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.
The star wars movies by Lucas explicitly do not do this. When they do, it's for emphasis. Most shots in all 6 star wars films are static, wide, slow, formal.
That's what made the first Pacific Rim work: even in the all-CGI shots the digital cameras were placed where you'd be able to put a physical camera to follow the action if the thing was really happening: on on the ground looking up, in aerial shots as if a helicopter (or drone, these days) were watching, and so on. If the camera was one set on the ground, then it didn't track along to follow the jaeger or the kaiju, it panned as the subject moved past the camera and it had to rotate to keep it in view. Godzilla 2014 did a similar thing: when the male MUTO flew across the screen to attack Godzilla, the camera didn't follow it, the camera was at a distance, as a real one would be, in order to see what was happening.
George's Star Wars movies are shot like documentaries, so the goal of the cinematography is to make everything look like it was "caught" by the camera as opposed to being staged for it, which is where most of the impression that it looks like a real event that really took place in another galaxy is created. Also, you'd be surprised just how many models and sets they actually built for the prequels. There are objectively more practical effects in The Phantom Menace alone than the entire original trilogy combined.
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.
Thank you for your work, it is one of my first movies i watched in cinema as a kid. Had a great impact on me. Its easy to critique this movie in 2023 when every home computer these days are super computers compared to 22 years ago.
Thanks for your work on this movie! Even with all of the flaws, it's still a groundbreaking film in so many ways. It's good that you point out the limitations of being able to look at renders of scenes, and that the equipment to do so was in so much demand during the production. I can imagine that there was a lot of trial and error on the IT side of the house in trying to set up digital pipelines for handling all of that data, and that building the IT infrastructure to handle all of that data must have been an enormous engineering challenge.
You guys did an amazing job bringing the amazing designs of the concept artists like Feng Zhu and Dermot Power to film, especially with the restrictions you were under. Regardless of the imperfections, the overall gestalt of the movie comes through clear and it's a beautiful vision from all involved.
@@ozmond yeah but it was finished in a 2K DI and the 4K disc is upscaled. A movie shot on film doesn’t matter if they downscale everything to a lower resolution. The 4K disc would look better if they scanned in the original camera negatives and redid all of the special effects. But that’d never happen because it’d cost millions of dollars for something that a vast majority of people wouldn’t care about or really notice
@@Tomhyde098 What really makes Phantom Menace look way better than Clones and Sith is that they used a lot more practical effects, model work and sets. Clones and Sith leaned a lot heavier on digital effects. The backgrounds in the Jedi Temple look especially bad. Even though it's a subpar transfer with too much DNR, it looks way better than Clones. The CGI got a lot better in Sith, but they moved away from model work, sets, costumes and miniatures. So the Clone Troopers still look fake, the Jedi Temple backgrounds still look fake, the shots of the ships look worse, Mustufar doesn't look as good as the light beam room, etc. Another thing is Clones was shot in only 1080p on very early digital cameras.
@@Haispawner Honestly, RotS is the only prequel I can fully watch without skipping parts (Anakin and padded scenes in episode 2) And I don't know how there was such a jump in quality. Maybe because it had to set up the OT and so had all the important parts, But also it had lots of other stuff too such as the CGI being so much better.
I used to love revenge of the sith growing up and I tried to watch it again and I couldn’t get through that scene, because it was so boring and felt so fake.
Well that was one of it's purposes yes. It wasn't the main purpose though, Lucas still had a story he wanted to tell as shown through the majority of the behind the scenes material.
Much of Lucas' fortune was built on being the best in the business at special effects work. The money made from ticket sales on the prequels would have covered the cost of developing those tools, which would then be used in other movies by other film makers. Lucas is not the only one to do this. James Cameron used/uses exactly this business model for his company Digital Domain. Same can be said for Avatar. It's not a movie so much as a massive special effects demo reel showing off cutting edge digital effects work that other studios can pay to use in their productions.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee True, but that wasn't the main point of the movies. If you look at all the behind the scenes material, (especially behind the scenes books) then you'd find that Lucas did also indeed have a story/narrative he wanted to tell while also wanting to develop the technology. It's why he used digital cameras for Episode II which were actually a hassle for him to get too according to The Star Wars Archives 1999-2005.
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.
@@calebford6318 -He made it the fuck up- Human physiology. Our perceptions are geared considerably more for boosting survivability than accurately portraying reality. So even if our sensations pick up, say, a concave face, our perceptions will pick up a convex face where there is actually an concave one. There’s a video on here with a literally paper-thin dinosaur model that demonstrates this effect. Trust me, even knowing that ahead of looking at it and altering/gearing my expectations accordingly, you’ll still perceive an illusion that feels more correct over the reality that looks plain wrong. This is because perception itself is top-down and not bottom-up like sensation is. A brain’s interpretations of ambiguity actively force an illusion. What I’m getting at here is that the animation in Attack of the Clones was so bad the *brains of fans had to intervene to protect them.* You are now free to “🤓” me.
in all probability, your brain did NOT register most of those small details without you realizing it. most of the very small things he was pointing out was stuff that's visible only if you adjust the brightness and contrast so it looks far brighter and flatter than it does on screen not to mention blowing up the frame to several tens of times larger than they would have appeared on tv or in the theater. there's more obvious reasons like the animation quality or just motion in general. we're not subconscious geniuses.
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.
Yea I think that shot was the worst as far as the cgi looking unrealistic. It literally almost looks like it could be from the clone wars animated show
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.
They tried to do very much with computers in Phantom Menace already. And the big scope CGI stuff like the battle between the Gungans and the droids holds up very poorly today. Like, have you seen the grass when the battle droid transport ships arrive at the battlefield? AotC looks splendid in comparison.
@@witoldwitoszekrecords3253 A lot of the effects in the Original Trilogy look like shit at times too. That doesn't discount the ones that look amazing.
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.
If it wasn’t for people like George Lucas and Robert Rodriquez pushing for it and actually making movies with digital cameras, it may have taken even longer to take off or not happen at all. I also believe RED, Netflix, and 4K TVs all played a big role in why camera resolution jumped up so quickly in the past 20 years.
Though Revenge of the Sith was filmed in 2003 with a more advanced camera compared to Attack of the Clones being filmed in 2000 these days both cameras are ancient relics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta#List_of_CineAlta_cameras
@@DDavEEwhat are you talking about? They didn’t have to use shitty early 2000 digital cameras, traditional 35 mm film cameras have detail up to 8-10k resolution, and films from the 60s like 2001 a space odyssey shot on 70mm can support up to 16k it has so much detail. Digital looked like shit in the 2000s compared to film and we knew it back then. There’s no excuse.
@@jordanmartel2937 Yes, but those are film cameras, with their own limitations and issues. I wager 99.8% of stuff shot today is done digitally, simple because it's more convenient and that's part of the tech people like Lucas had a hand in reinforcing.
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.
I like to think he has more of a Jackie Chan physique. The dude wasn't big, but his muscles were tight. I remember some expert claiming he had a perfect muscle to fat ratio.
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.
As a digital compositor, I noticed this video in my recommendation and thought "Hey, what can it possibly say that is new to me?", but I love Star Wars so I watched it. And by God, I was wrong. This video is amazing, watched it breathlessly. Bonus points for mentioning that every delay by every other departments makes our work harder.
For me it is the ambient occlusion and lighting in general. Feels just like turning off all lighting effects and everything just glows, specially digital characters
One thing that helps hide Yoda's helmet hair is that he has that thin, combed back, old man white hair going on, which is already kinda helmet-y in real life.
I mean, can any movie that's ever been made to be said to have no VFX errors? If anything, the fact that most of the VFX errors in the prequels are so miniscule that you have to meticulously comb through them frame by frame in order to even find any proves just how good the movies actually look. Revenge of the Sith looks so good that it looks better than a lot of modern movies do despite being made with the VFX technology of over 15 years ago. The majority of the errors with Attack of the Clones' VFX are honestly explained by the fact that many of the VFX in question were experimental in nature. The technology was still relatively new, and George wanted to push the technology forward and use it to tell his story the way he envisioned it. I think it's aged fairly well for an experimental film that came out in 2002.
There also looks to be an issue that everything is in focus, lacking motion blur, lacking dof blur, grain is minimal and no subtle fog, dust general atmosphere to denote depth. Again would be interesting how more time/people could have solved much of this perhaps even at the final compositing stage
Frankly, not a ton. Computer Graphics were quite limited back then. Today we have more than enough memory and processing power to do several frames of temporal effects. We often render highly graphical games in 7-12 separate frames, and composite them together in a shader. The effects you are talking about can be done convincingly in real time now. You simply couldn't do that back then with semi-realistic shots like this, so making convincing motion blur was simply not really possible. Same goes for depth of field. Unless you "cheat" those effects are very processing and memory intensive. Lucas did make the first fully CGI short (The Adventures of André & Wally B.) with motion blur in 1984, but pretty sure the motion blur was made by hand by compositing shots properly together. Considering it was less than 2 minutes, that sounds quite feasible.
This is the best Prequel CGI analysis I have ever seen. I have watched hours and hours of BTS Prequel content, seen the movies more times than I can count, yet you managed to show me something I'd never seen before every 60 seconds! I really hope you do more Star Wars videos like this as this was an absolute joy to watch, thank you :)
I mean a major thing … is that non of these characters have any subsurface scattering- at least that I can see. That would do wonders for lighting of skin .
Excellent breakdown. It isn't just VFX having to do more with less - think most workers and industries can relate these days! Stuck in a constant squeeze.
@@anomalyinc3239 Hes talking about QC issues and these are things the team would notice and fix before release- but they didn't have easy fast HD review of shots back then.
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 agree. The clone-trooper crowd scenes work ok, but the individuals generally have an over-acting style, giving them a "Power Rangers" feel. (see the scene when Padme falls from the transport onto the sand dune).
@@cheerleadersonsafari I don't think we've ever seen practical clone troopers in Disney-era Live Action stuff, but even if we include stuff like the Stormtroopers, the practical armour is miles ahead of the CGI clone troopers, ESPECIALLY with the weird, floating heads that you see in AotC and RotS when they take their helmets off. The Night-Troopers in Ahsoka were fine when they were practical (in terms of visual quality, I'm not talking about their aesthetic appearance), but when they became zombies, and were covered in CGI (for some reason), they were still bad, but better than AotC thanks to the technology having developed a lot since.
@@thevoidlord1796We have seen practical clone troopers in Book of Boba Fett, Mandalorian, Andor and Ahsoka and with today's technology CGI clone troopers would definitely look better than what we saw in these shows.
