CGI is Almost Impossible to Get Right in Live-Action Film

It is no secret that I find CGI to be the most tragically over-used trend in film today. I don't mean animated film, I mean Hollywood blockbuster films. I do think it can be done well if the CGI is animated well and couldn't have been presented better using any other method, like Pacific Rim and Godzilla, or if there's a perfect balance between practical effects and computer effects, such as Where the Wild Things Are and Attack the Block. Where movies fail these days is using CGI for basically everything.

I saw a talk by a representative for the studio, Double Negative, in which they described in detail how they designed and animated all the special effects. It was really quite daunting how much work they described that went into making the effects look "convincing". Seriously, like the audience was meant to believe that the effects for a giant wolf were real. I'm going to give an example of a situation they described and how they could have solved much quicker, cheaper, and easier. In one scene, in the movie Hercules, there was a scene where he gets attacked by a giant wolf. The wolf was biting his arm and he had to shake it off. How that scene was done, though, was they shook around a green object at the actor, and he had to just stand there pretending he was pulling his arm. He had to shake his torso a bit because his arm wasn't actually interacting with anything, instead they modelled a freaking CGI arm replica of the actor's arm! A good movie would have just used a real model of a wolf head and used that! Simple, more effective, and cheaper. Unfortunately, this is how most films today are made.

I think the heavy use of CGI in live-action cinema is very detrimental, because they instantly lose authenticity. So CGI is limited by the aesthetic quality a computer generated image tends to have, making a lot of time working and rendering completely worthless. I think if CGI was only used a little in live action film but mainly animation, it would fix a lot of the problems it causes with blockbuster films and more critical views on CGI in general.