ST Practical or CGI?

I've always been of the opinion that CGI doesn't work well for living things. The movement is just too fluid. Buildings, vehicles, etc., work fine in CGI.

 

Both.

Though I will always be of the opinion that miniatures and anamatronics look better, and age better, than CGI ever will.

Try watching Babylon 5 these days and tell me that the decision to use CGI rather than miniatures was a good one; it's so distracting to flick between live-action footage and what are effectively N64 cut scenes.

On the other hand, try comparing Jurassic Park to its modern all-CGI equivalents, and it still blows them all kinds of out of the water.

Another advantage to using physical props, animatronics, etc. is that that director has total and immediate control; if they think the shot might work better from another angle, they shift the camera a little bit and go for another take. In CGI, the scene will have to be completely rendered (which takes a lot of time and money), and then scrapped, recombined, and rendered from scratch in order to achieve the same result. On a schedule as tight as this one seems, they just wouldn't have the time to do it.

 

Why is it Either/Or? Is this Kierkegaard or something?

 

I absolutely love the fact that the look and feel of the Star Wars universe has become such an amalgam of techniques. It just feels very fitting to me. With the ST, they have the resources to go bigger than ever and use every technique at their disposal, and I hope they do.

 

Maybe?

 

I have mixed feelings about it. As someone said it wouldn't be Star Wars if they didn't push technology boundaries, but at the same time I feel that the PT CGI has not aged as well as the OT puppets.

 

Incorrect. The film universe has an amalgam of techniques, and its up to directors to choose which they prefer. And I think over his career he's clearly shown what that is. And, incidently, if we are only going to directly relate to other star wars movies, the wider audience has also decided on a preference of whether they prefer the digital prequels or the aesthetics of the originals.

 

I find it really difficult to watch ROTJ these days for all the muppets in Jabba's palace etc and the teddy bears on Endor. I'd personally much rather have a combination of both... and for the most part I think the PT actually tries to do both e.g. Watto, Nute Gunray, Clonetroopers, Darth Maul, Jango Fett, General Grievous, Mas Amedda etc. etc.

 

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...e-prequels-sets-pictures-models-etc.50017310/

 

Eh, death please. No, cake, cake. Sorry.

The reason for the CGI clones is more practical than that. It has been well documented that the Stormtrooper extras could barely see and were falling all over the place, due to the design of the costumes. CGI Clonetroopers took care of all of that and it allowed for more consistent body movements.

 

In an issue of the Insider from around 1997 or 98, Anthony Daniels said that he tried on a Stormtrooper helmet during the making of one of the films and said it was like looking at the bottom of a champagne bottle. During the making of ROTJ, when the Stormtroopers rushed to capture the droids, they all fell over each other one at a time due to their limited eye sight. Then there's this.



You can see how difficult it was at 1:40.

 

This isn't either an either or issue for me. They used both puppets and CGI in the PT. If you watch the podrace line up of racers, half of them are CGI and half are puppets. Some puppets worked very well. Admiral Akbar looks great. However, the Neimodians (Nute Gunray) looks pretty fake to me.

The use of CGI definitely improve through the PT films too, though I think the top 2 creations of TPM still hold up very well today -- Watto and Jar Jar.

To me, the Yoda puppet works pretty well in the OT, but a lot of that is because of the lighting and camera angles, but when he isn't lit right -- especially in ROTJ -- he only looks real in the sense that he looks like a real puppet. I think we're just used to Yoda being a puppet in the OT. I think if they introduced a new character that was a puppet that only looked as good as Yoda was in the OT, then people would immediately call it fake. If you turn off the sound and look at puppet Jabba, again you realize how puppet-like it looks. Again, I think we're just used to seeing puppet Jabba. Also, the blu ray Jabba in ANH is way better than the 1997 Jabba.

I really think the CGI in ROTS is almost flawless. Even in the close-ups, Yoda's skin has a real texture to it. It's so real looking that I can imagine what it would be like to feel it. (He actually seems to have pretty oily skin! I guess that's what's kept him so young-looking!) The only time it looks somewhat fake to me is when Obi-Wan is riding the veradactyl and, strangely enough, one long shot of Anakin and Palpatine in the opera scene (I really have to look close to see it though). The rest is pretty awesome. In fact, it was so good that there were things that I thought must have been done with CGI that I found out afterwards was real (a lot of the stuff with R2 and R4 on the wings of Anakin's and Obi's ships during opening sequence).

I think the clones look flawless in ROTS, but they sometimes do look fake in ATOC. They clearly improved the CGI between the 2 films, but I think what also hurts the clones in ATOC is that GL chose to use CGI in a way that almost creates the effect of a painting rather than a photograph. The clones in ATOC look especially fake when they are lined up on Coruscant with the orange-light of the setting sun hitting them. I think it's painterly effect of the soft orange lighting hitting them as much as the CGI that makes them look a little off. Sometimes you see that effect on Geonosis too -- it's a very red planet and the light becomes becomes very reddish when the dust is swept up in the air.

There is another issue that I think also hurts ATOC a little. I think the digital photography wasn't ready for prime time at that point. Sometimes things look a little fake not because of the CGI but because the digital photography couldn't handle very bright lighting very well -- think about the bright lights hitting Anakin and Padme in the droid factory scenes.

