CGI that will make your eyes pop out of your head
Sit yourself down, free up 15 minutes of your time, and drown yourself in The Third and The Seventh, an amazing piece of video from Alex Roman.
It would be an amazing piece of work if it had been produced by traditional means; it’s even more impressive when you learn that almost everything you see here is computer-generated.
A handful of shot elements (the sky, the flying aircraft, the pigeons) were real-world video. But everything else you see – the architecture, the books, the water, the cameras, the astonishingly realistic textures; all that was done with computers.
These two behind-the-scenes videos show you just how it was all done. The first is an overview, almost as creative as the original:
And the second is a stop-motion style walkthrough of the work required to produce just one shot:
And all of this makes me wonder: if this is what one person can achieve with some basic equipment, where is CGI going to take us next? A place that makes Avatar look like scratchy early black-and-white cartoons.
And another thought occurs: when CGI can be as photorealistic as this, what reality are we going to be capturing with actual cameras in the coming years? Will the viewers notice? Will most of them even care one way or another?
