Quoting Unicus69:

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Quoting northbloke:

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You should also take into account Gollum's performance. It was the motion-capture acting of Andy Serkis that "sold" Gollum to the audience. The realistic "appearance" of a character doesn't matter as much as realistic behaviour. After all, we accepted Yoda and he was a muppet!

My understanding is that they motion captured his movements.  The facial expressions...especially the eyes...were all done by the animators.  The part where he was talking to himself by the water was nothing short of spectacular.

It's comment like this that really get me thinking. Let's say that the facial expressions are completely animated (I've no idea without checking whether they are or not). You say that this performance was spectacular... but compared to what? If it were a person doing that scene instead of CGI and they did equally as good a job, might you be as impressed? Or is your high opinion of it because it exceeds your expectations of CGI? If so, does that not bring into question the value of CGI? How might it have compared to a puppet / animatronic creation with similar investment?

The thing that originally made me question CGI many years ago was watching one of the more modern era of Godzilla films (post 1980, when they restarted the franchise from scratch). At the time, Godzilla had been synonymous with 'men in rubber suites', but the special effect of the modern era (still with men in rubber suites) blew me away. It made me re-evaluate the quality of men in rubber suites, and prompted me to look at some of the modern blockbusters (in the CGI era) in a different way.

I came to think that the suspension of  disbelief required to accept CGI was greater than that for modern makeup and models, yet when I put people in front of traditional versus CGI techniques, they seemed to accept a lower standard from CGI. I wondered, had we simply been trained over time to 'ignore' CGI, in the same way as asking someone to identify a drawing of a dog leads most people to say 'dog' before 'drawing'? If I presented someone from 100 years ago with a real effect versus a CGI effect (especially thinking of creatures), how would they react to them (once they'd been persuaded off of the ceiling and given a good stiff drink that is)?

Stuart