Most valuable piece of info I got from this video was that Anakin fidgets with his hands a lot (which I hadn't ever realized), connecting that line about finding comfort in fixing things to a detail in Hayden's performance that subtly keeps the character's trauma real. Yet another detail showing how well Anakin was portrayed. Whole video is pretty dope though +1 sub
@@jjoe7078 He wasn't written as well as he should've been I agree, but I think it's good to find details within the films that you can appreciate to make the experience more enjoyable
TDLR: It was a very ambitious and experimental movie pushing what could actually be done 20 years ago. Somebody had to go first and figure it out, mistakes and all. Also I really appreciate this breakdown. So much prequel criticism ignores the context the movie was made in or what they where trying to do. Many people just say "CGI looks bad" and leave it at that which is ignorant, intentional or not. Great video.
"you were so concerned with whether or not you could you never stopped to consider whether or not you should" George did all this CGI shit so he could let the computer make the movie for him in post-production and he didn't have to actually direct a movie, and this style of filmmaking led to the mass-produced CGI marvel slop we get so often today.
@@Ryuk45 Such an ignorant take, lol. "The computer" didn't make the film for him. He wrote the film, he directed it, it was his story and he had a lot of collaborators, thousands of people worked on these films from the most overlooked things like cooking meals for the crew, to designing a wardrobre, to designing characters, composing music, sound design, VFX artists who worked on CG, VFX artists who worked with the practical sets and effects, etc. This was the combined work of thousands of people to serve the story of someone who wrote his own stories exactly how he wanted to and self financed his films. It's not at all comparable to Disney Marvel stuff.
@@Ryuk45fun fact! The prequels had far fewer VFX shots than the sequels did! The only reason anyone complains about CGI is because it was new technology at the time and George and the industry as a whole wanted to push the boundaries of what we thought was possible with computers!
That one stormtrooper in the background running away in the middle of the conversation just saw his other pal off screen and ran towards him. "Jerry? Is that really you? OMG we haven't seen each other for a really long time since High School!". Or he said to the other one "I'm sorry but I've to go to an important meeting, I'll be back!" or "Oh I forgot that I've a date with my partner right now! My partner would be very mad if I broke our promise again!" and ran off. Either way the other one just said "ok".
I feel there’s always a lot of “make them watch this hand, instead of this one” is used. What I mean is, that I myself never caught any of the mistake even though my brain knew there was. Things either moved too fast, or my attention was focused elsewhere in a shot instead of what is an obvious mistake. It’s funny how the brain knows something is off, but not too sure exactly what it is. Interesting video, I learned a lot here!
@@Jiub_SN Yes 80% is quite well, but one studio messed up rendering the clone troopers. Probabaly no Global Illumination or other simular fake technices at the time. The clone troopers look very CG at times. But not always.
I knew the fact that early digital cameras being used on episode 2 was a big problem, but the fact that the picture is lower resolution than a youtube video is just so painful, good lord.
This is seriously one of my favorite videos on youtube, please make more! It's so stimulating to think about the intersection of reality, animation, and technology
I was waiting for the bit on light. I'm a traditional artist & was taught that the most small detail will be evident on an object where it transitions from light to shadow - and your example of backlit Obi-Wan's robe vs. CGI Yoda is a perfect one. Most of the lighting in general in this movie seemed kind of soft to me - that's what stood out most, personally - perhaps that was in an effort to hide the lack of small detail which would show up more with harsher lighting? (Or maybe it's just an artifact of how the comparatively lo-res, not-as-high-poly-as-today models look, even when lit 'realistically'?)
I do wonder if its intentional, harsh lighting would make the lack of ambient occlusion and digital shadows even more obvious compared to the real shadows.
I actually remember an article in Maximum PC magazine in sometime in 2002 after Attack of the Clones in theaters was released, it was a roundtable about the new graphics cards from nVidia and ATI and the graphics engines that would leverage them. At the time, the Yoda model was the most sophisticated piece of CGI set in a "realistic environment" the world had seen, and one of the statements were saying "in 10 years time we should be able to run the Yoda model in real-time and make it interactive in a video game," so yeah that kinda plays into the whole subject matter here. How about that, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Always loved the way Clones looks, it's such a fascinating time capsule of the transition from early CGI to something closer to what we have now. You can feel Lucas and ILM really trying their hardest to break the barriers of what was possible. Clones' awkward visuals result in the trilogy being uneven, with Menace being a gorgeous, filmic, mostly practical film and Sith being a masterful use of CGI to make the world feel immense and detailed. But at the same time it also provides such an interesting view of the transition of special effects in those years the Prequels were being made. Oddly enough, Clones also has some of the franchise's most beautiful shots despite being so uneven.
i really disagree with describing any of these films as “gorgeous” or “beautiful” at really any point but it certainly is _interesting_ to have three films from the same series to see the steady change in technology. another similar case would be the matrix films; crazy auteur, vfx-obsessed, boundary-pushing directors and all, too. i’m still not convinced that in either case the end result were good movies or a better situation for vfx in general. progress … but at what human cost? vfx artists have desperately needed a large scale industry strike for years, too, now - and in a way we can certainly blame these early director pioneers for treating their artists like disposable meat bags whose labour power stood in the way of cost-cutting for the contemporary sweat shop situation we have. i know prequel defenders like to portray lucas as a benevolent and misunderstood visionary but the lucas from this time has always seemed to me more like he had become the very thing he was critical of at the beginning of his career; one of the greedy materialistic capitalist overlords that ruined the world and produced the dystopia we see in THX 1138.
phantom menace is ugly as fuck dude. ROTS is probably the best CGI movie ever made but even then has some really rough moments. The force awakens and last jedi are the most beautiful and visually pleasing Star Wars movies by far. Probably the only reason to watch them at this point.
@@barkley8285phantom menace is gorgeous. Best cgi movie ever made? You've clearly never seen the transformers films. Episode 7 and 8 were forgettable visually. There was nothing interesting or unique going on
@@novustalks7525The cinematography of 8 was amazing. It has a lot of really beautiful shots in isolation. Unfortunately in context they don't mean anything, as the movie itself is hot garbage. For me, the visuals are the only thing the movie has, which is unfortunate considering they could have been powerful had the movie made any sense, but I do think the movie is visually gorgeous. I strongly disagree that it's forgettable.
One conspicuous issue in AOTC, that I saw pointed out a while ago, is that dirt/grunge on clone armor completely lacks roughness and bump or normals maps. You can see this conspicuously when the sun reflects off their armor into the camera on Geonosis. It's a really bizarre and inexcusable omission for a blockbuster film, given that even _games_ soon after that time were starting to incorporate shaders with all of those into real time rendering.
Nah. Leave them alone. The "special editions" showed how poorly that kind of thing ages. Leave them be as projects of their time, appreciate them, and apply those lessons to newer products. Of course disney is making AOTC look good these days, so......
I was just watching "The Meg" the other day and while some will say it's a Jaws rip-off (kind of agree on that one) I think the shark "looks better" (tongue-in-cheek sarcasm :). They even had "we caught "A" shark....not "THE" shark moment......
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.
Yup. The reason why people think Hayden acted poorly was because the dialogue he was given kept demanding that he shift from an extremely grounded performance to an extremely theatrical performance, and it's usually easier to strike a balance between the two than it is to keep flip flopping between them.
this is a complete fallacy, there are movies with awkward teens that people/critics love. star wars isn't one of them because it wasn't a good performance. it was awkward acting for an awkward character. you didn't crack the nut that everyone else couldn't.
@@ImperialCalebOh no, I agree that the acting wasn't good. I'm just saying that I don't think many actors could have done a better job due to how differently Anakin was written from scene to scene. It's like Hayden had to play two completely different characters and it's hard to bridge that gap.
@@ImperialCaleb ☝️🤓 “ummm sir that’s a fallacy” The funniest part here is that I didn’t even commit a logical fallacy, and even if I did, you yourself are committing the Fallacy Fallacy. Fallacy isn’t a magic “win the argument” button.
Honestly this film more than any is deserving of a remaster. Not to replace the old, but as a new option we can use to compare how far VFX has come. Redo some of the animations, expand background detail, fix the damn light levels, maybe use AI upscaling to add some texture back to the rotoscoped areas. Even disliking the movie, I'd watch the hell out of that
Won't happen ever. Under the terms of the contract, if Disney change anything from episodes 1-6, all the profit goes to Lucas. And remastering AOTC would cost millions Disney, they'll never do that. Pray for AI to redo it on your PC soon.
I do need to correct you on one thing: Subsurface scattering was used on Yoda's ear in several shots. In the scene where he's riding in the Gunship, the sun shines through his ears.
I went into a big electronics shop in Japan, showing off the latest 4k and 8k TVs. They were playing the droid factory sequence from Episode 3 and I really did think it was a videogame cutscene! Even the live actors looked... "off" somehow, I assumed they were deepfaked into the "game" because the real actors have aged.
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".
@@peterroe2993 for thematic purposes for example. Lucas contrasts the Kamino with Naboo constantly… seeing how passionate he was about digital cinematography and animation he could have constructed Naboo solely with visual effects as well, but he deliberately shot these scenes on real places (Spain and Italy) to contrast nature with technology and industry. If you watch his more experimental films (THX 1138 or everyone lived in a pretty how town), you’ll notice this was a recurrent topic he addressed. Is not that he is lazy or anything, this was pretty much well-thought and used as a contrast to expose his themes. The prequels are actually way better than what people give Lucas credit for
@jonathanbirch2022 You're right, it wasn't entirely practical from a "what you see is what you get" perspective, but in this instance I am choosing to call practical effects models, sets, recordings of actual people etc. If it was made by hand and filmed it is "practical", in the industry if it is a model it is called a practical effect. The point I'm specifically wanting to make is how people said the hallways of the Kamino clone facility looked like "bad cgi" but they are in fact "practical" effects, as in they are models, not CGI.
