Does ROTK 'up the anty' for Lucas and EpIII ?

[Prime]

As good as the LOTR effects are, for things like sets and scenery, it is a lot easy to create a fantasy setting with horses and wooden barns with real materials than futuristic cities with flying cars. So LOTR has the advantage for that sort of thing.

 

But personally, liking one does not exclude liking the other.

[toms]

Originally posted by Prime

As good as the LOTR effects are, for things like sets and scenery, it is a lot easy to create a fantasy setting with horses and wooden barns with real materials than futuristic cities with flying cars. So LOTR has the advantage for that sort of thing.

 

huh? thats the opposite of what i said. Futuristic cars and vehicles are a lot easier to do than natural looking substances like trees and horses as they have much simpler shapes, textures and animations. Why do you think Ep1 had a huge droid army??? cos they didn't have the ability to CGi lots of realistic looking humans at the time. LOTR has nearly mastered the humans and scenery, but it's horses still looked fake.

 

In the Two Towers comentary even peter jackson admits that the horses and wargs in the warg ambush look fake and not as good as he was hoping.

 

I still think that by the time Ep3 hits the audience will no longer be impressed with big CGi battles.

[Astrotoy7]

Originally posted by toms

huh? thats the opposite of what i said...

 

cmon kids, we dont want to get into any geeky "CGI is better" fights. I am hardly qualified to say for certain but I would imagine rendering 2000 horses running across a field woul be realtively easier than the epII chase through coruscant for example, where the entire backdrop had to be created visually and give the illusion of height and depth, which I think it achieved quite well...

 

I just think there are more complex things in ep2. effects that you wouldnt even know are effects, eg like the first shot of obi wan being lassooed and dragged by fett is CGI ! Ah well, I wonder what CG can do in the future.....

 

MTFBWYA

[Gabrobot]

Originally posted by toms

I still think that by the time Ep3 hits the audience will no longer be impressed with big CGi battles.

 

From what I've heard, the Clone Wars will be almost over at the beginning of the movie, so I don't think the movie is going to be centering much on that. Also, I heard that the Obi-Wan/Anakin fight will be the longest in cinematic history lasting about eleven minutes, I think...

 

Also, I thought of something LotR sure can't beat. LotR used a completely computer generated volcano...EpIII will feature a real one.

[toms]

Originally posted by Astrotoy7

cmon kids, we dont want to get into any geeky "CGI is better" fights. I am hardly qualified to say for certain but I would imagine rendering 2000 horses running across a field woul be realtively easier than the epII chase through coruscant for example, where the entire backdrop had to be created visually and give the illusion of height and depth, which I think it achieved quite well...

 

I just think there are more complex things in ep2. effects that you wouldnt even know are effects, eg like the first shot of obi wan being lassooed and dragged by fett is CGI ! Ah well, I wonder what CG can do in the future.....

 

we aren't fighting about which cgi is better, just disagreeing on which is harder. It is pretty universally acknowledged that organic "real life" shapes are the hardest to do in cgi as they are far more complex, rounded, fur or cloth covered shapes that move in much more complex ways than robotic or electric shapes. Heck, a playstation can render a realistic looking car as the shape is fairly simple and boxy and the animation only consists of moving the wheels. With a horse you have to move the limbs, taking into account bones, muscle structures, hair, manes, wind, tails and then the rider and all his gear as well.

Making the city scape chase in Ep2 would be pretty easy, you just create a lot of buildings (boxes) and vehicles (boxes) and then move them around paths. Fifth element did one just as good about 5 years ago.

So what i am saying is that the battle in Ep2 looked better, but was easier to do. The one in ROTK looked fake in places, but was a lot harder to pull off.

 

I assumed a lot of the Fett stuff was cgi... but ever wonder why he has his helmet on for all of it, because it would be a lot harder to make it look realistic if they had to model and animate a human face as well.

 

I think you will find that most of the towns, cities and the battlefield in RotK is cgi as well, but the thing that lets down CGI most often is the compositing (inserting CGi into a real scene without it looking out of place due to lighting etc..). This is where i think Gollum (best cgi character ever. period) really nailed it as he never seemed to be just inserted over the top as Jar jar or Yoda did occasionally.

