this toolbox and you use what's appropriate in relation to the story.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

I think the CG is an instrument to create reality. I don't think it's an instrument to create a heightened reality.

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

On 'The Dragon Prince', we wanted to push that even more to leverage the strengths of a CG and 3D pipeline. We wanted details on the character designs, in the costumes and sets, that you really can't get in traditional 2D animation.

This new generation of animators was trained in CG. They know all the fundamentals of any 2D animator, but a lot of them learned on these CG rigs. You give them a good rig, and they can make that thing sing.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

Just like those little Viewmaster slides, there's a inherent magic that's captured in 3D that you can't get in drawn animation or in CG.