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ForumsDiscussion Forum → Episode VII to limit cheap CGI tricks and keep it real
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Episode VII to limit cheap CGI tricks and keep it real
2013-07-29, 7:36 AM #1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jul/29/star-wars-episode-vii-cgi

Quote:
The next Star Wars film will eschew CGI in favour of real locations and models wherever possible, according to Kathleen Kennedy, the film executive in charge of the sci-fi adventure.
The LucasFilm boss made the comments at a Star Wars convention, where she also revealed that composer John Williams would return for the upcoming JJ Abrams-directed Episode VII.
"The conversation we're having all the time now about Episode VII is how much CGI," Kennedy told fans at the Star Wars Celebration Europe convention in Essen, Germany. "We're looking at what the early Star Wars films did; they used real locations with special effects. So [for Episode VII] we're going to find some very cool locations, [and] we're going to end up using every single tool in the toolbox."
Kennedy revealed that the DIY approach adopted by Star Wars fans when designing home-made costumes helped inspire the move. "I was amazed yesterday, looking at what the fans are doing," she said. "Using model makers, using real droids, taking advantage of the artwork that you can touch and feel – we want to do that in combination with CG effects."
Kennedy's comments were well-received by fans at the convention. George Lucas's trilogy of prequel films between 1999 and 2005 were heavily criticised for over-relying on CGI.
Kennedy also revealed that the iconic composer Williams would return to oversee Star Wars: Episode VII. In a clip posted on the Star Wars website, Williams said he expected to weave familiar themes and motifs into the new score. "Of course, I haven't seen the script," the composer told The Hollywood Reporter. "The story is still unknown to me, the new story. But I can't imagine that there will not be some references to the existing stories [which] we know would necessitate … the use of some of the earlier themes."
Kennedy said Abrams and screenwriter Michael Arndt are currently working on "story and character" for the new film. After buying all rights to the series through its acquisition of LucasFilm for $4.05bn, Disney announced a trilogy of new Star Wars films in October, with Lucas agreeing to step aside after more than 35 years in charge. The stars of the original trilogy, Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) and Harrison Ford (Han Solo), have been tipped to return in Star Wars: Episode VII, which is being shot in the UK next year for a 2015 release date.



This is certainly welcome news.
2013-07-29, 7:47 AM #2
This whole Episode VII thing sounds like a huge joke to me. I remain very sceptical.
ORJ / My Level: ORJ Temple Tournament I
2013-07-29, 8:00 AM #3
Mesa likey
Star Wars: TODOA | DXN - Deus Ex: Nihilum
2013-07-29, 8:30 AM #4
What's the worst bit of CGI in the prequels?

My favourite 'worst bit' is the rubbish trade federation landing sequence in episode 1. There's a ship that lands in the trees. It's just awful.
Magrucko Daines and the Crypt of Crola (2007)
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Magrucko Daines and the Vertical City (2016)
2013-07-29, 8:30 AM #5
This seems like its possibly going in a neat direction. I'll admit though, I will enjoy just about anything that is put out. They could literally film mice running around an cgi in them all holding tiny lightsabers and I would happily sit through an hour an a half of it.
Welcome to the douchebag club. We'd give you some cookies, but some douche ate all of them. -Rob
2013-07-29, 8:44 AM #6
Originally posted by Goit:
What's the worst bit of CGI in the prequels?

My favourite 'worst bit' is the rubbish trade federation landing sequence in episode 1. There's a ship that lands in the trees. It's just awful.


I thought it was a strange decision to make all of the clone troopers in episode 3 have CG bodies and the actors head. It was quite out of place (and that is my favorite of the prequels)
2013-07-29, 9:19 AM #7
Originally posted by TSM_Bguitar:
I thought it was a strange decision to make all of the clone troopers in episode 3 have CG bodies and the actors head. It was quite out of place (and that is my favorite of the prequels)


Speaking of Episode 3, when Obi Wan breaks open Grievous's chest... the innards just don't "look" right. For some reason, that just stuck with me.

