As I watched the season one finale of HBO’sThe Last of Us, I found myself surrounded by arguments. “It’s obviously CGI,” one of my friends snapped across the room. “No, it looks real,” someone else said. “It looks too weird to be real,” another said indignantly. We were all busy staring at the giraffe that Ellie and Joel hand feed in the final act, trying to decide amongst ourselves if it was computer generated or not. It seemed far too extravagant that they’d have gotten an actual giraffe in, but it looked real enough to be believable. Yet something was just a little off, and gave it away as not being completely genuine.
It turns out thegiraffe was real, it just looked weird, maybe thanks to the green screen panels put around it to CGI in the background in post-production, and maybe because none of us know what a giraffe looks like up close. Speaking toVariety, production designer John Paino said that there hadn’t been time to make a CGI giraffe, and in fact, they had spent over a month training this very real giraffe to eat out of a stranger’s hand. Apparently, press who’d seen pre-SFX footageclaimed that scene had featured a man in blue, on stilts, wearing a giraffe hat, which is incredibly funny. Release the pictures immediately, I’m begging you.
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It does track that The Last of Us would use a real giraffe, considering how heavily they’ve relied on actual practical effects throughout the show – every single clicker is wearing prosthetics, making them all the more terrifying. On the official podcast, Craig Mazin said, “If you go into a CGI characterization right off the bat, it just starts to feel like it’s not there.”
Here, Mazin has tapped into a feeling many of us get when we see bad CGI – the uncanny valley. This is an issue that comes up often withMarvel movies and TV shows, since they’re the most egregious abusers of shitty CGIas a result of underpaying their VFX teams. I sometimes wonder when the last time any of those actors were on an actual set was.
I’m one of those luddites that doesn’t like watching movies with too much CGI. I think the Marvel Cinematic Universe, among others, has desensitised us to bad visual effects to the extent that some of us just accept the uncanny valley as unavoidable when it comes to newly released media. I am aware that some people believe they’re capable of spotting CGI – many of those people admitted they were wrong inthis Reddit threadin the subreddit for HBO’s The Last of Us.
We’ve somehow gotten to the point where we’re assuming real things are just bad CGI because they make us feel weird, and I’m questioning if it’s worth it. Computer-generated graphics were a huge step forward in terms of what we became able to do with visual effects – no more puppet Yodas – but must we continue to strive forward, making movies almost entirely computer generated? It lets us capture fantasy elements, sure – Game of Thrones used it to fairly good effect, though House of the Dragon’s CGI wasn’t quite up to par – but there are still things that could be replaced with practical effects, and wouldn’t look quite so shitty. Maybe it’s time we stop relying on overworked computer graphics artists and take a look at how to build things in real life again.
