"No, that was the Star Wars Trek."

[Reply #680 on:]

::Standing ovation::

[Reply #681 on:]

 

Originally posted by FishyJoe:
the guy who played Palpatine

Ian McDiarmid!

And it says Star Wars on your shirt too... 
Haha. 

I thought she was ok in Garden State, and I certainly enjoyed her ass-acting ("That's using your ass!" ) in Closer, from the short clips of certian scenes I've seen. 

[Reply #682 on:]

That was a stunt ass! Search your feelings, Faze, you know it to be true!

[Reply #683 on:]

The only problem with Revenge of the Sith was the CGI. It looked awesome, but there was too much of it and not enough real sets. It's just that I like some good old fashioned sets.

Also, they seemed to have more big name actors than they did in the Originals. George said he wanted to make no names into somebodies with the first ones, but why did he go all out with the big names in this trilogy?

[Reply #684 on:]

Indeed, CGI might look great but I crave for the old school rubber monsters, sets and models.

[Reply #685 on:]

CGI > Stop motion, though.

[Reply #686 on:]

 

Originally posted by Nixorbo:
CGI > Stop motion, though.

Yea. if done right

[Reply #687 on:]

Riiight, rubber monsters and stop-frame puppets are better than CGI. Now I've heard everything.

I really wonder at what point in time it became so punkasfuck for armchair critics to be anti-digital. "Oh my, no 16mp digital camera could ever be a match for my piece of shit 35mm compact SLR. I don't have any technical measurements to back up my illogical discriminations, but hey, that just makes me more trendy. Down with the WTO too!"

[Reply #688 on:]

Nothing like that, But it gets tiresome like with everything overused. It also reminds us of Jar Jar. If you ever own the Special Edition DVD, you see CGI has been done quite poorly and makes you wish for the Originals. For example, the guy who did Vader's Lightsaber which was originally rotoscoped or just painted over kept his cursor over the renamed light red, which was once known to some as pink.

Not to mention it sort of, takes jobs. Which some people spent years of their life learning to do.

CGI is great if used in the bits where stop motion situations just look unrealistic. If you use CGI for freaking everything including props and background it not only dulls the watchers senses but also the actors.

Maybe the reason why some of them didn't act so well because they had nothing to act with but Lucas reading aloud from his own script and making vague gestures. Or maybe they just suck no matter what they had to aid them.

There are some situations where CGI has more or less worked out in Star Wars, like the space battles which didn't have to use the same 3 TIE Fighters and same X-Wing model over and over again.

Heh, It's a double pointed sword.

[Reply #689 on:]

My only objection to CGI is when it's used in the place of stuntmen. In that context is ALWAYS looks fake.

[Reply #690 on:]

True. Also, think of the poor unemployed stuntmen who still have a full set of limbs.

[Reply #691 on:]

That said, the ability to CGI horses for the battles in the LotRs is a good thing, considering that usually in epic battle sequences, real-life stunt-horses often die in their dozens. But usually CGI is done using motion capture, so there is A stuntman involved somewhere, inevitably.

[Reply #692 on:]

 

Originally posted by FishyJoe:
That was a stunt ass! Search your feelings, Faze, you know it to be true!

NOOOOOOO!! 
That's impossible! 

Meh, an ass is an ass. 

[Reply #693 on:]

It was CGI.

[Reply #694 on:]

 

Originally posted by Ben:
Riiight, rubber monsters and stop-frame puppets are better than CGI. Now I've heard everything.

I really wonder at what point in time it became so punkasfuck for armchair critics to be anti-digital. "Oh my, no 16mp digital camera could ever be a match for my piece of shit 35mm compact SLR. I don't have any technical measurements to back up my illogical discriminations, but hey, that just makes me more trendy. Down with the WTO too!"

Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Corpse Bride were all stop motion, if you remember. They didn't look bad. In fact, they look better, in a sense of comparing an animated look to a realistic look, than the CGI of stuntmen, the R2-D2 fire scene, and some other points in the movies.

