negative1 said: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
-1
The problem is that CGI just looks fake in the movies today, for me IMO. I agree that stop motion models is very time consuming, and probably more costly, but that is the reason the OOT movies hold up so well years later, is they still look real. I look at the golden years for action/scifi movies of the late 70's/early 80's and these movies just hold up so much better then most movies today. Plus because of the limited technology, the director was forced to focus on a good, interesting story, and good character development, which is pretty much gone from the summer blockbuster today, as they are mostly mindless CGI-fest movies with zero story and ridicolous one dimensional characters.
I always use the analogy of how Jaws was made, and if it was made today, it wouldn't be as good. Spielberg simply couldn't get the shark to work, so he doesn't even show him in the first hour, which turns out to be genius because the music really messes with the viewer and finally the shark shows up on screen. The movie has great characters who really drive the story, and I believe if Jaws was made in 2008, it would be a CGI-fest movie with the shark being the star of the movie, and they would probably have George Clooney or some dopey actor as the Roy Scheider character.