John Badham Quotes

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.

We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.

Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.

I don't have anything against CGI.

Obviously, CGI in the last ten years has gone through such leaps and bounds that today, people are looking for these kinds of movies to wow audiences with technology.

Technology continues to bring us wondrous advances in filmmaking to improve how we view movies.

My particular aesthetic of light and color and design wouldn't change as a result of working with computer graphics rather than with slit scan or miniatures.

Every film that comes out that incorporates CGI or performance capture is a little bit ahead of the last film that came out. You're on the cutting edge for a certain amount of time, and then the new technology comes out.

I came in during the era of models, motion control, and optical printers. ILM had just started its own computer graphics division, after the Lucasfilm computer division had been sold off and became Pixar.

ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.

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.

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 can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

I remember when I first came around, the computer-generated stuff was pretty wicked. I was like, 'Wow!' but I feel like then for the longest time, we saw so much of it, after a while, you might as well just be watching an animated movie.

3D is quite a lot more advanced in animated movies; for live-action movies we're just taking baby steps, we're just in the beginning.

I could take my grandma and put her in a cape, and they'll put her on a green screen, and they'll have stunt doubles come in and do all the action. Anybody can do it. They're relying on stunt doubles and green screen and $200 million budgets - it's all CGI created. To me, it's not authentic.

Special effects are becoming more and more affordable and looking more and more like the real thing.

When I was younger, I was hopefully going to do animation and special effects.

Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.

I'm not a big fan of visual effects.

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.

Going from 'Shark Night' to 'Piranha,' a guy holding a fish on a stick in front of you that they're going to replace in post-production, it's a lot different than seeing this animatronic shark that, if you get caught up in the moment, looks, acts and you sometimes think could be real.

I grew up watching movies and being amazed at the animatronics you'd see in stuff like 'The Dark Crystal,' and all those kinds of movies. So, I'm always enthralled with how they can make it all work, behind the scenes, with the visual effects.