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Did the prequels have boring visuals?
Did the prequels have boring visuals? :: 1 < 2 > 3
American Hominid
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DavidBrennan said:
American Hominid said:
To me, the prequels had some pretty evocative designs/preproduction work too:
[....]
Granted, some of that was not used as-is, but I don't think there was a lack of interesting design. Though I do see a difference in how McQuarrie's work, along with the rest of the artists on the OT, creates a sense of "world" in me that some of the prequel art does not. This might be due to the use of traditional media and generally sketchier aesthetics (there are some nice prequel pieces like that too). I'm not sure. McQuarrie's world definitely feels more lived-in, but I also like the nouveau/deco/early 20th century feel that shows up in the prequel designs, especially in TPM.
I do think that the OT, though it was created and viewed as a spectacle when it was made, struck a nice balance between good filmmaking and showing off the designs. I think the PT got progressively more showy, and it can just seem garish.
Not only did they seem to construct shots specifically to show off the design work (in very in-your-face ways, I mean), there were so many designs that it was hard to keep track of things. I never felt the OT was impoverished in its numbers of new ship/character designs per movie. It became a bit overwhelming in the prequels.
I think one major distinction between the PT and OT art can be viewed by contrasting the Alderaan design - and bear in mind that the above Alderaan design is among the more detailed and grand designs used for AOTC or ROTS (by far, in my opinion). It's clearly more of an impressionist design, whereas Ralph McQuarrie's were much more tactile and definitive - and yet every bit as grand (in my opinion).
I highly recommend the book, The Illustrated Star Wars Universe. which features I think almost all of McQuarrie's great paintings (woven together in a faux travelogue of the galaxy by Kevin J. Anderson).
TISWU is one of my favorites. :)
And that's a good point - McQuarrie's work, and the OT in general, is much more modernist/minimalist in flavor than the PT. In some ways this is intentional (Theed, etc). But in other ways it probably reflects the changing styles in illustration, architecture, and design over the last 30-40 years. Personally I tend to prefer the "70s-80s future" look.
"Star Wars films are basically silent movies. And they're designed as silent movies, therefore the music carries a -- has a very large role in carrying the story, more than it would in a normal movie." -GL
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Hoth-Nudist
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fought in the battle of "macho grande'"Mrebo said:
Many good points. And ultimately blame lies with he who chose which visuals to use. It's not that the battle droids (pictured below) do not have artistic merit or would not make for a cool sci-fi painting.
I am curious, how would you have envisioned the galactic senate?
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DuracellEnergizer
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Anti-CowboyBlame the CGI. The visuals of the PT - flawed though they are in places - would have looked a lot better done in the old school "models-and-mattes" method of production.
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Bingowings
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Magister Pontifex Maximus
....
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American Hominid
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DuracellEnergizer said:
Blame the CGI. The visuals of the PT - flawed though they are in places - would have looked a lot better done in the old school "models-and-mattes" method of production.
Case in point: the prequels themselves. To me, there is a noticeable difference between this:
and this:
A ton of the landscapes in the later prequels were models; I'm not sure if any of the post-TPM vehicle shots were.
"Star Wars films are basically silent movies. And they're designed as silent movies, therefore the music carries a -- has a very large role in carrying the story, more than it would in a normal movie." -GL
"NOO! NOOOOOO!!" - Darth Vader
greenpenguino
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Double standards!!They were models????? How the hell did they screw it up and make them look cgi then??
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American Hominid
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I really don't know. I suspect it has to do with the complex camera movements within shots (not possible in the OT), and perhaps even more to do with the heavy use of CGI characters and vehicles, and their flashy movements (really not possible in the OT).
I think I'll watch through the PT a little and see if that makes sense.
"Star Wars films are basically silent movies. And they're designed as silent movies, therefore the music carries a -- has a very large role in carrying the story, more than it would in a normal movie." -GL
"NOO! NOOOOOO!!" - Darth Vader
walking_carpet
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star wars fan since age 2the pt had models - but many of the models would have been actual sets or partial sets in the OT. i guess the trade-off is you can build actual sets, but only so many and then you lose the diversity of locations. one of the model makers also said that the digital camera gave problems because it was too 'clean'
for vehicle models, the problem is they would have one or 2 models engulfed within hundreds, if not thousands, of cgi objects.
[sigh] have movies become 'overproduced' ? you may remember during the late 1980s, the music business focused on hit singles, slick big-budget production values and a lot of synthesized/keyboard music. then came eric claptons unplugged album and everyone was like 'wow, check this out!"
not too long after, almost every music genre (rock, pop, rap) became more stripped down and rebuilt from the ground-up.
maybe not a great analogy, but do movies need an 'unplugged'? how about the artist? its black and white and silent!! will that change things?
timdiggerm
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American Hominid said:
I really don't know. I suspect it has to do with the complex camera movements within shots (not possible in the OT), and perhaps even more to do with the heavy use of CGI characters and vehicles, and their flashy movements (really not possible in the OT).
