Discussion Abrams and CGI

Man, body paint sure has regressed a lot in the last 40 years.

 

Cue Mr. Plinkett:

"What's wrong with your faaaaaaaace?"

 

Definitely. We created a thread about The Little Nuances that make a Star Wars Film. The credits not being at the beginning was a big part of it. For it to be a "real deal" Star Wars film, no credits in the beginning!

 

Star Trek'09 and Super 8 doesn't have credits at the beginning, so i don't see this problem with JJ

 

It is quite common now and has been for some time for movies not to have credits at the beginning.
I've never belittled the whole "standing and acting with a green screen" thing. It's really not much different from the stage. (Remember "Dogville"?) They're actors. Even when on a complex practical set, actors still had to imagine creatures and craziness some of the time.

 

It was only a year ago that Sir Ian McKellan was talking about crying actual tears because of having to act alone in front of a green screen for the Hobbit. I think even Ewan McGregor found that worthy of an eyeroll.

 

What a drama queen.

 

Maybe he's afraid of the color green?

 

Nah. Pipeweed is green.

 

Sorry, but I still wince at the Clone troopers. Part of what Lucas was talking about in the commentary was making them more more realistically, like military soldiers, and I do think the clones in ROTS look better. But I remember even when I first saw AOTC I certainly wasn't surprised the clones were CGI. That said, I do think there were great moments with CGI in the PT, like Watto and planet environments, like Feluccia, so I'm certainly not antagonistic to all CGI. I just wish the clones had been done in a more convincing manner.

 

In the ROTS commentary Lucas isn't commenting about how real or fake the CG of the clone troopers look, he's talking about their movements. He says that in AOTC they don't move like experienced soldiers, so for ROTS they had some marines do motion cap, so that they move like real trained soldiers.

 

In order to get the film out the door by 2015 its either going to be full blown CGI, or a combination of CGI and sets that are just legit factories like in star trek.

 

I don't get why STAR WARS fans suddenly cared about troopers moving like "real trained soldiers." The stormtroopers in the OT had a distinctive look. Did fans watching really criticize the way they bumbled around and stood to fire off their blasters? That's just STAR WARS.
I doubt most people would have known the clonetroopers weren't real if Lucasfilm hadn't boasted about it (just like all the other things going back to the Special Edition that people never cared for years until it was being touted as such a great upgrade.) I don't care what anyone says, the clonetroopers during the rescue from the arena looked really good.

 

There are cases where the actors' interaction with the environment helps. It's easier for actors to evoke a sense of awe or fear if they actually are seeing something awe-inspiring or scary. Ridley Scott actually talks about some of the tricks he used in Prometheus, including actually scaring actors on set with practical special effects in order to get genuine reactions.

 

Why is it unfortunate?

If it's done seamlessly and has "no excuse to be bad" then what is the problem with it?
It's almost like you guys have forgotten why you hate CGI but haven't stopped hating it.

 

I don't think it was "fans," it was George Lucas. Most fans weren't bothered by ow the clone troopers in AOTC moved, as far as I can remember. But yeah I agree with you.

 

Gollum > Yoda
LOTR battles > Star Wars battles
Avatar visuals > Any recent stuff ILM did

Weta aren't perfect, but I cringe at stuff in the PT and when I watch stuff Weta have done I at least can accept it because most of it is at the same level of quality (a couple of bits stood out in The Hobbit but nothing very noticeable I found).

 

Lucas, while filming the PT, was usually on a set seated firmly in his director's chair drinking coffee. And the camera was either on about 30 feet of straight dolly track or we had a static shot/reverse shot.

JJ Abrams, meanwhile, is running behind a camera on wheels tapping the housing to get shake and judder while he's directing the scene.

 

This one was a case of CG to distort the actress' face, it's in the bonus materials on the Blu Ray.

 

Again, in what way? As just plain old regular CG characters? Maybe Gollum has more expressiveness than Yoda. But Yoda is also a CG character based on motion reference of the on-set puppet from ESB and ROTJ. Pretty danged impressive.
Meanwhile, Gollum does look great. I love Gollum. But if you look carefully, once again bad compositing ruins it occasionally. In scenes in the dark there's no issue. Just like in ANH, ESB and ROTJ ships flying in space have no compositing issues because they're flying around in a black background. But as soon as they went to Hoth, they had issues because compositing lines were showing up against the white snow so they had to play with transparencies. Same thing happened to Gollum in daylight. It's slight, but it's there. It's much more pronounced with the brontosaurus stampede in King Kong though, as I previously mentioned. So basically WETA is learning things now that ILM figured out how to deal with 30 years ago.

Regardless, Davy Jones >>>>>>>>>> both Gollum and Yoda.

Again, as I said before, this is really apples and oranges. In LOTR battles, they had a lot of humans fighting a lot of orcs and other creatures. This required them to create their Massive system because they didn't have the personnel to hand-animate everything. And it's really custom-fit to that need. Even if ILM had Massive, they wouldn't have used it for the Prequels. The battles were all fought between homogeneous-looking critters. Battle Droids, Geonosians, even Gungans all look relatively samey except for a few outliers like Captain Tarpals and Jar Jar. Everything CG in those shots is pretty much hand-animated. So both groups did some equally impressive stuff.

You do know that ILM worked on Avatar too right? They did most of the Vehicle VFX shots like the Valkyries and such. In some shots like the attack on the Home Tree, the scene is constantly shifting from WETA shot to ILM shot. In that particular scene, the ILM shots were generally shot backwards towards the human ships as they fired missiles etc.

But better than any recent ILM stuff? Including Avengers? Because what they did on Avengers was extremely impressive.



And here's their Oscar reel too.


Also, full disclosure, WETA did the Iron Man VFX shots for Avengers.

 

Didja realize Lucas did the same thing with the prequels? Check out the documentaries and film zines. It's not like it's top secret. Might make you unpopular with the hip kids, though.

 

Actually Nick Dudman was just CGI'ed into the behind the scenes specials to fool you into believing that there were prosthetics and animatronics. It was really fake CGI too.