You can’t deny he was technologically innovative though, since most movies today are shot in digital cameras and Lucas was the one that started the trend.
I don’t find it innovative. The technology already existed and was being used on smaller films. All he did was use it badly.
Innovation doesn’t always age well, but what GL and Lucasfilm (along with Sony, Panavision, and a host of others) did for digital cinema literally revolutionized the industry. You don’t have to enjoy the prequels, I certainly don’t love them, but whether or not they were innovative isn’t up for debate. It’s a fact.
Just like digital photo cameras, digital film cameras are much more convenient. It’s easy to assume that they would have been adapted eventually, if they perform just as well as analog cameras. I don’t deny that Lucas probably recognized the potential and wanted to advance the technology. However, he definitely used it too early. He was more concerned with being comfortable while making the movie than with the final product. The reason more and more directors started to film digitally after Lucas was simply the advancement of the technology itself, not because they liked the look of Episode 2.
I hadn’t thought about Lucas’s comfort. I’ve always felt he was just trying too hard to appear innovative.
Shooting digital back in those early days was hardly easier and comfortable. If anything, it was a bigger pain in the a$$ than shooting on film. The problem is that shooting on film wasn’t practical for the sheer amount of digital post-work needed for episode II.
Man, I’ve edited this post way too many times, but I have one more thing to add…
One of the biggest things that made the prequels so innovative, wasn’t just the use of digital cameras or the amount of CGI or the use of Non-linear editing, etc. It was the COMBINATION of all of these things. Yes, eventually we would have gotten to where we are now. But the sheer amount of advancement in all of these technologies for one film (specifically Ep.2) brought about a good 15 years of advancement in a matter of 3-6 years.
Yes, and I don’t think any filmmaker that we’ve had in the past 40 years would have the courage to go as experimental as Lucas did in his work. Some may even argue he’s the hugest contributor to the industry for the past 50 years, by creating Jar Jar and CGI Yoda and Coruscant and shooting on digital camera in the latter two prequels. All of these things were undoubtedly milestones. Just because they would eventually happen doesn’t take the merit away from Lucas.
That’s not to say that the prequels weren’t dog crap though, because they certainly were. RotS objectively less than the others but still.