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Which has more CGI: Phantom Menace or Force Awakens

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What do you guys think? On the surface level it really seems like they’re about equal. The reason I ask is because, being the start of the prequels, it’s always been noted as having too much CG. TFA was lauded for the amount of practical effects that it used, but it seems to use just as much green screen and CG characters as TPM.

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I’m not entirely sure. Obviously Force Awakens looks better but Phantom Menace used a lot of miniatures.

Did Force Awakens use any miniatures? Miniatures in a day of photo-realistic CG is kind of a waste, really.

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No idea. I still think miniatures have certain advantages over CGI. Explosions have a random element a computer really can’t recreate. At least not yet.

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SilverWook said:

No idea. I still think miniatures have certain advantages over CGI. Explosions have a random element a computer really can’t recreate. At least not yet.

At the same time CG explosions usually scale better.

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NeverarGreat said:

Phantom Menace probably had more miniatures, whereas TFA probably had more animatronic creatures and props.

I don’t know, there’s quite a bit on Tatooine.

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 (Edited)

“Every single shot has a visual effect”

I don’t think that’s the case for TFA (besides obvious like coloring). And even if it is, it blends with practical so well you can barely tell the difference.

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Pretty sure it’s the same amount, or TFA has more.

I think that a fan edited TLJ will have much less than both though.

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NeverarGreat said:

Phantom Menace probably had more miniatures, whereas TFA probably had more animatronic creatures and props.

That sounds about right.

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OutboundFlight said:

“Every single shot has a visual effect”

I don’t think that’s the case for TFA (besides obvious like coloring). And even if it is, it blends with practical so well you can barely tell the difference.

It’s quite possible that it’s the same thing for TFA, but it’s so common nowadays that it’s not even worth mentioning, pretty different from how it all was in 1999.

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Collipso said:

OutboundFlight said:

“Every single shot has a visual effect”

I don’t think that’s the case for TFA (besides obvious like coloring). And even if it is, it blends with practical so well you can barely tell the difference.

It’s quite possible that it’s the same thing for TFA, but it’s so common nowadays that it’s not even worth mentioning, pretty different from how it all was in 1999.

At the very least I feel like there’s a lot of little, quality of life type things that go into modern movies, like painting out wires and prop operators and alike.

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I think it depends how you define “more CGI”. Do you compare the amount of shots with CGI to CGI-free shots? Then I would assume TPM has more. If you want to compare the number of objects created with CGI, I would say they are about even. If you want to take into account how detailed the CGI is, maybe by comparing the computer hours spent on rendering, I guess TFA has more, simply because it is newer and had more resources available (correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it also done in 4K? Compared to the HD resolution of the TPM effects, that would add a lot of computer time).

When people say “the prequels have too much CGI”, what they really mean is “the prequels rely too much on CGI”. It doesn’t matter if TPM uses more miniatures than the OT or if TFA uses more CGI than TPM. In TPM, the practical effects like miniatures are hidden in the background, while the CGI is very prominent. In TFA, the practical effects were very prominent, while the CGI was mostly in the background.

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 (Edited)

The CG in TPM isn’t even really that big a problem (except for the fact that it’s aged 19 years and there are a lot of gratuitous bits with CG characters), it’s really AOTC and ROTS where it gets ridiculous.

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DominicCobb said:

The CG in TPM isn’t even really that big a problem (except for the fact that it’s aged 19 years and there are a lot of gratuitous bits with CG characters), it’s really AOTC and ROTS where it gets ridiculous.

I was going to say this as soon as I saw the thread title. However I patiently waited, scrolling through each post in the thread, getting more and more excited that no one had posted it yet, only to find you ruined it near the end of the thread.

I know the divorce papers are on the way, but now a second set is also on the way. Prepare to be double divorced.

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TV’s Frink said:

DominicCobb said:

The CG in TPM isn’t even really that big a problem (except for the fact that it’s aged 19 years and there are a lot of gratuitous bits with CG characters), it’s really AOTC and ROTS where it gets ridiculous.

I was going to say this as soon as I saw the thread title. However I patiently waited, scrolling through each post in the thread, getting more and more excited that no one had posted it yet, only to find you ruined it near the end of the thread.

I know the divorce papers are on the way, but now a second set is also on the way. Prepare to be double divorced.

1168294

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John Knoll broke it down in an interview with Slashfilm last year when asked how many vfx shots were in Rogue One:

“It’s about 1,700. The original A New Hope was about 360. Empire Strikes Back was about 700. Return of the Jedi was about 900 or 950. Episode I was 1,900-something, 1950, I think. Episode II was 2,200. Episode III was 2,400. Episode VII was, I think just under 2,000. So we’re kind of in the middle.”

http://www.slashfilm.com/rogue-one-john-knoll-interview/

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Fang Zei said:

John Knoll broke it down in an interview with Slashfilm last year when asked how many vfx shots were in Rogue One:

“It’s about 1,700. The original A New Hope was about 360. Empire Strikes Back was about 700. Return of the Jedi was about 900 or 950. Episode I was 1,900-something, 1950, I think. Episode II was 2,200. Episode III was 2,400. Episode VII was, I think just under 2,000. So we’re kind of in the middle.”

http://www.slashfilm.com/rogue-one-john-knoll-interview/

That sounds about right, except that RO number is a little surprising, I would’ve thought it’d been more than that.

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That reminds me of how RO was pitched as being so low budget they could reuse sets and props from TFA. Obviously, it didn’t turn out that way though.

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I’m sure the Han Solo movie is going to benefit from all the stuff leftover from RO.

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Where were you in '77?

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SilverWook said:

I’m sure the Han Solo movie is going to benefit from all the stuff leftover from RO.

Which might explain why all the anthology films so far have been set in the same era. (I’m including the all-but-officially-announced Kenobi movie, too.)