How CGI Effects Can Create Amazing Monsters And Aliens

Films and TV have made great strides down the years in special effects, especially when creating something out of the ordinary. Nothing fits such a description as much as mythical monsters and aliens.

CGI Versus Stop Motion

This is where special effects really come into their own, especially now, when the best post production companies can use CGI to create the monsters, leaving the actors to do their work in front of a green screen or on location before the high-tech work fills in the rest with a scary beast.

Such technology is clearly a great advance on stop motion technology, which has been around for over a century. That is the technology that was used, for example, in the early Godzilla films and still has its place today in animation, such as the plasticine adventures of Wallis and Gromit.

The latter is not, of course, meant to look totally true-to-life, whereas CGI has the potential to be much more realistic. Another advantage is that it is a lot faster to create, with stop-motion films being notorious for taking a very long time to produce as every tiny move has to be recorded. Don’t expect Feathers McGraw back on your TV screen for a few years yet.

Why Less May Be More

However, it is not necessarily the case that CGI is a silver bullet for high-quality monster effects. Many film fans and critics have argued that the quality has actually gone downhill.

According to Watch Ops, a key reason for this decline has been that post-production teams are getting overworked, being asked to churn out too much work in too little time, with quality suffering as a result of an excessive emphasis on quantity.

Other criticisms include the wrong background lighting (too bright and too much orange), CGI having to do too much by producing backgrounds as well as the foreground characters and effects, plus a “lazy” approach to making films that assumes post-production will fix all flaws.

The Watch Ops critique did cite some examples of best practice, such as Christopher Nolan’s sparing use of CGI, deploying it only when no alternative was available, or the use of the right lighting in the Planet of the Apes prequels. That indicates that CGI is still a great tool, but not everyone uses it the right way.

For this reason, you can still be confident that CGI, when used correctly, can deliver great results. Big monsters and scary aliens are, of course, exactly the kind of thing that you would want CGI to produce, to make them look as realistic as possible.