However, like any technology, CGI has dropped in price and is now beginning to be used in more daring forms by adventurous filmmakers whose financial backers can now afford to take more risks because of the lowered costs. An excellent and exciting example of this is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). The use of CGI in this film was notable for two reasons. First, the entire film, with the exception of the actors, was computer generated. Second, and more significant in my mind, CGI technology had dropped in price to the extent that a studio was willing to allow a first time director to create this world and create it in kitschy 1930s pulp-serial universe that was by no means something the average filmgoer would embrace. I’m not suggesting that Sky Captain was Cassavettes with CGI, only that a major studio was willing to allow a decent amount of artistic license for a film whose CGI costs only a few years ago would have surely precluded such license. The fact that the film’s budget could be contained to 70 million meant that the film could be made with many of its idiosyncrasies and artistic risks intact (such as the film’s pulpy time period, retro look, campy dialogue and woozy cinematography). If Sky Captain had cost 200 million (and had then been made at all) one suspects that it would have featured a lot less of these qualities. In short it probably would have looked a lot like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

An even more ambitious use of CGI was seen in Sin City (2005), which used it to create probably the best film adaptation of a comic book so far. Sin City was Sky Captain with tits and brass knuckles. The fusion of CGI and live action worked fantastically, creating a world that seemed both real and comic booky at the same time. Sin City cost less than Sky Captain and took more artistic risks. How many directors have had the freedom to film in black and white and use CGI to color individual elements of the film: a prostitute with blue eyes, a cop with red shoes; a grotesque villain who appears (and bleeds, a lot) only in yellow? Previously, a director could never get away with the completely over the top direction allowed by CGI (“when he dies the camera enters his eye and the red iris morphs into the heart shaped bed with red satin sheets where his story began”) as well as the B-movie dream cast (“Mickey Rourke’s going to be our lead”) featured in Sin City. You could always make a movie with B-movie actors sitting around talking a la Reservoir Dogs but to create that same movie in a fantastic, alternate universe with directorial flourishes available only through CGI attests to the freedom provided by the reduced costs.

Most breathtaking of all has been independent film’s expansion of the scope of what CGI can be used to visualize. Beyond the artistic gambles taken with the style of familiar popcorn concepts (pulp serials, comic books) in films like Sky Captain and Sin City, there has been a more ambitious (though so far less widespread) application of CGI to more abstract concepts in films like Amelie (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004). If CGI can be used to depict destruction and hate in its innumerable manifestations, what about using it to depict love? CGI, in these films, transforms people into puddles of tears and dismantles houses, piece by piece, in an attempt to convey unreciprocated love and the agony of falling out of it. I remember watching Sunshine and being absolutely blown away by its use of CGI to address abstract concepts, formerly relegated to conversation after conversation in Woody Allen films and their ilk. Years of the limited use of CGI in big budget films had not prepared me to see CGI used to visualize feelings and ideas. This was for me the most refreshing and unexpected use of special effects since I first saw CGI used in film and a large part of why it was one of the most critically acclaimed films of last year.

The decreasing cost of CGI has not only expanded the scope of what CGI may be used to visualize (from the literal to the nonliteral) by independent film makers who can now employ the technology but also, along with digital cameras, expanded the ranks of who those independent film makers are. As Clive Thompson of Slate, pointed out in his recent article on the $20,000 Star Wars fan film Revelations, desktop animation and editing programs like Bryce and Adobe Premiere Pro allow for special effects that can hold up on the big screen and would have been unimaginable for amateur film makers to have available to them even a few years ago. If you couple this with the availability of the increasingly cheap digital camera (as demonstrated by recent films such as Tarnation (2003) and Primer (2004)), the potential for technologically sophisticated, artistic films by virtually anyone is limitless.

Francis Ford Coppola predicted this democratization of filmmaking in Hearts of Darkness (1991), commenting that decreasing technological costs “will allow the next great director to be some fat girl in Iowa." Indeed. Unlike other mediums such as literature and music (which allow anyone with a pen or a 4-track to create), film’s prohibitive production cost has meant that individual expression either has not taken place at all or has largely taken place without all of the tools available to less artistically ambitious, big budget films. Now, "art" films no longer have to be defined by merely edgy ideas, relationships and scripts, they can also use CGI to visualize completely new things that commercial cinema doesn't have the imagination or courage to visualize. And now, with digital cameras, virtually anyone (even you and me) can make these films.