 

From what I've heard, the Clone Wars will be almost over at the beginning of the movie, so I don't think the movie is going to be centering much on that. Also, I heard that the Obi-Wan/Anakin fight will be the longest in cinematic history lasting about eleven minutes, I think...

 

Also, I thought of something LotR sure can't beat. LotR used a completely computer generated volcano...EpIII will feature a real one.

 

probably. I don't mind them having a big battle. I just don't think they should rely on it for the Ohhh! factor it used to have.

 

11minutes? cinematic history of what???? I have seen hundreds of films with fight scenes longer than that. Heck, that smiths fight scene in Matrix reloaded seemed to go on for hours

 

i think you might find that they use a cgi volcano as well or it might get a tad dangerous for the actors ;-)

[Astrotoy7]

Originally posted by toms

....This is where i think Gollum (best cgi character ever. period) really nailed it as he never seemed to be just inserted over the top as Jar jar or Yoda did occasionally.....

 

yes, however it is Andy Serkis performance and voice acting that *really* makes gollums character so fantastic. to illustrate this, check out TTT dubbed in another language, where it isnt serkis doing gollums voice, ....AS did the role so well, you become wrapped up in the character and his personality rarher than sitting there looking at which bits look fake or were animated poorly.....

 

MTFBWYA

[Gabrobot]

Originally posted by toms

i think you might find that they use a cgi volcano as well or it might get a tad dangerous for the actors ;-)

 

Well you see, way back about a year ago there was a volcano in Itali that errupted, and George Lucas decided that he couldn't pass up the chance to get real up close footage of an errupting volcano, so he sent a couple of those crazy volcano photographers over to Itali with some high resolution digital cameras to film it at various angles and places. (Read it on theforce.net...stuck in my mind because it was the first EpIII shooting that was done) So it's still going to be somewhat a computer generated scene thing, but it's going to be real volcanism you see, mostly...

[manoman81]

If we're supposed to come from a SFX perspective on the 2 movies, ROTK will come out and stay on top of Ep III. I think that the difference is that Jackson wanted to use cgi and sfx to show different locations of Middle Earth. Lucas relies too heavily on cgi and sfx to show characters and locations.

 

The thing that made the OT great was that there were many people in costume (like the orcs in LOTR) and many of the scenes were shot on/ at places that looked like Tatooine etc.

 

Granted, there is no real place that looks like Corusant, but many of the scenes that Lucas wants looks too much like a video game. The real life actors look out of place in many of the scenes with cgi backgrounds.

[Prime]

Originally posted by toms

huh? thats the opposite of what i said. Futuristic cars and vehicles are a lot easier to do than natural looking substances like trees and horses as they have much simpler shapes, textures and animations. Why do you think Ep1 had a huge droid army??? cos they didn't have the ability to CGi lots of realistic looking humans at the time. LOTR has nearly mastered the humans and scenery, but it's horses still looked fake.

 

In the Two Towers comentary even peter jackson admits that the horses and wargs in the warg ambush look fake and not as good as he was hoping.

Sorry toms, I didn't explain myself very well. You are completely correct. Using CGI to create natural looking structures and creatures is a lot harder than creating vehicles, droids, and so on. What I was trying to say is that LOTR had an advantage because they didn't have to use CGI at all to create a significant part of the scenery, locations, and so on.

 

The LOTR crew did not have to create (for the most part) the landscape, buildings, horses (in the non-wide shots), orcs (again non-big army shots), and so on. They didn't have to create things like scenery and horses because they can easily be represented by the real thing. Edoras and Hobbiton were actually built as it was feasible to do so. Lucas did not have the same option with places like Coruscant, asteroid fields and so on. Certainly LOTR did some of those things as well, but a lot of the stuff was done practically, with minatures if the not life size.

 

I get the impression that many of the effects in LOTR were done pratically with models in addition to the CGI a lot more that Ep1 and 2 did. Hell, there were zero clonetrooper suits created. Every last one of them was CGI. Personally, I still find models more convincing.

 

So I agree with you that things such as Shelob and the fell beasts are a lot more difficult than droids and so on.

 

Originally posted by toms

I still think that by the time Ep3 hits the audience will no longer be impressed with big CGi battles.

Which is too bad, really.