[Reply #695 on:]

That's not the issue here. I'm not saying those processes don't have their place, especially in stylized productions such as those you mention. But do you really think a strop-frame sequence of R2-D2 would have been more realistic than the CGI one?

I'm by no means a fan of the work ILM did on the Star Wars prequels - it looks washed out in episode 1 and garish in the other two, but that's just down to process and direction, not technology - you can have bad CGI just as you can have bad stop-frame (full-frame Tauntauns on Hoth..) Look at Weta's work. There's no way you could do anything like Shelob or Gollum with stop-motion or rubber masks.

It's bad enough that there are still anachronists in the industry that have a thing against digital, let alone ignorant consumers who have no idea about the technology involved.

Oh, and by the way, there was a good portion of CGI in The Corpse Bride. The fact that it's integrated so well reinforces my point.

[Reply #696 on:]

I don't have a thing against CGI, but I do think it needs to be used properly in order to be totally effective. Too much CGI makes the effect look incredibly phony and pulls me out of the movie. The first two Star Wars prequels are great examples of it. During scenes on Corsucant (sp?) and the pod races just looked too shiny and cartoonish.

Objects should look "real," with all the dings and scrapes they normally have. For instance, I still think the opening Star Destroyer crawl in IV looked better than any of the ships in I - III. It was "real" and easier to believe as giant. Or take Blade Runner...the scenes in which Decker is entering the city look much more impressive to me than any Corscucant scene from I - III. Or compare the LOTR orcs to the Battle Droids from AotC. For backgrounds and touch-ups, I think the CGI looked good. But a whole lot of CGI characters look really bad.

I have to be honest, though. None of the CGI I saw in SW really impressed me that much when I first saw it. It was acceptable at best, but I was never "wow"ed by it. Some of it looked good, but some of it just looked too flat.

And, before someone tries to nail me, I liked the CG in Sin City because the movie was supposed to be cartoonish. The art direction fit the effects properly. The B&W aspect of Sin City negated any silliness normal CGI would have.

[Reply #697 on:]

 

Originally posted by evan:
Objects should look "real," with all the dings and scrapes they normally have.

Or look at Firefly/Serenity - not the most technilogically-advanced CGI, but it is dirty, it is gritty, and that lends a better sense of realism to it.

Of course, the camerawork helps as well (I ::heart:: the "dirty zoom," as I like to call it.)

[Reply #698 on:]

If they ever release a SE DVD Prequal Boxset, I wish they would at least improve some of the CGI mistakes like with Yoda the TPM and completely edit Jar Jar Out.

Though the last one would rock, I expect it won't happen.

A good example of CGI was with the battle of Coruscant in Revenge Of The Sith.

So...anyone hear anything more about that series?

[Reply #699 on:]

You fool. Yoda was a puppet in TPM.

[Reply #700 on:]

 

Originally posted by Ben:
Riiight, rubber monsters and stop-frame puppets are better than CGI. Now I've heard everything.

From a certain point of view they are.
Animatronic devices (if properly made and filmed) are known to look more 'real' than CGI.

One example:
When 'The Mummy' was released, one of the sfx crew that had they used an animatronic mummy instead of a CGI one they never would have received a PG rating, because the use of CGI made it look less scary.

[Reply #701 on:]

 

Originally posted by Ben:
You fool. Yoda was a puppet in TPM.

Who looked even worse with the CGI.

[Reply #702 on:]

Gocad: The effects in that movie are also 7-8 years old. The shader, rendering and motion capture tech available now basically mean you can replicate anything, if you're prepared to throw money and time at a team of artists and a big-assed render farm (i.e. "if properly made and filmed",  ). Like everything else involved in the production, you've got to have good direction and talent on the ground. I think the problems you guys mention have more to do with deficiencies with the former. I don't doubt the talent of the modelers and animators at ILM, but perhaps the director should have been a bit more a hard-ass. I mean, if it's anything like his direction of the rest of it, no wonder the CGI sucked..

Nurdbot: Don't be such a sap.