I think I'll watch through the PT a little and see if that makes sense.
This is a really good point. Sometimes we complain about CG looking fake...and we are wrong. We're tricked by things we think can't be done without CG.
Free Hat
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I think the reason the models look cgi is because they were scanned into a computer, then augmented by cgi, giving it a somewhat blurry, shiny, soft look.
Kamino for instance, sure the structure is a model, but all the waves crashing around, not to mention that flying whale, or whatever, were cgi.
Mrebo
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Hoth-Nudist said:
Mrebo said:
Many good points. And ultimately blame lies with he who chose which visuals to use. It's not that the battle droids (pictured below) do not have artistic merit or would not make for a cool sci-fi painting.
I am curious, how would you have envisioned the galactic senate?
"DIE, Jedi dogs. Oh... what did I say?"
Oh shit, ROTFLMAO! Now Im crying! too......damn........funny!
Glad you enjoyed it xD
And, Bingo, I don't blame Brad anymore. Not in the least.
What PT moments could have had (more) visual impact with minimum alteration?
This is not a lightsaber. Nor a euphemism.
Mrebo
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American Hominid said:
I really don't know. I suspect it has to do with the complex camera movements within shots (not possible in the OT), and perhaps even more to do with the heavy use of CGI characters and vehicles, and their flashy movements (really not possible in the OT).
I think I'll watch through the PT a little and see if that makes sense.
I do wonder though. The model which appears to be Dex's diner and the blue building on the back right are not the same as what we see on screen (which are placed different as well).
This is not a lightsaber. Nor a euphemism.
American Hominid
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Walking carpet, timdiggerm, good points.
I just stepped through AOTC looking at effects shots; here's what I noticed.
-Actors are often composited directly into model or CGI environments. In the OT, mattes were used to extend sets (docking bay 327 on Cloud City, the Executor bridge, etc), but the actors were on a mostly real set with real lighting. Not only does this automatically look more natural, I think it allows for better shot compositions, because you can take advantage of the geometry of the set, the lighting effects, etc... instead of everything being a two-shot against some to-be-determined background that may or may not really work against the actors' placement in the shot.
-Things move strangely. Aliens are sometimes very animated, and missiles, energy trails, explosion debris, etc, all follow twisty paths through space, which might be cool a few times, but it happens a lot.
-On a related note, the lighting from said explosions/projectiles seems off, probably because it doesn't bleach out the shot the way a real huge explosion would. Rich orange tongues of flame sometimes seem out of place (the destruction of the flying wing at the beginning of AOTC sticks out in my mind).
Relatedly, the lighting on CG objects often seems flatter (or less stark?) than normal, which exacerbates the amount of visible detail (sometimes so much that it makes things look unrealistic, with tons of circuits and things all over) as well as making the objects in question not look like real objects.
Compare (apologies for the image heaviness, but I think it's illustrative):
"Star Wars films are basically silent movies. And they're designed as silent movies, therefore the music carries a -- has a very large role in carrying the story, more than it would in a normal movie." -GL
"NOO! NOOOOOO!!" - Darth Vader
captainsolo
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Tauntaun herder-Damn Fool Idealistic CrusaderI've only briefly thought about this before but the answer to OPs question is:
YES YES YES UNEQUIVOCALLY YES!
Flat, dull, lifeless, boring, inane, stupid, pointless!
There is no life to these shots, no vitality, no wonder, most criminally no imagination. By the time of II and III when everything was an empty room with a blue screen, all semblance of camerawork was gone.
There were flashes of energy in TPM. Such as actual people walking around in a desert. That was nice.
SW has a freshness in it's camerawork if you look at it. There's a definite energy that ties into the overall experience. That said, my camera related favorite moment is in the DS chasm when Luke begins to pull out the super-convenient grappling hook and the camera pans up into a sudden an unexpected documentary style closeup.
A moment of inspired energizing camera movement that sets up a composition most would never use.
THERE. IS. NEVER. ANYTHING. LIKE. THIS. IN. THE. PREQUELS.
EVER.
You simply can't set actors in front of a stationary shot and expect to fill in the lifeless looking void with a massive amount of whirring bits of crap from a computer. For some reason live action is now being seen by a few as uninvolving. Spielberg made Tintin with essentially a videogame controller. I couldn't watch the film after seeing that.
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STENDEC
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For me, what makes the PT fall apart visually is the lack of grit. Nothing seems real because most of it isn't. It's all very clean, fake looking, sterile and cartoony.
