So the deadline aspect I completely understand, if you don’t have enough time you can’t make the best product.
But I don’t understand how the budget factors into the quality. For example Antman 3 has a budget x20 bigger than Godzilla M1 and it looks infinitely worse.
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They need budget to afford high quality studios, more experienced artists, softwares, hardwares, and maybe even licensing some assets they can’t get firsthand.
Also, the longer they work (i.e. the movie use more CGI), the more the people have to get paid, and good CGI really need to pay attention to details
so you either let the artists do longer work *or* get more people to work on the same scene–both results in more costs.
The CGI (or more broadly special effects) budget also determines how many people can work on the CGI for how many hours. As you said, if you don’t have enough time, you can’t make it look as good.
But budget isn’t everything. It also depends on how the movie was shot and what demands are being placed on the CGI department. Some productions expect everything that didn’t work out during shooting to be “fixed in post”. Things are visible in the shot that shouldn’t be? Just get the CGI people to digitally remove it. The actor has a mustache in the shot but the character shouldn’t? Just get CGI to remove it. The actor should be wearing a different costume? Get CGI to insert it. And so on. Also, CGI works much better if it is already planned for during shooting. E.g. CGI artists can deliver much better work if they have good reference footage that tells them how the lighting would interact with an object they are meant to insert into the shot, or how water would respond to it, etc. The more you leave for the CGI department to just figure out from scratch, the harder it is and the more time it will take to do well (if it is even possible).
Also, it’s not always obvious what effects are the hardest to pull off. Human faces, for instance, are notoriously difficult to get right, in part because we have so much experience looking at them in real life, so we can tell when something is even a tiny bit off. Whereas, a big hulking lizard monster… that’s not something you see every day. Who’s to say whether the texture of its scales or the way it moves are dead-on? So sometimes what seems like a big set-piece expensive CGI shot is actually cheaper than something that, as a viewer, you might not even notice was CGI.
And, related to the previous two points: you can set yourself up for success by how you shoot the scenes that are supposed to have the monster (or other big, complicated effect) in it. If you shoot long takes of the monster in broad daylight, on a still camera, in a wide shot, in a complex environment, that’s much harder to render and composite convincingly than if you have the monster in a darker, simpler environment, with brief, dynamic shots that often show only partial views in close rather than the whole thing.
This is how well-planned productions that consult with their CGI department from the beginning can get a small CGI budget to go much further than sloppier productions that expect their CGI people to just magically make the movie they failed to get on the day.
Often just because you pay a lot doesn’t necessarily mean you get a lot for it. Let’s use vehicles for example. Let’s say you’re driving 30 miles. A car might be able to do this on 1 gallon of gas, a Hummer will take 3 gallons, and a motorcycle will use a 1/2 gallon. Now instead of always picking the efficient motorcycle you might have situations where the car is better. For example if it’s raining, or you have 3 passengers (and not in Southeast Asia). Then you have situations where the hummer might be better even though it has the worst gas mileage.
For your example it makes sense that Antman 3 has a huge CGI budget because pretty much every scene needed to be designed from the ground up in CGI while Godzilla M1 you could just overlay a few CGI aspects into each shot (destroyed buildings, monsters, smoke all of which have standing strategies, and such).
There has been a huge change in how VFX is handled, especially by Marvel.
Marvel has been using VFX (not just CGI, thats 1 type of VFX) for damn near everything. They constantly change the movie, even right near release date, things that were never meant to be VFX now HAVE to be. So now not only do you need to pay for the VFX that were planned, but you’re paying for things that are now unplanned, which adds complexity AND speed. These are not cheap.
Redoing work, changing the vendors working on it, etc… well now they’re also paying for it twice.
Now picture this for multiple movie releases in a year, plus multiple shows. Everything is churned out, rushed, overused, etc.
Davey Jones was not Marvel, that work was done by ILM. A VERY different type of facility than how Marvel farms their work out to many vendors. 20 years ago, high end VFX took a lot of time, effort, and talent. So when they needed a fully CG main character.. it was very well planned, and executed, and done for quality. It wasn’t rushed, with a million other VFX shots, and 20 other movies.
Godzilla Minus One is similar. They’re making a single film, using VFX when needed, and doing it to benefit the movie and make it look great.
Great VFX doesn’t need a giant budget. It needs planning, talented people, and the time to do it.
I work in VFX, btw.
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