Old CGI just doesn't age as well as puppets/miniature models/real sets do. Episode 1 looks awful to my eyes, worse than Episode 4 and 5 in visual appeal.
SnailIracing:n(500tpostshpereline)pants
-----------------------------@%
2013-07-29, 1:50 PM #8
None of the cgi in the prequels is worth complaining about as far as I am concerned. Only truly bad cgi warrants serious derision:



When anything in the prequels looks remotely that bad, let me know.
>>untie shoes
2013-07-29, 2:33 PM #9
1) It's unfair to compare the relative infancy of CGI effects in comparison to non-CGI effects.
2) Non-CGI effects can look crappy too, and have often enough.
3) Movies to this day seem to not grasp the strengths and limitations of CGI effects.
Pros: Great for backdrops, inanimate/mechanical objects, and when there needs to be a LOT of something that doesn't need to be particularly scrutinized.
Cons: Very difficult to pull off live, particularly humanoid, animations when they are in focus.

The LotR trilogy I think used the SFX tools, CGI and non-CGI, to their best respective strengths, mixing so no one effect dominated and broke suspension of disbelief.

As for this particular news, while promising, it is no guarantee that it'll make for a good movie, or will shut up the nerd-rage about how the movie even looks.
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2013-07-29, 2:35 PM #10
Originally posted by Antony:
None of the cgi in the prequels is worth complaining about as far as I am concerned. Only truly bad cgi warrants serious derision:



When anything in the prequels looks remotely that bad, let me know.

Personally, the worst CGI I remember recall seeing at the time I saw the movie was one of the later fight scenes in Daredevil.
The Plothole: a home for amateur, inclusive, collaborative stories
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2013-07-29, 2:57 PM #11
Modelling light is super complicated. It is basically impossible for CGI to still look good 10 years on and it will probably always be that way, especially when it's being inserted into live-action.

Remember, Gollum was award-winning CGI in The Two Towers and Return of the King, but now he looks ridiculous (especially the blobby rotoscoped shadow he cast).
2013-07-29, 3:02 PM #12
So you're saying reality will keep getting more real-looking to out pace CGI.

That or film and video resolution will go up. Yeah let's go with that.
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.
2013-07-29, 3:09 PM #13
Even without the cgi those movies would have sucked.

They ruined lightsaber duels.

Riddle me this, you're fighting someone with a laser sword that has precognitive ability. At which point in this fight should you not be facing them?

For ****s sake there were parts in the final duel of rots where they were pinwheeling and not even touching each other, or attempting to.
2013-07-29, 3:10 PM #14
Or how about wirelessly activated autonomous robots that must verbally communicate with each other?
2013-07-29, 3:13 PM #15
Originally posted by Emon:
So you're saying reality will keep getting more real-looking to out pace CGI.

That or film and video resolution will go up. Yeah let's go with that.

No I'm saying that realistically modelling the way light behaves at a single discrete point on a surface requires an experimentally-determined function f[sub]r[/sub] : (R[sup]3[/sup] x R[sup]3[/sup]) -> R[sup]4[/sup] for each point on that surface. We are not yet able to construct an accurate model for this function based on physical properties. Our approximations are getting better all the time for most materials, which is why most old CGI looks so bad now, but until we're doing atom-level simulations of environments our models will not be truly convincing.

e.g. this is why on new movies they have to use special equipment to record the subsurface light behavior on actors faces. We can approximate subsurface scattering in human flesh. The approximation isn't remotely good enough.
2013-07-29, 3:33 PM #16
But you'd expect it to get "good enough" at some point that you're at least out of the uncanny valley. You don't need atom-level detail for a film that's only 1080p. But I'd expect video resolution to leapfrog simulation detail so you'd have an ever losing battle of trying to get "good enough."
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.
2013-07-29, 3:37 PM #17
I hope they make Star Wars good again.
COUCHMAN IS BACK BABY
2013-07-29, 3:43 PM #18
Unfortunately the new definition of "good" have may have been permanently skewed by a younger generation raised on the prequels. And I doubt many have them will have had a chance to watch Harry Plinkett's reviews.
2013-07-29, 3:48 PM #19
Compared to the average summer blockbuster, all three Star Wars prequels were pretty good movies. They get an undeserved amount of hatred from butthurt fans that think they deserve something from George Lucas.
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.
2013-07-29, 3:53 PM #20
Originally posted by Emon:
But you'd expect it to get "good enough" at some point that you're at least out of the uncanny valley. You don't need atom-level detail for a film that's only 1080p. But I'd expect video resolution to leapfrog simulation detail so you'd have an ever losing battle of trying to get "good enough."


