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Mike Brennan

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I was just reading an article where the Visual Effects Supervisor for War of The Worlds was talking about fake looking CGI.

 

Essentially he was saying that CGI is being used for too many things these days. He discussed how difficult it can be to properly represent weight, mass, volume, scale, velocity. And that other techniques than CGI can often be a simpler and better solution.

 

Which is what makes miniatures, prosthetics, and painted backgrounds still useful and viable tools.

 

For creatures, monsters, and or fleshy animated objects I have yet to see CGI that could completely replace a real puppet or animatronic. Gollum was the best, but not 100% there yet.

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I was just reading an article where the Visual Effects Supervisor for War of The Worlds was talking about fake looking CGI.

 

Essentially he was saying that CGI is being used for too many things these days. He discussed how difficult it can be to properly represent weight, mass, volume, scale, velocity. And that other techniques than CGI can often be a simpler and better solution.

 

Which is what makes miniatures, prosthetics, and painted backgrounds still useful and viable tools.

 

For those of us who supervise visual effects for a living, this is not news. CGI as a solution for everything exists primarily in television, where the scrutiny is not quite as high and where many small companies will do reasonably good CG work at a very low price. In features, multiple techniques can be and are used on a regular basis. The two most recent Star Wars movies and the Lord of the Rings trilogy were some of the heaviest miniature projects ever done. CG is used where there is no other way to bring about what the director wants to see. Even in pictures like Spider Man and Day After Tomorrow, entire cities were done in CG primarily because the shots were not determined ahead of time, and given the post schedule and the likely directorial desires, it was necessary to have total freedom of camera placement and movement. It was also necessary in the second case to show natural weather phenomena that cannot easily be done practically.

 

In the case of War of the Worlds, I'm not surprised at the statement, primarily because that picture required lots of destruction of buildings, bridges, and other things, all best done with miniatures - mostly pretty large miniatures. In addition, that picture had a very, very fast turnaround, with little time for extensive CG R&D, not to mention modeling, rendering, and compositing. There were multiple shooting units at ILM for the miniature work and pyro elements in order to get it done. Not to mention the simple fact that Dennis Muren is one of the most experienced visual effects supervisors in the business, and has a great grasp of all methodologies, traditional and new, and a great sense of what to use for any particular need.

 

For creatures, monsters, and or fleshy animated objects I have yet to see CGI that could completely replace a real puppet or animatronic. Gollum was the best, but not 100% there yet.

 

No puppet or animatronic device can deliver a directed performance, in real time, interacting with human actors, and often displaying the entire body, head to toe. Gollum was CG because that was the only way to deliver Peter's vision of what the character was and could do. And if you didn't find Gollum convincing, you're part of a pretty small minority of viewers who didn't. The truth is that the visual effects cat is now out of the bag, and has been for a while. Since everyone knows that CG exists, whenever you see something on the screen that clearly can't exist in the real world, you pretty much guess that it's CG and lose much of your emotional investment in it. I think that's a shame, in part because I remember that when I was a kid, I would go to the movies and see some pretty fantastic images and have absolutely no idea of how it was done. Most of that magic is, sadly, now long gone.

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I think that's a shame, in part because I remember that when I was a kid, I would go to the movies and see some pretty fantastic images and have absolutely no idea of how it was done. Most of that magic is, sadly, now long gone.

 

I think hugely stylized movies like Moulin Rouge, Sin City, Sky Captain, etc. are partly a by-product of this - moving into the realm of "yes - it's fake, love it."

 

Harryhausen commented often he didn't think "real looking" was best - he thought the stylization tapped into fantasy.

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David bringing up Die Hard made me think of another example from that film. When the henchmen launch the rocket down at the police armored vehicle. The visual effects team had a line from the office window to the ground. They fired a rocket that flew along the wire from the window to the ground in camera frame.

 

In the Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo first sees Darth Vader, pulls his gun and fires. Vader uses the force to pull the gun from Solo's hand. The director used fish line to pull the gun from Harrison Ford's hand. They threw it across the table and got a shot of it flying across frame. Then turned the camera upside down and used fishing line to pull the gun from Vader's hand. Once played right side up the gun looks as though its flying into Vader's hand.

 

I love that kind of simplicity.

