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It's funny, years ago I thought I and II were a lot weaker than revenge of the Sith, which was bad but not awful. Now I realize that the whole final fight truly ruins that film to such a degree that TPM is kind of decent in comparison. The locations and effects were well done. Jar Jar was awful but everything else was interesting to some degree. The pod race and the fight at the end were some of the best sequences in that trilogy. The third one blows through and through. I can't name one thing that I liked about it after that opening battle.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 07:41 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 18:27 |
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BarronsArtGallery posted:It's funny, years ago I thought I and II were a lot weaker than revenge of the Sith, which was bad but not awful. Now I realize that the whole final fight truly ruins that film to such a degree that TPM is kind of decent in comparison. The locations and effects were well done. Jar Jar was awful but everything else was interesting to some degree. The pod race and the fight at the end were some of the best sequences in that trilogy. The third one blows through and through. I can't name one thing that I liked about it after that opening battle. The Opera scene? Or Palpatine in general?
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 07:43 |
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It was all handled so terribly that while there are ideas deep down they were poo poo as presented
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 07:50 |
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Bongo Bill posted:Each of the prequels used more practical effects than the entire original trilogy combined. I didn't realize the Star Wars thread was for failed comedians now. BarronsArtGallery posted:Ummm revenge of the Sith uses green screen on every scene except for the end in Tunisia The Phantom Menace was the only one of the prequels that had a respectable practical vs. CGI ratio.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 08:07 |
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Lampsacus posted:Yeah I think the BoG will stand out as one of Star Wars' greatest battles. Its got it all. Action, adventure and a killer cast. Killer cast?! The Battle of Geonosis is the nadir of Star Wars. Maybe even cinema as a whole.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 08:31 |
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viral spiral posted:The Phantom Menace was the only one of the prequels that had a respectable practical vs. CGI ratio. There's literally one shot in the phantom menace with no digital effects of any kind (it's the vent spewing gas into the conference room at the very beginning of the film) star wars fans, like most people, are tremendously bad at distinguishing cgi from non-cgi special effects that they don't like
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 08:32 |
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ungulateman posted:There's literally one shot in the phantom menace with no digital effects of any kind I meant it didn't have a cartoonish level of CGI like the other two. Don't get me wrong, I think all three of the prequels are atrocious examples of filmmaking, equally. viral spiral fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Oct 1, 2017 |
# ? Oct 1, 2017 08:46 |
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viral spiral posted:I didn't realize the Star Wars thread was for failed comedians now. True, the RLM thread is in GBS, where it belongs.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 09:05 |
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I really like the duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan because the fight is really an extended recapitulation of their relationship that foreshadows their eventual fates. In the course of their battle, they accidentally break the systems maintaining the station, and then the whole thing falls apart around them. They both fall into a hellscape featuring a point of no return—the massive lava waterfall that will surely destroy them both. Obi-Wan starts out higher and immediately begins to climb up, away from the fire. Anakin pursues him, but is singularly focused on his rage, heedless of the danger around him. Obi-Wan swings off, landing on a lonely platform that gives him some small measure of solace amongst the firestorm. Anakin goes over the edge, but then at the very last second, he makes a huge leap back, landing on a tiny refuge that he damages in the process. Anakin invades Obi-Wan's temporary home, so Obi-Wan retreats to solid ground. Anakin here is not wise enough to recognize that Obi-Wan has already saved himself, and he gets horribly maimed for it. But ultimately, he's out of the hell world too. Also, that lava river is a fuckin' sweet practical effect.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 11:29 |
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viral spiral posted:I meant it didn't have a cartoonish level of CGI like the other two. I mean, they made two very successful CGI cartoons set between them.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 11:39 |
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[quote="“BarronsArtGallery”" post="“476937437”"] Ummm revenge of the Sith uses green screen on every scene except for the end in Tunisia [/quote] The use of practical effects and the use of cgi in any given shot are not mutually exclusive
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 13:01 |
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El Burbo posted:The use of practical effects and the use of cgi in any given shot are not mutually exclusive the method of special effects really doesn't matter, the outcome is what matters. I know people are trying to say the older movies look better because they used practical effects but they probably look better because the artistic director wanted a certain look which we like more than what George shat out.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 13:05 |
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Green screen is used for chroma key compositing, which is used to combine footage from multiple sources into a single shot. Those sources of footage may include other cameras, digital effects, or anything else. The prequels used a huge amount of effects, and any given shot is likely to contain multiple techniques like matte paintings, miniatures, puppets, animatronics, computer generated imagery, and post- processing. What you are probably noticing is that Attack of the Clones was the first major film to use digital compositing. That means when combining the effects above, they used computers. That allows many more elements to be included in a shot. So they captured a lot of footage of all these effects so they could be composited in. However, the technique and technology was early at the time, and it worked better under certain lighting conditions. Consequently, they lit the photographs in a distinctly bright and even and unnaturalistic way, much more so than was strictly necessary to make it look right. Honestly, the sets and physical objects look more like CGI than most of the actual CGI. The movie has significant themes of unreality and deception, and an aesthetic that borrows from retro-futurism with good reason, so that suits it.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 14:27 |
