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Am I the only one who thinks the CGI effects look fake? — Page 2

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I think it's most sadly obvious in all the non-sets.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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In Attack of the Clones, definitely.

But as I said before, it was surprisingly good throughout most of RotS. Or maybe the movie was so much better I just didn't notice the CGI as much.

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To be perfectly honest, I didn't notice that none of the sets were real in Attack of the Clones until I got the DVD, and they told me it was all fake. Sad, but true. I noticed them all in Revenge. Could be because I already knew ahead of time they were going to be, but I'm hoping it's just because I've developed a more discerning eye for CG.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
To be perfectly honest, I didn't notice that none of the sets were real in Attack of the Clones until I got the DVD, and they told me it was all fake. Sad, but true. I noticed them all in Revenge. Could be because I already knew ahead of time they were going to be, but I'm hoping it's just because I've developed a more discerning eye for CG.


Well, it's normal that you see things more in detail the more you view a movie.

I felt that AOTC/ROTS had its issues not only with CG but with the camera used. The most obvious shot where it just reeked of video was the opera scene. Look at the flesh tones on Anakin and Palpatine. Then look around their edges. It had this "video" look to it that's attributable to the medium used to record the movie on. It was really annoying.

(yes I know it's 24p HD 4:4:4 cameras, but it's still just a CCD trying to convert light into 1s and 0s)

But getting back to the CG topic, there are several reasons why the live actors and full blown CG backgrounds have a hard time of mixing correctly together. There's the obvious statement that's been brought up before that CGI isn't "real", it's just a 2D image trying to look 3D (so is film essentially - but for the sake of the argument, let's forget film theory). But there's one major issue, IMO, that really makes it look fake: the cinematography.

The most important thing to remember is that everything in your environment affects how the light will look in that space. Light is reflected, diffused and bounced off many objects which affects the final look. Just inserting a green chair will subtily change how the light in your space looks. Why? Well, light bounces off the green chair and creates a green hue around it. Because the two last PT films were shot mostly in greenscreen (at least in TPM they tended to build sets and create CG environments around it), it's hard to light the shots as realistically as they would had they actually acted on a set. I look at the before shots on the star wars sets and it's mostly just a simple three-point lighting scheme with some really harsh backlight. Look on their shoulders and heads. There's a constant bright halo around them. While backlighting is important when lighting a film (you don't want your characters to blen in the background), I feel the dullness and sterility of it in the PT just makes the human characters pop out more than usual. It's backlighting for backlighting's sake. The DP probably had an idea or a sketch of what the set was going to look like when the animators inserted it, but had to play it safe.

Another issue that bothered me was some weird issue going on with the focal length distortion. Basically, a wide lens distorts straight lines, making them curvy, objects seem further than how they really are and you have a large depth of field. A long lens "flattens" the image. Objects seem closer than they are in life and the depth of field is shortened. It seems as if in a lot of shots, someone got the focal length wrong when doing the special effects shots because the distortions between the human actors and the backgrounds were somewhat off. A good example of this are the medium closeups of Anakin and Obi-Wan swinging on those cables on Mastafar. Another one, in The Phantom Menace is when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are just about to fight Darth Maul and there's this weird medium shot of them jumping into frame as both of them attack Darth Maul.

Anyway, just some more contribution...

What’s the internal temperature of a TaunTaun? Luke warm.

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I've always preferred the "real" sets and models to the weird, fuzzy look of Lucas' CGI. The CGI environments as a whole ended up having a really clean, unnatural look... Until they can get it completely straight, they should go back to good old-fashioned sets.