Whenever i'm watching a Lord of the Rings DVD, I notice that the picture looks SO MUCH MORE realistic. Like ur watching real life, and when I switch to star wars, it looks almost animated. Like changing from Geonosis arena, to helms deep. It looks like "Fake" to "Real". Does anyone else agree?
__________________ A day will come when the age of making movies dies.
A day will come when no director has the courage to produce a film anymore.
A day will come when every single director on earth, will give up his/her work in helpless grief, overwhelmed by the greatest movie on earth.
Could it just be easier to view realistic, although massive, castles than giant fungus, domesticated riding lizards, and immense battle cruisers?
I thought Coruscant looked like it could be real. Alderaan looked good but was the scene was edited so quickly you could not take time to note what was good about it. When Braveheart came out, I not only liked the story but was caught up in the scenic background settings of Scotland. Beautiful full open vistas, mountains, and open fields, lovingly filmed and edited to let you take it all in. Batman Begins did this with the opening scenes of a Tibetan glacier/mountain range. For some reason, GL decided to edit his pan quickly through the worlds he drove his FX team so hard to create. I think he mentions it to some of the ILM crew when he was filming as I recall in the Making of ROTS book. Like, "...this is a great background, too bad it will only be on screen for two seconds..you just get where it is and go right to the main theme of the story (Anakin's fall)..."
Until I get the DVD and watch it as often as I have LOTR, I will have to say the FX did not suck. It was bogus to use animated bodies for the clones with the Jango Fett actors head though. How much could it possibly have cost to make one or two full scale uniforms? It just would have blended in better. You don't see Peter Jackson CGI'ing leather and animal skins on his main Orcs.
There were some terrible CG shots is both films...
I like how Lucas doesn't spend too much time on establishing shots in this film. Yeah, they may look cool but they slow the pace down and are really pointless. This is something I think he learnt from Episode I and II...
Star wars effects have always had a certain style to them, they never were about 100% realism they were about being epic. lotr was going for realism. the geonois arena is a miniature so i don't see the problem there.
lotr was also shot on film which has a graininess to it, star wars 2+3 are shot on digital video which doesn't. The film grain makes visual effects look realistic easer. it gives the illusion of detail for miniatures and cg better because of this.
ShadowKing said
Could it just be easier to view realistic, although massive, castles than giant fungus, domesticated riding lizards, and immense battle cruisers?
which is true, lotr could acuallay shoot locations of new zealand or at least get good referece, in star wars george wants to see alien world the can easilay be distingushed from each other. Hes used nearly every real world loction in the first 4, so by episode 2 be has to creat them form scrach basically. design wise these newer places dont exist ie kamino that weird planet in episode 3 or courasant or its dam dangerous as well like mustafar. for mustafar they did get real volcano footage though as well as minitures.
i thought Kashyyyk was very well done because they got real life footage and still for some of it and minitures for the rest it thought it was very belivible. geonossis was hard because george didn't want it to look like tatooine, which would have been easy to do, so its much more alien and red.
Last edited by Smegulated on Jun 22nd, 2005 at 12:50 PM
Kashyyyk was pretty well done. I was very impressed with Mustafar, I thought it looked great.
The things about the VFX that bug me are the use of digital doubles (mainly for the jumps). They just don't look realistic. And also the digital Clonetroopers look really bad in many shots.
Shots that bugged me in particular: Plo Koon's death - way too cartoony, it looked awful; The Jedi on the speeder bike's death - ditto; a particular shot in the Kashyyyk battle looked really bad; some of the shots of the ships looked too cartoony; Obi-Wan being thrown by Dooku - the worst shot of the film.
Re: Do you think the Star Wars special effects suck?
this coming from the same guy who becomes personally hurt and offended when anyone so much as jokingly pokes at ep3? mesa confused...mesa VERY confused oh man i didnt just speak in jar jar did i? damn...time for a memory wipe.
but i also agree that SW has always had a style to it. it looks "real" but its not supposed to look 100% real. its supposed to look almost surreal. its an epic space fantasy film. its not as gritty as LOTR is.
Jun 21st, 2005 10:39 PM
oh man i didnt just speak in jar jar did i? damn...time for a memory wipe.
