yes its amazing what computers can do isnt it . making a dream land. while also making nothing look real and interesting no one for any elapsed period of time. keep on keeping on
Not that I want to start an argument over this, but you do understand that it still takes months of work to make computers do anything even remotely interesting? I still had to build everything you saw there that wasn't an actual set. And we did have half a real set there too. Computers definitely take a load off. But they still take time and energy to make anything happen.
I originally wanted to do everything practically. And I'm certainly in favor of doing it when one has the resources and the budget. But whereas building even a model of those rotating gears would've cost about $75 dollars, and would've taken far too long to build and paint within my very short production window: doing it all digitally costs exactly nothing if you already have the software and the memory space. And it can all be done after production is completed.
My biggest revelation was that when it came to building and photographing our steampunk space craft, there's just no way to film them in an accurate and technical way where it looks good, without the use of a dolly track, a really wide angle fast lens, and a step motor. Doing it in any other fashion without the best steady cam rig or a DIY rig with a small camera lens, doesn't lead to favorable results, and would not have been easy to plan out or design within the time that I had while working on this for my Senior year at college. I had to get it shot and "in the can" by late February. So there was just no time to gather the man power, money, or resources to do these effects with models or live set pieces.
So budget-wise and schedule-wise, I had to make the decision to go all digital with the effects, because my vision was just too big to do on any "practical" or "physical" scale.
Besides which, I never really intended for the CGI here to look photo-realistic. I've certainly tried to get it as close as I can so that you can't see where the seams are if you aren't looking for them. But this is supposed to be a whimsical, cartoonish universe rather than a realistic one. And so the effects are intended to reflect that in their own way.