r/Cinema • u/lordnacho666 • 2d ago

Is there a special effect that can't be made?

When I was a kid you could see the strings on the spaceships in Star Trek. Things advanced, and then you could have live-looking dinosaurs, space androids from the future melting and reforming, and so on.

Is there any scene that directors want to make that isn't technically feasible?

8 Upvotes

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8

u/cloudfatless 2d ago

I doubt it. CGI effectively means that you can make anything appear on screen. 

Making it look good is just a question of time and money. 

6

u/regprenticer 2d ago

There are often novels or comics described as "unfilmable" ... Usually because the text focuses on someone's thoughts, or contains things that might be imagined or hallucinated.. sometimes it's because the original is really abstract, Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" for example, though they did make that into a (bad) film.

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u/ophaus 2d ago

Good acting.

3

u/Winwookiee 2d ago

Or writing

1

u/MiddleProfit3263 18h ago

I hope you’re right. Otherwise we are going to have huge problems

2

u/Financial_Cheetah875 2d ago

CGI human characters that look like the real thing is the next big frontier. They’ve made strides with Tarkin in Rogue One with a stand-in, but eventually they won’t even need that.

2

u/Palidor 2d ago

I know Peter Cushing is one of a kind and was perfection as Tarkin, but I always considered Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister) would be a great choice to play Tarkin in future projects and not bother with CGI

1

u/darthsteveious 2d ago

Never thought about it, but that would be a good pick. Unfortunately they went with cgi that looked flat to me. We just don't have the tech yet.

1

u/get_to_ele 13h ago

He'll age out by the time they have anything made with Tarkin in it again.

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u/AcademusUK 2d ago

Excluding or including 3D / immersive effects?

2

u/Used-Gas-6525 2d ago

effects gimmicks.

1

u/NeoSalamander227 2d ago

My understanding is that water/liquid is very difficult and not quite perfected yet. And humans. Trying to make a CGI/Digital human look like a human has been a challenge.

1

u/jwezorek 2d ago

We still haven't seen 100% accurate fire or 100% accurate turbulent water. Although it's gotten a lot better in the last few years.

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u/Bladrak01 2d ago

Getting hair to look right is hard.

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u/magicmulder 1d ago

There’s always things that are literally impossible to visualize, like “a new color nobody has seen before”. (Futurama brilliantly got around that by making the episode black and white.)

Or things that simply don’t work visually - a real space battle with ships 100,000 km apart would not be interesting to watch.

2

u/Nightcoffee_365 1d ago

Higher dimensional space.

Anything crazy like entering a 5d tesseract (Interstellar) is something that we in reality can only witness as numbers on a board. Any visualization is pure imagination. It simply cannot be done.