SilverWook said:
It would probably be easier to hollow out an asteroid and mount the superlaser inside. But it's probably not as scary looking when it shows up to annihilate you. ;)
Just use Iapetus; it already looks like the Death Star:
TV's Frink said:
The views are a lie. And I'm not joking, I've seen massive view jumps on my threads in no time, with no real explanation.
After each new reply to a thread, people who have already viewed the thread have a reason to view it again. For example, suppose a forum only has 10 members, and they all religiously view each new thread at least once a day, and when they see a new reply, they always view it again to read the new reply. If someone posts a thread and no one replies, it will have 10 views. If on the next day, someone replies to the thread, it will then soon have 20 views, and so on. This is why you see the "massive view jumps on [your] threads in no time"; it happens after a new reply has been posted and a bunch of people check out the new reply.
To get a rough idea of how many different people have been following a thread, divide the number of posts in the thread by the number of views.
Harmy said:
@darklordoftech: Yes, exactly.
@MaximRecoil: I simply disagree with this - people weren't used to seing CGI dinosaurs, so they seemed much more real back then, than the seem now - I know this, because I experienced it and my dad said this as well, last time we watched Jurassic Park. I just watched the 1st Harry Potter movie yesterday and I could spot things being obviously CGI, where I never spotted them before. And the LOTR example is a very good one as well - when I first saw those movies, they seemed flawless (visually anyway) and now, I can see all kinds of things looking fake and CGIed, though I can still see less CGI fakeness there than in the Hobbit movies, because there is simply less CGI - like Neverar says, people just learned to recognize the signs of something being CGI but in the early days, most people thought it was photo-realistic. You may be the exception to that but not the rule.
Sure, some CGI always looked bad (CGI Jabba is a great example) but most CGI definitely seems much more fake now, than it did when it was created.
Anecdotes can't establish anything one way or another. "Confirmation bias" is the biggest potential problem with anecdotes of this nature. A controlled study of some sort could give meaningful results. This would have to involve people who have never seen the CGI in e.g., Jurassic Park and therefore have no preconceived notions about it.
As for "learning to recognize the signs of something being CGI": logically, there should be no learning process required. Those signs are simply differences from reality, and reality is something that pretty much everyone is extremely familiar with.
As for my own anecdotes, I have none where I once thought a certain case of CGI looked real or good but now I think it looks fake or bad. I'm too old to have seen any photorealistic attempts at CGI as a kid, though that could change things (i.e., a child's brain isn't even close to being fully developed yet, and they are inherently more credulous than adults as a general rule). Another thing that can change things is the quality and resolution of the picture and the display, i.e., CGI that looks good on a VHS tape or even a DVD displayed on a 15 kHz CRT isn't necessarily going to look good at far more revealing levels of resolution/quality.
Harmy said:
I don't know, have you seen Jurassic Park recently - the CGI in it has aged a lot - the T-Rex scenes still look great, because they are in low light and there's rain and stuff but that first Brontosaurus shot (the CGI model of which they tweaked and re-purposed for the SE's Ronto) looks ultra fake today, yet, in 1993, everyone thought that it looked totally real
If it looks ultra fake now it looked ultra fake then. Seeing reality is something that most everyone has done for most every day for their entire lives, so most everyone has a good frame of reference for comparison, and the wiring in the visual system and the parts of the brain which interpret visual information have not changed. However, it didn't actually look "ultra fake", then or now (link). Watch some Asylum movies to see some "ultra fake" looking CGI.
- the perception of what looks real on screen and what doesn't has always changed over time - when they first showed footage of a train coming towards the camera in the early days of cinema, people were ducking and running out of the way - and that was black-and-white, grainy, 2D projection, likely at 15fps.
That's something entirely different, assuming it ever really happened at all. For someone who has never seen motion picture of any kind, you could have an animation of a simple solid-colored black circle coming at the screen at high speed and you'd probably get reflexive reactions out of someone (and not because they are consciously thinking it is e.g. a real bowling ball headed toward them). And if it did happen, do you think it would happen upon an immediate second viewing with anyone? If you questioned people in theater after the show, and asked them, "Was there an actual physical train in the theater?" do you think any of them would say yes? Do you think that anyone of reasonable intelligence ever thought that cartoons were real people?
