A Quote by Ray Harryhausen

With all the hype that computer graphics has been getting, everybody thinks there's nothing better than CGI, but I do get a lot of fan mail saying they prefer our films to anything with CGI in it. I'm grateful for that, and we made them on tight budgets, so they were considered B-pictures because of that. And, now here we are, and they've outlasted many so-called A-pictures.
I feel that so many sci-fi films and films in general have just become really dependent on and addicted to CGI, and that some of the big CGI films of the summer, you see these effects that look like crap. You don't know if you're watching a cartoon or something that's real. And I didn't want to fall into that trap. I really thought there was a way to use a lot of these old techniques to do some new and really neat stuff.
What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it, it can be put on the screen.
We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn't get it done in time. We couldn't get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn't as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.
People regard CGI as a gimmick; they almost blame CGI for a bad story or a bad script. They talk about CGI as if it's responsible for a drop in standards.
CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives. But I knew CGI was gonna start taking over.
CGI is to me like watching a cartoon. It can be effective, if it's done well. A lot of times you don't feel any real risk. You're watching a bunch of computer-generated graphics.
The quality of CGI, audiences are now so used to it. They don't know what is CGI and what is real.
I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.
Everybody hates to edit my film. Back in the day, we called it film - now, my digital cards. But I shoot an awful lot of pictures. I don't want to hesitate, because I believe the moment is everything in a picture. So, I take the pictures.
None of the pictures I take a risk in cost a lot, so it doesn't take much for them to turn a profit. We don't deal in big budgets. We know what we want and we shoot it and we don't waste anything. I never understand these films that cost twenty, thirty million dollars when they could be made for half that. Maybe it's because no one cares. We care.
I just think action films now have... often, because you can do anything with CGI, people do. And I don't think you necessarily should. You lose that sort of human dimension, and you get all the stuff breaking the laws of physics.
As far as CGI and hand-drawn animation, I consider them both nothing more than tools for drawing pictures, the same as crayons or oils. Which is why, to me, the most important thing is what it is you are drawing, and in the themes that I depict, I think hand-drawing is the most effective.
I don't know. I don't go around looking at my pictures. I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures. When the time comes, for whatever reason, I get involved in editing and getting some prints made and stuff. There are things that interest me. But I don't really mull over them a lot.
I think sometimes big budget means explosions! CGI! CGI, the possibilities are so limitless that it begins to be impractical.
The industry in Japan moving toward CGI is not as severe and extreme as in the U.S. The animation industry in the U.S. is firing 2D animators and closing those studios, but I think it's possibly because the national traits of the U.S. prefer super-realism. Since Japan is a country that prefers plane vision, I don't think we will leave 2D and substitute hand-drawing with CGI entirely.
Approximately 400 cuts - that would make 25 percent of the total - use CGI. I worked on the Steamboy's animation production based on the usual handwriting method. Digital animation is just supplementary. I didn't do anything surprising, because the idea is to overcome the limitation of expressions done by handwriting with the help of CGI.
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