Computer is only one of the elements in visual effects (but it is getting to be the most dominant one)

Well, I don’t say that computer is running the whole thing of visual effects and even visualizing science (as we saw in the department seminar.) There are many movies that use puppets for their scenery, static modeling & etc. but not for animating those objects with deformation or stop motion animation anymore. For instance, in the Lord of the rings movie, most characters were first of all hand sculpted, then scanned in 3D and then that scan was used as a base for modeling a character in computer to be rigged and animated.

I don’t underestimate the power of sculpting. It is actually much more tangible than modeling in computer. I think if not all but most of the scenes that we could see in Kendra’s YouTube movie were Stop motion animation that is not used in visual effects anymore since computer can do a better job of it. But the richness of pictures real objects is kind of difficult to be depicted in computer shading so they actually take pictures of hand-made scenery to be used in the scene. Like for example the cities in the lord of the rings in long shots were all very small hand made sculptures and then very tiny cameras were used to take pictures of these so they look like to be huge. Like here the tower is made by hand then they have put some effects on it in computer to make it look very old…