NeverarGreat said:
In many accounts of Near Death Experiences or OBEs, deceased loved ones are often seen as in the prime of their life, even if the OBE-er couldn't ever recall seeing them that way. So actually, having a young Anakin Skywalker ghost makes more sense than seeing the image of an old man who could have only appeared that way if he was not horribly mutilated decades ago. Of course, that would mean that the ghost of Obi-wan would need to be played by Ewan McGregor, and they would need to make a CGI version of Yoda of him in his vigorous tadpole years.
Those sort of anecdotes vary wildly, and of course there isn't any proof that the stories are true. However, mythology and religion are both well-documented with regard to the claims, and the hope to be "made whole" again in the afterlife is pretty much universal among people who believe in an afterlife.
In any event, the specific requirements of the movie need to be taken into account as well, i.e., the audience needs to recognize the ghostly characters, so it follows that the same actors who portrayed the characters in their natural life would portray them in their afterlife appearance.
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
MaximRecoil said:
They could make a lot of types of special effects look more believable in '97 as compared to '77-'83, but they were still a long way from being able to create realistic looking people or critters entirely from CGI.I don't know, Jurassic Park was 4 years earlier, was much more ambtious, and looked 10 times better. I think the challenge was that they were trying to add CGI to a 20-year old film, and a deleted scene at that. Just a bad idea to being with. Yes, Jabba always looked awful.
That's because Jurassic Park used few, if any, 100% CGI critters. Most of it was animatronics with perhaps some CGI enhancement. And if there were any 100% CGI critters, they were helped tremendously by dark lighting and other filming techniques (which also helped the look of the animatronics).
Easterhay said:
Spare a thought for my boy. Since watching ROTJ the other day and questioning why Anakin's spirit was wearing clothes he never wore in life, last night he saw a picture from the original ROTJ with Sebastian Shaw as the ghost.
Questions such as "Why has he got hair? Where are his scars? Why has he got both arms? Why has he got both legs?" What could I do but shrug and say - once again - "They messed up."
They didn't "mess up". It is pretty standard in mythology and religion that people are "made whole" in the afterlife. The only precedent I know of for the idea of people retaining infirmities and/or wounds in the afterlife is from works of fiction in the "horror" or "thriller" genre.
The main reason that the concept of an afterlife has had such a long-term and widespead appeal is the hope that things will be better there, which obviously includes getting back lost limbs or otherwise rectifying other forms of disfigurement/impairment/infirmities. Who would dream up an afterlife for "good" or "redeemed" people where things suck just as bad as they did during the natural life, you know, other than people like Stephen King? That would be great for people who e.g. died in a fire or a high-speed car accident; they'd get to spend eternity looking like a charred corpse or a piece of hamburger.
Easterhay said:
45-ish with no hair, no arms or legs. Just a floating torso, really.
See above.
Also, why should he look "45-ish"? I never got the impression from SW, TESB, or ROTJ that he was supposed to be a generation younger than Obi-Wan Kenobi. Kenobi described him as having been a "good friend", and people's good friends tend to be in the same age range as they are. Darth Vader does say to Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Your powers are weak, old man," but "old man" is often used ironically/sarcastically, and if I had a dollar for every time I've heard an old man call another old man "old man", I'd be rich.
I first saw Star Wars when it was broadcast on TV (on our 25" RCA color console TV, on CBS I believe) in '84 when I was 9 years old. I think this was the first time it was broadcast on regular TV, because it was a pretty big deal. Kids at school were talking about it about a week prior to its broadcast.
I was enthralled by it; it seemed so epic. It was an event, like The Wizard of Oz, but even better.
I'd been aware of the Star Wars movies since my earliest memories, and even had some of the toys (given to me by my neighbor who had "outgrown" them), including some action figures (Boba Fett, Luke Skywalker [orange flight suit], Darth Vader, a standard storm trooper, Hammerhead, and Greedo), Luke's landspeeder, a TIE fighter, an X-Wing, and the insanely awesome Millennium Falcon. All of those were built roughly to scale around the action figures, so they were pretty big, especially the Millennium Falcon.
So, between the toys I had and what I'd heard from other kids over the years, I knew what it was all about, but I'd never seen any of the movies. So seeing Star Wars for the first time after having wanted to see it for as long as I could remember, was a pretty big thing.
I didn't see another Star Wars movie until '87 when I was 12. My mother was going to be gone for the weekend, and she dropped my little sister and me off at our grandfather's house. He had a VCR (we didn't get one until Christmas of '88), and he said we could rent a couple of movies. So I rented Return of the Jedi and Star Trek IV (which was a new release at the time). I loved both of them, and watched them 3 or 4 times over the weekend.
