PT Practical Effects in the Prequels- Sets, Pictures, Models, etc.

Yep. Because, as we all know, the prequels are the only movies to have CGI heavy action scenes. The ONLY movies. Because CGI clearly ruins emotional resonance and investment.

Look at this ruined movie. RUINED, I SAY.











HOW CAN I CARE ABOUT STEVE AND BUCKY WHEN THERE'S SO MUCH GREENSCREEN?!?! HOW?



HOW COULD THIS SCENE BE SAD?! NOTHING WAS REAL BUT CHRIS EVANS IN COSTUME?!!?

















HOW ARE THE ACTORS SUPPOSED TO ACT AND HOW CAN I FEEL ANYTHING WITH ALL THIS GREENSCREEN IN THE WAY!?!

Steve and Bucky's final confrontation clearly had no emotional resonance! It was just Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan in costume with NOTHING ELSE. FAIL.

 

Sorry, but you're wrong! They built all those sets as completely practical and functioning sets in real environments, then went back and used CG to put the green screen in for the BTS documentaries.

 

SW Saga Fan

"Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up."

"The Empire Strikes Back... is malodorous offal... everything is stale, limp, desperately stretched out, and pretentious.. Harrison Ford (Han) offers loutishness for charm and becomes the epitome of the interstellar drugstore cowboy. Mark Hamill (Luke) is still the talentless Tom Sawyer of outer space - wide-eyed, narrow-minded, strait-laced. Worst of all is Carrie Fisher, whose Leia is a cosmic Shirley Temple but without the slightest acting ability or vestige prettiness."

What in the world do quotes like this have to do with what I said? How did this get turned into an OT vs. PT debate? I never once mentioned the OT even in terms of technicalities. As per the mod warning I'm not going to discuss the comparison.

My main motivation behind my post was in fact that it seems difficult for some to acknowledge hearing there are a lot of special effects in the prequels without this being an attack on them. I've seen it questioned in this thread how the new film is going to use more practical effects than the prequels. My point still stands that the prequels have more than enough needless CGI and whole scenes of actors interacting with nothing whatsoever, something I've very rarely scene aside from The Hobbit. And the needless CGI - clone troopers, green screen desert, speeders being made up of blue or green boxes, C-3PO, battle droids when they had actual models for the droids in The Phantom Menace. For better or worse there's the sense that a lot of the CGI is for the sake of being experimental - Lucas is an experimental filmmaker, he complained people didn't like his experimenting in the prequels. The PT was a positive driving force for CGI. I'm probably going to enjoy the style of The Force Awakens a lot more but I think I'll also be able to appreciate the prequels as doing their own thing more. My point is, saying that the prequels use a ton of special effects is a valid point and doesn't mean it's an attack on them.

 

I agree with this. People keep filling this thread up with examples of good & reasonable use of CGI in the prequels. Of course there are plenty of those. There are also alot of occasions where they could have used more practical elements. Lucas used animation whenever it was convenient. The TFA philosophy is to use it where necessary. Two different philosophies. I prefer the second one, but each to their own.

 

You seem to have completely ignored my example of The Winter Soldier above. Steve and Bucky's fight takes place in an entirely CGI environment and yet it is VERY commonly cited as one of the most emotional scenes of recent modern blockbusters.

And look at it -- the walkway is basically the only practical element. All of the backgrounds, the ships, the smaller props, the effects are in CGI. Even Steve's shield was often CGI in that scene. And yet that in no way impedes audience investment. And this was a film made around the same time as The Hobbit.

The problem isn't CGI. It's not being invested in the characters or caring about the story. Which is fine. It's a legitimate opinion. But I don't for a second believe that the actors standing in entirely CGI environments is the problem because so many films have shown, to me, that this does indeed work. I hate The Avengers and Star Trek but I love The Winter Soldier and all of the Star Wars films.

It's not effects. It's story and characters. If effects really did make or break it, there would be no way that I, a person born in the early 90s, could enjoy Star Trek TOS. And yet I do. Thousands of times more than the bright, new, shiny JJ Abrams films. Regardless of whether they have practical effects or not.

 

The standard of CGI is far better in WS than in the PT, esp AotC. Perhaps it wasn't wise to feature that much animation back in 2001-2 when it wasn't quite up to it. There are significant sections of AotC that now look like scenes from TCW. You choose the tools at your disposal based on how good those tools are at the time.

 

There's not a single moment in AOTC that looks like a scene from TCW. I know the movie looks a bit dated now in days, but come on...