The best example I can come up with for this is the theatre sequence in RotS. Palapatine and Anakin are there discussing the sith and the war, but while I'm watching that scene I can't get the memory out of my head from the making of footage of them sitting in a blue screen box. Virtually nothing in that whole sequence is real, aside from the actors and the seats they're sitting in. Every single thing around them is digitally generated. Why? Because George didn't want to have to build a real set to work on (or, God forbid, go on a real location and shoot there). That's also part of the reason I think that the actors seem bored throughout most of the films. They had literally nothing around them to react and interact with.
Another aspect is that to me the visual designs of the PT look like cheap imitations of Ralph McQuarries' work from the OT. Like somebody described the OT's production design to someone down the phone and said, yeah do that. The designs have hints of McQuarrie's brilliance in them, but only in so much as they are derivative works.
DavidBrennan
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Regarding the general idea that the PT was just too synthetic and smooth looking, I would like to compare the production methodologies of the PT versus what James Cameron used for AVTR. I'll just paste a post I made at TFN a few months ago. This was in response to a claim that somebody made that there was all this great subtext and symbolism in the PT movies. (My argument was that most all of the subtext and symbolism there we, the audience, project onto it and it is not usually intended by Lucas.)
The making of the [PT] is VERY well documented, and so I think it's obvious that there's not some Great Hidden Mystery buried in the movies.
The scripts were obviously written in a hurried, haphazard manner, with plenty of late changes. It wasn't like the writing of ANH or ESB where there were multiple drafts, each unique with their own reflections on the story. The process for the PT (most especially AOTC and ROTS) was:
(1) Lucas comes up with very, very crude outline and gives vague instructions for the art design team
(2) Art design team comes up with numerous illustrations of characters, settings, creatures, vehicles, etc.
(3) Lucas approves select designs and set-construction and digital asset creation begin
(4) Lucas utilizes those designs as some combination of inspiration and guide as he writes the one and only draft of the script
This process is well-documented on the DVDs, "Making of" books, testimonials, etc., etc., etc.
And since that's the process, there's obviously no time or inclination of Lucas to include narrative depth and philosophical ideas into the process.
In fact, even the stories themselves were often changed at the very-last second - critical parts of the story. Examples include Sidious revealing that he's Anakin's father and the identity of Sifo-Dyas (who was originally Sidious, then implied to be Dooku, and then the EU created a different story).
So, most of the depth of the PT was created by the large, first-rate design team that LFL hired, because they did the vast majority of the idea- and data-conjuring.
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If we then look at the production of the PT movies themselves, we can see that, again, there's no opportunity for depth in the performances, blocking, or improvising. In fact, by every account of the PT I've ever heard, the productions were virtually raced along in Australia (for AOTC and ROTS). You can see this in the documentaries, and there are many quotes to this effect throughout the production. Actors were given minimal "aids" to counteract the all-digital process.
To draw a comparison to a movie that made more money than all the PT movies combined, look at 'Avatar': There, it was also a largely digital production, but James Cameron had a strict edict that the acting was paramount. (He usually talks about this in reference to the motion/performance capture, but it also applies to the production itself.) For the scenes where the Na'vi aliens are pleading with their deity to save a life (of Grace and then Jake), ethereal music was pumped in loudly and everybody was "coached up" to get into a trance-like mood. Another example would be the scene where the Na'vi are fleeing as Hometree is being destroyed by the military. There, stagehands were throwing little Nerf ball-like objects at the actors and other tricks were used to make them LITERALLY dodge and flee shrapnel. The 'Avatar' production also took, I believe, seven or eight months. (It actually occurred in three separate phases, but I think the primary performance capture period was this long, I believe.) The PT movies, on the other hand, were filmed in 60 days, plus about 14 more for pick-ups.
That's all, basically, a fact.
The question is, does any of this show up in the movie? My strong opinion is that, yes, it does. In the PT (especially AOTC, in my opinion) it's almost clinical - there's a tonal bifurcation between the actors and the sets around them. Lots of the lines the actors speak them as though they have no clue about the context - virtually the full Invisible Hand scene is like this, to cite just one example. Conversely, in 'Avatar', there was (light) talk about an Oscar nomination for Zoe Saldana....and she was a cartoon character in the movie! Whatever flaws 'Avatar' might have, I don't think anybody could say that it was flat or clinical.
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So, what I'm saying is that I think that SW in general, but ESPECIALLY the PT, are unquestionably light. The movies' VERY tight budgets of time and money also resulted in a tight budget of thought and complexity. Viewers can IMAGINE and PROJECT complexity and depth in the movies, but that's not the same as the moviemakers intending that. The PT is pretty much WYSIWYG. For the most part.
