Is CGI Getting Worse?

3. Shooting In Post-Production

For the modern blockbuster director, CGI isn’t just a way to pull off a fancy set-piece, but a core part of the production. Directors like Peter Jackson, George Lucas, the Wachowski sisters and the Russo brothers are famous for shooting on green screen. For decades, blue screen compositing had been how different backgrounds were inserted, but with the advent of CGI green became the colour of choice.

Today, whole environments can be created: battlefields, cityscapes, underground lairs, you name it. Monsters and villains can be motion captured and the whole scene blocked and composed in post-production, the actors positioned against nothing, acting to no one. Lucas was notorious for cutting shot material into pieces and reassembling it digitally, moving live actors from one side of the frame to the other as though they were layers on a photoshopped image.

Actors have always shot scenes out of order: the majority of television and movie productions group scenes together in the most practical arrangement possible, not in the order they’re seen in the script. With largely green screen productions, actors can be wholly unaware of who they’re sharing scenes with (sometimes it's a stand-in rather than the actual other actor in the scene) or where said scenes lie in the narrative. In fact, if they’re not supplied with a full script they may even be clueless as to how the film's story works or where it’s supposed to go.

In these situations, an actor will have to make decisions about their character based purely on what’s happening with them in that scene at that moment and trust that the director and editor know what they’re doing.

That’s the reason for Gwyneth Paltrow’s total ignorance as to what was happening in her final three Marvel Cinematic Universe appearances. Paltrow (who clearly hadn’t seen any of the Marvel movies she was in) had no idea she’d been in movies with Sebastian Stan, Tom Holland or Samuel L. Jackson, and it had completely escaped her attention that her scene at the Avengers press conference was being shot for the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming, not one of the last two Avengers films.