its 2009

I thought the Death Star was a painting

That's funny as hell.

but in 2005 it probably still cost millions of dollars more

For 2009 it's the same scene, except done over with a few slight differences and with over-riding canon.

More or less.

Is that what happened to his creativity and writing skills?

He never had writing skills. He wrote episode 4 but his wife edited it. He didn't write 5 or 6.

In 2009, the screen would be blue.

I like it. I think?

Actually he co-wrote 6.

The man can't direct for **** either.

I think American Graffiti is still his best movie. Yes, above Star Wars.

That is exactly what I hated about the new starwars movies. Everything felt fake. Minimal props were used. Moreso in episode 2 and 3 then the first. That whole concept of props is kind of what set starwars apart from just another scifi series.

Back in the 70s and 80s, the original had the most advanced special effects ever seen.

Things didn't look "fake" in the new Star Wars films because CGI was used; it was because crappy CGI was used.

ide hit that

This!

If you asked me most of the old aliens looked crappy (yes, even back when it first came out) to me because they were far too obviously puppets.
Not all the old aliens of course, but a lot of them

Even the best modern day CGI sucks. Puppets and real things are going to be better for a long time. Well, relatively long in relation to how long special effects have been around.

Yeah, puppet Gollum and puppet Shelob would have been REALLY convincing.

A mixture of CGI and Puppetry is the best answer, really. A good Gollum puppet with CGI effects and additions would've sold it and creeped the hell out of us. I don't think we've even begun to see what a combination of real and animated can do.

I wasn't the only one taken out of the movie when Frodo tried to throw the CGI around.

I never understood this puppet nostalgia.

Your eyes know when something doesn't belong. In a produced film, subjects are backlit and spotlighted to put them to the forefront of a scene. If you take a film where reality and grit are important, you want the subject to blend in with your surrounding. You want the eye to follow its natural paths and to believe the scene just happened. CGI creates an automatic contrast, draws focus from the real stuff, and requires an extreme amount of work as far as lighting goes to be even close to convincing. Puppets are real, and you don't have any of those problems. Furthermore, you can give a puppet real glass eyes that reflect the actor's face. Look at the work Spiral has done, or the Aliens series. A good puppet creates a stunning, real experience. CGI can currently remove the limitations puppets have, but they're a poor replacement.

I'm sure CGI will eventually make leaps and bounds past puppetry, and as far as solids like the transformers or the space battles go, it's gone way past many of our miniatures.

I agree with Kirby on this one 100%

I agree only slightly. They did a fine job on Gollum, even with the subsurface scattering on his skin. (SCIENCE!)

A lot of VFX and CGI in movies goes unnoticed in movies now, so to say its immediately noticeable is a bit of an exaggeration.

I think I agree with this. It was a fantastic movie.

You all just have puppet fetishes... pervos.

I think Gollum was absolutely superb. I really think the key to a good CGI character is really to have a great performance behind it. There is no question in my mind that Gollum as a character would not have been good had not Andy Serkis been brilliant. The key was that while watching the movie, I was concerned about the character, and not about the visual FX behind him. And I think that does more to fool the watcher than any amount of good visual FX.

Frankly, a mix of CGI and Puppet would've made the fact that the character was fake stand out even more, but maybe that's just me. Gollum was extremely consistent, and to blend puppetry into the character would've taken away from him. A lot of his scenes too were extreme close-ups on the face, and with so much dialogue, I don't think the "puppet" mouth would've been any good whatsoever. Same with his eyes. Some of his scenes were sold strictly base on facial expression, which I think couldn't have been done with puppetry.

You can have the greatest graphics in the world, but without any substance behind it you will always just notice the object in question as visual FX.

That's why you let the CGI performance take most of the hard work out, but use real physical props and puppets (this term is misleading, as most modern puppets are highly constructed animatronics with lots of mobility) to weight and capture environment elements for processing and artistic assistance.

There's a certain emergence in filming where unanticipated effect can truly mark a good film. We've lost that in the digital age. Effects are forced or controlled to the point of propaganda-like films that use cheap gimmicks to represent meaningful concepts. Before, a character's performance would draw us in, a film would develop unique tropes on its own. Now film is all derivative.

To bring this back to puppets, a raw visceral capture with a high fidelity of happy mistakes provides source material for an animator to build on and into. The green screen is a very primitive, non-responsive blocking-out of space. Puppets with texture and value will simply trick the eye into believing the model instead of seeing the model as "so realistic." It lets you focus on the performance and believe it.

I think what I'm saying is that CGI is contrived. That is, until we push graphics further.

Couldn't disagree more, I'll take CGI over puppetry any day.
Have yet to see a single puppet in a movie where my mind hasn't immediately gone "that is a puppet, suspension of disbelief ends here" except for when I was a lot younger and the original star wars were new.

I'll grant you though that a really good combination of the two could pull it off

Watching Lord of the Rings, I want you to compare the people dressed in makeup (I realize they're not puppets) to the gigantic CGI troll.

If they had combined a real anamatronic face and used CGI to integrate the puppet into a high action scene, it would've been far more realistic and visceral. The slop in between the trolls lips can be real snot and liquid dripping that moves in unpredictable ways, and can react to the environment around the face.

I know I wasn't the only one who felt the troll was out of place. I feel like you'll agree with me in 10 years when CGI really does look real.

Maybe for creatures but models like ships and objects and locations.. those you can't beat with CGI. I would take an older Xwing over a Jedi star fighter any day. Although the flight paths of the computer generated ones look more natural.



[nerd]Speaking of which.. after watching episode 3 again I noticed a small fluke in the star wars time line.. the clone star fighters that are presumably first gen x-wings.. aren't they supposed to come out much later, because isn't the Z-95 headhunter supposed to be the predecessor to the X-foil design?[\nerd]

I think most people think they dont look real because... Giant trolls are quite obviously not real.

Neither are Orcs, but I really believed them. I thought the makeup on the orcs is the best argument in favor of real stuff over CGI. Imagine if all the orcs had been CGI like Pan's Labyrinth?

And I already agreed that solids are far more believable in CGI. It's organics that take in light differently and move in human or animalistic ways that are hard to recreate that look like **** on the big screen. Like I said, it'll be more obvious once we make another few leaps in technology.

Yeah but Orcs are a little more humanoid than trolls and the like..., therefore they are easier to recreate with cosmetics, etc.

Shelob looked real

Good example of practical + cgi is Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park's CGI still manages to suspend my disbelief...which is pretty amazing considering it's from the early 90s.

A lot of the problem with CGI today is stupidly impossible camera angles and movement. And of course, the biggest problem, is animation and direction of the physics. Both of the problems could be solved in a large way if the idiot directors didn't want everything so perfectly choreographed and over the top. There's more to good actions sequences than shiny things moving quickly. And for the sake of all that is holy, less slowmotion. Let things go at normal speed, and make them a bit messy.

I still remember my room-mate talking about how bad the cgi was in the latest batman movie.

I asked him "which part?"

and he said "the part where the truck flips"