Anyone else think that something was lost now that everything is pretty much cgi?
 

all the aliens for the most part and worlds look neat but they look so dull and lifeless. i dont know if its too much cgi or something but i think they lost the fun and magic. the creature Obi-Wan Kenobi rides etc. even the space battles arent really exciting. maybe the cgi not looking realistic, but something was lost when Lucas went nuts with the cgi.

Or, the cgi is overanalyzed and is blamed for differences caused by other factors ... ;)

I've never been a fan of CGI since Jurassic Park. I'll take puppets and mechanics over it any day.

CGI should be used in moderation. I've never been a fan of it but directors now a days use it in every scene. That's ridiculous. I look back to the 90's with movies like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 and ask why was the CGI better back then?

I only hate CGI in modern horror movies. Given fake computer images and fake prosthetics I prefer actual physical objects on screen. Computer blood is pretty terrible as well.

To me, it's definitely less realistic and pulls me out of a movie almost instantly.

By going from miniatures, real props, sets, and puppets to digital pixels everything kind of lost their "hardness" for lack of a better word. When something is real it does translate through the film. It probably has something to do with how real light reacts to real objects among other things. Also some of the background looked too colorful and too deeply saturated with color to look convincing. They looked more like the Maxfield Parrish paintings Lucas got inspiration from, than live action. A lot of the CGI in the Prequels do look great and things like thousands of clone soldiers is difficult to replicate. But LOTR mixed enough of their "Bigatures" and matte paintings along with CGI so it wasn't as noticeable compared to the SW Prequels. And the more things are computer generated the more chances they're gonna come up with things don't look very convincing.

the cg background in ep2 when anakin takes off on the speeder bike to get shmi looks bad. the coloration just isn't right
they should have driven/flown at low altitude through a real desert and blue screened him on a bike into the real footage instead of cg desert

see in Phantom Menace everything wasnt cgi and it made it more interesting and depth to look at. the cgi in the recent star wars has too much of a glossy look to it, its great that what ILM can do with visual effects but does it make the movie better?when all of the creatures and worlds are completely cgi it loses character and and i agree with IanH saying they lost eh "hardness" thats one thing i have hated in episode 2 and 3

yeah, it made Yoda look terrible.

I think CGI is the easy answer to blame when shit goes wrong in a film.

72 full-scale sets
More miniatures than the original SW trilogy combined
Many matte paintings
Background plates of live locations for Kashyyk(Jungle) and Alderaan(Swiss Alps)
On-location shooting for Tatooine

Everything is not CG in ROTS, not even close.

If you didn't like the movie, it wasn't because of CGI. The effects in this film were stunning, and it was a beautiful film to look at. Though I have to say, I wondered when someone would start whining about CG. It's become that cliche.

It wasn't better. In fact, it's better today by leaps and bounds. The only CG in Jurassic Park was the dinosaurs, and some of those weren't even CG. You don't have to use much CG when your story takes place on earth. Same goes for T2. The only CG in that was of the liquid metal T1000.

Some things really distracted me, such as Christopher Lee doing that back flip off the deck in the beginning of the movie. Why was that even needed?

I don't mind CG, but it seems that Lucas has gone way overboard and made the move look too busy. Like the OT there weren't so many aliens, Lucas has turned the new movies into the muppet show

I agree. I used to blame the CGI for the prequels and then I saw Sin City and realized I was wrong.

Ya there is a lot of stuff that is going on in the back ground during ROTS that I could have done without. A lot of droids and aliens trying to do humorous things. No place for it really.

Look at LOTR..things look more real..Unless they were doing really wide shots with hundreds or thousands of characters on screen, things like orcs and soldiers were real people in suits for the most part. In my head within the story I believed those things were 'real.' In the SW prequels, pretty much everything like the troopers and so on were CG. Weren't even all the wookies CG? All that pulled me right out and I noticed each time I was looking at something that was CG.

So what if the special effects don't always seem real? Movies have and always will use tricks and effects to bring us into the story. Look back at movies just 10 or 20 years ago, the special effects just aren't as good. Watching Empire and Return of the Jedi again I really do notice the difference, notably what appears to be stop-motion / scale models for the Imperial Walkers, just as an example. CG really is the best tool film-makers have for showing things that would be impossible in the real world, they probably won't get anything else either. It's the future of films; all thats required to enjoy a movie has always been suspension of disbelief.