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AotC is the best Star Wars.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 14:42 |
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Bongo Bill posted:Green screen is used for chroma key compositing, which is used to combine footage from multiple sources into a single shot. Those sources of footage may include other cameras, digital effects, or anything else. The prequels used a huge amount of effects, and any given shot is likely to contain multiple techniques like matte paintings, miniatures, puppets, animatronics, computer generated imagery, and post- processing. Just a slight correction - digital compositing was already the standard for visual effects work since the early 90's at least, AOTC was a pioneering use of digital capture, and it's the early digital cinema cameras used which had a limited dynamic range. George Lucas/Lucasfilm/ILM was also a pioneer in digital compositing though, between the stained glass knight in Young Indiana Jones through to the Special Editions, and viewed the need to capture in film, have it processed, then scanned, then edited, then printed back to film, then transferred again for home media as archaic. The other advantage (aside from complementing the aesthetics of the plot) was the near-revolutionary ability for the director to review the footage as it was being captured rather than on a one-day delay while the film was processed, hence all those backstage shots in the Red Letter Media reviews of George Lucas sitting surrounded by screens. josh04 fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Oct 1, 2017 |
# ? Oct 1, 2017 15:02 |
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UmOk posted:AotC is the best Star Wars. I agree more and more. It's really well made.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 16:33 |
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Thanks for the correction. I've come to think of The Phantom Menace as the one that's best put together, but Attack of the Clones is certainly ambitious.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 16:47 |
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The Phantom Menace is probably my favorite, but thats mostly because it features a great sword fight, builds massively on the universe, and mother loving Pod Racing
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 17:58 |
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Phantom Menace is the best because Qui Gonn is a magnificent bastard.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 18:07 |
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euphronius posted:I agree more and more. It's really well made. I assume you're referring to aspects other than the scriptwriting?
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 19:09 |
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I view Attack of the Clones as both one of the most flawed and fascinating. The romance scenes are awkward as Hell, BUT it's a doomed broken relationship to start with. The early digital photography does produce some uneven results and it's not as consistent an aesthetic as the other films, BUT there are some lovely shots in it and it's also much more transparent in its homage to sci-fi iconography of ages past. It's an oddly put together story but it has the ring of history in how the Clone Wars are the direct cue to the rise of the Empire, instead of just being some isolated past heroics as they seemed when first spoken of.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 19:35 |
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viral spiral posted:I assume you're referring to aspects other than the scriptwriting? Scriptwriting itself has aspects. Dialog, one of them, is consistently something that George Lucas does poorly, and he admits it. Aside from being non-naturalistic, it also tends to be blunt and lack distinct voices. (This, of course, is why so many lines first spoken by one character can later be quoted by another character. Star Wars loves quoting - verbally and visually.) There are other things like the construction of a scene, however, and The Phantom Menace does it particularly well. The way the pod race manages its tension is very skillful, for one. And I've literally never seen a movie that manages to juggle multiple parallel action scenes as well as its climax - there are four plotlines all coming to a head, and yet the events are all clear and the pacing is tight. It's hardly unexpected, as it's the sequel to Return of the Jedi, which did a fantastic job balancing three of them. Rogue One attempted a similar feat in its own third act, but I feel it didn't quite reach the same level, with respect to having the action rising consistently across its A, B, and C plots and keeping their mutual context and stakes clear. And it's on a scene-by-scene level that I think Attack of the Clones is weakest. It has a few redundant scenes between Anakin and Padme that could have been consolidated, and even knowing that dialog was his weak point, Lucas relied on it heavily to sell the tension between Obi-Wan and Jango, which fell a bit flat. Needed to be cleverer.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 19:45 |