 

Not at all. I saw your post and I said "My point still stands". I talked about scenes where the actors had nothing at all to interact with, if that's the point you were focusing on. There's a walkway and it's two human actors, the only characters in the scene, on set with each other. From what I remember of the movie the set around them is crumbling so the green screen makes some sense. Which is similar to the fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan on Mustafar, which I never complained about. Except that the Mustafar duel had (IIRC) CGI doubles when it wasn't even stunt work, like twirling lightsabers. I think most people agreed it was one of the most emotional scenes of the trilogy even with all the CGI.

The Winter Soldier soldier scene being commonly hailed as one of the great recent Hollywood scenes I've never heard, but ok. The majority of reviews I read called Bucky the weakest part of the film which I would agree with.

Talking about story and characters, yet you haven't even seen the movie...seems legit. Sounds like there's some bias there. Unless if you're not talking about Star Wars. Visually I've never seen it being described as bright and shiny but that's getting too off topic.

 

How well the WS will look 13 years from now? AOTC looked good in 2002. Lucas is all about moving technology forward. If he just looked at what was available to him in 1970s he'd have never tried to film Star Wars. Instead he created ILM to push the boundaries.

 

To many there were sections of the movie that didn't. Far from it. Hence that being mentioned often in reviews, Neeson's "pyrotechnics" comment etc. The goal of CGI is for it not to look like CGI. In Clones it's so blatantly clear you're watching animation.

No come on about it. Here are stills from the movie. I genuinely wasn't sure if they were from TCW before I posted them. Had to check to make sure first so I didn't look like a fool for posting TCW images. They're from the movie alright:






Badly aged animation. It all just looks so out of place in a live action movie. Not to say some of the other effects weren't very good. No doubt though there are examples where the over-saturation of unconvincing animation hurt the movies in alot of people's eyes.

 

I went to see AOTC with a bunch of friends. No one complained about CGI. Most people didn't even realize the clones were not real. I think AOTC was hurt more by the early adoption of the digital camera than by the special effects that were state of the art for its time.

 

The difference in terms of animation between AOTC and TCW are like night and day. I can easily tell those are AOTC scenes and not a cartoon.

EDIT: Those are lousy screencaps, BTW. I just finished watching AOTC on Blu-ray today and the Battle of Geonosis still looks great.

 

[quote="Drewton, post: 52955024, member: 1348869" And the needless CGI - clone troopers, green screen desert, speeders being made up of blue or green boxes, C-3PO, battle droids when they had actual models for the droids in The Phantom Menace. For better or worse there's the sense that a lot of the CGI is for the sake of being experimental - Lucas is an experimental filmmaker, he complained people didn't like his experimenting in the prequels. The PT was a positive driving force for CGI. I'm probably going to enjoy the style of The Force Awakens a lot more but I think I'll also be able to appreciate the prequels as doing their own thing more. My point is, saying that the prequels use a ton of special effects is a valid point and doesn't mean it's an attack on them.[/quote]

The reason why they used CGI clones is because they couldn't get the same movements from men in suits.

 

I can tell bcs the characters are animated in a different style but the ships & environments often look very similar.

 

No offence, but this is ridiculous to the point of bizarre. The vast majority of the time the clones are doing nothing that normal human actors couldn't do.

I think one of the things that hurt AOTC the most story aside was there are just so many cases of interacting with CGI characters, often exclusively. It's very experimental. It feels like in over half the movie the actors are interacting with CGI. This is something you don't see in movies like The Winter Soldier. It also hurt The Hobbit, most people complained about Azog.

And yeah, I would agree Attack of the Clones battle scenes look good. But the clones on their own look fake to me.

 

Even the ships and environments in any of the prequels are leagues above what was seen in TCW, but for a cartoon TCW looked impressive.

 

Everything I've read suggests Lucas made the decision on a whim for convenience. Just fitting in with his policy of "if it can be animated it should be animated". It's discussed here for example:

"I wanted to build a clone suit," says Ben Snow, visual effects supervisor. "It makes a lot of sense when we have a clone talking to an actor, for example. But George said, 'Look, this morning you showed me a CG R2D2 that looked absolutely believable. It's fine. You'll be able to do it.' He and Rick [McCallum, producer] love throwing down the gauntlet like that."

Even the head of visual effects wanted to build suits! Then the article shows the tedious lengths the crew had to go to by making this choice rather than just having actors in trooper suits:

In one scene, for example, a clone trooper runs after Padmé (Natalie Portman) who has tumbled out of a vehicle and rolled down a hill during the clone war. He kneels down to ask if she's OK; the interaction continues as she gets up. There's no clue that the trooper helping her is digital. "We worked and worked to come up with every footstep, every reaction," says Light. "We did more takes of that performance than any [motion-captured] scene in the film."
The crew started with rough blocking from an animatic created in Maya that showed what the clone was supposed to do; measurements from a camera match-move showed where Portman was on the bluescreen stage. Using those measurements, the crew put a volleyball on the mocap stage to represent Portman's head when she was lying down, and used a tripod with a marker so the performer would look in the correct direction when she stood up.