Resolution doesn't really matter since rendering is linear in the number of samples; to quadruple the number of pixels you can just throw four times as many servers at the problem and you'll finish the job in the same amount of time. Simulation accuracy is the hard part. And it does matter, even at 1080p, since the color of a pixel is supposed to be the weighted average of all of the visible points inside the frustum subtended by that pixel.

Doom 3 running at 320x200 still looks like plastic, and that's thanks to a bad f[sub]r[/sub].

(Edit: Rasterization is essentially choosing the most significant contributor of color to each pixel, antialiasing puts some of the realism back by taking the average of multiple samples. Rendering it at a lower resolution can actually make it worse. Most movies are being rendered at 4k+ with multisampling.)
2013-07-29, 3:59 PM #21
Originally posted by Emon:
Compared to the average summer blockbuster, all three Star Wars prequels were pretty good movies. They get an undeserved amount of hatred from butthurt fans that think they deserve something from George Lucas.

2013-07-29, 4:09 PM #22
Let's see: Attack of the Clones had 3x the budget of The Empire Strikes Back. In the former, you had a dark, magnificently paced and focused adventure played by lovable characters. In the latter, you have annoying CGI pew-pew battles (the ones in the desert) with so much crap on the screen you can hardly be bothered to care about what's going on. I also had a bit of a hard time relating to what the purpose of what was happening at times (Obi-wan is going to this planet now, because why?). Every prequel (except Revenge of the Sith) suffers from this feeling that the whole thing is contrived and lacks purpose. I will admit that Return of the Jedi is pretty darn bad if you don't cut 1/2 out.

I totally agree with Mike Stoklasa when he bemoans Lucas for exercising far too much creative control over the prequels instead of allowing for a more natural process. Lucas' greatest strength was his vision, his drive to succeed, and somehow allow the brilliance of many, many others to flourish in the process. Don't we owe just as much to the likes of Ralph McQuarrie as Lucas? In the prequels, Lucas overestimated his own screenwriting ability, simultaneously dumping money on the project.
2013-07-29, 4:16 PM #23
[http://www.starwars-universe.com/images/multimedia/Images/CCG%20-%20TCG/CCG/Star_Wars_CCG/13-special_edition/light%20side/general%20mcquarrie.gif]
2013-07-29, 4:36 PM #24
Oh, and as for the thread title:

[QUOTE=George Lucas]
Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves[/QUOTE]
2013-07-29, 4:50 PM #25
Why do people always bring that quote up? What the hell does it have to do with anything? Lucas was using special effects as a means of telling a story in the prequels. The story just isn't all that good. It isn't all that bad, either. The bad comes from some pretty awful dialogue and some incredibly awful acting. Otherwise I agree with Emon. They're fairly sound movies.

I'm not going to go into the Plinkett thing again, because I think it's fairly well known around here that I think that guy is a pedantic douchebag.
>>untie shoes
2013-07-29, 4:56 PM #26
I can basically agree with that. My dislike for the prequels mostly comes from high expectations and a warped perspective nurtured by my idea of what the Star Wars universe should "feel" like after having played so many hours of Tie Fighter, SWCCG, and everything else that rehashed the the crafts, planets, species, and costumes almost directly from TESB and ROTJ.
2013-07-29, 5:00 PM #27
Originally posted by Antony:
I'm not going to go into the Plinkett thing again, because I think it's fairly well known around here that I think that guy is a pedantic douchebag.


One might think that such traits could actually be considered a plus around here.:awesome:
2013-07-29, 5:08 PM #28
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
I can basically agree with that. My dislike for the prequels mostly comes from high expectations and a warped perspective nurtured by my idea of what the Star Wars universe should "feel" like after having played so many hours of Tie Fighter, SWCCG, and everything else that rehashed the the crafts, planets, species, and costumes almost directly from TESB and ROTJ.

pee much.

In the original movies there was a certain level of whimsy that was more-or-less absent from the Expanded Universe. I don't think George Lucas paid enough attention to the EU to understand the shift in tone that the fans were expecting in TPM. Scenery chewing in the next two was probably overcompensation.
2013-07-29, 5:08 PM #29
Originally posted by ECHOMAN:
Old CGI just doesn't age as well as puppets/miniature models/real sets do. Episode 1 looks awful to my eyes, worse than Episode 4 and 5 in visual appeal.


