[grumbel]

> I call hooey on that, the real issue is cost.

It's actually rarely about cost itself, just look at modern movie budget, they didn't exactly get cheaper than 20+ years ago. The main factor is time, predictability and control. When you do it in post with CGI, you always have full control and can change your mind at any time. If you do it practical, you are stuck with whatever you filmed. Going back and doing a reshoot takes a long while, in CGI you just jiggle some parameters and rerender. If your movie-star-lookalike stuntman breaks a leg, you have a problem. If you do it with CGI, it barely matters what you captured in camera, just change it.

With modern movies there is so much CGI to begin with, that it hardly even matters what you filmed, it's not unusual to completely redesign scenes in post, as the script wasn't even finished when they started filmed the thing.

[mindslight]

In theory, the flexibility is great. In practice it is itself a problem, as those decisions are avoided throughout production and instead accumulate into post. Where they get further kicked down the road - client for first 80% of schedule: "looks alright". client for remaining 80% of schedule: "[now that we've actually thought about this] we want it to be this way". The artists lament what they could have done had they gotten this direction earlier, ultimately just polish the turd with weekly extensions until the client is satisfied-slash-actual-deadline, and look forward to the next show where things might not go as awry.

Like everything in our society, the real problem is that the people in charge of managing don't know how to do the work, and rather than listening to, taking feeding, and trusting the people doing the work, they act as if their job is to blindly push orders downwards and micromanage whatever catches their attention. The article ('s followup) touches on this, ("managed to get themselves into really high positions but don’t know how a green screen works... People in the traditional leadership roles are boomers or Gen X guys, and what we do now didn’t exist when they were coming up"), but is naive in thinking that it's going to get better over time. In actuality, the "creatives" of tomorrow are busy gladhanding today, and the dynamic will persist.

I think this is why the production setup of Mandalorian got many VFX people excited, despite Engine being so counter to the standard workflow. It pushed the bulk of CGI to where it belongs - as a backdrop for actual acting and storytelling, and directly fed into the director's real time decision making. There are always going to be touch ups and last minute changes, but those are only practical in the context of having larger structure locked down. There are definitely constraints of the digital backdrop technique (watch Mandalorian again after that video, and you see it in everything), but I look forward to seeing how it might trickle out into the rest of the industry.