Practical FX in movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Fast X are mostly just invisible CGI, and the FX artists deserve the proper recognition or their excellent work.
View Reddit by SquishyGamesCo – View Source
View Reddit by SquishyGamesCo – View Source
This isn’t our video, but really thought this is a great dive into how much work FX artists put into the films we love. It is appreciative that this video shows how much the Practical AND CGI teams work together to make seamless results.
The Maverick snowjob on this front was *pretty shitty*, honestly. IIRC the producers issued a gag order on the VFX project leaders, because their marketing (and Oscar campaigns) centered around falsely presenting most of the movie as “practical”- letting people presume the actors were either flying the planes, or all the stunts were done in real planes and shot in real time – and then never disabusing them of how much VFX work and cleanup went into that.
The whole thing is pretty fucked in that it exploits an already out-of-date “either/or” POV on VFX and leverages the poorly-thought-through biases against computer generated effects as a means to champion a false “authenticity” they don’t have.
(also: in my personal experience I’ve found the loudest voices online speaking the most authoritatively about how they can clock the difference between CGI and practical effects are lucky to be batting over the mendoza line. It’s just a giant waste of time and energy more often than not)
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So Tom Cruise really didn’t fly a multi-million pound aircraft?
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The video does a good job of showing directors/actors/producers saying “No CGI!” and then showing the exact shots where CGI was used and how *later* producers had to say they did use CGI – then they show the shots with and without the CGI, including editing notes about where to insert VFX shots.
Not that any of it is a surprise if you pay attention – there is no way Top Gun 2 could have been done without CGI – but companies like to lie during marketing and then the credits of the movie show 100 CGI artists.
Maybe it just skipped past me at the time, but I don’t think fast x was ever marketed as real stunts.
Good special effects are when the best methods are used where their strengths lie and each covers the other’s weakness.