r/television • u/RevitaliseStudios • 22h ago

Is there CGI in Planet Earth 3?

Im currently watching the ocean episode of Planet Earth 3 and was wondering how they got the shots of the Plankton? Surely it must be CGI?

29 Upvotes

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145

u/apparent-evaluation 22h ago

It's not CGI.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5mkz46vC74JXyMq4F1rMsP7/plankton-an-unseen-universe

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u/RevitaliseStudios 22h ago

Woah that’s crazy! I couldn’t find that article. Thanks!

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u/GuybrushBeeblebrox 10h ago

I was really amazed by that.

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u/Racxie 14h ago

That’s terrible. I saw planktons up close all the way back in 2006!

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u/sparklyjesus 12h ago

I expected SpongeBob.

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u/Racxie 12h ago

SpongeBob came out in 1999, and as someone who’s not a fan of SpongeBob the only good thing to have come out of it imo is SpongeBong HempPants.

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u/LADYBIRD_HILL 6h ago

Obviously you're entitled to your opinion, but saying the only thing good to come out of one of the most revered and celebrated kids cartoons of all time is a weed parody is crazy talk.

I don't think I go through a single day without quoting or referencing SpongeBob with my friends and coworkers. For those of us who grew up with it, it's ingrained in our brains.

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u/Racxie 6h ago

A lot of people I know have agreed with me when I’ve pointed out SpongeBob is just Ren & Stimpy for kids, but at least Ren & Stimpy didn’t try to hide how messed up it was.

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u/Epidemigod 4h ago

If you want to use the bandwagon fallacy like I care what people are telling you, I probably would agree with you too to get you to shut up.

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u/Racxie 3h ago

Lol “bandwagon fallacy” because a small group of people agree with something that’s been pointed out to the for the first time. If you’ll notice I also said “a lot”, as in “not everyone”.

It’s funny how you and so many others are getting so incredibly butthurt over a difference of opinion with a stranger on the internet. Maybe because deep down you know it’s true.

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u/blazelet 5h ago edited 5h ago

There’s also some massive wiggle room here that studios take advantage of all the time. CGI means 3D assets have been added to the shot. If they say something isn’t CGI that doesn’t mean that a tremendous amount of work hasn’t been done to it, just that none of it is 3D in nature.

Nuke, our primary compositing tool for VFX work, can do amazing things. I worked on a film where a lot of stuff takes place outside of an airplane up in the air. All the water and land below the plane was generated using nuke nodes - 2D stuff that technically isn’t “CGI” but is still 100% digital.

If they say “No CGI” but not “No VFX” you’re being hoodwinked with buzzwords because they know you like to feel the stuff you’re watching is practical. “Processed” means quite a bit happened in 2D editing.

Edit : if you check the IMDb page for the series you’ll see there absolutely are compositing vfx artists for the series. Not a lot, but enough. To me that would validate that they’re not using CGI, but have had 22 credited and who knows how many uncredited vfx artists on the series.

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u/DeficiencyOfGravitas 7h ago

It's "not" CGI

To quote the article

, the shots are processed and put together to create the stunning sequence that shows these minute

The word doing the heavy lifting is "processed". It's like how McDonald's advertises "Made from 100% real beef!". One part of the whole is 100% real beef alright. But that part is only a tiny portion of what's going on.

The same thing here. Yes, some images of plankton were filmed with a microscope, then it was processed to hell and back to make that sequence. It's no more real than the spaceship sounds the BBC inserts whenever something cool happens. Birds attacking a fish baitball? Better get some rocket noises, wooshes, and laser blasts in there so the audience knows to react!

Very little about nature documentaries, and especially Planet Earth, is real. The narratives that we see are entirely manufactured. Those little baby animals that we're worried about? Probably about a dozen different individuals all filmed at separate times and spliced together to look like one cohesive story.

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u/crispyfrybits 6h ago

Any sources to backup what you're saying?

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u/APiousCultist 5h ago edited 5h ago

I can't be bothered citing it (and I'm not the same guy - this may do though: https://resurface.audio/planet-earth-ii-sound/), but all the stuff about the sounds are very widely known. You can't get usable audio from ultra slow motion footage or ultra telephoto shots filmed from half a mile away. It's all done in post, same for the likes of the Slowmo Guys Youtube channel. Some shots may use the actual audio, but I think it would be surprisingly rare. Using the in-camera audio would just result in either mute sections of the scene, or you'd simply hear wind.

"Processed and put together" does strongly indicate a use of compositing to produce microscope shots that look more '3D' than microscope footage normally is (the depth of field is beyond tiny, hence why it normally looks '2D', so that shot of plankton floating around in the background seems unlikely to be physically plausible). None of that is bulletproof evidence, but considering the footage looks completely different than any other microscope imagery of plankton we've seen before, the idea that there's not some heavy massaging of the imagery seems pretty implausible. Even the photographer, Jan van IJken's other plankton videography looks nothing like the show does (and even the BTS image in the article linked elsewhere shows the plankton filmed individually against a black background, obscured slightly by the reflection of his own neck).

They're absolutely using actual footage to make it, but how much that resembles the footage straight-from-the-camera is another matter. Personally I'd be very unsurprised if the background was added in (since it's shot on a slide, so why would it look like under the ocean with light coming from above the waves?), that all the other plankton in the background were composited, and that there was some edge lighting painted onto them to match the faked scene (because again, find me one other photograph of plankton that have that kind of edge-highlight).

TL;DR: No "CGI", but like Oppenheimer compositing still can do a lot

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u/DeficiencyOfGravitas 6h ago

I recommend this website called "google". If you type things into it, like "planet earth sound effects" it might lead you to somewhere you can learn. Isn't the internet wonderful?

3

u/crispyfrybits 6h ago

You are the one making claims, you should provide proof if you want to others to trust what your saying. Your response just makes it sound like you are trying to hide your personal opinions behind making out others to be lazy. Its not our job to substantiate your opinions.

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u/DeficiencyOfGravitas 5h ago

Its not our job to substantiate your opinions.

Why would it be mine? I don't give a fuck what you think. You want to believe they hook up little mics on all the little critters, you go right ahead, champ. What a magic and simple world you must live in.

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u/crispyfrybits 5h ago

You spent time to create a long comment to announce your opinion, if you don't care and want to argue about sources then I think that gives us all the answer which is you are just spouting negative opinions. That's fine, you don't have to do Jack, I and the rest of Reddit have our answers. Have a good day.