All of that rather than just shoot the damn scene with an actor The irony with this scene is that they spent so much time & effort on all those technical shenanigans they didn't notice the blunder in the dialogue when Padme gets up from being unconscious & says "we've got to get to that hangar" !

 

I just watched AotC two days ago and was complaining about the CG in it--but not on Geonosis! That looks nearly flawless IMHO.

I do think that they should've made a suit for Temura Morrison in RotS but have no problem with digital troopers in AotC. I think they (mostly) look great.

 

Walked in this thread to expect some pleasent conversations....



Walked out of this thread........

 

All you've done is remind me of how gorgeous and surreal that battle is. It's almost like different people perceive things differently or something. But that's crazy talk. We all know art is objective

 

Yeah, those screenshots look great to me, even better in motion. AOTC, for me, is one of the most gorgeous SW movies to look at.

 

Fair points. I don't even think it looks "bad". Just...animated. Certainly doesn't ruin the movie though.

 

Irrelevant when it comes to actors. Hayden and Ewan had as much to react to when filming Anakin vs Obi-Wan as Chris and Sebastian did when filming Steve vs. Bucky.

Moreover, you may argue that the CGI standard is better in the WS than in the PT and I would agree, but art direction counts for a lot too. Otoh Gunga, for example, looks many, many times better than many things in The Hobbit to me, for example, because of amazing art direction.

Also, I think you're ignoring the fact that, when it comes to clones, CGI has a HUGE advantage: it can standardize much better than people in suits could ever hope to. The clone troopers, because of CGI, can be exact copies. Perfect replicas. This makes them far more unnerving to the audience and is also much more reflective of how they were designed and grown by the Kaminoans.

Yes, the CGI will age. But I think the aforementioned aspects are worth it personally. That perfect standardization and synchronicity really hammers home just what the Kaminoans have created for the Republic.

But...that has nothing to do with CGI? I'm not sure what your point is?

Moreover, while you're certainly entitled to your opinion, I've been enduring hundreds of thousands of Tumblr fangirls screaming about BUCKY!!!! and their "feels" for months now in the Captain America tags, so it clearly struck a chord with some people.

Sorry I wasn't clear -- I was comparing Star Trek TOS to Star Trek 2009 and STID (I think most would agree with me that new Trek is "bright and shiny"). Star Trek TOS has really old, obviously fake effects but I adore it completely. I also love the prequels and The Winter Soldier even though they both make use of heavy CGI. Even where some scenes are entirely CGI.

And yet, I hate JJ Abrams' shiny, bright new Trek films. They're awful to me. I don't care how many practical effects there are -- I don't care for the characters and the story.

CGI isn't the problem.

 

Agreed but what actors seem to want/need in cases where there's a virtual environment & virtual characters to act with is alot of direction. Then they're more comfortable with what they're doing & the result is a better performance. Lucas' self confessed minimalist style of directing actors combined with the level of green screen environments seems to have led to some problems. It's the combination of those two factors that may've been what Ewan & the others had issues with: virtual environments & minimal direction.

Yeah that was one benefit but I'm not sure it was a big one. After all for years people speculated that the stormtroopers in the OT may've been clones. No one thought it was a deal-breaker that they were of slightly different height.

 

Depends. For example, The Avengers has a ton of greenscreen as well and yet, I heavily dislike that movie because of the way it's written and directed. The constant quipping and one-upmanship sounds very, very artificial to me. I will take the sometimes awkward dialogue and stilted formality of the prequels any day. To me, it feels much more earnest and believable. So which result is better is a matter of opinion. Some actors do need more direction but other actors thrive in greenscreen environments (Ian McDiarmid, IMO).

Again, this is a matter of opinion. To you, the uniformity of the clones doesn't matter, but I would not remove those shots because seeing thousands of perfectly identical faces dining on Kamino or soldiers lining up is one of the most iconic Star Wars images to me and perfectly encapsulates the artificiality of the the Clone Wars -- a conflict created by the Sith for their own personal gain.

It reinforces the visual strength and symbolism of Star Wars, which is one of the things I love most about the Saga. It really makes excellent use of film as a visual medium. Much more so than almost every other film, IMO.

But to each their own.