As a former SFX and VFX Artist (TD) I agree with the animations. But the biggest “video game” feeling are the poor textures. Color saturation often is too much or too little, the occlusion isn’t there and it all lacks surface imperfections- that also goes for the characters. Skin is very blotchy and certain areas are well bled through and have more rose (or olive in case of a yoda I guess) and others don’t. And little pores, little freckles and little bumps all the imperfections add up. When I worked in SFX make up, it was very easy to add those. And initially when you literally dissolve wax clay and put it on a chip brush and flick it on, you get a heart attack, because your modeling looks terrible. But you noticed that when you continue and vary the amount of solvents and later those imperfection and then gently blend them in, instantly adds realism. This is not (still not) easy to do in digital. And color matching is a lot easier now, I actually wrote plug-ins for Nuke pipelines to automatically set black, white and rgb levels based on a reference block. Which only require the smalles (artistic) changes from an compositor. But that’s only as good as the imperfections, in the shader and material. lol: you get to the occlusion now 😂
It isn’t just terrible in comparison. It was just plain terrible back then. And not due to many imperceivably small imperfections and animation flaws. Major things like textures of characters in the foreground. These should have been live action. There’s no reason a few troopers in foreground couldn’t be live. It came across as cheap, lazy, or rushed, forced overuse of cgi, not caring about the audience. The clone troopers looked so fake. As did Yoda. As did many other things. It killed the realism and made us not care about the characters or outcomes. It absolutely looked like a video game or animated feature, not live action. Even if video games of the time weren’t up to this level yet. It just looked like a higher quality video game. Very fake. I watched episodes 4-6 over and over countless times. Episodes 1-3 i didn’t care if i ever saw again. Not because Jarjar was annoying and ridiculous. Or the pod race was too long. Or the bad acting. It was because the extensive use of bad computer graphics killed the realism and made me not invested or interested.
I went into this expecting just another 30+ min video trashing AOTC but instead was presented with an incredible crash course lesson on VFX as a whole. I now know more about this than I ever thought I would and have SO much more respect and appreciation for the art. Very well done!
18 дней назад+1
One item you missed wrt people thinking the movie "looks like a videogame" is that the screenplay *feels* like a videogame. Walking around while getting a lore dump, platform jumping, on-rail driving level, mandatory arena fight and so on. When people see the action as videogamey, it's easy to see the visuals as videogamey.
So interesting. I actually feel similarly about Clones as I do Hope. I've watched both so many times that I notice things that look slightly off and I always get the same feeling. This movie feels like somebody made it in their garage and that makes me want to do the same. That's not an insult to the movies, just a testament to human ingenuity and imagination.
In all honesty watching a new home in original quality like through a old 8mm archive makes the visual effects far more impressive and makes you realize how good they were for the time
@@cultofsucc5807 "A New Home" .. awesome movie about a young family purchasing their beautiful starter home with a dream of prosperity and a family to call their own. Great film! 👍🏻
I definitely hadn't consciously picked up on most of these things. If I were asked to describe what was wrong with the CGI in this movie I'd probably say things like "animations look floaty and unnatural", "surfaces look weirdly smooth", "a lot of the backgrounds are too obviously CG and the real elements stick out ". This was an enjoyable and interesting video to watch. I'm definitely subscribing.
There's a way to cheat hair simulation that would have potentially worked for a lot of Yoda back in the day: simulate it as a low polygon softbody and apply that as deformation. Then of course cluster simulation etc. But this being a late 90s production, they didn't really have something off the shelf and the possible options were for sure not all too well researched. There also isn't a rule that says CG cloth has to behave incorrectly. The underlying model even back in the day is a mass spring system, but there's nothing to say that the spring weights have to be isotropic, indeed you can just model cloth that either does or doesn't stretch diagonally to the weave that way. You can even imagine vertex painting a spring stiffness mask to harden up those bits of cloth supported by a seam, such as to not make collars swim away too badly. It's not specifically computationally intensive, it just requires that extra iteration experimentation and effort, and engineering as well. Differences between specular and metallic reflections were not particularly well understood back then either, the easiest distinction is that metal colour affects reflection, and every metal has its own shade, while other reflective surfaces cannot modify reflected colour. The shading model of the era is effectively layered, superimposing a perfectly matt surface with one that selectively creates highlights, while real surfaces don't behave this way. Another problem was that when you have specular, the light reflected there needs to not be available to the underlying diffuse layer, but the classic rendering models neglect this conservation of energy. This may sound a little abstract and the corrected model is even usually difficult to tell in direct comparison, but problems like these do all add up. That being said there's rarely a time when i look at a modern CG heavy movie and think that it doesn't look like a videogame cutscene - not that it bothers me, i'm used to it, but i do think we have medium traits sort of leaking into each other this way, where they converge. There's something about special effects heavy 60s to 90s films that we lost, but what is it exactly? Why isn't a film like Barbarella or 2001 filmed today?
As a full time VFX compositor, the breakdown of the shot at 23:37 is so relatable it almost gave me PTSD haha. It's exactly the kind of stuff that would keep someone like me working overtime for days. This kind of 2D comp stuff is usually what takes the longest to do, just a lot of rotoshapes and 2D patches.
Totally non-related, I'm an optometrist, but this is what I was thinking about too, like "dude imagine working for hours, if not days, if not weeks, if not months, doing something like this, and then, years later, to the 2023 VFX artist, your work is broke down and errors are found when back then it was basically most of the best work "
@@MrTaitanz Actaully, if that happened today, I would chuckle and get some satisfaction that my leads doing all this internal tech check still didnt catch that. Sort of a "gotcha!" moment. Like trust me, as soon as the shot is approved we really don't care if you find something like this.
What a very balanced presentation, well done. I saw Ep ll in IMAX and it was almost unwatchable, especially the speeder chase. I teach after effects and bring up black levels all the time. If Lucas is so eager to "improve" the original trilogy, he should consider this film as well. I wish they had shot film stock alongside the rinky-dink 1.56 megapixels. This movie was the sacrificial lamb to move the industry forward.
I hear the IMAX version was heavily cut down due to the limitations of theater projectors of the time. Do you recall anything being cut from that screening?
@@Double-R-Nothing if the movie was cut down a bit, I didn't notice. It was a long time ago, in a theater far, far away. 😊. If there is a limit, my guess it's due to the size of the platter the film sits on.
So refreshing to watch a critique of a Star Wars prequel that's actually well-researched and in good faith. While I think the imagination and experimentation of the trilogy eclipses its technical flaws (I'd even argue that its video-gamey qualities are an assured aesthetic ripe for cinematic analysis), I very much appreciated the perspective of somebody who knows how it all ticks. Very much excited for your Transformers video!
I'd second that argument, Attack of The Clones feels the "weirdest" out of the three movies, but that means it's left the biggest impression on me, and I'd love to see something able to match it somehow.
@@numetal_samurai There are no compelling arguments for why the prequels are bad movies despite the fact that people have had over two decades to make those arguments. I seriously doubt you'll be the first person to make that argument given how nearly all of the criticism the prequels have received is just a giant circle-jerking echo chamber made up of original trilogy fanboys who don't have a solid grasp of what Star Wars even is or was intended to be.
Anakin's shadow on the Tatooine home was a critical moment in the film. There were movie posters advertising the film that had this shadow isolated and it was a silhouette of Darth Vader's helmet. It was a bit of foreshadowing and chill-inducing. Brilliant!
Man, this is a great video. I know ZERO about visual effects, other than as a consumer. I do however know when stuff doesn't look quite right, or feel quite right and I always appreciate it when someone with inside knowledge breaks it down into words I can understand. Thank you for this
Also this channel is CRIMINALLY undersubbed. I've watched a couple videos so far, and have decided to binge all your videos today! Keep it up dude, you're going places.
Man, I’d never picked up on the outlines of the shot of Padmé and Anakin at the homestead before this. Now they’re clear as day lmao. Still an amazing effort and a hugely important film for VFX
I love how you broke down lightning and texture, it really makes me think of ambient light in a different way. Like, viewing every visible color as a light source? Thats so cool, i can apply that to my painting and drawing.
The Phantom Menace is worse than AotC, it's only the duel in the end that holds PM up but AotC at least has good action throughout, interspersed by awkward narrative and dialogue.
I genuinely find Phantom Menace to be harder to get through. Like, at least I could roughly follow the plot of Attack of the Clones my whole life. I didn't know what the plot even was in the Phantom Menace until I went to see the re-release in cinemas a couple days ago, and I went in with the intent to actively try my absolute hardest to understand what was happening.
What's really crazy, is I didn't notice any of this when I watched the movie. Even though, as you highlight in this video, these are all entirely present in the movie. It's crazy how a trained eye can see entirely different things than an untrained eye.
Cause it was filmed on crappy turn of the century digital cameras. That's why the Phantom Menace looks so much better than the other 2 prequels, it was the only one that was filmed on film.
That's not entirely the case, though. Yes, most of EP1 was done on film, but the final cut was still done at the same resolution as the other prequels, and was even DNRd to hell, especially in the 4K release, which didn't even bother re-scanning the non-digital footage into a native 4K presentation. Film, when treated properly, will hold up better, but sadly that's not the case here.
Another thing to consider is that most people's experience with the OT today is from one of the many special editions, where they cleaned up a lot of the compositing artifacts inherent to physically layering two film strips on top of each other and copying the resulting image. If you manage to land a copy of the actual 1977 release, you'll really feel its age.
Such copies do exist (google Empire Strikes Back Grindhouse Edition for example) and they still look superior to Attack of the Clones. There is some organic tangibility in practical and optical effects that makes them age more gracefully than digital. Unlike CGI they don't look cheap, they just look vintage.
Funnily enough, I liked some of those better than the "cleaned-up" ones. My school library had the early editions of the Original Trilogy DVDs, with the (an?) remaster on Disc One and the original on Disc Two (IIRC it's not quite Laserdisc original, but close). I always preferred seeing the "halo" around the lightsabers, and the slightly dodgy outline around the speeder and the X-wing.
Nah I grew up watching the CBS Fox released OT movies with all its imperfections, still enjoy them because they where working within limitations of the time, the prequels where clearly the result of a man who had all the resources possible to make better art even at the time, but who CLEARLY didnt care. With all the errors in color correction and compositing and CG and tone in all the prequels come from pure laziness.
Excellent video. Put into words things I had half-noticed from when I was a kid, but could not articulate at all. Next maybe you could explain why season 3 of The Mandalorian looks like a car insurance ad.
4:12 wait.. my sarcasm sensor is acting up. 8,4 million hours? That's close to 100.000 years of render time. And they did it in 3 years. These people are overworked indeed
Processor hours to render. One hour on one core is one processor hour. ILM presumably has render farms, possibly millions of CPU cores working in tandem like a supercomputer (a million cores rendering at once for a single real-time hour would be counted as a million processor hours). And that's just for rendering out the film-ready image, not the workspace environment they assembled the scene in, which would be significantly less resource intensive. They're basically saying it took a lot of computational power to render, not necessarily that it literally took a long time (though I imagine it was still days, if not weeks, in real-time).
Just looked it up. ILM's render farm is called the Death Star and it had around 3000 processors... in 2005. They don't talk publicly about it so we don't actually know about its current configuration but it's safe to say it's significantly bigger than it was 19 years ago. I was exaggerating when I said "millions" but honestly, it wouldn't surprise me.
