Quote from: SiL on May 09, 2021, 08:17:53 PM
Quote from: Voodoo Magic on May 09, 2021, 05:57:21 PM
It sure is gooey! I wonder how screening audiences reacted to it.
Wasn't that the story, where test audiences complained about The Thing 2011's practical fx (among other things) and everyone acknowledged improvements needed to be made in areas, but the debate was go CG or replace some of troublesome practical fx with improved practical fx?
The producers didn't seem to want to use the practical effects as early as shooting. Woodruff has a story about the guy who splits in half in the helicopter; the producers didn't like that the effect they made only looked good from certain angles. ADI explained that was kind of how practical effects worked and it was ok because that was the angle it was meant to be seen at. The producers didn't like the limitation and the effect was replaced with CGI ... Seen at exactly the angle the practical effect was designed for anyway.
Here's what I remembered... The Thing 2011's Screenwriter Eric Heisserer.
Eric on the belief going in that everything should be practical:
- There's a lot of CGI in the film. While it was in development we kept hearing that the effects would be practical [Rob Bottin's groundbreaking practical effects are a hallmark of the 1982 The Thing]. When did this come into play?
"I got this job going in with the firm, fervid belief that no CGI should ever be in this movie. That it should be all practical. We are creating a very grounded psychological thriller and part of that paranoia with the monster movie is to have the monsters as real and as grounded as everything else we're making around them. That's not to say that I am slighting the CG department, because those guys are workhorses... [But] the last thing you want to do is take the audience out of the film. You want to have them married to the story. And I felt that, what little I saw being onset and in the dailies, the practical stuff looked great. But that's an argument that I was out of and it's an argument that I trust [director] Mattjis [van Heijningen Jr.] stuck with for as long as he could and for his reasons. While I'm not quite as qualified to talk about the specifics, I know that as a storyteller, we were all onboard with this being a practical movie."
Eric on the test screenings that changed things:
- Principal photography wrapped a while back. What's the gestation process on this been like? "Test screenings really changed the shape of this film from what I wrote to what the audience will ultimately see, for better or worse... I can say that going through this experience that no studio would make a film like 'Alien' or even Carpenter and Lancaster's version of 'The Thing' today. There is a sense of impatience from the audience to just get to whatever it is they paid their ticket for. And that can hurt filmmakers but it can also help box office. It's a strange argument to have."
So what was added in reshoots? "As I understand it, they were replacing scene work outside of Antarctica. Like at Columbia where we meet Kate and to a lesser extent where we meet the other American members. The other re-shoots as I know them were more of a fight between practical effects and CG. When I was on set and when Mattjis shot a lot of this, and he's a great director by the way, it was all practical. We had Mary using a flamethrower on an animatronic and it looked great. It's hard to say what it looked like once they got into editing, I wasn't a part of that process, but I do know that there were two definite sides of the argument. There were people saying we had to replace with CG and there were people saying we could make the practical [effects] better in places where they fell short."
https://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/26758/interview-the-thing-2011-screenwriter-explains-how-the-film-transformed-into-what-you-saw/
So it was part of the reshoots after the test screenings, but was it audiences dictating, just producers, or a mixture of both, it's hard to be sure.
It seems based on this last sentence "
There were people saying we had to replace with CG and there were people saying we could make the practical [effects] better in places where they fell short" there was an acknowledgement even on the pro-practical fx side that some of their fx (per Eric) "fell short", but it does seem a shame (if that's the case) that they couldn't even try to fix the practical fx with practical fx... especially when the love for the first film is so tied to its practical effects.