"CG really is the best tool film-makers have for showing things that would be impossible in the real world,"

Yes but the problem as has been stated is when you use CG when it's NOT needed. Like for example when I said clone troopers and wookies. Would be more effective to use real people in those situations.

I'm not one to bash CGI, but I do agree with this. The big CGI rocks he was flying through were ridiculous. It was one of those "gee, look at the neat rocks we can put in here that we couldn't do in the original trilogy" things. It added nothing to the story and in fact made it confusing when he switched back to Genosis, because both planets looked almost the same.

So, they're supposed to hire thousands of extras to play storm troopers? That does get rather costly, same reason lots of movies use CG for crowd enhancement. I personally don't have the CG beef...I like the look, and a rubber puppet or stop motion never looked better imo. Sure they could've hired people to play the storm troopers, but IMO they looked fantastic. I doubt a lot of people even noticed they were CG. But, sometimes CG is used as a cost prohibitive tool...hiring thousands upon thousands of extras is, if you didn't know, very expensive.

So, no, I don't think anything is lost because of CG. It's just another tool, like paintings and blue screen and puppets and stop motion. And, quite frankly, it looks much better then any of those. If there are good artists behind these creations and a good filmmaker, then great. If not, then not. But the CG itself I don't think is to blame. Take for instance Van Helsing...many of the complaints regarding the film were about the CG. Whereas, imo, the problem with that film had nothing to do with the technical quality and everything to do with bad writing, bad direction and poorly conceived action sequences. So...no, it's not the CG.

Again..I'm not talking about large crowd shots..but up close stuff with 3 or 4 or even 10 or 15 people in a shot.

It wasn't better; technically, the CG in those movies were extremely primative. However, the SFX were better because they were more stylisticially tuned to the movie environment. When you think about it, it's not hard to make a creature made out of liquid metal look...like shiny metal. And no one's ever seen a living dinosaur before, so there's no real frame of reference. Keep in mind those movies also mixed in a healthy dose of puppets, animatronics, and real props as well.

I don't see why everyone complains about CGI. Really it's all about evolution in the SFX industry, and you have to give them some recognizance when you consider that the technology is so new and quite difficult to master. Most people say that movies that used puppets, models, and other hard props were much better looking, and that's true, but most of those movies - especially the OT - were made at the height of the technology. Think back to those really cheesy 50s sci-fi movies that used models which were homebrewed and the SFX industry was very new....and CGI doesn't look so bad.

I just couldn't agree with this more--to this date, I have yet to see a more convincing use of CGI than the two films you mentioned...even the JURASSIC PARK sequels fail to measure up to the first in terms of its seamlessness with reality, and they were made 12-14 years ago! It's just insane to me that CGI is used so carelessly and indiscriminately in everything these days. You want to digitally erase the wires holding Stallone to the mountainside in CLIFFHANGER? Rock on with that CGI. You want to fill up a giant movie screen with a blatantly fake and cartoony Yoda face when there's a perfectly believable puppet from 20 damn years ago that will work 1,000 times better? Now it's time to walk away from the fucking computer, cyber-geek filmmakers...

I think that when CGI is used properly it is a big plus no matter how often the director uses it. (i.e. CGI gives Sin City a certain tone through out) I do feel that Lucas is overreliant on CGI to acheive his goals. I felt distracted by certain scenes in ROTS by unneeded special effects. (i.e. Dooku's flipping entrance, all the droids whizzing by when Anakin & Obi-Wan duel on Mustafar etc.)

I feel that something is lost when CGI is misused. For me personally it's that feeling of "How'd they do that?". Now the answer is always CGI. Do I like CGI sure, when it's needed and used properly, but CGI just for the sake of CGI? That I can do without. I think this may have been what the OP was trying to get across.

I disagree. Puppet Yoda can not display any emotion at all.

