speaking of special effects..

i watched the special effects of empire....(on laserdisc, and part of the

editdroid 4 disc special..

first they talk a lot about stop frame animation.. that is ridiculously time

consuming... something like spending a few hours a day just to get a few seconds

worth of footage..

they also showed a lot of how the models were used in the blue screen process,

again, several hours a day just to get a few minutes of footage.

i appreciate the artistry and the craftsmenship they had back then, but it seems

WRONG to destroy those beautiful models by exploding them just for a few shots..

i'm sorry, but after imaging all the time it took back then, and then seeing the results

(which were decent for the time)... there's NO WAY they should ever go back to that,

now that they have the digital resources to do it in a lot better fashion, and much

more convincingly...

granted its easy to go overboard, and if done wrong , it will still look fake...

i wonder if they had redone the battle at hoth with CGI, how much better it would

have looked, compared to the jerky stop motion, and the same with the stop-frame

tauntaun.... it would have looked much better now...

anyways, go back and watch the 'making of star wars'.. i like mark hamills commentary..

also in the 'empire' one, he does a pretty good 'yoda'...and ominously he ends by saying

that the special effects should not take the place of good storytelling, characters and plot..

later

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