Visuals Discussion Thread

First of all, congratulations on a great idea for a thread!


I just want to say more generally:

George really went to town on AOTC, didn't he? The Battle of Geonosis shows his uncanny "digital oil painting" abilities at full tilt. It's an extremely delectable diorama -- or, indeed, a collection of them. The film canvas feels something like a balmy dumping ground: a zany garbage masher and suctioning sandcrawler, both operating at near-lightspeed, as Lucas embraces the elastic and voluble properties of digital filmmaking for maybe the first real time, leading to a sort of propellant, whimsical, "anything goes" quality approaching abstraction. Tessellated tussles on a gleaming turntable. Oh! What did I say?

I mean, basically, the guy has Anakin-like talents when it comes to action, intercutting, pacing, spectacle, mise-en-scene, colour palettes, symbolism, and layering in a multitude of groovy "micro narrative" beats. You can zone in just one aspect, analyse it for five seconds, and go "Damn, this guy is good!" Like that wacky "sound gun" used by that Geonosian which knocks Jedi and pillars over like tenpins (there is surely also a link between the two: the "pillars" of the galaxy getting waylaid and destroyed). It's just freakin' cool. So much going on: controlled chaos. Eye candy. In the best sense of the term. 

George Lucas is a bit like the Willy Wonka of digital cinema and far-out action fantasy. Could anyone really doubt this after the prequels? He loves his chocolate factory so much -- but only when he's showing it off to others. And we are all Golden Ticket holders. How fortunate we are that the universe created a George Lucas! 


There's some super good shit happening in the prequels, no doubt about it. I agree with the moments you highlighted. That Super does look insanely real! But I also don't care too much when things look a bit more smooth or cartoony. I mean, whatever. It's the prequels! My favourite epigram about the prequels is probably someone on IMDb, complaining about AOTC, who headed their review up: "It all looked REAL FAKE!" Real fake. Probably even better than digisheen. 

Anyway, yah. Yoda is outstanding, especially in ROTS. That scene you're talking about is exceptionally well done. But my favourite Yoda moment in the prequels, and maybe my favourite CG character moment ever, is that intense close-up on Yoda meditating on Polis Massa -- or rather, the wider shot, and then the close-up of his meditation being broken. The camera work is splendid, the music is just right, and the animation just couldn't be better. Yoda's odd look of concern, irritation, and mild shock when Bail enters the room, like interrupting a cat from a deep nap, is perfect:



Note here that the camera does a subtle pan-up -- it's first made clear Yoda is meditating with his hands in a meditation pose, and this is almost a subliminal impression before the camera moves up slightly and captures Bail, an anxious tower of energy, at full height in the background:





Meditation interrupted!

"Can't I get some damn peace on an asteroid in space??!!"







"Gah, dammit! Just solved a Rubik's Cube in five dimensions and started envisioning five Twi'lek dancers tweaking my ears, I did. Important, this better be!"

It's not so clear here, in these screencaps, but Yoda actually does a double-blink in the close-up, when Bail interrupts him.

Just look at the shadow detail on Yoda's face. There's a really great mood in Yoda, in the shot itself, and it feels ominous in a way that defies the written word.

Anyway, I remember that shot of Yoda opening his eyes intriguing me in the teaser trailer for ROTS, and my world hasn't been the same ever since.

And yes, I know he's meant to be conversing with Qui-Gon there, which only makes the scene all the cooler, stranger, and endlessly compelling. It's maybe the one moment in the movie that ROTS turns kinda inward and angelic-feeling (this scene is also well-placed in that contrast-y GL way and occurs immediately after Palpatine puts Anakin to sleep on Mustafar). But with slightly dark undertones even here. The PT in micro.

* * *

Oopsie. Sorry if I blurred the line between VFX and aesthetics. But it's hard to have one without the other. Or as Lucas once famously said: "A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing."

But I also like the way Battle Droid heads going spinning off when they're shot sometimes. That's neat. I mean, just in general, there's some nice destruction porn in the prequels, isn't there?

Wrecking the Trade Fed!





Precision shooting!





Ah, the prequels! So, so satisfying...

The digital aquarium that keeps on aquarium-ing. 

Episodes II and III are also the "Clone Wars" installments. They have more of a "living painting" feel. There's something more meta or manipulated about them. Just as Palpatine gains considerable power over the machinery of the Republic, so does Lucas, the out-of-universe "Father" of Star Wars, become more controlling and dexterous within the busy visual field. These episodes expertly blend dream and nightmare together. 


That's a really interesting way of putting it. Threepio also becomes "confused" in the droid factory. And yes: contrast, counterpointing, dissonance. Lucas is a master of these things. But whereas he uses almost a kind of grayscale in his earlier films, he went full "Technicolor" in the prequels. He even comments (in "The Beginning") that TPM is "bold in terms of jerking people around", and that the boldness is there by design ("It's stylistically designed to be that way"). Most people could only focus on Lucas admitting that he "may have gone too far in a few places" -- missing the point of his artistic experimentation and his embrace of extremes. 


