Neil Marshall Quotes

If you think about it, you can have the best CGI, but you can always tell that it is CGI. Your brain can spot that is not real even though you think it looks cool. Your brain knows the truth, so you don't jump and you don't scream. It was very important for me to expose the audience to real elements.

I wish they taught green screen acting classes.

Other effects in the show included models of the ships which were extremely expensive to make. We used to do our shots in front of a blue screen and they'd put the effects on after.

I just don't think CGI is up to manipulating the human face yet. I feel like you can get away with it with aliens or monsters or something that's intentionally foreign, but I have yet to see anything digital to do with the human face that doesn't just look ridiculous.

Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it's all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I'm completely in love with CGI. It's great for conveying a cartoonist's sense of reality.

Get the shading right, the lighting right, and there are things you can do to make the CGI look more real. People end up going crazy and give themselves a little too much freedom in how they use CGI, and if you overuse it, it draws attention to itself.

The quality of CGI, audiences are now so used to it. They don't know what is CGI and what is real.

I don't know, I'm still a little bit like, when you blend CGI well with real life, it's impressive, but if you remove real life completely, I still get pulled out of the movie a bit.

If you look back at Disney's 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' or 'Pocahontas,' animated films were trying to get more and more real before CG really arrived.

You hear people say that there's too much CG in movies today, but CG is what allows me to take a green-painted wall in a studio and make it disappear, and then put 100 miles of landscape in. CG, in the right hands, can be a marvelous tool.

'Smurfs' just seemed like a great way to represent a young father to be, guy in a marriage, work in conflict, and I was really interested in the technical CG side of things. I'd never done a movie that I thought would be so physical and yet so precise. So I was intrigued by all of that.

I think the work that they do and the style of 3D graphics is absolutely fabulous and I think it's a great brush to use for some stories. And there are other brushes that I think are exclusive to a different kind of story.

When I made 'Real Steel,' the director actually had the robots in the monitor, so he knew where everything was. So technically, there's been advancements. But at the end of the day, movies are about story and characters, so all the other stuff is great, but unless you have those two elements, then you've got nothing.

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.

I want to go wherever there's great work. I'm a huge fan of film primarily. But you can get a great TV show and get attached to it. Making a great film is forever, though, so I always want to be part of film. It's my first love.

Animation is a great way to work. No early morning call times, no make-up chair. In live action, you're always fighting the clock; the sun is always going down too soon.

I don't use film cameras. I don't do visual effects the same way. We don't use miniature models; it's all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It's a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same.

Even today, a lot of the CGI you see in movies is so clean and crisp that it just looks fake. It's weird: the more advanced they get, the faker it looks.

It's always fun when you're doing the CGI stuff, to actually get to work with someone who is real, who's there.

If you stood me in a costume next to a computer graphic of the same-looking character, I think there would be a difference. And many movie fans I've spoken to would rather see an actor in a costume than CG.

I love doing action scenes, there's that great thing when you sort of stop acting because if you're running, you're not acting like you're running, you are just actually running.

I learned a lot about 3D animation from and with my dear friend Michael Hemschoot of Workerstudio. Taught me that I want to play more with animation and image manipulation. Fun stuff!

If you imagine yourself as a craftsman at ILM, you spend your days tumbling buses and animating shards of glass. You're doing a lot of visual effects work.

I love great animation.