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.
I don't have anything against CGI.
It's been about 15 years, and I've never really worked seriously in CGI and I thought that here was an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I was not able to do on Ghostbusters.
It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.
Since we made Shrek in the digital format, you actually can see it in its purest form digitally.
Anyone can buy CG technology. It's not that it's easy to make those films. Those films are just as difficult, they're incredibly hard to make.
Certainly the animation technology is growing like crazy. All media technology is.
When I did Yoda, me and three other people worked our asses off, and I was sweating every single day, it was tough as hell. Now that it's CGI, 24 people work on Yoda, and I get all the credit -- I do nothing.
Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do.
Animation has always been about technology. You can't have animation without technology.
If you always want to look relevant, just be CGI-prepared.
I've been working in computer animation for 25 years. I'm obviously a devotee of the technology. I just think it's the one aspect of the medium that's going to continue to revolutionize the filmmaking. It's constantly changing and it's constantly opening up new possibilities. The technology is evolving where 2-D animation was ultimately limited by how long you could pay how many people to make a movie. I mean computers, not that it's in anyway a labor saving device, but it promises to open up exciting new technical possibilites.
In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves--'I press too hard here, and it breaks here' and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it's important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials.
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.
