I always hear that for large amounts of CGI in movies and TV shows it costs a lot of money. What is costing so much money?
In: Technology
The CG doesn’t just fall out of the sky. There are dozens of people working every day for months/years to produce that work for a show or movie, and they require compensation.
The software costs money, the computers they run it on costs money, and it takes quite a while for it to actually be done and you have to pay the salaries of all the people working on it (who I assume get paid fairly well)
Basically, you have to pay the salaries of all the artists creating the computer graphics, people who have gotten special training and know how to use those programs, spending months working on the film.
You probably have a preconceived notion that CGI is cheap. Because lots of shows, particularly animated shows, are filled with CGI these days. Or they’re entirely CGI these days. You’d be hard-pressed to find a children’s show airing on TV these days that isn’t CGI produced for example. So it’s a reasonable assumption to make that CGI must be some kind of relatively cheap way to do things. Basically like cheating.
The difference, though, is that CGI in shows like that are cheap because they can take advantage of the same assets and use them over the course of an entire show. Take a show like Paw Patrol — nearly every single episode, the animators are going to use the same exact character models, the same exact environments, probably a lot of the same objects as well. The animations are floaty and not very convincing, because they don’t really have to be. Some of their animations might also be reused, or serve as bases to be tweaked into whatever they need for minimal effort. Creation of all these assets probably wasn’t cheap, but once they have them, they can be reused for season after season. The only cost at that point for the animation is spending the time to animate the sequences, and maybe create a few extra assets unique to that one episode. This is way less expensive than something like hand-drawn animation, where very little can be re-used since it all needs to be drawn from scratch. Though, hand-drawn is also computer assisted these days, it’s why shows like Family Guy look far more rigid than they did in their earlier seasons.
With a large-budget live-action film, though, this game is completely changed. Now, you don’t get the luxury of reusing anything. Every frame of that film where CGI is used is going to be a unique frame with some kind of unique effect going on. All of those frames have to be hand-crafted, and any assets they need will need to be created completely from scratch for the film. On top of this, they also need to put in a lot more effort to make the CGI look realistic (if that’s what they’re going for) and seamlessly blend it in to the shot using complex techniques. That inflates the cost *a lot*.
We’re essentially talking the difference between a toy space ship you can buy at Walmart and an actual billion-dollar satellite built by NASA. The Walmart painting probably did have a considerable price, but once they hashed out the design and built a factory to mass manufacture it, it could be mass produced with ease and sold relatively cheaply. But that billion-dollar satellite is one-of-a-kind, and was made completely from scratch using very expensive tools and put together by some of the most talented people in their field. And it’s mostly only good for a single launch.
EDIT: Also worth mentioning: if you have a film that is purely live-action, you’re going to need resources that are tailored to this kind of production. Sets to shoot, physical actors, cameramen, lighting experts, practical effect technicians, costume and makeup artists stunt doubles, audio engineers, props and prop designers, extras, the works. And all the catering and human resources that that expects. With a CGI-only film, you’d probably replace a lot of that with lots of animators, riggers, digital artists, and that jazz. A film that is purely one or the other only has to dip into one of these. But a film that tries to marry the two together has to pay for both. Or more likely, contract a firm that can provide one or both of these parts for them.
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