@@AnnDVine This comment here is the best example peak Dunning Kruger, hears a big big number, knows about the overwork, puts them together and has no idea that the two is not even CLOSE to related :P
Amazing that it was all done in less than 1080p. Really a great job and you only notice the "issues" under a fine tooth comb..in theaters you would have been blown away and as a theatrical experience it would have achieved the goal. Only with hindsight can we critique it so precisely....
remote control/animatronic yes, but not a "muppet" like in ESB. Mostly because much of Yoda we saw was in the Jedi Council Chamber or in Palpatine's office where he could conveniently sit in a chair and not move much.
It's all those little things you masterfully pointed out. The low res textures, blurring, shadows and lack of shadows, CG characters and clipping. It does give the overall film a playstation 2 era kind of vibe to it all. All those tiny things that you don't consciously notice, but they're still there and just leave you in disbelief. Although, with all that said and done I still find it astounding they were able to accomplish this feat over 20 years ago. They really pushed the limits and made possible so much of what we take for granted today.
This is amazing - for me it drives home just how hard you can work, how much effort and brilliance you can bring to vfx, and STILL fall short of the human eye. The people who created these effects are so so clever and yet we can subconsciously see the strings. Thank you so much for this really fascinating analysis:)
Because George likes to push technological bonderies within filmmaking. He did it with the Originals, and he wanted to do it again with the Prequels. And since CGI really started to become popular in the 1990's, he wanted to push that even further
@EmpireWreckers: You actually made a mistake at 26:07. 2K is 2048×1080, not the 2560×1440 you named. While some gaming monitor manufacturers are using 2K to describe their 1440p monitors, in the film industry DCI 2K has long been standardized to mean 2048×1080. Additionally, when filming on anamorphic glass, 1440×1080 would be more than enough to deliver a clean DCI 2K image, as the image itself would already be stretched in the lens.
@nrezmerski in terms of gaming that may be true, but for cinema 2K has never meant anything than 2048×1080 and variations of it. In cinema, 2560×1440 has never been used, and as result, the graphic at that timestamp is wrong.
Yeah that bugged me a little coming from a VFX artist. It's usually something people repeat when they hear someone else use the term without knowing it's wrong. It seems to me inexperienced PC gamers started calling it 2K a while ago and manufacturers picked up on it because I've been hearing less technically inclined people call it that for a decade but haven't heard many monitor manufacturers call it that until somewhat recently
I think it's especially impressive how good most of these shots and models were, 22 years ago. Sure a lot of them are only on screen for 2 or 3 seconds, but for those 2 or 3 seconds, they shine. Of course we nitpick things on our 30th viewing on the bluray, where we can slow things down to 1/8th speed and pause at will. The biggest shame I think, as pointed elsewhere, is the lack of a practical clone trooper costume. It's VERY impressive that all of them were digital, but it also is just a genuine shame about them. Though maybe it'd be unfair making 6-7 different costumes just for Mr. Morrison, even if he does deserve it.
For me, when I first saw ATOC in the theater, the thing that killed my immersion and made me feel like I was watching video game cutscenes was the Zam Wessell scenes in Coruscant - specifically the ones where the actor is clearly in front of a blue screen with all of the neon signboards and advertising. It immediately reminded me of the cutscenes from the Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2 video game which had come out only a couple years earlier. Obviously the movie had far better renderings and resolution, but the jarring bluescreen effect of "something real in front of something fake" was immediately apparent, and that carried through all of the prequels.
I was on On Set Dresser for years in Hollywood. On Sets deal with set continuity alongside Script Supervisors. One thing this video forgot to mention (although the excellent distinctions re: light came close) is that sets and locations will always be filmed through air. Air is full of microscopic particles that, themselves, bounce light. Like the “micro-poof” of dust as an actor sits on a sofa or rolls over on bedding. The stage dust that eddies around the grid, 15 feet above the set where the lights hang. All of this combines to the human eye (the ultimate in camera technology) to create a warmth that digital will likely never overcome.
It's really interesting to hear a professional who's also a fan take it apart in detail like this. I do know the feeling you describe but now I actually understand it, and that feels very good indeed. Thank you.
@@MaryBrownIsTheBlairWitch Well, I can only speak for myself, but I've been obsessed with Star Wars for nearly 24 years now. I adore the prequels, with Revenge of the Sith being my favorite Star Wars movie overall. I think the criticisms in this video were pretty valid and fair (specially from a VFX technical standpoint) but they don't affect my enjoyment of the movie at all. Btw, I would have gone crazy as a kid if we had games with graphics like AotC's back in 2002.
@@MaryBrownIsTheBlairWitchA real "fan" can point out faults all they want, you can enjoy a movie and be a fan despite said faults. And this video is more of an analysis/breakdown of the movie effects rather than the writing/story.
I actually love that the Clones and everything relating to the Grand Army of the Republic is CGI, since it highlights the mass production and cloning of it all. Clones are clones, and making them CGI helps emphasize that, and their tools are mass produced for all the clone to use, and since their tools are extensions of themselves, CGI helps in that regard too of making them feel artificial.
This was an absolutely fascinating video. Huge credit to you and I really hope more of your videos get favored by the algorithm. It's EXTREMELY rare that I watch a video with no particular connection to the subject material, and yet finish it completely.
Lucas was so excited about all this new technology that he never stopped to think whether he should actually be using it, and whether it would hold up in the future. Films aren't like video games, where a certain amount of leeway is given to fakeness. If it doesn't look realistic in films, it is immediately obvious and only compounds with time. It's amazing that with all the talent working on the prequels, there wasn't any quality control. Any competent film maker would've looked at the Yoda fight for example, and said: "This is too much for us to handle. It looks fake. Let's scale it down and do something more manageable".
![Twenty One Pilots - “The Line” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/E2Rj2gQAyPA/mqdefault.jpg)
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.
Exactly
The star wars movies by Lucas explicitly do not do this. When they do, it's for emphasis. Most shots in all 6 star wars films are static, wide, slow, formal.
That's what made the first Pacific Rim work: even in the all-CGI shots the digital cameras were placed where you'd be able to put a physical camera to follow the action if the thing was really happening: on on the ground looking up, in aerial shots as if a helicopter (or drone, these days) were watching, and so on. If the camera was one set on the ground, then it didn't track along to follow the jaeger or the kaiju, it panned as the subject moved past the camera and it had to rotate to keep it in view. Godzilla 2014 did a similar thing: when the male MUTO flew across the screen to attack Godzilla, the camera didn't follow it, the camera was at a distance, as a real one would be, in order to see what was happening.
George's Star Wars movies are shot like documentaries, so the goal of the cinematography is to make everything look like it was "caught" by the camera as opposed to being staged for it, which is where most of the impression that it looks like a real event that really took place in another galaxy is created. Also, you'd be surprised just how many models and sets they actually built for the prequels. There are objectively more practical effects in The Phantom Menace alone than the entire original trilogy combined.
Exactly, the cinematography of the prequels is very ugly.
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.
Thank you for your work, it is one of my first movies i watched in cinema as a kid. Had a great impact on me. Its easy to critique this movie in 2023 when every home computer these days are super computers compared to 22 years ago.
Thanks for your work on this movie! Even with all of the flaws, it's still a groundbreaking film in so many ways.
It's good that you point out the limitations of being able to look at renders of scenes, and that the equipment to do so was in so much demand during the production. I can imagine that there was a lot of trial and error on the IT side of the house in trying to set up digital pipelines for handling all of that data, and that building the IT infrastructure to handle all of that data must have been an enormous engineering challenge.
You guys did an amazing job bringing the amazing designs of the concept artists like Feng Zhu and Dermot Power to film, especially with the restrictions you were under. Regardless of the imperfections, the overall gestalt of the movie comes through clear and it's a beautiful vision from all involved.
Thanks for your work! There’s so much to love about the movie, including many of the affects.
Come on dude it’s terrible. At least Mando looked better due to actual real sets.
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
Phantom menace looks good in 4K cuz it was shot on film
@@ozmond yeah but it was finished in a 2K DI and the 4K disc is upscaled. A movie shot on film doesn’t matter if they downscale everything to a lower resolution. The 4K disc would look better if they scanned in the original camera negatives and redid all of the special effects. But that’d never happen because it’d cost millions of dollars for something that a vast majority of people wouldn’t care about or really notice
@@Tomhyde098 The disc suffers from very heavy DNR as well, feeling like it was an attempt to match the look of the later two.
@@Tomhyde098 What really makes Phantom Menace look way better than Clones and Sith is that they used a lot more practical effects, model work and sets. Clones and Sith leaned a lot heavier on digital effects. The backgrounds in the Jedi Temple look especially bad. Even though it's a subpar transfer with too much DNR, it looks way better than Clones. The CGI got a lot better in Sith, but they moved away from model work, sets, costumes and miniatures. So the Clone Troopers still look fake, the Jedi Temple backgrounds still look fake, the shots of the ships look worse, Mustufar doesn't look as good as the light beam room, etc. Another thing is Clones was shot in only 1080p on very early digital cameras.
I prefer to watch LOTR in HD , rather 4K.
The opening scene for Revenge of the Sith, the Battle of Coruscant, is still one of the most incredible VFX scenes ever
Revenge of the Sith is so much better than the other prequels it's not even funny.
Agreed!
@@Haispawner Honestly, RotS is the only prequel I can fully watch without skipping parts (Anakin and padded scenes in episode 2) And I don't know how there was such a jump in quality. Maybe because it had to set up the OT and so had all the important parts, But also it had lots of other stuff too such as the CGI being so much better.
@@diablo_wayne Agreed, the script's dialogue and conversations are much more believable.
I used to love revenge of the sith growing up and I tried to watch it again and I couldn’t get through that scene, because it was so boring and felt so fake.
Learning that Lucas meant the prequels to be essential tech demos really puts a lot about them into perspective.
Also means a lot when the central storyline of AOTC is about the reproduction of a benevolent army which eventually becomes the enemy
Well that was one of it's purposes yes. It wasn't the main purpose though, Lucas still had a story he wanted to tell as shown through the majority of the behind the scenes material.
Much of Lucas' fortune was built on being the best in the business at special effects work. The money made from ticket sales on the prequels would have covered the cost of developing those tools, which would then be used in other movies by other film makers.
Lucas is not the only one to do this. James Cameron used/uses exactly this business model for his company Digital Domain. Same can be said for Avatar. It's not a movie so much as a massive special effects demo reel showing off cutting edge digital effects work that other studios can pay to use in their productions.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee True, but that wasn't the main point of the movies. If you look at all the behind the scenes material, (especially behind the scenes books) then you'd find that Lucas did also indeed have a story/narrative he wanted to tell while also wanting to develop the technology. It's why he used digital cameras for Episode II which were actually a hassle for him to get too according to The Star Wars Archives 1999-2005.