I understand what you're saying, but I just want to remind everyone of how awful the Yoda puppet in Episode 1 was.



Originally posted by Antony:
I'm not going to go into the Plinkett thing again, because I think it's fairly well known around here that I think that guy is a pedantic douchebag.


I am absolutely sick of people that use that bloody "oh look, I'm an angry pedantic nerd that hates everything" shtick for "comedy" that's all over the internet. It's bad chat. The only person that's genuinely good at it is Yahtzee, and Zero Punctuation still got stale after half a dozen videos.
nope.
2013-07-29, 5:31 PM #30
The most awful part of it is that so many people take it as gospel in regard to the property being lambasted, as though it is the final word on whether something is worthwhile or not. If one were so inclined one could spend hours of one's life critically dissecting any movie and *****ing about it in comparison to another. It's a ****ing waste of time, and it doesn't add anything to the proceedings. It just causes people to dislike something more than they already did, or in an even worse case, causes them to dislike something they were perfectly okay with before.

How is it a good thing in any way to cause someone to stop enjoying something so harmless as a ****ing movie or a videogame? The fact that someone spent hours of his or her life tearing apart something you like doesn't mean you are wrong for liking it.
>>untie shoes
2013-07-29, 5:41 PM #31
Quote:
It's a ****ing waste of time, and it doesn't add anything to the proceedings. It just causes people to dislike something more than they already did, or in an even worse case, causes them to dislike something they were perfectly okay with before.


The jury was rigged from the start.

Anyway, I enjoyed the reviews a lot more than the movies, so at least they have that going for them.
2013-07-29, 6:19 PM #32
With a few exceptions I really quite enjoyed the prequel movies. I absolutely hate jar jar, and Haden's acting was particularly horrible in parts of attack of the clones. But story wise thought they were good.
Welcome to the douchebag club. We'd give you some cookies, but some douche ate all of them. -Rob
2013-07-29, 6:53 PM #33
The fact that George Lucas is a terrible dialogue director/writer is to blame for a good bit of the flaws of the prequels. The proof of this is Natalie Portman delivering the three worst performances of her career.

Somehow several of the actors managed to overcome this, most notably Ewan Mcgregor, who is easily the best thing about the prequels.
>>untie shoes
2013-07-29, 8:42 PM #34
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Simulation accuracy is the hard part. And it does matter, even at 1080p, since the color of a pixel is supposed to be the weighted average of all of the visible points inside the frustum subtended by that pixel.

That makes sense, thanks for the good explanation.
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.
2013-07-29, 8:43 PM #35
Originally posted by Jon`C:

Yeah but it is it really much worse than a Shia La Bouf Transformers movie?
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.
2013-07-29, 8:46 PM #36
Other supporting evidence: all of ​The Mummy Returns
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.
2013-07-29, 9:05 PM #37
You can't tell whats going on in those transformers movies half the time.

Cool that they got the nemoy in the last one.
2013-07-29, 10:29 PM #38
Originally posted by Antony:
The fact that George Lucas is a terrible dialogue director/writer is to blame for a good bit of the flaws of the prequels. The proof of this is Natalie Portman delivering the three worst performances of her career.

Somehow several of the actors managed to overcome this, most notably Ewan Mcgregor, who is easily the best thing about the prequels.


Ewan has the unholy acting talent to make awful dialogue sound fine, just like David Tennant.

-I think what people hate about the prequels, though they'd never admit it to themselves, is it makes them see the similar flaws they'd imagined away from the original trilogy.
2013-07-30, 2:48 AM #39
That's because Ewan McGregor understands that when you are saying ridiculous things you must act ridiculous. Ian Mcdiarmand understands this as well.

I was sad that Terrance Stamp didn't have a larger role.
>>untie shoes
2013-07-30, 5:12 AM #40
Originally posted by Emon:
Yeah but it is it really much worse than a Shia La Bouf Transformers movie?

No, but that's because all of the Transformers films are truely god awful.
Originally posted by Emon:
Other supporting evidence: all of ​The Mummy Returns

The Mummy Returns on the other hand, I like. Can't say that about the unneeded one with Jet Li.
Originally posted by Antony:
I was sad that Terrance Stamp didn't have a larger role.


It's been that long since I've seen TPM I forgot that he was in it. Terrance Stamp should be in everything!
nope.
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