ww12345 said:

So regarding the camera work on that dive, in your opinion does that make for a more realistic shot than say the one used in the new teaser trailer for VII? I agree - I think it's kind of like CGI in general, that if it's not used to do something that "could" happen that your brain sort of discounts it as fake without you even knowing it...

When I'm doing VFX work, I'm careful about the aggregate amount of non-real in a frame, which is more important than any one single element. For example, the entire idea of a spaceship flying and shooting lasers is "non-real" essentially, so I consider it important to have a lot of things in the camera motion and lighting and physics which are based in reality to help compensate for that. Too much and the entire thing becomes unreal, and cool as it may look, our brains absolutely disconnect from the experience. This is part of why our films today are insanely cool looking, and totally forgettable; it's why they need a new Avengers movie every year or whatever, whereas we're still trading in on Star Wars almost 40 years later. Your average frame of a sci-fi/action movie today is almost entirely artificial, from the CG environments and unbounded cameras to the impossible physics, and having every element color graded separately so they no longer interact with each other. The result is almost painterly and surreal, and usually fantastic looking, but also so utterly non-real that we're unavoidably detached from it. The human brain is the greatest bullshit detector in the universe when it comes to visual comparative analysis. We can't always tell what's wrong with an image, but after a lifetime of experiental, comparative data to weigh it against, we can feel it. And when that feeling is disconnected, you're not "in" the film, you're watching the film, and when you're not "in" the film, it doesn't stay with you.