Yes - a warning about dictators - while at this very moment trump and his lawyers are trying to turn your president into a king. Or dictator.
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.
Uncanny valley
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@@calebford6318 -He made it the fuck up- Human physiology. Our perceptions are geared considerably more for boosting survivability than accurately portraying reality.
So even if our sensations pick up, say, a concave face, our perceptions will pick up a convex face where there is actually an concave one. There’s a video on here with a literally paper-thin dinosaur model that demonstrates this effect. Trust me, even knowing that ahead of looking at it and altering/gearing my expectations accordingly, you’ll still perceive an illusion that feels more correct over the reality that looks plain wrong.
This is because perception itself is top-down and not bottom-up like sensation is. A brain’s interpretations of ambiguity actively force an illusion.
What I’m getting at here is that the animation in Attack of the Clones was so bad the *brains of fans had to intervene to protect them.*
You are now free to “🤓” me.
@@wildfire9280🤓
in all probability, your brain did NOT register most of those small details without you realizing it. most of the very small things he was pointing out was stuff that's visible only if you adjust the brightness and contrast so it looks far brighter and flatter than it does on screen not to mention blowing up the frame to several tens of times larger than they would have appeared on tv or in the theater. there's more obvious reasons like the animation quality or just motion in general. we're not subconscious geniuses.
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.
Yea I think that shot was the worst as far as the cgi looking unrealistic. It literally almost looks like it could be from the clone wars animated show
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@@calebford6318 He's talking about personal expirence
You mean the Bill Maher alien?
@@calebford6318Are you ok?
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.
The Revange of the Sith CGI also look like shit at times.
@@witoldwitoszekrecords3253The R2 vs Super Battle Droids scene on the Invisible Hand are a particular low point. So oversaturated and fake looking...
I hate sand
They tried to do very much with computers in Phantom Menace already. And the big scope CGI stuff like the battle between the Gungans and the droids holds up very poorly today. Like, have you seen the grass when the battle droid transport ships arrive at the battlefield? AotC looks splendid in comparison.
@@witoldwitoszekrecords3253 A lot of the effects in the Original Trilogy look like shit at times too. That doesn't discount the ones that look amazing.
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.
If it wasn’t for people like George Lucas and Robert Rodriquez pushing for it and actually making movies with digital cameras, it may have taken even longer to take off or not happen at all. I also believe RED, Netflix, and 4K TVs all played a big role in why camera resolution jumped up so quickly in the past 20 years.
Though Revenge of the Sith was filmed in 2003 with a more advanced camera compared to Attack of the Clones being filmed in 2000 these days both cameras are ancient relics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta#List_of_CineAlta_cameras
@@DDavEEwhat are you talking about? They didn’t have to use shitty early 2000 digital cameras, traditional 35 mm film cameras have detail up to 8-10k resolution, and films from the 60s like 2001 a space odyssey shot on 70mm can support up to 16k it has so much detail. Digital looked like shit in the 2000s compared to film and we knew it back then. There’s no excuse.
@@jordanmartel2937 Yes, but those are film cameras, with their own limitations and issues. I wager 99.8% of stuff shot today is done digitally, simple because it's more convenient and that's part of the tech people like Lucas had a hand in reinforcing.
in 2002 mostly all the TVs were analog tube TVs.
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.
I think that shot is possible with a curved dolly track, but yeah like you said it’s too smooth
Therapist: Ripped Yoda isn't real, he can't hurt you.
Ripped Yoda: 9:09
I like to think he has more of a Jackie Chan physique. The dude wasn't big, but his muscles were tight. I remember some expert claiming he had a perfect muscle to fat ratio.
Sorry but I have to vehemently disagree that Watto was digital. It was quite clearly my mother-in-law.
Do we have the same mother in law?
@@davisjacobs5748 I dunno, since I got rid of my ex, she has been engaged four times.
Source?
marriage jokes = funny + relatable+ W
Boomer humor
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.
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
I am a 3D artist and an AR/VR developer, I worked as a VFX compositor. What a wonderful video! Exceptional breakdown quality.
As a VFX Supervisor myself, this is a very good breakdown
Yes❤❤
As a commenter myself, I can comment that this comment is very comentative.
I appreciate the double meaning
69th like
ok.
As a digital compositor, I noticed this video in my recommendation and thought "Hey, what can it possibly say that is new to me?", but I love Star Wars so I watched it.
And by God, I was wrong. This video is amazing, watched it breathlessly.
Bonus points for mentioning that every delay by every other departments makes our work harder.
18:27
Is this why episode 3 yoda looks significantly better than episode 2 yoda?
For me it is the ambient occlusion and lighting in general. Feels just like turning off all lighting effects and everything just glows, specially digital characters
One thing that helps hide Yoda's helmet hair is that he has that thin, combed back, old man white hair going on, which is already kinda helmet-y in real life.
Incredible video man! was mindblowing to see all the vfx errors left in the movie lmao
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@@calebford6318weak troll. Sorry about the lack of friends
M’lord, as his highness clearly explained, these were not FX efforts but rather producing errors.
99% of us wouldn't notice any of the flaws he pointed out, but it's still interesting.
I mean, can any movie that's ever been made to be said to have no VFX errors? If anything, the fact that most of the VFX errors in the prequels are so miniscule that you have to meticulously comb through them frame by frame in order to even find any proves just how good the movies actually look. Revenge of the Sith looks so good that it looks better than a lot of modern movies do despite being made with the VFX technology of over 15 years ago.
The majority of the errors with Attack of the Clones' VFX are honestly explained by the fact that many of the VFX in question were experimental in nature. The technology was still relatively new, and George wanted to push the technology forward and use it to tell his story the way he envisioned it. I think it's aged fairly well for an experimental film that came out in 2002.
There also looks to be an issue that everything is in focus, lacking motion blur, lacking dof blur, grain is minimal and no subtle fog, dust general atmosphere to denote depth. Again would be interesting how more time/people could have solved much of this perhaps even at the final compositing stage
Frankly, not a ton. Computer Graphics were quite limited back then.
Today we have more than enough memory and processing power to do several frames of temporal effects. We often render highly graphical games in 7-12 separate frames, and composite them together in a shader. The effects you are talking about can be done convincingly in real time now.
You simply couldn't do that back then with semi-realistic shots like this, so making convincing motion blur was simply not really possible. Same goes for depth of field. Unless you "cheat" those effects are very processing and memory intensive.
Lucas did make the first fully CGI short (The Adventures of André & Wally B.) with motion blur in 1984, but pretty sure the motion blur was made by hand by compositing shots properly together. Considering it was less than 2 minutes, that sounds quite feasible.
This is the best Prequel CGI analysis I have ever seen. I have watched hours and hours of BTS Prequel content, seen the movies more times than I can count, yet you managed to show me something I'd never seen before every 60 seconds! I really hope you do more Star Wars videos like this as this was an absolute joy to watch, thank you :)
I have to agree. This guy’s analysis is on par with what the guys at Digital Foundry do for real time video game graphics.
I mean a major thing … is that non of these characters have any subsurface scattering- at least that I can see. That would do wonders for lighting of skin .
You're not a real Star Wars fan
@@amsrremix2239he mentions that in the video
@@Michael-jj8gzBlud out here trying to gatekeep because they liked some films that you didn't. 😂😂
Excellent breakdown. It isn't just VFX having to do more with less - think most workers and industries can relate these days! Stuck in a constant squeeze.
28:00 made me burst out laughing. I don't know how I never noticed that incorrect perspective.
Because he had to zoom in to point it out for you because it was incredibly obscure and it would be incredibly pedantic to complain about
@@anomalyinc3239calm down, it’s more of a fun detail than a flaw.
@@anomalyinc3239 Hes talking about QC issues and these are things the team would notice and fix before release- but they didn't have easy fast HD review of shots back then.
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
idk Genosis battle always made me feel ill because of all the uncanny valley ness going on.
I think you'll find practical clone troopers look worse in the disney shows. Cgi is what you need for a mass army of perfect copies
I agree. The clone-trooper crowd scenes work ok, but the individuals generally have an over-acting style, giving them a "Power Rangers" feel. (see the scene when Padme falls from the transport onto the sand dune).
@@cheerleadersonsafari I don't think we've ever seen practical clone troopers in Disney-era Live Action stuff, but even if we include stuff like the Stormtroopers, the practical armour is miles ahead of the CGI clone troopers, ESPECIALLY with the weird, floating heads that you see in AotC and RotS when they take their helmets off.
The Night-Troopers in Ahsoka were fine when they were practical (in terms of visual quality, I'm not talking about their aesthetic appearance), but when they became zombies, and were covered in CGI (for some reason), they were still bad, but better than AotC thanks to the technology having developed a lot since.
@@thevoidlord1796We have seen practical clone troopers in Book of Boba Fett, Mandalorian, Andor and Ahsoka and with today's technology CGI clone troopers would definitely look better than what we saw in these shows.
Most valuable piece of info I got from this video was that Anakin fidgets with his hands a lot (which I hadn't ever realized), connecting that line about finding comfort in fixing things to a detail in Hayden's performance that subtly keeps the character's trauma real. Yet another detail showing how well Anakin was portrayed. Whole video is pretty dope though +1 sub
Or he just isn’t a great actor and didn’t know what to do with his hands.
@@silvrfruit Hmmm nah my idea's cooler
@@silvrfruit Watch Shattered Glass .. he's a good actor ... Lucas doesn't know how to direct. 😂
This is what I call looking wayyy too deep into something. he was not that good as anakin. Not due to him, but the horrendous writing.
@@jjoe7078 He wasn't written as well as he should've been I agree, but I think it's good to find details within the films that you can appreciate to make the experience more enjoyable
TDLR: It was a very ambitious and experimental movie pushing what could actually be done 20 years ago. Somebody had to go first and figure it out, mistakes and all.
Also I really appreciate this breakdown. So much prequel criticism ignores the context the movie was made in or what they where trying to do. Many people just say "CGI looks bad" and leave it at that which is ignorant, intentional or not. Great video.
"you were so concerned with whether or not you could you never stopped to consider whether or not you should"
George did all this CGI shit so he could let the computer make the movie for him in post-production and he didn't have to actually direct a movie, and this style of filmmaking led to the mass-produced CGI marvel slop we get so often today.
@@Ryuk45Bullshit, don't project your lazy ass into others jobs, and calling George Lucas lazy is one of the most ignorant thing one can do, so
@@Ryuk45Oh. Source? Or is that what you like to think?
