THERE'S A SCENE in the Jennifer Lawrence movie No Hard Feelings where her clothes catch fire. She's riding on the hood of a car as it speeds across a crowded beach and crashes into a barbecue, sending burning coals flying. But the flames don't look like any real ones that you've ever seen. They're plasticky and neon yellow, pointing straight up when they should be blowing back toward the windshield. Even in a low-effort comedy such as this one, the effect is distractingly flimsy. ¶ It's not an isolated incident. Computer-generated fires are breaking out everywhere, and they look terrible. Prominent house fires in last year's The Banshees of Inisherin and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery appear as if they've been scribbled onto the liveaction footage by hand. So do the kitchen fires on Hulu's The Bear and some wildfires on CBS's Fire Country. On Game of Thrones, the dragons' breath was created by mounting honest-to-goodness flamethrowers on cranes; on the spinoff House of the Dragon, the titular creatures are clearly spewing digital fire. Amid all the obvious effects in the latest Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy movies, it's the fires-flat, over saturated, and motion-smoothed-that stick out most.
Not so long ago, there was no CGI, so the only way to put fire on film was to light a real one in front of a camera. For decades, Hollywood pyrotechnicians ignited scenery, vehicles, and stuntpeople, often within face-scorching distance of movie stars and children. Houses were burned down for deodorant commercials, and Pink Floyd once set a guy on fire just because they thought it would look cool on an album cover. In rare cases, there were injuries and even deaths, but that didn't deter filmmakers from embracing an effect that couldn't be achieved by any other means.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 23 - November 5, 2023-Ausgabe von New York magazine.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 23 - November 5, 2023-Ausgabe von New York magazine.
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Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
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