-YOU- advise George Lucas about Ep III ... whaddiya say?

You can say what you want about CGI, but nothing can top the OT Star Destroyers (and most of the other ships) for reality. They look completely real, quite stunning. The space battle at the end of ROTJ tops anything in the PT. If you remove the little box lines around some of the ships, it looks 100% realistic. And the puppet Yoda looks far more realistic than the CGI Yoda. When I was at the Magic of Myth exhibit at the Smithsonian, I stared into the eyes of the Yoda puppet for like 5 minutes expecting him to move. Alas, he had no wisdom to offer me.

 

I liked the "real" Gollum we saw for a few moments in the beginning of ROTK. He looked freaky and disturbing. CGI Gollum looks like a cartoon caveman baby.

That's strange. Because I thought that the CGI Gollum looked infinitely more realistic than that make-up thingy.

I frankly don't see the problem with CGI. There is good CGI and bad CGI, just as there is good puppetry/bad puppetry and good models/bad models. They're all just tools to tell the story. That is all.

 

I'd agree with that. CGI is just another form of trickery, like rubber masks and minature models were back in the day. They were complained about back then, CGI gets complaints now *shrugs*.

Give it twenty years, and I guess people will be complaining about the new 3D optical imaging holograms or whatever, and wishing for good ol' CGI

Oh - and I can't believe I forgot to tell George to hire me as an extra for Ep3, before the security guards dragged me away.

 

I take it for granted that movies like Star Wars and LOTR will use CGI, but it still doesn't look real at all to me.

My favorite use of CGI in a movie was The Others. It never occurred to me that it was there until I looked at the special feature on the DVD... they used it to add fog, reflections in windows, modify shot composition, etc. And it all looks completely seamless. You can do a lot of cool things w/ computers besides making weird-looking monsters.

 

I guess as with anything else, if you use CGI in tasteful and subtle ways, it works. But if you expect it to carry the load of the story, it is not going to cut it. There are many subtle uses of CGI in LOTR, such as modifying Gandalf's staff in scenes when he appears much bigger than the hobbits (like when he walks in on Bilbo at the beginning).

Plus, I think it removes an element of the spectacle. LOTR succeeds in part because New Zealand itself is so beautiful. But should we be impressed by an entirely CGI vista? It's much harder to suspend disbelief, and therefore be impressed.

 

Hmmm...I thought Kamino and Geonosis were both very believable environments. Perhaps less so when the droids and clones are fighting, but it still looks good to me.

 

Believable, sure.. but impressive? Awe-inspiring? I don't know. Think about those sweeping mountain vista shots in LOTR..now that's really something. I guess I'm a purist when it comes to CGI; I've seen PC games with scenery as impressive as that in TPM or AOTC, so it kinda cheapens it for me in films..plus in a game you can roam around and explore it. I just find it hard to be impressed by film scenery that somebody came up with on a computer. You can practically see the person behind the curtain.

 

I wish I had my hands on some of your PC-games, LSHB! Which ones are you talking about, specifically?

I don't mean to sound so condescending, I'm just interested.

 

I agree with LSHB. The effects in AOTC are quite pretty, and I enjoyed the movie, but I just don't buy the CG as much as real world photography. I'm not a fan of LOTR, but I agree that the New Zealand scenery was far more striking than anything in the PT.

The overuse of CG is starting to make some movies look like cartoons. A good example is Naboo...why not just find an exotic locale to film, instead of all the CG? It just looks completely fake half the time.

 

Freelancer, Gothic 2, and Homeworld 2.