lordjedi said:
So what you're saying is that if a director is envisioning a certain environment that simply doesn't exist, rather than do it with CGI the director should just throw their vision out the window and compromise everything in order to do it "realistically"? The problem I had with the prequels wasn't the "unreal" looking environments, it was the non story. Lucas could've shown us the most amazing, can't find this anywhere on Earth environments and if the story had been good, I wouldn't have given a shit if the environments were 100% CG. My biggest beef is simply the fact that most of the story elements in the PT didn't match up with the OT, which shouldn't have been that hard to do.
If there's a good story to the movie, it shouldn't matter if the environment is 100% CG or not. Sky Captain was heavily CG, but it had a great story too so that didn't matter.
So what you're saying is that if a director is envisioning a certain environment that simply doesn't exist, rather than do it with CGI the director should just throw their vision out the window and compromise everything in order to do it "realistically"? The problem I had with the prequels wasn't the "unreal" looking environments, it was the non story. Lucas could've shown us the most amazing, can't find this anywhere on Earth environments and if the story had been good, I wouldn't have given a shit if the environments were 100% CG. My biggest beef is simply the fact that most of the story elements in the PT didn't match up with the OT, which shouldn't have been that hard to do.
If there's a good story to the movie, it shouldn't matter if the environment is 100% CG or not. Sky Captain was heavily CG, but it had a great story too so that didn't matter.
Well, they are not throwing out their vision, they just have to be creative, like they did for the first 75 years of making movies. Did Spielberg have to compromise his vision of Jaws cause they didn't have a CG shark back in 1975? The shark didn't work sometimes, so he made it more suspensful by having the shark not show up on screen for the first hour, but the movie is still a classic.
I agree with you the story rules over everything, but there is reason that they make animated movies for kids, they don't look real! I go to the movies for a great story first, but the CGI greenscreen environments honestly take me out of the movie sometimes.
I look at movie like Bladerunner, and then a movie like AOTC, and you tell me which one is more realistic? The CGI Coruscant Greenscreen Environment or the urban gritty look of the city in Bladerunner? The reason movies like Star Wars, Raiders and Bladerunner have held up so well after all these years is they don't look like outdated CG like most movies today that you can tell which year they were made, as they keep remaking CG like Jabba the Hutt ANH SE 1997, and then Jabba the Hut ANH SE 2004.
As I have said earlier, I am not anti CG when it comes to enhancing the movie like T2 with the Robert Patrick character, as that cannot be done without CG, I just don't like it when it overwhelms the movie.
And I don't buy into Lucas's argument of 'not getting his vision' on screen without CGI, cause he has said in many of the SW DVD commentaries, that they could have accomplished many of the environments, but they would have had to build a minature for the city, or shot on real location, and the reason Lucas didn't was simple: $$$$$$$.