@@Ryuk45 Such an ignorant take, lol. "The computer" didn't make the film for him. He wrote the film, he directed it, it was his story and he had a lot of collaborators, thousands of people worked on these films from the most overlooked things like cooking meals for the crew, to designing a wardrobre, to designing characters, composing music, sound design, VFX artists who worked on CG, VFX artists who worked with the practical sets and effects, etc. This was the combined work of thousands of people to serve the story of someone who wrote his own stories exactly how he wanted to and self financed his films. It's not at all comparable to Disney Marvel stuff.
@@Ryuk45fun fact! The prequels had far fewer VFX shots than the sequels did! The only reason anyone complains about CGI is because it was new technology at the time and George and the industry as a whole wanted to push the boundaries of what we thought was possible with computers!
That one stormtrooper in the background running away in the middle of the conversation just saw his other pal off screen and ran towards him. "Jerry? Is that really you? OMG we haven't seen each other for a really long time since High School!".
Or he said to the other one "I'm sorry but I've to go to an important meeting, I'll be back!" or "Oh I forgot that I've a date with my partner right now! My partner would be very mad if I broke our promise again!" and ran off.
Either way the other one just said "ok".
Now this is what I love to watch RUclips for. A well versed professional explaining details that regular people do not know. Great video.
I feel there’s always a lot of “make them watch this hand, instead of this one” is used. What I mean is, that I myself never caught any of the mistake even though my brain knew there was. Things either moved too fast, or my attention was focused elsewhere in a shot instead of what is an obvious mistake. It’s funny how the brain knows something is off, but not too sure exactly what it is. Interesting video, I learned a lot here!
Even if the CGI doesn't hold up well, damn the soundtrack even 20 years later is really good
The CGI holds up great
@@Jiub_SN Yes 80% is quite well, but one studio messed up rendering the clone troopers. Probabaly no Global Illumination or other simular fake technices at the time.
The clone troopers look very CG at times. But not always.
John Williams is the legend.
@@Jiub_SNYes and no. Some of it aged better than others, but I just can't stand how flat the backgrounds look. Like, zero depth whatsoever
Whats funny is minority report and AOTC have practically the same soundtrack..
they even managed to make the miniatures look like cgi
I knew the fact that early digital cameras being used on episode 2 was a big problem, but the fact that the picture is lower resolution than a youtube video is just so painful, good lord.
This is seriously one of my favorite videos on youtube, please make more! It's so stimulating to think about the intersection of reality, animation, and technology
I was waiting for the bit on light. I'm a traditional artist & was taught that the most small detail will be evident on an object where it transitions from light to shadow - and your example of backlit Obi-Wan's robe vs. CGI Yoda is a perfect one. Most of the lighting in general in this movie seemed kind of soft to me - that's what stood out most, personally - perhaps that was in an effort to hide the lack of small detail which would show up more with harsher lighting? (Or maybe it's just an artifact of how the comparatively lo-res, not-as-high-poly-as-today models look, even when lit 'realistically'?)
I do wonder if its intentional, harsh lighting would make the lack of ambient occlusion and digital shadows even more obvious compared to the real shadows.
I actually remember an article in Maximum PC magazine in sometime in 2002 after Attack of the Clones in theaters was released, it was a roundtable about the new graphics cards from nVidia and ATI and the graphics engines that would leverage them. At the time, the Yoda model was the most sophisticated piece of CGI set in a "realistic environment" the world had seen, and one of the statements were saying "in 10 years time we should be able to run the Yoda model in real-time and make it interactive in a video game," so yeah that kinda plays into the whole subject matter here. How about that, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Always loved the way Clones looks, it's such a fascinating time capsule of the transition from early CGI to something closer to what we have now. You can feel Lucas and ILM really trying their hardest to break the barriers of what was possible. Clones' awkward visuals result in the trilogy being uneven, with Menace being a gorgeous, filmic, mostly practical film and Sith being a masterful use of CGI to make the world feel immense and detailed. But at the same time it also provides such an interesting view of the transition of special effects in those years the Prequels were being made.
Oddly enough, Clones also has some of the franchise's most beautiful shots despite being so uneven.
i really disagree with describing any of these films as “gorgeous” or “beautiful” at really any point but it certainly is _interesting_ to have three films from the same series to see the steady change in technology. another similar case would be the matrix films; crazy auteur, vfx-obsessed, boundary-pushing directors and all, too.
i’m still not convinced that in either case the end result were good movies or a better situation for vfx in general. progress … but at what human cost? vfx artists have desperately needed a large scale industry strike for years, too, now - and in a way we can certainly blame these early director pioneers for treating their artists like disposable meat bags whose labour power stood in the way of cost-cutting for the contemporary sweat shop situation we have. i know prequel defenders like to portray lucas as a benevolent and misunderstood visionary but the lucas from this time has always seemed to me more like he had become the very thing he was critical of at the beginning of his career; one of the greedy materialistic capitalist overlords that ruined the world and produced the dystopia we see in THX 1138.
@@scushHow?
phantom menace is ugly as fuck dude. ROTS is probably the best CGI movie ever made but even then has some really rough moments. The force awakens and last jedi are the most beautiful and visually pleasing Star Wars movies by far. Probably the only reason to watch them at this point.
@@barkley8285phantom menace is gorgeous.
Best cgi movie ever made? You've clearly never seen the transformers films.
Episode 7 and 8 were forgettable visually. There was nothing interesting or unique going on
@@novustalks7525The cinematography of 8 was amazing. It has a lot of really beautiful shots in isolation. Unfortunately in context they don't mean anything, as the movie itself is hot garbage. For me, the visuals are the only thing the movie has, which is unfortunate considering they could have been powerful had the movie made any sense, but I do think the movie is visually gorgeous. I strongly disagree that it's forgettable.
One conspicuous issue in AOTC, that I saw pointed out a while ago, is that dirt/grunge on clone armor completely lacks roughness and bump or normals maps. You can see this conspicuously when the sun reflects off their armor into the camera on Geonosis.
It's a really bizarre and inexcusable omission for a blockbuster film, given that even _games_ soon after that time were starting to incorporate shaders with all of those into real time rendering.
It would be cool if they release a remastered version of the prequels with modernized vfx. I would definitely see a rerelease
Nah. Leave them alone. The "special editions" showed how poorly that kind of thing ages. Leave them be as projects of their time, appreciate them, and apply those lessons to newer products. Of course disney is making AOTC look good these days, so......
Still better than the effects in The Flash
And Flash Gordon
@@nikohanisch6411The Flash's special effects look so abysmal, LOL!
I was just watching "The Meg" the other day and while some will say it's a Jaws rip-off (kind of agree on that one) I think the shark "looks better" (tongue-in-cheek sarcasm :). They even had "we caught "A" shark....not "THE" shark moment......
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.
Yup. The reason why people think Hayden acted poorly was because the dialogue he was given kept demanding that he shift from an extremely grounded performance to an extremely theatrical performance, and it's usually easier to strike a balance between the two than it is to keep flip flopping between them.
this is a complete fallacy, there are movies with awkward teens that people/critics love. star wars isn't one of them because it wasn't a good performance. it was awkward acting for an awkward character. you didn't crack the nut that everyone else couldn't.
@@ImperialCalebOh no, I agree that the acting wasn't good. I'm just saying that I don't think many actors could have done a better job due to how differently Anakin was written from scene to scene. It's like Hayden had to play two completely different characters and it's hard to bridge that gap.
I don’t think most people hate his performance now. Movies this awful on a fundamental level couldn’t be saved by any actor. Not his fault at all.
@@ImperialCaleb ☝️🤓 “ummm sir that’s a fallacy”
The funniest part here is that I didn’t even commit a logical fallacy, and even if I did, you yourself are committing the Fallacy Fallacy. Fallacy isn’t a magic “win the argument” button.
Honestly this film more than any is deserving of a remaster. Not to replace the old, but as a new option we can use to compare how far VFX has come.
Redo some of the animations, expand background detail, fix the damn light levels, maybe use AI upscaling to add some texture back to the rotoscoped areas.
Even disliking the movie, I'd watch the hell out of that
I agree.
Won't happen ever. Under the terms of the contract, if Disney change anything from episodes 1-6, all the profit goes to Lucas. And remastering AOTC would cost millions Disney, they'll never do that. Pray for AI to redo it on your PC soon.
It was filmed in 720p, so the real sequences would stilll look not good. Goerge should have filmed analogue. Instead her smeared all over Ep.I
Because of the OT special editions went _soooo_ well.
It would definitely be interesting to see a Special Edition of the prequels. But I don't think they will ever try to do that with those movies.
I do need to correct you on one thing: Subsurface scattering was used on Yoda's ear in several shots. In the scene where he's riding in the Gunship, the sun shines through his ears.
I went into a big electronics shop in Japan, showing off the latest 4k and 8k TVs. They were playing the droid factory sequence from Episode 3 and I really did think it was a videogame cutscene! Even the live actors looked... "off" somehow, I assumed they were deepfaked into the "game" because the real actors have aged.
Shhirtless Yoda can't hurt you he's not real
Shirtless Yoda: 9:09
He's so fucking sexy
I didn't expect him to be this jacked 😳
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".
If the practical effects looked too sterile wouldn't that make them bad?
@@peterroe2993only if that wasn’t the intent, which in this case it was
@@notNajimi why would you ever want anything to look fake?
@@peterroe2993 for thematic purposes for example. Lucas contrasts the Kamino with Naboo constantly… seeing how passionate he was about digital cinematography and animation he could have constructed Naboo solely with visual effects as well, but he deliberately shot these scenes on real places (Spain and Italy) to contrast nature with technology and industry. If you watch his more experimental films (THX 1138 or everyone lived in a pretty how town), you’ll notice this was a recurrent topic he addressed.
Is not that he is lazy or anything, this was pretty much well-thought and used as a contrast to expose his themes. The prequels are actually way better than what people give Lucas credit for
@jonathanbirch2022 You're right, it wasn't entirely practical from a "what you see is what you get" perspective, but in this instance I am choosing to call practical effects models, sets, recordings of actual people etc. If it was made by hand and filmed it is "practical", in the industry if it is a model it is called a practical effect. The point I'm specifically wanting to make is how people said the hallways of the Kamino clone facility looked like "bad cgi" but they are in fact "practical" effects, as in they are models, not CGI.
