Fullmetaled said:
It was possible to update the effects in empire strikes back with adywan doing hoth with revisited so how is this impossible for a fan or even a major studio to do?
[Edit: Oops, this turned out long, sorry!] Fans don’t have time constraints and budgets restrictions and more. Pros have to coordinate with other individuals and other departments and deal with hardware set-ups that may not be their first choice, and they have to show their output to studio higher-ups for approval, and more. It’s a complicated web, mess, of interaction surely always walking a tightrope due to time constraints, rarely with a blank check safety net.
A fan, on the other hand, can work on only what they want, at their leisure, pick projects to begin with that are within their parameters of full comfort/desire, use only their fave software on a computer system they built themselves, do all this without having to answer to anyone else. A fan can seek help from others on their own terms (without legal hassles/contracts or even without paying someone) if there’s a bit they personally can’t quite do something themselves. (Because he couldn’t do such himself I did CG shots on Adywan’s New Hope Revisited — the Death Star plans graphics and the “40 Tie Fighters flying in” — I worked on those bits off and on for ten months; so he got targeted skill goals met for those shots of his project without having to pay anyone, deal with paperwork, etc., unlike professional studio environments that have to coordinate and juggle all that and more, especially budget.)
These guys/gals at studio departments surely have MASSIVE lists of things they have to get done within a time frame. One bit of my work on Adywan’s New Hope was making a Death Star mesh from scratch. That took me about a month, me working on it when I was in the mood, only when I felt charged to do the work. I could take a month “having fun” with it because there was no deadline. What if I had a five-day crunch to do it, couldn’t “hire” anyone to assist me for the more tedious parts of the modeling (couldn’t get help even for free because of legal reasons) and on my workload list for the whole project was also to make meshes for the three Star Destroyer types, Tie Bomber mesh, several beat-up variant meshes of X-Wings, Luke’s landspeeder with 100% matching damage to what’s in the film, and an AT-AT? Yes, I will have accepted the work because I thought I could do it, but what about any snags cropping up (like Covid or whatever)? What if I was locked to a partner on the project — he does texturing while I do modeling — and it turned out he was tripping up and dragging me down like an anchor while we’re on deadline and I couldn’t just replace him as my partner due to seniority structure? And if he and I tripped up, took longer than we were supposed to, the cost might be that the scene layout/rendering department would have to make up time by implementing some unfortunate shortcuts like sloppy compositing and shittier-quality rendering.
Getting a fan to help… There are pipelines that work certain ways; I imagine it’s not as easy as just getting a fan to do this shot or that and wallah, put their work into that of teams of professionals. Yes, one would think, but for reasons I’m not privy too it rarely seems to work out this way.
The solution of course is for Paramount to spend more money, hire more people to spread out the workload, but… When it comes to big studio spending, who knows what’s going on? So much messiness when it comes to that kind of thing. Let’s compare real quick the new Obi Wan Kenobi series and the latest Orville ep 4. I’m not a big fan of The Orville overall, but one has to admit that at times — yeah, I have s03xe04 stuck in my head — Orville looks a LOT better than pretty much everything in OWK, even though the latter has a budget of $25m per episode. What’s the excuse? OKW is official modern Star Wars, starring cast from Lucas-directed films, and freakin’ Trek parody Orville has much better effects (and a kicker is that ultimately both are Disney shows so one can’t even point out the studios making just have different philosophies). There’s surely a lot going on when having to coordinate thousands of people under contracts and such that make it messy in ways that are hard to both comprehend.
I’ll cease my rambling now. 😃