Cg Quotes

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

When you're working with a low budget, the most expensive time is the time spent on the set. The words of the day are, 'Get off the set as quickly as possible,' and so CG enables you to do that.

I really love animation as a storytelling medium, whether it's traditional, cel animation, or CG, or stop motion, which is more our studio's area of focus. But I find that the creatives behind any kind of animation are typically very similar, and so regardless of what aesthetic they use to realize their vision, I'm usually pretty into it.

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.

I don't have anything against CGI.

For me, CG tends to feel watered down and it becomes cold because it's so perfect.

I do a lot of CG stuff for fun.

That one [in "2012"] was different because it was all CG, getting washed away by water. In "Independence Day," everything was still done in models, built in a certain scale out of plaster, and packing tons and tons of little explosives and charges in there. We had a second one in case it didn't work the first time, but it worked the first time.

CG can do anything, but it can't do everything well. What it naturally can do is special effects. But using stop-motion comes from our desire to do handmade stuff. There are always going to be kids who get out whatever it might be - clay, bits of wire, Barbie dolls, Legos. They want to tell little stories.

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.

I mean, for sure, from my history, I have an extreme fondness for 2D. I think it feels very hand-crafted, and you see the artist's personal touch. I think something about CG makes it a bit more sterile.

As the CG in motion capture made it look realistic, it put more of an onus on the game makers to make the dialogue they're saying more realistic. It doesn't matter what they say when they're 8-bits, but if they look almost photo-real, it matters. More and more, the games industry is realising that.

I love CG - it's a great tool. I just don't think you should use it to replace reality; you should use it to augment and enhance. Do matte paintings, do composites, do replications, stuff like that, but you're taking something real and working with that as opposed to trying to fake it from scratch. The human brain can tell the difference.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

I see the tool set being the same and maybe doing virtual movies and that's fine for some stories but not for others. And maybe make all CG movies but they are already doing it.

I think 'The Lost World' could've been a successful movie except for the fact that it pre-dated the good special effects and computer graphics.

'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.

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.