Prometheus

[Bridge]

Guys, CGI is not expensive. It is time consuming which means you need to hire a bunch of people to spend hours and hours modeling but it doesn't take any longer than making an actual custom puppet/prop/whatever and with those you need to spend money (sometimes a lot of money) buying materials. When the licenses and salaries have been paid, CGI is practically free. If you made a Bayish Transformers movie only with animatronics and practical effects in the same scope, the budget would have probably been a billion dollars or more. So if you think about it CGI is much cheaper, it's just that more things are possible which makes some people get overambitious.

But as a result, you still admit that CGI is expensive. Only a couple people would have to work on animatronics and puppets. A couple people vs a ton of people. CGI is in fact expensive and in this current day and age, it's where at least a third of the entire movies budget goes. Let's say you have 600 people on the movie, maybe 100 of them are working on CGI.. Normally, CGI will be the first thing a ton of the money will go towards (CGI meaning color correction, 3D, animation, film compositing, background art [matte painting], texturing, etc).

Well if you're definition of CGI is so broad I would readily admit that most of the money goes into it. And yes, I admit that CGI is expensive but making a movie is very expensive in general. That was the point I was trying to make when I said if someone made Transformers with practical effects it would be a hundred times more expensive. As a result, CGI is less expensive and less time consuming on average, so I see no point in bringing up how expensive it is. If you worked hard for 20 years you could make a movie with effects on par with Transformers for free. As I said, most of the money goes towards salaries; it's just a way of speeding up the process by having a bunch of people working on it. I don't think it's really fair to compare CGI-driven movies to high budget films that predate CGI like Star Wars, because the technology has gotten simpler and therefore the possibilities have become more numerous. If someone made a movie with effects as simplistic (not in a negative way) as Star Wars today with CGI they probably wouldn't even break a million.