Titanic water simulation by Arete software.
About a month ago, watching Hitchcock's The Birds started me wondering what today's visual effects films will look like years in the future. Will we look at today's effects with fondness as we do Ray Harryhausen's stop motion work? Or will we look at the effects as poorly crafted and primitive like those in The Birds? Certainly there's no one answer. I think one possibility will be that certain visual effects will simply serve to date a film. They won't detract from the film, but will evoke the conventions of the time in the same that using outdoor locations and indoor sets identifies a film as mid-century. So maybe we'll remember the Arete CGI water period when water was always done using the same algorithms, or the Shake compositing period. Strangely, by the way, when I was arriving in Hawaii I noticed the water from the air. The wind was creating very hard, almost geometric striations and I thought "wow, that really looks like bad CGI!"
And yes, I do remember that this is a production diary not my 'write about visual effects, objectivity and complain about Dan Brown blog.' But nothing's happening! I'm back in LA now but Ben has relatives here again. Good for the soul, bad for the production schedule! I got the crane and tried it out, but I can't give it a good workout until I get my good tripod from Ben's. I can already tell that it's going to be tough, if not impossible to get the crane to stop smoothly. Haven't heard about the pickup truck yet. Both Ben and Erik have been incredibly committed. So hopefully we'll get going again soon.
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