Which one do you think does better CGI?

Weta Films
Lord of the Rings
King Kong
Fantastic Four 2
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Avatar
etc.........

ILM Films
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Jurassic Park
DragonHeart
Terminator
The Abyss
Star Trek
etc..........

Currently? WETA.

ILM had a good run and WETA wouldn't be around if it wasn't for them, but the effects on stuff like Lord of the Rings is in a whole other league, compared to the Star Wars prequels, the one series ILM should do top notch work on.

No Pole?

WETA 4 Oscars
ILM 16 Oscars

I think WETA does a better job of making things seamless. But I only saw LOTR and King Kong from WETA.

The ILM films are all old and dated except for Transformers and Star Trek... which I think anybody can do the textures/lighting for metal and spaceships.

I prefer ILM's CGI efforts. The folk at Weta are creative and talented but ILM's stuff is usually better.

That said, ILM has had some real stinkers (The Mummy Returns and Van Helsing, for example).

I prefer real strippers, not CGI.

You're forgetting the Pirates Trilogy for ILM. Davey Jones was crazy good. I think their best work was Starship Troopers though.

ILM is still at the top in my opinion

LOTR has a lot of dodgy CGI, as does King Kong, though Kong himself is an absolute marvel

Still, nothing Weta has done tops Davy Jones or the best material in Transformers

Forgot about Davy Jones.

Starship Troopers has definitely stood the test of time.

LOTR:FOTR has some really piss poor CGI. LOTR:TTT was better but it's most prized CGI creation (Gollum) was vastly over-rated. Sometimes he looks fantastic but others he's not too good. LOTR:ROTK was another improvement but it still had really crappy effects work (Smeagol being dragged by the fish) amidst some great effects work (Shelob).

I didn't really care for anything in King Kong. It all seemed too artificial.

If I recall correctly, Weta shared a hand in some of the fine CGI on display in Master and Commander.

Pole added.

Davy Jones from ILM was incredible and so are all the Transformers. Plus ILM kinda started the wholw thing with The Abyss and then Jurassic Park. King Kong looked great but not as good as a lot of stuff ILM has done. I haven't seen Lord of the Rings in a very long time so I can comment on that. From what i've heard Avatar is going to blow us away. My vote goes to.....................................ILM.

Who does the effects for Harry Potter? I was shocked when I found out that they CGed parts of Voldemort's face, very nicely done...

ILM does the Harry Potter films.

ILM

Weta is great but King Kong was so uneven. There was some amazing CGI... yet we also got the craptastic Dino stampede. That scene alone made me cringe.

T2 anyone? ILM, all the way. Weta is still a bit young compared to what ILM has done.

ILM easily. I think the work on LOTR was a bit overrated.

ILM -- Avatar was crap!

ILM, if not for T2 alone which even after almost 20 years still holds up.

Who worked on the Matrix sequels? Reloaded looks like shit today.

I think Imageworks vs Weta would be a better matchup. Both are pretty new compared to ILM.

ILM has been the industry leader for so long we seem to forget just how many amazing strides they made, from Sherlock Jr. to T2 to Jurassic Park and Pirates. WETA has done a surprisingly good job of carving out a space for themselves, and I would say they're second currently. Avatar could be a game changer, but we don't know anything about how the final product looks yet.

Imageworks has never done anything that rivals ILM or WETA, imo, and Watchmen did nothing to change my mind.

You can't always put it on the effects house - how good the CGI is depends just as much on directing, storyboarding, and cinematography as technology.

In all fairness, some of the early successes that ILM is getting praised for, such as T2 and Jurassic Park, have less CGI in them than meets the eye. When those two films came out, the hype was for the CGI but most of the special effects is model work and live-action animatronics. The liquid metal Terminator special effects were mostly live-action models and the CGI merely morphed between the extremes. The shot where he pours into the Helicopter was about 3 or 4 different models and the cgi just blended the dissolves between them. Same with the scenes where he gets heavy shotgun fire and has holes blasted into him or has his head blasted nearly off. Jurassic Park mostly had animatronic dinos except for quick shots of them running (usually in the dark lit scenes). The few CGI shots in broad daylight look as phony as any early CGI ever done (such as the Bronto/Apats). Counting up screen time, both of those films had barely a couple minutes of actual CGI compared to today's films where the special effects are almost entirely CGI.


Another point to make is rarely does one effects house do all the work in a film. They farm out a lot to outside companies so they can meet release dates. So anytime you ever watch a film and notice some really good CGI and some really mediocre or even bad CGI, then chances are you are seeing outside vendor's work interspersed with the actual company's work. They put their name on the work, so they deserve the praise or blame, but as a practical matter unless the hired work is atrocious, they really don't have the time or budgets to bring absolutely every shot up to the company standards so it's kind of unfair to damn a company's work because 100% of the CGI wasn't up to snuff.

Also, ILM has different teams for different movies. Just like video game producers, sometimes they are rushed to meet a release date.