Written by Kyle SevenoaksThere are few things worse than enjoying a good b-movie with an interesting set up, well executed ideas and good enough acting when suddenly the main monster pops up and it’s the worst rendered bug or something you’ve ever seen, and to take you out of a low budget film, it has to be really bad. This is exactly why when it comes to low budget films, be them short, feature length or anything else, I’m always going to encourage the use of practical effects over CGI for a number of reasons.When I was deciding which way I wanted to go for my debut film as a director, I put serious consideration into using CGI for the monster, feeling I may have had greater control during post and endless possibilities for tweaking and editing, but in the end I decided to go practical since my experience both watching and making films showed that a practical puppet with a low budget is 99 percent of the time going to work better, look better and not ruin the viewing experience. For one thing, the lighting is going to be absolutely perfect, you’re not going to need to take measurements of distances between lights and where the prop is meant to be (not for this anyway) neither are you going to have to take and HDRI image of the surroundings or any of the other prep work for heavy CGI. Another thing is since I went with a puppet for...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Tuesday, 24 September, 2024