 

 

I imagine from Spielberg's previous work. While watching War of The Worlds we should not notice the line between live action and CGI.

 

Bring in once again the example of Jurassic Park. Animatronics in the foreground, CGI in wider shots. Its very difficult to tell the difference.

 

I would even reach back farther Gremlins was all puppetry and work very well. It certainly had me on edge when I saw it in the theater. I haven't seen it in a while but I imagine the effects would still appear seamless.

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Guest Jim Murdoch
.

 

I love that kind of simplicity.

I helped out on a local film school production a few years back which was basically a ghost story. The principal "special effects" were "ghosts" produced by reflecting an image of an actor on a large sheet of glass retrieved for a demolition site, and a garden leaf blower used to suddenly agitate part of a hedge as the "ghosts" moved through it!

 

My contribution was to set up one of the actors in a totally dark room with a black and white CCD camera and a bank of infrared light emitting diodes for "illumination". (This was long before such cameras became commonplace)

 

In total darkness the irises of the actor's eyes opened up huge (this only works with young people by the way) giving a really creepy effect - he really looked DEAD! We simply double-exposed a recording of that played on an ordinary TV screen and it looked a million dollars.

 

In another film there was a creepy "seance" scene, where all they did was make things jump and vibrate around a wooden table by gluing magnets under them and using an electromagnetic TV degaussing coil under the table!

 

Simple but very effective!

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Guest Trevor Swaim
I also really can't accept the concept of Darth Vader blowing up his daughter's home planet just to make her cry, yet passing up the opportunity to rub salt into the wound by telling her he was her father :P

 

 

you need to rewatch the original trilogy vader didn't know that leia was his daughter. he know that pademe was prego but as far as he knew the child died with her. even when he found out about luke he didn't find out about leia being his daughter until late in return of the jedi.

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I finally just saw it, projected on 35mm. I know Lucas is the director and he's done massive things with this whole deal and I'm not worthy to criticize him etc. But I thought the movie flat out sucked. That HD cinematography printed to film was horrid with shitty skin tones and monotanous crazy uneven backlights and kickers that didn't match the lightsources keyed in behind them. Very soft everywhere and even in mild full shots the characters were downright blurry.

 

The only thing in the movie I liked was when they put his helmet on and he started to breathe. That was a cool shot but why the hell did they put that "bung" sound in there? Sounded like someone pulled the cork out of a moonshine bottle and I was laughing. I'm sorry but IMHO eps. 1,2 and 3 are whole step down in quality from the mark being set for a long time in filmmaking.

 

You could project a print of a film made 50 or 60 years ago and it would blow these shows away in the overall quality department. Even the 16mm comercial blow ups shown before it looked better! Just to be fair I'm going to go watch in 2K DLP this weekend.

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I saw the first two (if he changes his mind and does more we'll need charts like focal length format equivalent charts: Episode 12 = 9th in the series :D ) in 70mm, I think "today's audience" would be surprised by them - resolution shemsolution, it is the feeling of space that's been lacking....

 

-Sam

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Guest Jim Murdoch
Wow. What happended? I find myself agreeing with Jim Murdoch...

 

-k

Gasp...Wheeze... You have just experienced a small part of the immense power of the Dark Side, young KaiWalker....

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Guest Jim Murdoch
Lucas is a worthless, talentless hack and shouldn't be allowed near a film camera until he's been suitably beaten with rubber chickens, and assigned a pair of talented directorial minders to point out his excesses.

 

Phil

Well in 1999/2000 he reckoned he was never going to shoot another feature on film, so perhaps he was more insightful than you think :P

Then later he modified this somewhat, to something along the lines of "whatever is more appropriate to the project." Actually he modified a lot of his statements....

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Guest Jim Murdoch
even when he found out about luke he didn't find out about leia being his daughter until late in return of the jedi.

Yeah, but he supposedly had the ability to sniff out people with the Jedi gene, yet he didn't detect it on Leia. If Lucas had been awake when he wrote the script, he could have at least made Vader feel something was "not right". After all, Yoda was able to tell that: "there is another".

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Guest Jim Murdoch
You could project a print of a film made 50 or 60 years ago and it would blow these shows away in the overall quality department. 

