Why Does Attack of the Clones Look Like a Video Game?
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- Опубликовано: 13 апр 2023
- An extended look at the visual effects of the awkward middle child of the Star Wars prequels.
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The Empire Wreckers actual play podcast:
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CG Model credits:
Anakin Skywalker model by Stym:
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Obi-Wan Kenobi model by sidgara
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If you'd like to dive deeper into the Star Wars Saga's development history yourself, here's all the behind-the-scenes sources I usually pull from:
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Sorry but I have to vehemently disagree that Watto was digital. It was quite clearly my mother-in-law.
I miss the days when Attack of the Clones was the worst Star Wars movie.
As a VFX Supervisor myself, this is a very good breakdown
It’s crazy how our brains register all these so small details without us realizing, and it’s so fine tuned anyone can see it, but almost no one can describe it. Very fascinating.
I think a lot of the "it looks like a videogame" things also come from more video-gamey camera work - lots of complex panning and following shots that don't feel real because they're just a digital camera flying through a digital model. Real cameras can't really do it so it ends up feeling unnatural to us, but it's the norm in video games, so we associate it with those.
I'm always happy to see someone else that appreciates Hayden Christensen's acting. I think he did a great job of portraying a weird teenager forced into these kinds of situations.
The opening scene for Revenge of the Sith, the Battle of Coruscant, is still one of the most incredible VFX scenes ever
It was The Guy From The Banking Clan who first really stood out to me as a character who was clearly not in the same physical space as the live actors.
Learning that Lucas meant the prequels to be essential tech demos really puts a lot about them into perspective.
I actually prefer to watch the prequels on DVD instead of on Blu-ray or 4K. The lower resolution helps hide a lot of the imperfections
I worked on this movie! Wow, great video, you absolutely nailed it. One thing that's hard to fully appreciate -- and explains a lot of the quality control issues -- is how incredibly difficult and time consuming it was to actually review final frames. You couldn't pull up the high-resolution composite on your machine and play the entire thing in real-time, unless if it was a very short shot, maybe 20 frames or less. You could play a low-resolution proxy video (which already was quite revolutionary compared to just a few years prior), or you could painstakingly step through the high-resolution frames one by one as they slowly loaded into memory, but there was neither enough memory nor enough I/O speed to just stream 2k final frames to your monitor for review. In order to review the frames you either had to transfer them to a custom type of review hardware that could play them in real-time, a transfer which could easily take 30+ minutes, assuming you could even book one of the few available review stations, or you had to send the final frames to film and review them in film dailies 12-36 hours later depending on how fast the shot was developed and delivered back to the facility. All of the combined to make it very difficult to catch the kinds of errors you point out for the volume of work that was being done, i.e. hundreds of shots in progress every day at any given time.
The lack of real clone troopers is almost the biggest problem i would say. Outlandish creatures and worlds, there we can suspend or disbelief. The armor that we know what it's supposed to look like we can't
I think the video-gamest shot in Attack of the Clones is when Yoda draws his lightsaber. There's a dramatic, swooping, mathematically perfect camera move that completely betrays the unreality of the moment while also exposing the flatness of the floor. It's the opposite of the modern style, which is to "shoot " CG moments as if there are physical cameras, treating them as real subjects.
It's unbelievable that the movie cameras they were using had less resolution than 1080p! I know the movie came out in 2002, but it still feels so weird that the camera would be so low-resolution for such a high-budget movie.
What's so interesting to me is how Attack of the Clones looks in relation to the other Prequels. Together, they feel like they're each from different stages of CGI. The Phantom Menace was groundbreaking in its scale of CGI, and while there is a lot of CGI in the film, plenty of practical effects were still there because they just couldn't do everything with computers like they could later. By the time Revenge of the Sith came out, the technology was mature enough to look great in every shot, and could be used consistently throughout the film. Attack of the Clones, on the other hand, feels like the awkward stage between them. There's a sense of empowerment that CGI can do anything, but they don't have the technology or manpower to do it all to the level of success they would hope, so it's stuck looking really artificial and not very impressive.
A testament to the practical effects in episode 1 and 2 is the scenes that get misjudged as being cgi when they were practical. A great example is the halls on camino, everyone thought they were cgi, and while the camino character walking with obi wan was the entire set was practical. It was just so well made and sterile it looked "fake".
On the full HD edition of revenge of the sith, during the elevator scene at Grievou's ship, Obi-Wan's hair reflects the green screen
Even if the CGI doesn't hold up well, damn the soundtrack even 20 years later is really damn good
That detail about Anakin's fidgeting was pretty neat. I wonder if that was a deliberate choice by someone or if it's just an accident that worked out well.
Cause it was filmed on crappy turn of the century digital cameras.