For some reason, it was a while before I first saw The Empire Strikes Back, because even after we got a VCR and I could have easily rented it, for some reason I was under the impression that I'd already seen it. But, at some point in '89 I rented it, to watch it "again", and realized I'd never seen it. It too was amazing.
I remember talking about The Empire Strikes Back with my neighbor Jeff after watching it, telling him how great I thought it was, and how I'd just seen it for the first time despite thinking I'd already seen it, and how it was the movie where Luke first finds out that Darth Vader is his father. Jeff kind of scoffed and said, "It was obvious from what Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke in the original Star Wars that Darth Vader was Luke's father." That claim is funny in hindsight, considering what I know now, but back then, everyone believed that George Lucas had 9 Star Wars movies all written and ready to go, right down to the last detail, before the first movie was even made.
Jonno said:
As well you should be! Good to see you back here, Maxim. Any more projects in the pipeline?
I'm still feeling my way through Illustrator, slowly but surely. Thanks again for those early tips!
No problem. I'm not working on any projects currently. The last vector project I did was creating a custom Atari 2600 cartridge label for a particularly good arcade-style hack of Space Invaders (created by AtariAge member Nukey Shay), i.e., a hack which transformed it into Space Invaders Deluxe. I used this poor quality cellphone camera picture (which was the only image of that particular artwork from the kickpanel of the original arcade machine that I could find) to create this label by manually vectorizing it, like so.
Handman said:
Well, people's standards change. Look at a PSOne game. It looks terrible by todays standards, but back in the day it was state-of-the-art! Same with Toy Story (although not so bad as the PSOne game)!
I thought PlayStation games looked terrible from day one, just as I did with all of the early 3D games, even in the arcade, such as Virtua Fighter and Tekken. The only games that looked good on the PlayStation were the few 2D games, such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and only then on a standard resolution (~15 kHz) CRT display.
If we're talking about movies, "looking good for the time" relies on what people will accept in a movie without taking them out of it. A sort of "suspension of disbelief", if you will.
All of the CGI character/critter additions in the '97 SE stuck out like a sore thumb, because they looked cartoonish in an otherwise live-action movie; i.e., the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? effect, minus it being part of the premise as in that movie.
As far as Toy Story goes, it looked good enough that it could be seen as an artistic/stylistic choice (such as a particular style of hand-drawing chosen for a cartoon or comic strip). The characters/objects weren't all jagged polygons like in a PlayStation game, which screams of "technical limitations" rather than "artistic/stylistic choice". The CGI in the '97 SE wasn't jagged polygons either, but the problem there was that it was trying (and miserably failing) to pass for reality, which Toy Story obviously wasn't trying to do.
Without a doubt, special effects age. In 1997, the effects were state-of-the-art, and people could look at them without breaking their suspension of disbelief. Nowadays, that isn't the case.
They could make a lot of types of special effects look more believable in '97 as compared to '77-'83, but they were still a long way from being able to create realistic looking people or critters entirely from CGI. If they'd just stuck to things like digital recompositing and enhancing the look of certain explosions, that would be a different story.
moviefreakedmind said:
Well, other than the changes of course, the SE's looked pretty good for the time when they were released in '97 in my opinion.
I don't think there is any such thing as "looking good for the time". People's ability to distinguish between what looks real and what looks fake hasn't ever changed as far as anyone knows, much less in the past 17 years.
That's an awesome poster.
As for this specific project, it wouldn't have helped (though if you have a way to scan it in, definitely do it; there are no doubt other uses for such a scan), because the problem was that DVD cases have a wider aspect ratio than VHS sleeves, so the artwork from the VHS sleeves is cropped too narrow for use on a DVD case. So I had to find the front artwork from other sources, ideally from the original posters for each movie. Finding the first two wasn't hard, but ROTJ was. "Video Collector" solved that problem. This is what I said about it in an earlier post:
Video Collector sent me an ROTJ image that he worked up using msycamore's "Style B.bmp" scan and various LD cover scans from his own collection; and he did a hell of a job. We now have everything that's showing on the VHS cover, plus a little more on the top and a lot more on the sides (more than enough to fit the DVD cover aspect ratio). We have small Lando, more of the Death Star, the entire lightsaber blade, and Leia's stomach
They all printed out beautifully, and looking at the finished product, Video Collector's Photoshopping is so seamless that I can't even spot it. For the life of me, I still can't get a decent picture of the case with my handheld camera, but here is a scan of it from a flatbed scanner:
Click here to see the full-resolution scan.