What really amazes me about the PT is how well most of the special effects have stood up. I just watched 2 films that came out in 2012: Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men: First Class -- and I thought the CGI was worse in those films. Yoda and Watto and even Jar Jar from 1999 look way better than Caesar and some of the other chimps. In the X-men movie, they couldn't even make CGI boats and submarines that they didn't look fake. The PT used both a lot of models and CGI for the ships and vehicles, but both look way more realistic than that stuff in X-men: First Class. I actually think one reason people are against CGI so much is that it has been overdone and so poorly done in so many recent movies. The special effects in the PT, especially ROTS, holds up very well in comparison.

 

The PT had eighteen months of post production work. Films like "X-Men: First Class" only have six to eight months of work. The results will always vary as a result.

 

I hope this doesn't prove true for the ST. They are on a faster schedule than GL's schedule for any of the SW saga films apart from ANH. Right now they basically have about 18 months from the start of principal photography to the December release date.

 

I completely disagree. If I didn't know any better I'd think that this scene was done by starving Andy Serkis, knocking a few teeth out and shaving him.

But CGI shouldn't be the only tool they use. The reason why Jurassic Park holds up so well today is because there is a mix of CGI and animatronics.

 

Completely agree.

 

First off puppets do not interact better.

That is an objective fact.

Puppet Yoda was nigh impossible to get to work and it tooks weeks to get a few minutes of screen time out of it.

If they feel like cartoons to you that is fine. They feel real to me. Far more real than the puppets.

Artoo in the PT was a prop and CGI and the often you couldn't tell the difference except when he was obviously doing something that a prop couldn't. I think he looked great.

Chewbacca was PM in a suit in ROTS.

I really don't quite understand the cartoony aspect of the CG characters in as much as they are that just as the puppet characters are muppety.

On is as "fake" as the other in essence though one fake one can be fully interactive and the other fake ones can't.

Besides that ROTS was 10 years ago. Think of how amazing any CG character would be now.

 

I don't understand why people think CGI shouldn't be used in Star Wars. Yes, GL should have used more Location Shots, and real sets in AOTC, and ROTS. And yes, the Original Star Wars Practical effects looked incredibly real for the time, and they still hold up today. But if JJ only uses Practical models and miniatures for the ST, he will be greatly limiting what we can see in the Star Wars Galaxy.

I believe that if GL would have done the Prequels right after ROTJ, the limitations of Practical effects would have started to become obvious. The locations would have started to look too "Been there, done that", and the scale too limited. We certainly wouldn't have been able to see the full scale of the Clone Wars. Star Wars has always been about using the most cutting edge technology. In my opinion, they should use both practical, and CGI. Whatever allows JJ to put whatever he wants to put on screen, with the most realistic result.

 

The problem is when CGI is used for things it doesn't have to be used for(like clonetroopers, and the entire background, some shots in the prequels looked like they were from an animated film) and when it is not done well. Obviously, the minimal amount of CGI, the more time they have to work on it which means the better it turns out in the final product.

 

I don't mind CGI when is done right, I believe that Andy Serkis character will be the best CGI character ever made (if he's gonna be a CGI character). I also believe that the space scenes, the spaceships and space stations and the space battles will all be CGI and I would be ok with. I don't know if JJ used models in the Star Trek movies but I quite enjoyed the space scenes of those movies.

Sure, wide shots, big armies or heavy crowded open places I'm ok with CG, if it's done right. (there are good and bad CG like there is good and bad animatronics/man in suit) Oblivion sfx (isn't one of the production designers working in SW also?) is probably the best sfx I've seen in a movie. The key is quality, the best CGI is the one you don't notice and I'm sure ILM will nail it.

But of course I want animatronics, man in suits costumes, practical sets, location shooting, and full enclosed sets that doesn't need to have a green screen surrounding it, unless it's absolutely necessary. I don't want animatronics or other practical effects for nostalgic reasons, it just works best in various situations like close-up shots and also it allows for improvisation and better interaction on set. And it dates way slower than CGI (the xenomorphs animatronics of Stan Winston in Aliens still look fantastic unlike the digital xenomorph in Alien 3 or the Orcs in LOTR vs CGI Orcs in the Hobbit)

A nice blend is the perfect solution, but I'll be totally ok if this trilogy does not have groundbreaking CG or new digital achievements if the story is great. It will not be less Star Wars because of that. Just hope they don't exaggerate like Peter Jackson did with the Hobbit movies (and I like those movies)

 

The problem is that it's relative. How does one portray a battle featuring 1000's of Clonetroopers but using only men in costumes? That's when we end up with the battle of Endor, where it looks like there's literally 15 stormtroopers in total... and it looks so small scale as to really detract from what the storyteller is trying to convey. The only battles in the OT that have 'scale', are the ones primarily realised by special effects... be it the battle of Yavin IV, Hoth or Death Star II. The prequels aren't doing anything that the OT didn't (in relative terms of course) other than having the facility to 'up the scale'. And in relation to more contemporary films - the battle in New York (Avengers Assemble), the battle of Gondor (TLOTR), Spiderman versus the Goblin, the battle for Hogwarts, the Enterprise versus Khan etc. are all pretty much 'virtual'. The only real difference is Lucas has a tendency (positive IMHO) to set them in alien like environments... which clearly standout as being in a GFFA.

 

If AOTC Yoda >had< to have a light saber battle, then obviously a puppet would not work. But does anyone know if there was any kind of motion capture for the stunts, spins, flips, etc that CGI Yoda did? My eye tells me there was no such consultation from the physics of the real universe, and I would be happier to know if there had been. The transition from hobbling with cane to warrior to hobbling was nice; I give it that.

 

I don't believe there was any physical motion capture...