Yesterday's news that filmmaker director Gore Verbinski levelled some blame for today's VFX looking a little bland at the feet of Unreal Engine has caught fire. The director of Pirates of the Caribbean and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die called it “the greatest slip backwards” for cinematic CGI.
Setting the record straight, and offering some balance, Pat Tubach, VFX Supervisor at Epic Games, said in a statement to us: "It’s inaccurate for anyone in the industry to claim that one tool is to blame for some erroneously perceived issues with the state of VFX and CGI."
Adding, "It's true that there are a lot more people making computer graphics than ever before, and with that scale comes a range of successes and failures – but aesthetic and craft comes from artists, not software."
The final remake carries a lot of weight: "Unreal Engine is primarily used for pre-visualization, virtual production, and in some cases final pixels. I can guarantee that the artists working on big blockbuster VFX films like Pirates of the Caribbean 10-15 years ago could only dream about having a tool as powerful as Unreal Engine on their desks to help them get the job done – and I should know – I was one of them!"
As I said in my article yesterday, there are many interesting movies and shows using UE for previz and more, including Amazon's Fallout show and indie films like The Voice in the Hollow. And Verbinski himself was keen to point out the software's good uses in his original But Why Tho?
Epic Games has had huge success with Unreal Engine in pre-production and animation, particularly virtual stage technology, The Volume, as used on Star Wars: The Mandalorian to The Creator.
There's no good or bad here, just technology and how creatively its used. What do you think?
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