"By Lucas' own calculation, 60 percent of the prequel plot....takes place in Sith. The remaining 40 percent he split evenly between Menace and Clones meaning each movie contained a lot of....filler. Or, in Lucas' parlance, "Jazz riffs". -Entertainment Weekly. May 20, 2005.
American Hominid
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I don't know, I'd give the prequels a tad more credit than that, if only because their (very) general plot already existed in the 1970s. (It's not that those ideas are automatically good because they're older; rather, they were developed in concert with the other films, and have also had more time to age in Lucas's mind.) Where there were changes made to this, I think they mostly ended up being less effective. And of course, a ton of stuff was added, some good, some not.
And there are some things that aren't really followed up on thematically. Anakin's motivation - political, personal, what? It varies. This is where there was clearly some basic idea, but more development of a throughline in all three films would have been VERY beneficial.
But I don't think the PT is all in the viewer's head (though I have seen quite a few people go way overboard with their analysis of symbolism).
"Star Wars films are basically silent movies. And they're designed as silent movies, therefore the music carries a -- has a very large role in carrying the story, more than it would in a normal movie." -GL
"NOO! NOOOOOO!!" - Darth Vader
skyjedi2005
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Jedi KnightI think they look too modern, and newer in tech than the oot.
When the designs should look older than the other movies not newer.
Also bringing back the Joe Johnston, Ralph Mcquarrie designs would have helped.
Again they look too clean and sterile and not lived in or universe once used like the oot. Even the props and costumes in the oot had meticulous aging done to them to give them a real world feel, also real sets and models and locations/stuntwork instead of cgi helps too.
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Darth Bizarro
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Mmmmmeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwww!Ralph McQuarrie's art had a really nice pulp science fiction look to that found its way into the entire design philosophy for the OT. The prequels just don't have that lived in look without McQuarrie's designs.
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Bingowings
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Magister Pontifex MaximusYou should only age stuff that meant to be old.
So I didn't mind the Naboo ships and the Senate looking clean and new.
If anything some of the PT stuff is inappropriately aged, the senate craft and the Jedi ships are maintained by a Government that has access to most of the Galaxy's top technicians and engineers.
Their stuff should look new even when it's ancient.
On Tatooine everything should look beaten up and worn out and it does.
It would have been nice to see Coruscant and the Naboo etc losing it's shine as the war went on because they are having to make do and mend because they have less resources.
It would also be nice to see the capital damaged by the battles.
Theed and Coruscant don't look like they have been in a war at all in the end of ROTS.
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Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda
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legendary but little-known Jedi MasterAmerican Hominid said:
I don't know, I'd give the prequels a tad more credit than that, if only because their (very) general plot already existed in the 1970s.
Really?
Bingowings
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Magister Pontifex MaximusVery, very generally yes but only from a certain point of view.
The Emperor isn't a distant puppet of the regional Governors in the final PT.
Vader stops being Obi-Wan's pupil before declaring his turn to evil and seems to deliver most of his assistance in hunting down the Jedi in one night, in one building.
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TheBoost
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Better a bad bomb than a bombadThis is less about how the visuals were achieved, but about the lack of passion put into them.
Think of how awesome the following should have looked
- A guy fighting with two lightsabers at once.
- A lightsaber duel in the dark.
- A guy fighting a four-armed monster each arm wielding a lightsaber.
The lightsabers in the dark I fantasized about in the 80s. When I was in middle-school I made an art project called "Jedi Fighting In a Cave" with a piece of black construction paper, whiteout, and highlighter pens.
Yet all three ammount to nothing. Nothing memorable or exciting. They all last for less than ten seconds.
I think the commentary on the ROTS DVD said that they couldn't figure out how to do a four-armed sword fight, resulting in Grievous losing two arms in 9 seconds.
Ray Harryhausen did in with STOP MOTION in 1973!!!
What should have been these extremely fun and visual fights almost result in just a throwaway joke.
walking_carpet
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star wars fan since age 2Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
American Hominid said:
I don't know, I'd give the prequels a tad more credit than that, if only because their (very) general plot already existed in the 1970s.
Really?
whatever plot lucas had in the 1970s for the PT you could fit on a napkin - maybe the reverse side of the same napkin spielberg used to write up his pre-nup with amy irving
walking_carpet
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star wars fan since age 2TheBoost said:
This is less about how the visuals were achieved, but about the lack of passion put into them.
Think of how awesome the following should have looked
- A guy fighting with two lightsabers at once.
- A lightsaber duel in the dark.
- A guy fighting a four-armed monster each arm wielding a lightsaber.
i was excited when I first heard about the a lightsaber fight in the rain for AOTC. I assumed that the rain would cause obi-wans lightsaber to sizzle and crackle...
but it didn't :(
Did the prequels have boring visuals?