As a former SFX and VFX Artist (TD) I agree with the animations. But the biggest “video game” feeling are the poor textures. Color saturation often is too much or too little, the occlusion isn’t there and it all lacks surface imperfections- that also goes for the characters. Skin is very blotchy and certain areas are well bled through and have more rose (or olive in case of a yoda I guess) and others don’t. And little pores, little freckles and little bumps all the imperfections add up. When I worked in SFX make up, it was very easy to add those. And initially when you literally dissolve wax clay and put it on a chip brush and flick it on, you get a heart attack, because your modeling looks terrible. But you noticed that when you continue and vary the amount of solvents and later those imperfection and then gently blend them in, instantly adds realism. This is not (still not) easy to do in digital. And color matching is a lot easier now, I actually wrote plug-ins for Nuke pipelines to automatically set black, white and rgb levels based on a reference block. Which only require the smalles (artistic) changes from an compositor. But that’s only as good as the imperfections, in the shader and material.
lol: you get to the occlusion now 😂
Honestly, this is the thing that takes me out of it; none of the other stuff.
Exactly!
It isn’t just terrible in comparison. It was just plain terrible back then. And not due to many imperceivably small imperfections and animation flaws. Major things like textures of characters in the foreground. These should have been live action. There’s no reason a few troopers in foreground couldn’t be live. It came across as cheap, lazy, or rushed, forced overuse of cgi, not caring about the audience. The clone troopers looked so fake. As did Yoda. As did many other things. It killed the realism and made us not care about the characters or outcomes. It absolutely looked like a video game or animated feature, not live action. Even if video games of the time weren’t up to this level yet. It just looked like a higher quality video game. Very fake. I watched episodes 4-6 over and over countless times. Episodes 1-3 i didn’t care if i ever saw again. Not because Jarjar was annoying and ridiculous. Or the pod race was too long. Or the bad acting. It was because the extensive use of bad computer graphics killed the realism and made me not invested or interested.
@@Robbyrool "Made us not care about the characters", speak for yourself...
Also nice copy paste
What does "TD" mean?
I went into this expecting just another 30+ min video trashing AOTC but instead was presented with an incredible crash course lesson on VFX as a whole. I now know more about this than I ever thought I would and have SO much more respect and appreciation for the art. Very well done!
One item you missed wrt people thinking the movie "looks like a videogame" is that the screenplay *feels* like a videogame. Walking around while getting a lore dump, platform jumping, on-rail driving level, mandatory arena fight and so on. When people see the action as videogamey, it's easy to see the visuals as videogamey.
So interesting. I actually feel similarly about Clones as I do Hope. I've watched both so many times that I notice things that look slightly off and I always get the same feeling. This movie feels like somebody made it in their garage and that makes me want to do the same. That's not an insult to the movies, just a testament to human ingenuity and imagination.
Source?
@@calebford6318 Source to what? It's a comment about his opinion on the matter. Do people just say "source" to sound clever or something
@@Ethan-wr2osthey're a troll. Just ignore them.😊
In all honesty watching a new home in original quality like through a old 8mm archive makes the visual effects far more impressive and makes you realize how good they were for the time
@@cultofsucc5807 "A New Home" .. awesome movie about a young family purchasing their beautiful starter home with a dream of prosperity and a family to call their own. Great film! 👍🏻
I think the fact that I watch this movie oh a vhs tape as a kid made this movie look so much better
Same here!
That goes for a lot of movies.
I definitely hadn't consciously picked up on most of these things. If I were asked to describe what was wrong with the CGI in this movie I'd probably say things like "animations look floaty and unnatural", "surfaces look weirdly smooth", "a lot of the backgrounds are too obviously CG and the real elements stick out ". This was an enjoyable and interesting video to watch. I'm definitely subscribing.
There's a way to cheat hair simulation that would have potentially worked for a lot of Yoda back in the day: simulate it as a low polygon softbody and apply that as deformation. Then of course cluster simulation etc. But this being a late 90s production, they didn't really have something off the shelf and the possible options were for sure not all too well researched.
There also isn't a rule that says CG cloth has to behave incorrectly. The underlying model even back in the day is a mass spring system, but there's nothing to say that the spring weights have to be isotropic, indeed you can just model cloth that either does or doesn't stretch diagonally to the weave that way. You can even imagine vertex painting a spring stiffness mask to harden up those bits of cloth supported by a seam, such as to not make collars swim away too badly. It's not specifically computationally intensive, it just requires that extra iteration experimentation and effort, and engineering as well.
Differences between specular and metallic reflections were not particularly well understood back then either, the easiest distinction is that metal colour affects reflection, and every metal has its own shade, while other reflective surfaces cannot modify reflected colour. The shading model of the era is effectively layered, superimposing a perfectly matt surface with one that selectively creates highlights, while real surfaces don't behave this way. Another problem was that when you have specular, the light reflected there needs to not be available to the underlying diffuse layer, but the classic rendering models neglect this conservation of energy. This may sound a little abstract and the corrected model is even usually difficult to tell in direct comparison, but problems like these do all add up.
That being said there's rarely a time when i look at a modern CG heavy movie and think that it doesn't look like a videogame cutscene - not that it bothers me, i'm used to it, but i do think we have medium traits sort of leaking into each other this way, where they converge. There's something about special effects heavy 60s to 90s films that we lost, but what is it exactly? Why isn't a film like Barbarella or 2001 filmed today?
This video was incredibly well-made, wonderfully edited and brilliantly scripted. This is top-tier content right here. Really enjoyed watching this!
As a full time VFX compositor, the breakdown of the shot at 23:37 is so relatable it almost gave me PTSD haha.
It's exactly the kind of stuff that would keep someone like me working overtime for days. This kind of 2D comp stuff is usually what takes the longest to do, just a lot of rotoshapes and 2D patches.
Totally non-related, I'm an optometrist, but this is what I was thinking about too, like "dude imagine working for hours, if not days, if not weeks, if not months, doing something like this, and then, years later, to the 2023 VFX artist, your work is broke down and errors are found when back then it was basically most of the best work "
@@MrTaitanz Actaully, if that happened today, I would chuckle and get some satisfaction that my leads doing all this internal tech check still didnt catch that. Sort of a "gotcha!" moment.
Like trust me, as soon as the shot is approved we really don't care if you find something like this.
Imagine having to do such a film with software that is not much better than Microsoft Paint
@@Einheit101 The software available at the time was still much more advanced than microsoft paint. Something like After Effects 5.0 or Shake
27:43 😱
What a very balanced presentation, well done. I saw Ep ll in IMAX and it was almost unwatchable, especially the speeder chase. I teach after effects and bring up black levels all the time. If Lucas is so eager to "improve" the original trilogy, he should consider this film as well. I wish they had shot film stock alongside the rinky-dink 1.56 megapixels. This movie was the sacrificial lamb to move the industry forward.
I hear the IMAX version was heavily cut down due to the limitations of theater projectors of the time. Do you recall anything being cut from that screening?
@@Double-R-Nothing if the movie was cut down a bit, I didn't notice. It was a long time ago, in a theater far, far away. 😊. If there is a limit, my guess it's due to the size of the platter the film sits on.
How dare people attempt develop new techniques in a risky manner. HOW DARE THEY!?!?
@@SioxerNikita Glad Lucas had the courage to push the industry. I'm glad he "dared" to go there.
@@keithartworker If no one takes a risk, nothing gets improved.
"It's so dense every single image has so many things going on"
"I may have gone too far in a few places.."
Wow I had no idea that Anakin’s hand touching Padme’s hand was cgi
My mind was blown too, I don't mind the CGI throughout the movie. I thought most of the points were nitpicky.
It wasn't CGI, it was another person's hand filmed separately, overlayed onto Anakin's hand
"Fan forums, the place that would cut the movie the most slack..."
Oh my sweet summer youngling
You are my favorite video essayist on RUclips. I always love hearing what you have to say about production.
So refreshing to watch a critique of a Star Wars prequel that's actually well-researched and in good faith. While I think the imagination and experimentation of the trilogy eclipses its technical flaws (I'd even argue that its video-gamey qualities are an assured aesthetic ripe for cinematic analysis), I very much appreciated the perspective of somebody who knows how it all ticks. Very much excited for your Transformers video!
I'd second that argument, Attack of The Clones feels the "weirdest" out of the three movies, but that means it's left the biggest impression on me, and I'd love to see something able to match it somehow.
Technical flaws are the least of the prequels’ problems, unfortunately 😢
@@numetal_samurai Thank you for your 2009 ass opinion
"well-researched and in good faith" = "it doesn't contradict with my pre-established opinion"
@@numetal_samurai There are no compelling arguments for why the prequels are bad movies despite the fact that people have had over two decades to make those arguments. I seriously doubt you'll be the first person to make that argument given how nearly all of the criticism the prequels have received is just a giant circle-jerking echo chamber made up of original trilogy fanboys who don't have a solid grasp of what Star Wars even is or was intended to be.
correction episode 1 didn't have a cgi yoda intill the later dvd releases as he was still a puppet for the cinema release.
All good points aside, anyone else notice how frickin jacked Yoda is in 9:08?
I was checking to see if anyone else noticed.
Anakin's shadow on the Tatooine home was a critical moment in the film. There were movie posters advertising the film that had this shadow isolated and it was a silhouette of Darth Vader's helmet. It was a bit of foreshadowing and chill-inducing. Brilliant!
Further, the shadow of Padme facing him is also familiar; combined they form the exact silhouette of Vader & Leia’s first meeting in A New Hope.
You mean this Episode I teaser poster? i0.wp.com/www.weidmangallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/WG00963-1.jpg?fit=800%2C1186&ssl=1
Man, this is a great video. I know ZERO about visual effects, other than as a consumer. I do however know when stuff doesn't look quite right, or feel quite right and I always appreciate it when someone with inside knowledge breaks it down into words I can understand. Thank you for this
Also this channel is CRIMINALLY undersubbed. I've watched a couple videos so far, and have decided to binge all your videos today! Keep it up dude, you're going places.
Man, I’d never picked up on the outlines of the shot of Padmé and Anakin at the homestead before this. Now they’re clear as day lmao. Still an amazing effort and a hugely important film for VFX
I love how you broke down lightning and texture, it really makes me think of ambient light in a different way. Like, viewing every visible color as a light source? Thats so cool, i can apply that to my painting and drawing.
I miss the days when Attack of the Clones was the worst Star Wars movie.
The Phantom Menace is worse than AotC, it's only the duel in the end that holds PM up but AotC at least has good action throughout, interspersed by awkward narrative and dialogue.
still is but TRoS does come close
I genuinely find Phantom Menace to be harder to get through. Like, at least I could roughly follow the plot of Attack of the Clones my whole life. I didn't know what the plot even was in the Phantom Menace until I went to see the re-release in cinemas a couple days ago, and I went in with the intent to actively try my absolute hardest to understand what was happening.
It still is.
@@optillian4182guess you haven’t seen anything Disney
With the exception of a tiny few number of “stars”, everyone in the entertainment business gets squeezed till the pips squeak, not just the VFX crowd.
