Enough about these "new movies" that aren't coming... I want to rant about something!
You know, the CG defenders (and Lucas himself used this argument once in an interview) will finally come down to saying that CG effects are no less "real" (portraying fantasty characters and objects that don't exist in the real world) than puppets, models, and miniatures.
They sort of have a point. However, the key problem is that the effect that overuse of CGI has had on the new movies has been detrimental and there's a very simple reason for it.
Actors are human beings. They're trained to ACT, and when an actor is acting in a scene with another human being, they play off that human being and the performance is granted realism (and improves) as a result.
This is why it takes a much better actor to effectively act alone than with other people. What's even harder is when you take two performances that were done in isolation and slap them together to try to make it look like they are playing off each other in a real scene at the same time.
Much of the prequels were done with live actors "interacting" with CG characters.
How this actually played out was that an actor was sitting/standing/whatever in front of a blue/green screen, reciting their lines while staring off into space. They could only imagine who or what they were interacting with.
This was a problem since whatever character Lucas had his digital wizards add in in post-production would not be anything like the character would have imagined that motivated their performance. The average actor is not used to acting this way anyway, so it easily explains a lot of the lack luster performances (if you imagine a specific thing, you'll probably give a specific performance, so if you just imagine nothing, it'll come out really wooden and generic).
The characters might as well be talking to themselves.
In the Jar Jar scenes of Episode I for example, for some shots, somebody was just reading Jar Jar's lines off camera (iirc), and for others, Ahmed Best was standing there in the same outfit that Jar Jar wears, except he had his face covered in dark black makeup (or at least the top part, making it look like he was wearing a Zorro type mask) with an absurd looking, small rubber "Jar Jar head" on TOP of his head. Actors were told to look at the head rather than at Best's own face, and not pay attention to the lines coming out of his mouth.
In the actual movie, the actors are interacting with a strange duck/frog dinosaur creature that acts ridiculous and they don't seem to think anything of it. Now I'm not saying that they should reel in terror from him... after all, this is the Star Wars galaxy, and presumably the Jedi have seen their share of exotic creatures (just look at some of the faces on the Jedi Council!), but still. He acts goofy even for a Star Wars character, and they seem to be looking past him sometimes. I don't know about you, but I don't always stare directly into a person's eyes (or at the top of their head) when speaking informally to them, even if they're taller than me.
So the whole blue/green screen interaction thing IS a problem, and will always be a problem with CG. Yes, Lucas did take some steps to try to minimize it down the road, giving actors "eye levels" to speak to on a microphone stand, or a Yoda statue they were supposed to look at for reference... or Lucas himself standing just off camera reading the lines off a typed script. The trouble is such things are still inauthentic. It's no substitute for having another person, in character, interacting with you in the scene. So it takes a very high calibur of actor, who realizes what's going on, to overcome those sorts of problems.
The only way they're going to totally overcome this problem is either by totally "painting out" (a la Golem in LOTR) a living actor with a CG character of the same proportions and relative mannerisms or by having some kind of instantly realized "post production" (sort of like how weather reporters can see the fake blue-screened digital background they are interacting with on a monitor as they do their spiel for the camera, even though they're really pointing at nothing).
In the old days, if a live actor were "interacting" with an empty space that would be replaced with a stop motion minature or model, the same problem would occur. Obviously because of that, such techniques were typically limited to shots that didn't involve dialoge (like space dogfights or shots of characters riding an animal or ground vehicle in the distance). Realistic interaction is something that just isn't going to be easily solved simply by adding more polygons or better shaders.
Of course some CG just looks fake (like some of the close ups of Yoda, or the Clone Trooper armor when Morrison takes off/puts on his helmet). Real props, puppets and such may not be "real" in the sense that they really are what they represent (living breathing, or functioning aliens or alien technology from a galactic civilization), but they at least have weight to them. They cast realistic shadows, because they ARE really in the scene. Of course, if a lightsaber is supposed to be super heavy and the prop in the actor's hand is light, he or she has to pretend, but that's different than if you were to have an actor swinging, say, their empty fist around and then you digitally added a lightsaber to it (thankfully I don't think Lucas has actually attempted such a trick yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did someday!).
Another problem is harder to see. This came to light with the "making of" Episode II. The practice I think began with pasting the faces of the actors onto stuntmen's bodies digitally, as was done in Episode I. In Episode II they actually recorded multiple takes of the actors doing their scenes, and spliced these "takes" together into one scene, digitally.
So they got the "best" delivery from Hayden Christiansen of some line and put in Nataline Portman's "best" take of the following line, and so forth, to build a scene, even if the shot doesn't break (digitally splice in the face and audio).
This sounds like a great time saving method, but unfortunately it can create another problem... that of flow and continuity. If an actor delivers a line a certain way, the reaction TO that line by the other actor is likely to be different as a result. If you splice two deliveries from different takes together, you may get bizarre or unnature seeing reactions as if the characters are talking past each other, creating a tension that wasn't there before.
This can be disconcerting, and if this technique was used extensively (don't know), it could help explain some of the clumsiness of the character interaction in the dialogue scenes of Episodes II and III.
The other problem with CG is that of overkill. It's one thing to put it into scenes where it would be more expensive or time consuming to do it with traditional effects (witness the battle scenes in the LOTR movies that would otherwise have required a "cast of thousands" or else lots of bluescreen work with small groups, multiplying them over and over to create a realistic simulation of a large battle between thousands of combatants). Virtually every shot in the prequels has some CG in it, and many of the shots are completely digital.
The battle scenes in the OT had to have purpose, because they had to spend time and money on each model and effect to get it just right. With computers you can copy and past the same 3d model a million times, and as long as you have enough hardware, you can render the scene on time, no matter how elaborate it is. The result is often a chaotic mess. Look at the space battle in ROTJ vs. the space battle in Episode III. Which is easier to follow, visually? Which truly looks more exciting (and not just dizzying?).
Finally, some of the editing in the Prequels looks far too much like the cutscenes from a video game. That may be a "chicken or the egg" kind of question since many video games aspire to look LIKE movies. But still, combining the fact that these scenes are obviously computer generated and they happen to resemble video games, AND they happen to be being used to promote video game sales, can you help but make the connection?
That kills the realism. If I'm watching a serious movie and suddenly the character starts jumping and bouncing on things like Super Mario, the sense of suspension of disbelief is lost, if I associate it with an unrealistic video game.
A lot of the Lucas apologists act as if we simply irrationally leap on things just because they came out of a computer. In reality, it's because of a set of unsurmountable (or as of yet not fully surmounted) obstacles to realism that use of the CGI presents.
And it's a fact that other movies have made better use of CGI than the Star Wars prequels... better in the sense of a better movie, or a more convincing scene. And CGI will continue to improve, making the effects in the prequels continue to look dated.
I cynically suspect, as some others do, that much of the overuse in the Prequels was not merely done because of Lucas's ego (and his desire to get movies to the point of not needing human actors) but to make them into 2 hour tech demos (commercials) for his special effects companies.
Some stuffed shirt or ponytail wearing director is going to watch this and go "I like how that looks, I want that in my movie, call George!"
Lucas is a genius, that's undeniable, he's just not as great a director these days as the apologists like to make him out to be.... and there's solid reasons for saying that, it's not just some kind of blind hatred or jealousy.
This post has been edited by KurganX: 25 May 2007 - 04:54 AM
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