That is the saddest thing of all. When you shoot something on "2k" HD video all you're ever going to capture is is about 1,000 lines horizontally by 500 lines vertically (or about 400 if you're going 2.35:1). There is nothing else in there, and no matter how much bullsh*t "up-rezzing" jiggerypokery you get up in post production, there's never going to be any more information than that.

 

With 35mm film on the other hand, the original negative nearly always contains more information than can be usefully extracted by mainstream post/distribution equipment, but it will always be there if and when better technology becomes available.

 

The recent re-releases of classic colour movies dating back to the 1930s shows just how much information is available even in the primitive emulsions of those days, most of them never looked anywhere near that good in their original cinema release!

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I thought it sucked.

 

In fact, I would like my 9 dollars and 2.5 hours of my life back.

 

But on the other hand, I did get some good laughs. I'm currently working as 1st AC on a film in which many members of the cast and crew are pretty hardcore Star Wars fans. So the crew went to see it after finishing the day early... and considering the DP had been running around in a Darth Vader mask all day ("Okay guys...looks like a :wheeze wheeze: 2.8 :wheeze"), we were in hysterics during Darth's now infamous "You killed her in your anger." "NOOOOO!" scene.

 

And I mean hysterics as in, people turning around in their seats to glare at us because we couldn't stop snickering. So at the very least, I had a nice hour-long nap and I laughed so hard that I started crying. That's about it, though. The movie pretty much killed the rest of the evening because we were all too depressed about it to do anything but go home and go to bed.

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I have mixed feelings about it. I read your post about the information in a 35mm print versus HD, and I think it's a very good point. I'm not *against* HD, I just don't think it can "replace" 35 the way some people seem to claim. For now, we might be convinced. But in as little as 10 years, will it hold up? Not the way 35mm does!

 

For some reason, the compositing looked a little off to me. I also didn't like the transitions like the wipes and iris outs; I guess he was trying to make it look like the original 3, but I just found it jarring. And what was up with R2D2 doing all this crazy stuff that he's never done before?? (Has he been upgraded? :lol: )

 

I'm trying to think of one positive thing...honestly, in order to do so I'd probaobly have to see it again...

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I'm not quite sure why some people are so negative about the way this film looks. Other than some digital artifacts and technical mistakes here and there (and movies shot on film have film artifacts and technical mistakes) I thought the image quality -- at least in the 2K DLP presentation I saw -- to be excellent on average.

 

It doesn't look exactly like film, but that's another issue. I don't necessarily judge the image based on how well it mimics something else; I try and judge it on its own terms and the perceived intent of the filmmakers.

 

It just seems to me that a few mistakes or artifacts and people assume the attitude "see, I told you that HD was no good for making movies if you want them to look decent!" yet for some reason, some film mistakes or artifacts don't seem to negate the notion of shooting movies on film.

 

I've seen many films shot on 35mm that looked softer than this movie; I've seen movies shot on film that went through a D.I. to have odd fleshtone reproduction now & then.

 

If "Revenge of the Sith" is a bad-looking movie, then 90% of everything released looks bad too.

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Guest Kai.w
With 35mm film on the other hand, the original negative nearly always contains more information than can be usefully extracted by mainstream post/distribution equipment, but it will always be there if and when better technology becomes available.

 

This is getting ridiculous... So, now we are at film being for eternity or what? If there is one advantage of digital media than its that it does not age (the format might, but thats less problematic). I'd like to remind you of the commonly known fact that film does!

To say that the information will always be there is simply BS.

 

-k

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Hi,

 

While I could see the DCC in the highlights and that skin tone hotspottng was there, I had to look for it. I think it's better than good enough for the average punter, which is of course who actually matters in all this - not our variegated opinions.

 

Yes, there were only two or three shots in the whole film that were actually filmmaking - the mask going on was one of them. Yes, the "Noooo!" was hugely comedic, but I didn't think it looked so bad as to be unusable.

 

Again, what we need is direct from the CCD, unprocessed, uncompressed recording. It's not just about having 4:4:4 on HDCAM-SR, it's about not having the processing that makes that hotspotting happen - digital stills cameras don't do it, or at least don't do it nearly as badly. This is what comes of bending Sony's hi-def ENG cameras to try and shoot features.