Indeed. The chimerical digital tapestry of the prequels gives these films a unique cinematic timbre. There's a satisfying fusion of elements and a strong quality to the imagery, which alternates from the softly romantic, to the idyllic, to the chaotic, to the abstract. Different scenes and moments occupy different parts of the spectrum. If the droid factory tips the scales in one direction, Anakin's fireside confession is kinda the other side of that equation. Similarly, while a kind of tonal bifurcation is sometimes apparent, it's normally buried down in the mix, and different pieces give off slightly different vibes. The technologic visual construction is almost as "jazz riff-y" as the storytelling itself. 

It'd be interesting if it were somehow possible to "blend" all the prequel frames together and come out with some kind of aesthetic "average". I wonder what it would look like? Of course, one would, in practice, be left with a multitude of averages. Is there really one Chosen One? Nevertheless, some epic "P-frame" is a cool concept to think about. Kinda like Jango's DNA seeding all the clones.


Ugh, yeah! That was something I was vaguely thinking about in my last post. The copper-plated sound cannon I mentioned, combined with it being used by a termite-like alien, in a big brawl between Jedi and robots in a quasi-Martian landscape, is a level of visual delectation and weirdness almost entirely absent from the Disney projects. Disney erased 50% of what made me fall in love with Star Wars in the first place.

"VFX SEX"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction

Really great! I actually had something like those "summation" images in the back of my mind. I'd seen those frame compilations before, but not with all the films, nor in the form of tightly-packed circles.

Some years ago on TFN, I actually had a similar-ish circle/wheel/eye image for my avatar. See the following archival snapshot for an example (Post #58):

web.archive.org/web/20150624132043/http://boards.theforce.net/threads/is-revenge-of-the-sith-the-greatest-work-of-art-in-the-past-30-years.50030948/page-3#post-52470223

The image used for my avatar back then is an assemblage of "splitting door" imagery from TPM. Or to be more exact, it's all the following frames, in non-circle form, in this tabulated image I posted to Naberrie Fields last year (Reply #118):

naberriefields.freeforums.net/post/2731/thread

Lots of things look really neat when we see them from a new perspective. Or to use a quote I'm fond of:

"Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All the images above that you posted also remind me of Airy disks:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk


A computer generated Airy disk:



Real Airy disk (red laser beam through a micrometre pinhole):



Sort of appropriate for a series called STAR WARS.

The real size of stars confounded even the best, the most patient, and the most careful humans for thousands of years. Even Galileo got fooled by the Airy disk phenomenon. Yes, guys 'n' gals -- when you look at a star in the sky (except for the sun, where direct seeing isn't advisable except during sunset), you're not seeing its real size. In addition to atmospheric effects, it's impossible to see a star's actual size, since a) almost every star in the universe is beyond the perceptual limits of the human optical system (i.e., they're invisible to our senses), and b) of those few stars located in our galaxy that are visible by a human from Earth, all appear far too big due to the Airy disk phenomenon described above. Even today's most powerful telescopes can only resolve a handful of stars to their real size with hints of real surface features. Stars are incredibly far away and the universe is huge.

Or as Douglas Adams amusingly put it:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

Anyway... I guess the Star Wars movies make for some strange-looking Airy disks, not the least of which is due to their having a dark blob in the centre, instead of the light blob of real Airy disks. What happened? Someone sucked out the light. These must be black hole movies or something.

More musings:

- I notice that there are some faint blue rings visible inside the black blob in a few of the images. Do some of the movies have more intense end credits or something?

- I love the little band of red in the ROTS image for Mustafar.

- LOL. TESB and its cryo blues.

- TROS. WTF? Wasn't expecting so much green/yellow from you. But makes sense, actually. And I love the tiny band of red at the start denoting Mustafar again.

- AOTC has a gorgeous swirl of white (Kamino, I presume). I don't know if it's just my fancy, but AOTC also appears to be the only disk pattern with three distinct and near-equal outer rings. 

- Based on the way TPM and TESB appear, it looks like someone was using the 2004 (DVD) or 2011 (Blu-ray) John Lowry transfers. In many ways, that was maybe Star Wars at a colour optimum.

It would be interesting to see a 4K version of the rings for each movie to compare how different they are. To my eyes, a lot of Hoth looks more purple than blue now. And Mustafar is like a weird orangeish sepia in 4K than the red on the 2011 Blu-ray.

Has anyone seen any of the 3D transfers? Wondering what parts of the movie they emphasized (other than the podracer tube). I wish Disney would put them out in theatres, it's been 10 years and no public release.

Edit: On 2nd thought this might belong in the SE thread

Cryogenic Is there any chance you might have the moviebarcode for AOTC saved? What I mean is this kind of thing, which (this one is ROTS) became popular many years ago:

I came across all of them recently, except AOTC.