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Epic blockbuster storytelling is honestly hard. I just recently did, for funsies, an informal treatment, just to practice that format and did it for a big elaborate space opera kinda movie, and it's easy to see how big epic movies frequently stumble (even before you get into scripts being messed with by studios or sequences being planned before the script is done, etc.) Obviously, the selling point is spectacle. You want to have Big Things Happening. Epic battles, terrifying villains, the plot itself needs to have some sort of mechanisms by which the conflict and the stakes are established and there's a "win" condition for the heroes and the villains. This works against the natural instinct of a storyteller to tell a simple story, one which is as easy as possible for the audience to follow. And you don't want it to ever slow down too much so you introduce complications, new elements, new wrinkles. The Jedi and Queen Amidala can't just fly to Coruscant, talk to the Senate, and fly back- they have to stop somewhere, and hey, on that planet there's Anakin Skywalker, a helpful kid who has some sort of magic potential, but he's a slave, and owned by an unscrupulous parts dealer who has something the Jedi needs but won't accept their currency- but he's got a weakness, he gambles... And yeah in the climax of TPM Lucas one-ups Return of the Jedi and has even MORE things going on at once and at no point is it really unclear what's going on. The Queen and her troops are out to get the Viceroy. The Gungans are fighting the droids. Anakin is in a spaceship fighting the Droid control ship. And the Jedi are there to hold off an attack by a Sith warrior, almost a mythic figure- something they thought they would never see in their lifetimes. Each group has a goal and their opponents have a goal, and at various times the enemies seem to have the upper hand, then the heroes come back... this poo poo is Hard to Do. It's no wonder that a lot of climaxes in modern blockbusters feel long and a little bloated, because they're trying to pay off EVERYTHING they set up- Christopher Nolan even has this problem (I love Interstellar but drat that takes a while to even start wrapping up.) Phantom Menace's finale is doing a lot, but it has a consistent driving rhythm.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 20:03 |
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Phantom Menace will always impress because it is a huge blockbuster with two of my favourite action scene archetypes, the no-score/only sound design of the podrace, and the finale with Duel of the Fates and the plotlines reaching their crescendo. Ben Burtt carried the gently caress out of Star Wars, along with Williams. The pod-race scene is as gripping as it is because of the quiet you get to dwell in before you're hit with the modulated noises of space-chariots roaring into tunnels, without any musical cue or strings to draw the tension up. There isn't a sad chord change to clue you in to what's on screen, or a sting before a cut or anything. And then the complete opposite during the finale, where the emotional thread tying the scenes together being Williams with the score and the sound design taking a backseat.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 21:23 |
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Yeah at the time it stood out to me that this was a big Star Wars action sequence with no music until the last stretch. When you think on it there are actually a few more times like that- a few parts of the Death Star run, the speeder bike chase- but it still stands out because of how the music normally is used in these movies.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 21:43 |
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The CGI in the Gungans vs. Droids part of the final battle in TPM looks like a PS1 video game cutscene these days.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 22:06 |
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FlamingLiberal posted:The CGI in the Gungans vs. Droids part of the final battle in TPM looks like a PS1 video game cutscene these days. Have you actually played a PS1 recently? Or just reciting hyperbole?
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 22:16 |
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The gundam vs battledriods battle looks like the intro screen from Blaster master on the NES(nintento entertainmant system)
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 22:45 |
Help guys I can't tell the difference!
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 23:35 |
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It just makes me want a new Disney Star Wars composed and shot in 4:3
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 23:45 |
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Help guys I can't tell the difference! They're really not that dissimilar at all. Star Wars: Battle Front certainly looks better than the prequels.
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 23:51 |
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viral spiral posted:They're really not that dissimilar at all. Star Wars: Battle Front certainly looks better than the prequels. i agreet. if anythink the Nintendont 64 ones look better thaN that garbage fire that jorge made
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# ? Oct 1, 2017 23:59 |
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I think we would all do well to revisit this thread full of photos from the sets of the prequels.
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 00:08 |
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viral spiral posted:They're really not that dissimilar at all. Star Wars: Battle Front certainly looks better than the prequels. It's a real commitment to a gimmick to pretend to be blind
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 00:08 |
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the star war 3 look like pong (atari)
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 00:10 |
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Nothing like replaying that old Star Wars Episode One video game with the most atrocious camera angle and utterly bullshit everything tossed in "DOOR'S OPEN, LET'S GO." Screw your shiny new Battlefront II, 1v1 me in Episode One Racer on the N64
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 00:12 |
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Bongo Bill posted:I think we would all do well to revisit this thread full of photos from the sets of the prequels. Yeah. I have already said the practical effects vs. CGI ratio is respectable in TPM, despite the film being an incoherent clusterfuck of epic proportions. I like the miniatures of Naboo in particular.
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 00:24 |
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I do agree that EA presents: DICE's Star Wars: Battlfront 2015 looks better than Star Wars episodes I-VI, and many other movies, as well
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 00:26 |
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Bongo Bill posted:I think we would all do well to revisit this thread full of photos from the sets of the prequels. FAKE NEWS. Those were created after the movie was released to try and make Crooked George look good. Sad
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 03:11 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 18:27 |
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Ben Burtt owns. RIP you were the Imperial officer in the Endor bunker who said freeze and got a box thrown into your poo poo and you fell over the one guard rail in the galaxy
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# ? Oct 2, 2017 03:26 |