Burton Applies Light CG Touch to Big Fish
Famed director and former Disney animator Tim Burton was more than happy to enhance the fantastical Big Fish with in-camera tricks, models, puppets and occasional computer animation, such as… the big catfish. Burton recently spoke to VFXWorld about the Columbia movie, which opens Dec. 10 in L.A., N.Y. and Toronto, expands Christmas Day and goes wide Jan. 9, 2004. Big Fish, which blurs fantasy and reality while weaving a compelling father-son saga, features vfx by Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Bill Desowitz: The use of CGI here is very restrained.
Tim Burton: Like anything CG, I like to have as much of it be sets and real. If you can do anything [digitally], then why bother being there. I don’t care what anybody says, but the closer you can get where it is, the better.
BD: It’s getting to that point where there are creative choices now where you question: Why are they creating a CG environment for this when they could just shoot it?
TB: Yeah, exactly. Like I said, everything we tried to do is to kind of enhance.
BD: Even with the twin sisters, you’re not really sure that they are digitally conjoined.
TB: That was the fun of it, because it’s about stories and stuff and I didn’t want it to get too [overdone] ‘cause I have a problem with some CG anyway. We have some effects that are CG, but it’s real minimal. Even with the conjoined twins, we didn’t do a lot of CG. The more you can do yourself, the better because it [cumulatively] loses impact. You know, somewhere in your brain it’s not real. So there was a kind of funkiness and hand-made, old-fashioned feel that was appropriate to this anyways. The digital timing and digital effects that we have, we tried to base it on something we’ve done to solidify the look we were after. I could see you could go too far with this, so we tried to keep it where it fit the material.
BD: Do you think filmmakers are overdoing CG?
TB: Yeah, most tools are great, but like anything else, you can go overboard. CG seems to work really well with animated films because it’s consistent. But there’s something about doing it with live-action where you know that anything can be done so somehow it’s lost a little of its… you look at an old James Bond movie and there’s this visceral thrill about seeing somebody do their own stunt, whereas you lose something knowing that it was done in CG. Consciously, it somehow affects what you see, I believe.
BD: And you didn’t want it to get in the way of the storytelling.
TB: No, I’ve just always felt like it’s not Lord of the Rings; we’re not going to set the world on fire by showing giants. It’s more about the juxtaposition of things, I think, and that’s what I felt it had going for it. So we’ve tried to go for just doing as much simple [effects] in-camera and shot more on location [in Alabama and Paris] so that it had its own reality.
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