The other two turned out just as good. If I weren't the one who made these, I wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at them that they weren't factory-made. I couldn't be more pleased with the results.
I have an Epson Stylus Photo 1400 printer, and tonight I printed out the ANH sleeve on A4-size Epson Photo Quality Glossy Paper (S041126) using the "Photo Paper Glossy" and "Photo RPM" printer settings ("High Speed" unchecked, "Edge Smoothing" checked). I printed directly from my vector file, in which everything but the poster art on front and the screenshots on back are vector.
I chose the "Photo Quality Glossy Paper" over the various grades of normal photo paper because it isn't as heavy as normal photo paper, i.e., it is more similar in weight to retail DVD case sleeves like you would find in the DVD case of a store-bought Hollywood movie.
The results are amazing; very comparable to the quality, as well as the overall look and feel, of an offset printed retail DVD sleeve. All of the text and other vector elements are razor sharp, including the very fine print on the bottom of the back, and the raster images look like photographic prints. There's nothing about it that looks amateurish or "bootleg"; it truly looks like it was professionally printed. I tried taking a picture of it but my cheap camera doesn't even come close to doing it justice.
I had previously printed these sleeves out on blank matte DVD sleeves, the kind that are A4 sized but perforated around the edges so you can tear the edges off to make it exactly DVD sleeve size. The results were good, i.e., all the text was sharp and the raster elements looked good, but they just didn't look like a retail DVD sleeves if you looked closely enough to see the rough texture of the matte paper, which broke up the solid colors because of the tiny "cracks" running every which way in the paper. The Epson "Photo Quality Glossy Paper" doesn't have that problem at all.
Now I just need to figure out a good way to cut this A4 paper down exactly to the edges of the printing. I don't have a paper cutter, but I think the local library does. I was also thinking of using a metal straight edge along with a utility knife with a new razor blade.
Let's see how RapidShare works for now:
penguinofgreatness said:
Oh, btw when you are done with the covers, could you please make alternatives that don't have the hi-fi stereo or CBS/FOX logo on the front side of the cover. I think I would like this look the best. The covers look great.
Alternate versions:
(link removed)
Let me know when you have those alternate versions so I can take them down.
LexX said:
Any chance for sharing that? I've been looking for something like this for years now.
PM sent.
Video Collector sent me an ROTJ image that he worked up using msycamore's "Style B.bmp" scan and various LD cover scans from his own collection; and he did a hell of a job. We now have everything that's showing on the VHS cover, plus a little more on the top and a lot more on the sides (more than enough to fit the DVD cover aspect ratio). We have small Lando, more of the Death Star, the entire lightsaber blade, and Leia's stomach:
This has been a fun and interesting project, and I'd say it is pretty much done. I appreciate all the help; I obviously wouldn't have gotten far without it. I need to put together a folder containing 300 DPI PNGs of the CD labels (I need to do a little more tweaking to those first though; centering and such) and the DVD case sleeves and upload it somewhere (very annoying that Megaupload has been killed). Any suggestions where I can upload a .zip or .rar that will probably be 25 MB or more?
LexX said:
I took a few liberties, though. I replaced all mentions of video cassettes to video recordings and all VHS logos to DVD logos. Otherwise I avoided all mentions to DVDs or discs so they would feel more old school. Since the cases still hold DVDs and not videos, you could think about that.
Yeah, I thought about doing that, but I dismissed it. Not only did I want to stay as close as possible to the original box and label designs, but I like seeing the reminders of things that were important when I was a kid, like the VHS and Hi-Fi Stereo logos. The DVD logo holds zero nostalgic value for me.
Actually, I didn't have a clue what "Hi-Fi Stereo" really meant when I was a kid, but I figured it must have been a good thing; despite the fact that I had neither a stereo TV nor a Hi-Fi Stereo VCR (not that I realized that I needed those things in order to benefit from a "Hi-Fi Stereo" VHS tape).
"Listen to that. Doesn't that 'Hi-Fi Stereo' tape sound good?"
Good old "placebo effect".
By the way, the FBI warning on the tape label does mention "video discs" (originally referring to CED and LD I assume); a term which is coincidentally still relevant here.
LexX said:
You're doing exactly what I did!! And that's why I like it. ;)
P.S. that ROTJ LD cover scan would be awesome... A high quality scan of that would solve all my ROTJ cover problems, LOL.
