by gspencley | 2025-07-31 18:48:53+00:00
There is also a misconception that digital vfx are necessarily easier, faster and don't take as much skill etc.

My wife and I moonlight as performing magicians. We both love horror movies and when I was a child in the 80s / early 90s I wanted to do sfx makeup and practical fx for a living.

Around the late 90s / early 00s, the movie industry went through this phase where digital vfx / cgi was extremely trendy and hype-driven. Kind of like the LLM hype train in tech today. Movie studios embraced digital vfx to the exclusion of practical for a variety of reasons and with mixed results as far as public reception went. Just like with LLMs, there was this attitude amongst studios and fx shops that digital was "the future." It was driven partly by cost but also by the impression that you can do things digitally that you can't do practically, or can't do as safely or for the same budget.

So during this period we saw a hell of a lot more digital CGI and a hell of a lot less practical.

The state of vfx has matured quite a bit since then, and there has been a modern embrace of practical fx but not for the reasons that people think.

The idea that practical is better than digital is horse shit. But so is the idea that digital is better than practical. Just like with anything, it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.

Digital vfx artists are magicians. What they do is not easy. Neither are practical fx artists. Both are highly skilled crafts and disciplines and most movies today use hybrid approaches because it's all about finding the right tool for the job at hand.

What gives a lot of us vfx enthusiasts a laugh, is when studios boast about doing everything practically because of just how much of a bad image the general public has gotten about digital fx.

First, they're almost always lying to you. They undoubtedly do a lot with practical, but there is still a lot of digital vfx going on. But they play fast and loose with what they mean by "digital vfx." Is compositing the same thing as CGI? Not in a strict sense, but it's still an example of a digital effect unless you're filming on film and doing it the old fashioned way.

People have it in their mind that digital is always going to look artificial, and practical is going to "feel" real. Go look at some budget practical fx from the 80s. Some of it is brilliant and has aged well, while others looks absolutely garbage. That's true for digital as well.

The techniques needed to mature, the computers needed to mature and the industry needed to mature. Now a days most people would be surprised how much is done with digital vfx that they wouldn't have realized, because good CGI is invisible CGI. You believe it and don't question it. And amazing results are had when practical and digital are combined. Which, if I can play loose with the term "digital" has actually always been the case since Georges Méliès, a 19th century magician and early film and vfx pioneer, who accomplished a lot of his sfx using a combination of "on camera" practical methods and film compositing (what, pre-CGI, people would call "camera tricks"). A lot of what is done digitally today, takes tricks and concepts that were done by hand with film and lets people do it faster and easier with software.