What's really crazy, is I didn't notice any of this when I watched the movie. Even though, as you highlight in this video, these are all entirely present in the movie. It's crazy how a trained eye can see entirely different things than an untrained eye.
Cause it was filmed on crappy turn of the century digital cameras.
That's why the Phantom Menace looks so much better than the other 2 prequels, it was the only one that was filmed on film.
That's not entirely the case, though. Yes, most of EP1 was done on film, but the final cut was still done at the same resolution as the other prequels, and was even DNRd to hell, especially in the 4K release, which didn't even bother re-scanning the non-digital footage into a native 4K presentation. Film, when treated properly, will hold up better, but sadly that's not the case here.
It’s crazy how our human sight of reality knows something is wrong but we can’t tell what it is.
This was awesome dude
Another thing to consider is that most people's experience with the OT today is from one of the many special editions, where they cleaned up a lot of the compositing artifacts inherent to physically layering two film strips on top of each other and copying the resulting image. If you manage to land a copy of the actual 1977 release, you'll really feel its age.
Such copies do exist (google Empire Strikes Back Grindhouse Edition for example) and they still look superior to Attack of the Clones. There is some organic tangibility in practical and optical effects that makes them age more gracefully than digital. Unlike CGI they don't look cheap, they just look vintage.
Funnily enough, I liked some of those better than the "cleaned-up" ones. My school library had the early editions of the Original Trilogy DVDs, with the (an?) remaster on Disc One and the original on Disc Two (IIRC it's not quite Laserdisc original, but close). I always preferred seeing the "halo" around the lightsabers, and the slightly dodgy outline around the speeder and the X-wing.
Nah I grew up watching the CBS Fox released OT movies with all its imperfections, still enjoy them because they where working within limitations of the time, the prequels where clearly the result of a man who had all the resources possible to make better art even at the time, but who CLEARLY didnt care. With all the errors in color correction and compositing and CG and tone in all the prequels come from pure laziness.
Yet for some reason no special edition has yet to fit the obvious frame bounce that happens whenever someone ignites a lightsaber.
@@mechadeka good, at least some of the wonkiness remains.
Excellent video. Put into words things I had half-noticed from when I was a kid, but could not articulate at all.
Next maybe you could explain why season 3 of The Mandalorian looks like a car insurance ad.
4:12 wait.. my sarcasm sensor is acting up.
8,4 million hours? That's close to 100.000 years of render time. And they did it in 3 years. These people are overworked indeed
Processor hours to render. One hour on one core is one processor hour. ILM presumably has render farms, possibly millions of CPU cores working in tandem like a supercomputer (a million cores rendering at once for a single real-time hour would be counted as a million processor hours). And that's just for rendering out the film-ready image, not the workspace environment they assembled the scene in, which would be significantly less resource intensive. They're basically saying it took a lot of computational power to render, not necessarily that it literally took a long time (though I imagine it was still days, if not weeks, in real-time).
Just looked it up. ILM's render farm is called the Death Star and it had around 3000 processors... in 2005. They don't talk publicly about it so we don't actually know about its current configuration but it's safe to say it's significantly bigger than it was 19 years ago. I was exaggerating when I said "millions" but honestly, it wouldn't surprise me.
@@AnnDVine This comment here is the best example peak Dunning Kruger, hears a big big number, knows about the overwork, puts them together and has no idea that the two is not even CLOSE to related :P
It’s the same as 500 cores doing 16800 hours of rendering, which is less than 2 years of rendering each
This analysis is simply exceptional, and I would love to see more content along these lines. You absolutely nailed it.
This was amazing. You should do one on the Volume and Star Wars Disney+ shows, Ahsoka looked off sometimes and I don't know why
Amazing that it was all done in less than 1080p. Really a great job and you only notice the "issues" under a fine tooth comb..in theaters you would have been blown away and as a theatrical experience it would have achieved the goal. Only with hindsight can we critique it so precisely....
The most underrated video essay channel on RUclips, imho. Seeing this pop up brightened my day.
Wait a sec, wasn't Episode 1 Yoda a puppet originally, and it was the re-releases that added the CGI?
Yes
remote control/animatronic yes, but not a "muppet" like in ESB. Mostly because much of Yoda we saw was in the Jedi Council Chamber or in Palpatine's office where he could conveniently sit in a chair and not move much.
The shot he's talking about was originally the only shot where Yoda was CGI in TPM. In every other shot, he was a puppet, until the re-release.
It's all those little things you masterfully pointed out. The low res textures, blurring, shadows and lack of shadows, CG characters and clipping. It does give the overall film a playstation 2 era kind of vibe to it all. All those tiny things that you don't consciously notice, but they're still there and just leave you in disbelief.
Although, with all that said and done I still find it astounding they were able to accomplish this feat over 20 years ago. They really pushed the limits and made possible so much of what we take for granted today.
This is amazing - for me it drives home just how hard you can work, how much effort and brilliance you can bring to vfx, and STILL fall short of the human eye. The people who created these effects are so so clever and yet we can subconsciously see the strings. Thank you so much for this really fascinating analysis:)
A lot of this makes you wonder, why didn’t they just use practical costumes and sets where they could. Why’d it all have to be a tech demo
Because George likes to push technological bonderies within filmmaking. He did it with the Originals, and he wanted to do it again with the Prequels. And since CGI really started to become popular in the 1990's, he wanted to push that even further
@EmpireWreckers: You actually made a mistake at 26:07. 2K is 2048×1080, not the 2560×1440 you named. While some gaming monitor manufacturers are using 2K to describe their 1440p monitors, in the film industry DCI 2K has long been standardized to mean 2048×1080.
Additionally, when filming on anamorphic glass, 1440×1080 would be more than enough to deliver a clean DCI 2K image, as the image itself would already be stretched in the lens.
@nrezmerski in terms of gaming that may be true, but for cinema 2K has never meant anything than 2048×1080 and variations of it. In cinema, 2560×1440 has never been used, and as result, the graphic at that timestamp is wrong.
Yeah that bugged me a little coming from a VFX artist. It's usually something people repeat when they hear someone else use the term without knowing it's wrong. It seems to me inexperienced PC gamers started calling it 2K a while ago and manufacturers picked up on it because I've been hearing less technically inclined people call it that for a decade but haven't heard many monitor manufacturers call it that until somewhat recently
I love how you went to the effort of melting a square of cheese on a toy yoda and filming it for a few seconds of footage hahah
Amazing breakdown! I had noticed obvious flaws like with the animated cloth, but lots of this was new to me. Thanks for the education!
I think it's especially impressive how good most of these shots and models were, 22 years ago. Sure a lot of them are only on screen for 2 or 3 seconds, but for those 2 or 3 seconds, they shine. Of course we nitpick things on our 30th viewing on the bluray, where we can slow things down to 1/8th speed and pause at will.
The biggest shame I think, as pointed elsewhere, is the lack of a practical clone trooper costume. It's VERY impressive that all of them were digital, but it also is just a genuine shame about them. Though maybe it'd be unfair making 6-7 different costumes just for Mr. Morrison, even if he does deserve it.
Yodo always looks like his textures didnt load.
For me, when I first saw ATOC in the theater, the thing that killed my immersion and made me feel like I was watching video game cutscenes was the Zam Wessell scenes in Coruscant - specifically the ones where the actor is clearly in front of a blue screen with all of the neon signboards and advertising. It immediately reminded me of the cutscenes from the Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2 video game which had come out only a couple years earlier. Obviously the movie had far better renderings and resolution, but the jarring bluescreen effect of "something real in front of something fake" was immediately apparent, and that carried through all of the prequels.
I was on On Set Dresser for years in Hollywood. On Sets deal with set continuity alongside Script Supervisors. One thing this video forgot to mention (although the excellent distinctions re: light came close) is that sets and locations will always be filmed through air. Air is full of microscopic particles that, themselves, bounce light. Like the “micro-poof” of dust as an actor sits on a sofa or rolls over on bedding. The stage dust that eddies around the grid, 15 feet above the set where the lights hang. All of this combines to the human eye (the ultimate in camera technology) to create a warmth that digital will likely never overcome.
It's really interesting to hear a professional who's also a fan take it apart in detail like this. I do know the feeling you describe but now I actually understand it, and that feels very good indeed. Thank you.
A fan wouldn't draw attention to the film's 'faults' - a detractor feigning 'constructive criticism', on the other hand..
@@MaryBrownIsTheBlairWitchElaborate please
@@rustyshackelford4224 What's to elaborate upon? A fan wouldn't instigate criticism of something they purport to like.
@@MaryBrownIsTheBlairWitch Well, I can only speak for myself, but I've been obsessed with Star Wars for nearly 24 years now. I adore the prequels, with Revenge of the Sith being my favorite Star Wars movie overall.
I think the criticisms in this video were pretty valid and fair (specially from a VFX technical standpoint) but they don't affect my enjoyment of the movie at all.
Btw, I would have gone crazy as a kid if we had games with graphics like AotC's back in 2002.
@@MaryBrownIsTheBlairWitchA real "fan" can point out faults all they want, you can enjoy a movie and be a fan despite said faults. And this video is more of an analysis/breakdown of the movie effects rather than the writing/story.
Wait, Hayden didn't actually touch Natalie's hand while he was talking about sand?! That was comp'd in?!?!?! WHAAAT
Slight correction: diffuse lighting doesn’t come from rough surfaces, it comes from light leaving a surface almost immediately after being refracted
I actually love that the Clones and everything relating to the Grand Army of the Republic is CGI, since it highlights the mass production and cloning of it all. Clones are clones, and making them CGI helps emphasize that, and their tools are mass produced for all the clone to use, and since their tools are extensions of themselves, CGI helps in that regard too of making them feel artificial.
"Clones are clones, and making them CGI helps emphasize that,"
You're actually insane.
@@mechadeka is... that a good insane or a bad insane?
The anakin hand bit has perfect build up
This was an absolutely fascinating video. Huge credit to you and I really hope more of your videos get favored by the algorithm. It's EXTREMELY rare that I watch a video with no particular connection to the subject material, and yet finish it completely.
21:08 never realized the explosive ammunition was just stored totally exposed like that, what a horrible design flaw lmao
Lucas was so excited about all this new technology that he never stopped to think whether he should actually be using it, and whether it would hold up in the future. Films aren't like video games, where a certain amount of leeway is given to fakeness. If it doesn't look realistic in films, it is immediately obvious and only compounds with time. It's amazing that with all the talent working on the prequels, there wasn't any quality control. Any competent film maker would've looked at the Yoda fight for example, and said: "This is too much for us to handle. It looks fake. Let's scale it down and do something more manageable".