 

Phil

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Nah I wouldn't say Sith was a bad looking movie.

 

They accomplished what they set out to do.

 

The digital projection looked a great deal better than it has in the past.

 

My complaint would be the opposite actually. It was too clean, too polished.

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IMO, I don't think it's neccesarily that the HD capture is the culprit. I think rather it's all the digital futzing that is being done. The whole thing just looks wierd to me. I still can't believe that was their intention. If I shot that film and all the 35mm prints looked like the one I saw, I don't think I would ever be hired again. Maybe it's supposed to only look good with digital projection. If that's the case that was a mistake because most people will see it on 35mm. But as someone else said maybe it doesn't matter to the average Joe.

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Yeah, but he supposedly had the ability to sniff out people with the Jedi gene, yet he didn't detect it on Leia. If Lucas had been awake when he wrote the script, he could have at least made Vader feel something was "not right". After all, Yoda was able to tell that: "there is another".

 

I actually have a theory on what Lucas was trying to get at:

 

A good portion of Star Wars comes from the "Dune" series of novels by Frank Herbert. I remember in "Children of Dune" the the twins Ghanima and Leto had powers that were most obviously stronger when they were together. Luke doesn't have his first true "force moment" until he is on his way to the Death Star to rescue Leia. I almost think that their force powers didn't truly awaken until they came in contact with each other. This would also explain Yoda's "Seperate they must be," line more than "We can't let Vader or the Emperor find them," kind of thing.

 

Yoda knows that "there is another," because he was there when she was born.

 

But you're still pretty right about the whole thing. Lucas needs to pay attention more when he writes. After all, it probably would have been easier to just say that their powers are stronger when they're together.

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Yeah, but he supposedly had the ability to sniff out people with the Jedi gene, yet he didn't detect it on Leia. If Lucas had been awake when he wrote the script, he could have at least made Vader feel something was "not right". After all, Yoda was able to tell that: "there is another".

 

Jordan beat me to the punch...

 

But as we can see in this final installment...

Yoda and Master Obi Wan were there when Luke and Leia was born...

So they obviously know of Leia's existence and her ties to the force...

Of course this is unknown till recently watching the latest installment...

 

But part of Star Wars is the believing in the myth and story...

If you don't care about Jedis, Princesses, Pirates,

Dark Lords, Wookies, Bounty Hunters, and Hutts

Don't bother spending you're money you're just wasting you time...

Go see the latest Ron Howard or Michael Mann Drama...

 

Of course I have to agree with everyone Lucas is a horrible screenwriter...

He should have carefully created the world of Star Wars

Before even making the first movie of the original trilogy

Rather he put alot of it together on the fly while making the movie...

Which leaves many folks with a brain wondering "what the hell!"

 

One of the reason why Lord of The Rings was such an accliamed fantasy series

Was because it had a rich and well thought out back story...

Tolkien created and immense world that made these characters believable

And it translated itself into a great movie trilogy...much better than Star Wars...

 

The problem with the latest Star Wars trilogy is that you see the potential

It's just looks like a great story that's badly developed...

And you feel angry that it could've been better.

 

& the reason the first trilogy was so succesful is that it was just campy fun...

There wasn't the build-up this new series has...it was the 70's it was sci-fantasy...

There's an old movie geeks saying out there:

"Bad dialogue and crappy acting made Star Wars great"

 

Unfortunately that wasn't going to work again.

 

 

PS

Jordan I find your theory about Liea & Luke similarities Ghanima & Leto interesting.

 

But anyways I'm sorry, I'm not going to make this into a Star Wars forum...

Next thing you know ten million of us geeks arguing the ethnicity of Jedi Kit Fisto.

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...& considering the DP had been running around in a Darth Vader mask all day ("Okay guys...looks like a :wheeze wheeze: 2.8 :wheeze"), .....

 

I'm just laughing seeing this in my head...

 

I wonder.....

If they make "Living in Oblivion 2" (that's a long awaited sequel :rolleyes: )

I can see this as a plot twist...anybody?

 

Can't you picture Dermot Mulroney shouting "Where's my Vadar mask?"

And then James Legros pops out with it on..."I'm your father...

 

:) :D :lol: :P

 

How about? Anyone?

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