What live-action films would be impossible if CGI had not invented?

Lord of the Rings series. Much of the film was and still could be shot on site in New Zealand, but the great battles with vast armies of Orcs, Trolls, flying Nazgul, etc would be almost impossible to replicate in scope.
Have many Guys in Orc suits, and more a mob formation
war-and-peace-soldiers.jpg
 
Just need bigger budgets to do the big crowd and battle scenes

The gungans and battledroids would have to be animatronic and/or prosthetics.

Some aliens (Pilot, Rygel etc.) in Farscape were made by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, so it's not as if decent sci-fi and fantasy is impossible without CGI.

Some elements of Stargate would be harder, but there are ways around that too.
 
How about Pokemon & Digimon? They're quintessential examples of franchises imposssible to adapt to live action without modern advances in CGI.
I'll expand why adapting Pokemon and Digimon to the live-action big screen is impossible without CGI.

The main draw of both franchises is fantastical-looking monster battling out with flashy superpowers and abilities along with kid characters interacting with them. That's extremely to replicate considering the amount of practical effects required to depict the titular creatures.
For example, Pikachu is a furry yellow mouse-like creature that can generate electricity and leap to trainer's body whereas Agumon is a small, upright yellow tyrannosaurus with three digits on each appendage and capable of breathing fire. It's impractical to replicate their appearances without looking awkward or creepy if an adaptation of either franchises adapted in a film without CGI.

Another thing is the settings. Pokemon's setting is based on a world where humans and creatures called Pokemon interact with each other whereas Digimon's setting is based on a world where digital creatures called Digimon live in another dimension inside digital and telecommunications systems of the 'real world'.
The difficulty comes from the fact, you're going to need a lot of puppets and models for either world. The amount of puppets and models is enough to bankrupt a film studio without the existence of CGI.
 
How about Pokemon & Digimon? They're quintessential examples of franchises imposssible to adapt to live action without modern advances in CGI.

Not neccecaryily impossible. But it would be very expensive to do so without CGI and without looking super fake.

There are many films that combine live action with animation. There wouldn't be much point in doing it like this, if the option of pure animation exists.

However, if you have humans being brought into the digital world of Digimon, then that aspect could be animated, or have live-action humans interacting with animation - it would be something like Space Jam.

As for Detective Pikachu, again it's possible to do it, if you are willing to accept a lower standard of special effects, combined with a crapton of stop motion and/or animatronics. You'd have something like a late-90s/early-2000s Japanese tokusatsu series. Toei, arguably the biggest production company for this type of series, has been doing it since the 1960s.
 
The new version of The Lion King would be pretty much impossible without CGI.

Depending on your definition of CGI, the original would be harder to pull off as well. The buffalo in the stampede scene were individually rendered by computer, cutting the amount of time to make the scene significantly.
 

Driftless

Donor
Have many Guys in Orc suits, and more a mob formation
Is that shot from Waterloo or one of the War and Peace versions?

In it's day, Waterloo was one of the most expensive movies made, and literally took 17,000 Soviet Army soldiers for the battle scenes. That level of governmental support requires diplomacy and big money. That's not always a possibility. For LOTR, you certainly could suit a bunch o'guys in Orc suits, and creatively film (Jackson did that pretty well), but you do lose something in the scope of the battles unless you have a literal army of extras. The Trolls and flying Nazgul would need to be done with some animatronics and blue screen, but still it would lack something in scope - my opinion. Kind of a similar story for the Ents, especially in the sack of Isengard.

The series could be done with old school techniques, but the high expectations from the hardcore fans scared off movie makers for a couple of generations until the combination of technology and money could be brought into play. Conversely, again my opinion, the Hobbit series got seriously over-produced from both a CGI and storyline perspective, just because the could do it and make big money... Just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea.

Rotoscope is a form of motion capture
True, but I saw both the Bashki LOTR and Wizards and IMO, that was a subtraction from the experience. I really wound disliking both films for it's use.
 
I'm curious. I did not watch the earlier seasons of Power Rangers. Can you give me a video clip on what it would really look like?

Here you go.


The first one goes as far as Wild Force.

They didn't get heavy into CGI for several series, due to how expensive it was. I believe Wild Force was the first that had a lot of CGI. Other series used some CGI (particularly Time Force), but that the first that used CGI zords almost entirely*, except for the Megazord vs. monster of the week battles.

If they can manage that for a TV series budget, they could do better with a film budget and an extra decade of higher quality models.


*The Galactabeasts were animatronic even in their beast form, IIRC.

Meanwhile, Super Sentai started in 1975.

 
I'm curious. I did not watch the earlier seasons of Power Rangers. Can you give me a video clip on what it would really look like?
Here you go.


The first one goes as far as Wild Force.

They didn't get heavy into CGI for several series, due to how expensive it was. I believe Wild Force was the first that had a lot of CGI. Other series used some CGI (particularly Time Force), but that the first that used CGI zords almost entirely*, except for the Megazord vs. monster of the week battles.

If they can manage that for a TV series budget, they could do better with a film budget and an extra decade of higher quality models.


*The Galactabeasts were animatronic even in their beast form, IIRC.

Meanwhile, Super Sentai started in 1975.

That is the special photographic used in all models.

Still guys, CGI means anything Computer image, from 2d to 3d animation...we will see more overworked korean animators than ever
 
Forrest Gump used extensive amount of CGI to get Tom Hanks to interact with historical figures and play table tennis, and Gary Sinise legs were removed with CGI so maybe they could have used other types of visual effects but would it have been convincing enough?
 
