It can't be that expensive to do CGI these days if people can put together CGI effect heavy indie shorts with pretty realistic effects for just a few thousand dollars and a home PC.
The standards of a professional production are higher, and it has a lot of other costs and deadlines that home hobbyists don't have.
And bad animatronics and puppets can be just as phony looking as bad CGI
Not really. It's a lot easier to make animatronics convincing as physical objects, because they already
are physical objects. So the very hurdle that is by far the most difficult thing for CGI -- creating the appearance of a physically real object with texture and weight -- is by far the easiest thing for live, on-set effects to achieve.
Besides,
watch the videos. Those folks already have created animatronic dinosaurs that look very convincing even to a live observer. This is not a hypothetical, you can just hit the play button and see for yourself that they have succeeded at that. There's no reason the show couldn't hire
these actual people to do their dinosaur effects. I think one of the videos said that they already have gotten some work in Hollywood.
Besides, as I've been arguing for some time, it is a gigantic mistake to assume that FX artists have to choose only one technique to the exclusion of all others. You're defining this as practical vs. CGI, and that's an unnecessary dichotomy. The best way to do visual effects is by combining multiple techniques, using each one for the particular thing it's best at. In
Jurassic Park, they used animatronics for the shots where the dinosaurs were relatively stationary and the shots where they were physically interacting with the actors or other objects, because that technique was better for shots where you could see their fine textures clearly and for having real physical interaction instead of having to fake it; and they used CGI for the shots where the dinosaurs were seen full-length and moving quickly, e.g. running or jumping, or for the dinosaurs that were just too big or numerous to do practically, like the brachiosaurs.
So the most sensible thing to do here is to use a mix of both. Use the animatronic creature for shots where it's standing still and interacting with the cast, use CGI for the shots where it needs to do something more elaborate. This isn't a shocking or revolutionary idea, it's pretty basic stuff in FX work.
, and can be a nightmare to deal with on the set.
Again, just watch the video. There is a large, startlingly convincing dinosaur standing there and moving around in a real-world location, completely self-contained without any wires or cables or anything. It's a surprisingly simple puppet that can be operated by a single person inside the suit. This is not as complicated as you're making it out to be, and you can find that out just by watching the video.