[Reply #703 on:]

   

Originally posted by Nurdbot:
   

Originally posted by Ben:
You fool. Yoda was a puppet in TPM.

Who looked even worse with the CGI.

Get outta here nurdbot.  The CGI Yoda is good


Anyway i ended up getting up Star Wars: Clone wars vol 2 today

[Reply #704 on:]

What? It just looked ugly. If I have to content with ugly CGI, the last thing I want is an ugly puppet. I mean, you could have made a much better looking younger Yoda.

Zogonitwit: Duuuuh.

[Reply #705 on:]

No.  Nurdbot it must be just you that hated it

[Reply #706 on:]

UGLY PUPPET YODA FROM THE PHANTOM MENACE.

[Reply #707 on:]

Yea that yoda was pretty bad.  But not the CGI yoda

[Reply #708 on:]

Was there any CGI Yoda in The Phantom Menace?

[Reply #709 on:]

Did i say there was ?.................NO !

[Reply #710 on:]

Did I say CGI Yoda sucked? End of argument.

[Reply #711 on:]

By the great Jedi Masters, do we have to put you two in seperate forums or something?

[Reply #712 on:]

 

By Ben:
Oh, and by the way, there was a good portion of CGI in The Corpse Bride. The fact that it's integrated so well reinforces my point.

I'd say the fact that it was integrated so well points more to the quality of stop-motion than the quality of CGI.

I swear, when I saw the movie(well, three fourths of the movie--my movie theater had a fire and we had to be evacuated by the end, and I still haven't felt like going to see the end of it), I thought the entire thing was CGI. The animation was too smooth, and the camera moved around too much. When I heard from someone else that it was all stop-motion, I didn't believe it.

Now that you say that there was a good amount of CGI, it makes sense. Still--if even half of the movie was filmed with stop-motion effects, I am seriously impressed.

As for the whole CGI debate, I thought most of the "stunt doubles" were easily noticeable in Attack of the Clones. I didn't notice them at all in Revenge of the Sith(well, except for ONE instance with Christopher Lee). I'm not sure if it's because the technology has gotten better, or if it's because I didn't follow the "behind the scenes" action for Revenge of the Sith. I knew pretty much every detail about Attack of the Clones before it came out, which definitely lessened my enjoyment of the movie since all I had left to do was notice the bad acting and nitpick at the special effects.

So yeah. Generally, I'm against CGI when models or stuntmen or makeup are feasible. But if it looks as good or better, who am I to complain? The bottom line is, make it good. I don't care how you do it--models, CGI, paper airplanes being thrown across camera-view while the director makes zooming noises--if it looks good, then it doesn't matter.

[Reply #713 on:]

Corpse Bride didn't have CGI. They used a combination of digital camera technology with the traditional stop-motion technique to do the film. It was the first stop-motion film to use a digital camera to take shots. The circle shots, such as the one where the Corpse Bride corners Victor on the bridge, used moving cameras, as seen in the Nightmare Before Christmas. Where did you get the information that there was CGI in that film?

Anyway, I liked Yoda in TPM, thought it was a lot more realistic than some of the up close CGI Yoda shots, though I loved the kick-ass lightsaber CGI Yoda.

[Reply #714 on:]

Nurdbot, there are times when I couldn't disagree with you more.  This is one of those times.

::Huggles the little green pinball of doom::

[Reply #715 on:]

The puppet looked great in the late eighties Nix, but it did look a little scrappy with the advanced CGI Coruscant in the background and being right next to Samuel L Jackson.

[Reply #716 on:]

Now Nurdbot, that's not fair. CGI was the only way to properly replicate the full spectrum of colours emanating from Samuel L Jackson's forehead.   

EDIT: DAMN YOU SMILEY! 

[Reply #717 on:]

That forehead is perfect enough!
It needs no CGI!

[Reply #718 on:]

Well, I've realised it's futile trying to defend a process when a bunch of fanboys want to project their franchise's multitude of obvious failings onto one aspect of the production.

[Reply #719 on:]

Yeah, but you can still crush other people in many different things. Variety is what makes life worth it for you.