Nick Park Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

For all the spectacle of CGI, there's something alien and unreal about that domain, like a videogame.

As computers have become more powerful, computer graphics have advanced to the point where it's possible to create photo-realistic images. The bottleneck wasn't, 'How do we make pixels prettier?' It was, 'How do we engage with them more?'

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.

CGI is done after the film is done. It's through the computer. Most of the film is not computer-generated special effects. Most of it is that creature that is in the room with you.

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.

The combination of the CGI, 3-D, and sound effects, it's just impossible to separate them. It gives you a more immersive experience, and I prefer that.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

'King Kong,' especially the first two acts of it, is a really good example of the use of miniatures mixed with digital characters and how convincing it was.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.

With CG, I can do more and be sillier. In 'Diary,' there's a scene where they hit a guy with acid, and the camera is never off him, and you see it gradually eat through his skull and get all the way through his brain. That's fun, too.

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.

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 don't have anything against CGI.

If people want to watch a CG movie, there's plenty out there.

We're always striving to make Avatar look like a cinematic, live-action movie.

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.