Very nice. It looks like you had your work cut out for you on the TESB sleeve; that's quite a bit of text (when you have to match kerning rather than just type it out). Additionally, that text is squared up on both sides of each column, which means the original typesetter had his work cut out for him too. That's the kind of typesetting that they do for e.g. newspapers and bibles. Whoever did the typesetting for the original U.S. VHS releases didn't go as far as squaring the text on both sides of the column.
Here are mockups for the labels:
The variances between each label are because of the variances in the real labels; i.e., the CBS/FOX logo varies in both size and position (relative to the title logo), and so on. I didn't change anything, not even the physical size of the text and logos (the only thing I did was allow space for the disc's hub). Also, they fixed the spelling of "infringement" for the TESB and ROTJ labels.
I just printed out a test disc and scanned it in:
Click here for a higher resolution image.
The word "infringement" in the FBI warning is misspelled as "infringment". That's not my fault; I just copied what was on the original label.
penguinofgreatness said:
Scans of the tapes:
Awesome; perfect. Thanks yet again.
"doubleofive" said:
EDIT:
I'm not sure what I'm remembering, but I could swear my tapes had blue or green stickers. I can't describe it, I just have this feeling...
Maybe you had the 1990 releases, which had the same front artwork as the original 1984 releases, but had overall different designs to the boxes (the backs of the boxes were especially different). Here is an example showing the blue and green label on the tape for the 1990 release.
doubleofive said:
I can't wait to see what VC comes up with from his collection!
Same here. This LD release shows even more of the art on either side (definitely enough to solve the aspect ratio issue that I mentioned earlier), including the full lightsaber and Leia's stomach, text-free:
That picture is from Video Collector's site so he may still have that particular release. Unfortunately the ROTJ text/logo is covering some of the Death Star and Vader's helmet, but maybe a scan from a different LD release could be blended in with it. Blending is likely to be easier when working with similar sources (i.e. 2 scans from the same scanner/settings of offset printed LD covers).
I'd also like to get scans (high enough resolution to be able to read everything) of the VHS tape labels, i.e. the ones that look like these:
Inkjet printable DVDs already have a white background so it would be a simple matter (and it wouldn't use much ink) to duplicate those labels in a way that would fit on a DVD and print them. Some people might not want such plain labeling on their discs, especially when inkjet disc printing allows you to print any type of graphics you want, but there are two advantages to making labels that match the original VHS tape labels:
1. It is keeping with the spirit of the project.
2. It works well for people with inkjet disc printers as well as thermal disc printers. Thermal printers would probably even be superior in this case because of blacker blacks. I have an inkjet printer that can print on discs, but if I had a nice thermal printer I would probably use it for this type of label instead of the inkjet printer.
I'm finished for now:
When I get better images to use, I'll be updating the sleeves of course.
doubleofive said:
GENTLEMEN!
If we can get a nice high res cover of the laserdisc, we'll have tiny Lando and tons of more to the side!
Though it does look like Jabba's tail is an early Photoshop job....
Video Collector said: Very good job, Sir. I have that Laserdisc pictured above, so I'll have a go at making a wide version with tiny Lando too.
Wow, that LD cover art may be wide enough to solve the aspect ratio issue that I mentioned in post 39. It would be awesome if that could be made presentable.
Video Collector, do you have or have access to a large enough scanner to scan the LD cover in all at once? Maybe you could do a test with scanning it in at a high DPI and then resampling it to 300 DPI (in an effort to make the halftone dots more or less disappear). If it looks good like that, it would save a lot of trouble; it would leave only the ROTJ text/logo to remove. Just by virtue of its physical size it has quite a bit more inherent resolution than VHS box art (and DVD sleeve art for that matter); it is like scanning in a small poster.
doubleofive said:
Honestly, if we had a nice high resolution of the VHS box, we could just try putting Tiny Lando in there and calling it a day. If the colors and blending are done well enough, no one would notice.
Of course, no one will notice that its not Tiny Lando either...
Yeah, I doubt I ever would have noticed the difference in the size of Lando if it hadn't been pointed out.
doubleofive said:
I'm playing with them as well. There is slightly more to the sides of the other posters, we should be able to add extra there to give a bit more to work with.
I took a close look at the Lando thing. Simply shrinking Lando would be easy if you weren't trying to recreate something specific (i.e., if you could fudge the blank background that is left behind when you shrink him). However, redrawing or otherwise recreating the missing background after you shrink him, in a way that matches the VHS art (for which I don't even have a particularly high resolution scan) is beyond me. Maybe you or someone else can do it, but I believe you'll need a nice high resolution scan of the VHS box art for reference first.