For live action war films without (or severely limited) CGI you would see a continuation of practical effects via stand ins (repainted) or mocked up vehicles, ala the tanks in the Battle of the Bulge (1965), models for larger scenes and the sometimes good, sometimes truely awful ‘model ships in the water tank’ effects.
 
A live-action adaptation of Digimon would essentially resemble a cross between Tron, Space Jam and Sesame Street. The partner Digimon of the DigiDestined would be similar to the full-body animatronic puppets similar to ET. Humanoid Digimon like Angemon would be portrayed through a combination of make up, prosthetics, latex masks and costumes. The powers displayed by Digimon would be potrayed through a combination of camera tricks, animation and optical processing.
 
If CGI were never invented perhaps the late 20th century & early 21st century would see more historic/war epics, although given the cost of extras (always an issue, there was a reason Spain was a popular place to film epics in the 60s). Given the cheapness of human labor in China perhaps there would be a lot more filming there (perhaps a remake of "55 days At Peking" (please no)), of course Eastern Europe would be a better place due to Euro-Atlantic centerness of Hollywood...

Arguably there are CGI-era releases by major creators IOTL that come very close to fitting this criteria--Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan and Gangs Of New York, a few others.

Even then, from memory the scope of the opening battle sequence in SPR is deceptively small, while there is a helluva a lot of CGI for the brutal close-up mutilation shots in Braveheart (though nobody outside of the horror genre has ever really replicated that, er, dedication).

Yet Gangs in particular is notable for the amount of time and money spent on the physical, old school sets, i.e. 1860s Manhattan recreated at Cinecitta in Rome. Hence Lucas telling Scorcese when he visited the shoot, "This is the end of a an era, Marty."

Have many Guys in Orc suits, and more a mob formation
war-and-peace-soldiers.jpg

Is that shot from Waterloo or one of the War and Peace versions?

In it's day, Waterloo was one of the most expensive movies made, and literally took 17,000 Soviet Army soldiers for the battle scenes. That level of governmental support requires diplomacy and big money. That's not always a possibility. For LOTR, you certainly could suit a bunch o'guys in Orc suits, and creatively film (Jackson did that pretty well), but you do lose something in the scope of the battles unless you have a literal army of extras. The Trolls and flying Nazgul would need to be done with some animatronics and blue screen, but still it would lack something in scope - my opinion. Kind of a similar story for the Ents, especially in the sack of Isengard.

You can do scale, but you can also do impressionistic work; I've been looking on youtube for Eisentein's battle sequences, and from what I've seen they're not as big as these other epics. He was relying more on on camera angles, sound and acting, less on dense imagery.

The series could be done with old school techniques, but the high expectations from the hardcore fans scared off movie makers for a couple of generations until the combination of technology and money could be brought into play.

I haven't read enough about this, but was it a case that the 70's Hollywood guys were scared off, or they weren't that interested to begin with? (But Kubrick wanted to do LoTR, or is that exaggerated?)

Fwiw Milius strikes me as the only 70's guy that could have begun to do Tolkien justice... assuming he were interested.

Conversely, again my opinion, the Hobbit series got seriously over-produced from both a CGI and storyline perspective, just because the could do it and make big money... Just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea.

The Hobbit trilogy is a unique travesty, and could have been a game ender for a lot of onscreen genre stuff if not for the changing business model (particularly cheaper CGI, the theme of this thread) making more productions viable.

In a sense we're fortunate that no big budget movie these days has to bare the burden of Cleopatra or Heaven's Gates' commercial failures.
 
I think people underestimate what is possible with practical effects.

There are a lot of special effects in modern and classic movies that do not involve CGI without people necessarily realizing that.

Some stuff like the above mentioned crowd scenes would simply be more expensive to shoot.

Other special effects in modern movies are simply thrown in there because they could make them not because they are necessary for the plot of the movies. For example in the last decade or so there have been a lot of shots of stuff imploding upwards. This same effect was included in a ton of movies like that awful superman movie for no reason other than that it looked sort of cool and was something they could do. For most it was not necessary for the plot at all to have that specific special effect and it could have been easily replaced by the sort of model and pyrotechnics that were used for much of the original ID4.

There are lots of scenes of movie makers shoehoring in stuff that they think could only be possible with CGI without a good reason other than that they want to show of their CGI. Much of that is not really necessary for the plot of the movie and if executed badly enough distracts from the movie itself.

Matte effects, models, makeup, props, animatronics and pyrotechnics can make for some extremely realistic looking special effects. The likes of Rick Baker and John Dykstra have achieved some really impressive stuff without computer generated images.

Not to mention acting itself. A good actor helped by a good director can get the audience to immerse themselves into a story without needing too much in the way of actual effects. The greatest SFX happen in our brain anyway and a good actor with a bit of makeup can make you believe they are a dead person as well as any cgi pasting the dead guys face over an actors head. A closeup of an actor looking on in awe while light is reflecting of their face can make any explosion be as or more realistic as any cgi shot.

I believe that constraints can help creativity and that if CGI had not come along SFX people would have improved and build on what they could do more and more to give us practical effects that we would never believe possible.

Just like the demoscenes of 80s era computer hardware has achieved great results with the same limited hardware that people would not have believed possible when it was build, a lot more potential may have been had in not neglected types of effects like stop-motion.

CGI is a tool, that makes many things easier and in some cases makes the impossible possible, but I believed that a man could fly without CGI and I have trouble suspending my belief similarly in some modern movies that try to make me believe the same.

CGI does not automatically make a movie better and trying to shoot some movies without CGI might have made them better instead. The best CGI is often not the flashy stuff but the things that the viewer never realizes is there.

Some movies might not have been possible the way they are today without CGI but working around these problems could often have improved the movie.
 
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