Did you watch the OT at all? He displays FAR more emotion than the CGI one, from an uncharacteristic but delightful mirth when he's speaking of Yoda in the third person, to a frightening portentousness when informing Luke he "will be" afraid, to a wide-eyed alarm when he's knocked off his perch on Luke's upside-down foot, to a weighty disappointment when Luke walks into the magic tree with weapons in tow, to a gentle wistfulness at how bad Luke will look in 900 years, to a hazy, weakened and struggling state while hanging on to life enough to pass on one final message to Luke. In fact, while watching ROTS, there were a few moments when I said to myself, "Ah, they're improving the CGI--Yoda's making a few more of the expressions he had in the OT than he did in AOTC..."

Yes, I just watched the entire OT 2 weeks ago. People can read a lot of "emotion" into scenes because of voice acting. Try watching puppet Yoda's scenes without sound. He doesn't show a lot of emotion. Or at least he doesn't show it as well as ROTS Yoda can.

I think the biggest CGI problem with the new movie is Artoo. Having him flying in Episode II was bad enough, but between his popping out of the Jedi fighter and his laser light show on the bridge of Grievous' ship, it makes his actions in IV-VI really lame.

They could have at least had him be damaged to explain his later lack of spryness.

I still remember when they would strap a fan on the back of an iguana and call it a dinosaur. There's never been a point in cinema when everything looked perfectly real. Either it was compromised in design to be possible or it looked like a guy in a rubber suit or an obvious miniature or matte painting. As much as I love Ray Harryhausen, I'm the first to admit his stuff never looked real. The Tauntauns had that same staccato animated look. Honestly, I'm just happy they finally got that blue screen matte halo thing fixed. Everything else is gravy. They didn't go from realistic effects to fake looking CGI. They went from fake looking rubber/papier mache effects to fake looking CGI effects. The days of Cecil B. DeMille building a giant set with a cast of thousands is over. CGI has allowed filmmakers to put on screen anything they can imagine at a somewhat reasonable cost. As long as it's not as crappy as, say, the Scorpion King in the Mummy 2 (which looked like a Playstation 1 game), who gives a rat's ass if it is slightly not real? Rubber critters never looked real, either. Most of our eyes are trained to spot it now, thanks to having seen it through its infancy. If you are going to continue to watch fantasy films, then you'll just have to accept that certain effects are going to be done in a computer. Complaining about CGI in a fantasy film is like complaining about exhaust fumes at a NASCAR race. (I agree about its inappropriateness in Horror, though)

Now, if you want to complain about bad composition or utilization (which some of you are, of course), then that's another story. Lucas started this with Jedi (before CGI!)where the screen is so damned busy that you can't tell what's going on. CGI has nothing to do with it. Just bad utilization of it. It's kind of like Homer's webpage with all the dancing babies and assorted gifs ripped off other sites. He also makes films like a glorified Colorforms set, where actors are acting with ping pong balls on sticks rather than fellow actors. He then pastes them together for a scene making it more artificial. CGI is a tool, not a crutch.

I'd agree with you if you weren't completely wrong.

So are you saying you watched the puppet Yoda scenes without audio and you <i>still</i> think puppet Yoda can visually show more emotion than CGI Yoda? I just want to make sure there is no miscommunication here. Or are you just disagreeing without even trying my suggestion?

I don't need to take your suggestion because, again, while watching EPISODE III, I kept thinking, "Huh, they're actually working more of the puppet's expressions into the CGI version". This has nothing to do with vocal performance--hell, Frank Oz does the same voice whether puppet or CGI, so what kind of argument are you making? They've got a long way to go, but at least III's CGI Yoda was a substantial improvement over II's. Now if they could just get the skin tone and eye moisture right (the latter of which we wouldn't have to worry about if George would back the f-in' camera up)...

I've got to say...I'm with bwvanh114 on this one. I don't agree whatsoever that those puppets were more expressive. Honestly, when you think about the technology behind it, it makes sense that CG offers much more possibilities. And what about full body shots and action? Those puppets offer limited mobility and could never, ever do one quarter of the things CG Yoda offered the filmmakers.

Well, to each their own. Though I can't see how one could see that way without some rosy tinted glasses.

Just because CG arguably offers more possibilities does not mean said possibilities were satisfactorily explored.

Agreed, and if you were reading ALL of my prior posts, you would see that I've already addressed that my concerns with the Yoda CGI deal exclusively with facial close-ups.