Why did they Make the Clonetroopers 99% CGI?!

[Ritterin Sophia]

Not to mention the precise choreography that would be required. Try to imagine a couple thousand extras moving in perfect harmony. Try doing that and getting the movie out on time.

Gettysburg, The Last Samurai, Gods & Generals, and Patton all used a lot of extras, and those are just what comes immediately to mind.

How many of them had to be so similair in height and appearence that they were completely undiscernable from the others?

[Lord Revan]

Not to mention the precise choreography that would be required. Try to imagine a couple thousand extras moving in perfect harmony. Try doing that and getting the movie out on time.

Gettysburg, The Last Samurai, Gods & Generals, and Patton all used a lot of extras, and those are just what comes immediately to mind.

those were all natural men who could weren't even suppose to be clones, sure there's plenty of films that use alot of extras but how many of those include alot of more or less identical clones?

[Isolder74]

Not to mention the precise choreography that would be required. Try to imagine a couple thousand extras moving in perfect harmony. Try doing that and getting the movie out on time.

Gettysburg, The Last Samurai, Gods & Generals, and Patton all used a lot of extras, and those are just what comes immediately to mind.

The last two used reinactors who knows what they are doing aleady and Army volunteers for the extras.

[Kurgan]

Short answer?

Lucas did it because he could.


Now I can sense already somebody is formulating a rebuttal, but if you've already read this far, please read the whole thing before bashing my 10 cents worth!

I've become convinced that the Prequel Trilogy was less about telling the "always intended" backstory of "Star Wars" (though that was the hook of course), and more about showing off the latest from the tech wizards at Lucas' companies and what they could do. It's like a big screen tech demo, an advertisment.

That's not to say these aren't really movies, but you can see why the visuals are king and why so much time and effort is spent on so many "because we can" things like that.

Lucas was able to take a half a dozen extras in Wookiee suits and copy them to make it appears if they were a convincingly sized army.

In Episode II he was able to convincingly copy Temura Morrison/Bodie Taylor (sp?) and that little kid who played Boba to make it appear as if there were rooms full of identical clones doing things.

The Matrix sequels proved you could create armies of Hugo Weavings (granted, some were CG, others merely copied).

I therefore don't buy for a second the excuse that Lucas HAD to make all the clone soldiers into CG because it would be impossible to find enough extras (who work for peanuts anyway... and let's be real here, how many starstruck fans are there out there who would make a cameo in a Star Wars movie for free if offered the chance?) who are the exact height and build of Temura Morrison. And the voice thing is no biggie since most of them don't talk and all the dubbing is done in post.

He could have gotten away with having a half a dozen suits made with equal heighted actors (or close enough.. heck, if they can fool with perspectives and things in Lord of the Rings, they can compensate for a few inches height difference) and copied them via computers to create the illusion of more, and made them more convincing.

There was really only one shot that broke the illusion for me in AOTC, and that was the "sunset pan over" as the troops are boarding their acclamators at the end of the movie. At the time I was watching it in the theater this struck me as really fake looking. I had assumed the shots of many clones were obviously CG, but I didn't learn until after I'd seen it that no suits were ever cast.

I'm not a hater of CG that I think it's evil or shouldn't ever be used, I just hate when bad CG is used when they could have done it with traditional effects to make it look more real (and copying actors in a computer I consider different than using polygonal renderings of characters in place of extras or physical models). I also think Lucas could have feasibly used real costumes and it would have looked better.

Compare Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill in their stormtrooper outfits in ANH to Temura Morrison in his CG 'painted on' armor in ROTS. The latter just looks fake. In the theater the instant he took off his helmet I knew the armor was CGed onto the actor's body. It surprised me that he didn't at least use a real suit for the close ups with the helmet off!

I will agree that I got the same "feeling" that a lot of people did after seeing ROTS in the theater (or watching it on DVD for the first time), that I was thinking "wow, I know these guys are all CG, but they look fantastic!" Someone even said that they wouldn't mind if the stormtroopers in the OT were all replaced with CG. The thing is, that this feeling of euphoria is completely destroyed if you watch ROTS and then immediately pop in the 2004 DVD of ANH. Bad as the color and such is in the 'restoration' at least that opening scene of the stormtroopers boarding the Tantive IV shows you what the real thing looks like.

After hours of being innundated with images of CG troopers, you start to forget what the real thing looks like. But anybody watching a marathon of the movies in "George Lucas' intended order" (1-6, special editions only) will notice this.

The real suits have subtle lighting effects, scuffs and scratches, dirt, grime from the smoke of the battle, they rattle and clank like "real armor."

The ROTS Cg armor looks too perfectly fitted, too smooth and shiny (even the ones that are "dirtied up") to be real. The visors are too perfectly polished and opaque at every angle. And when they move, they all move identically (which looks cool as the sign of disciplined troops, but also suggests that they're fake... watch footage of disciplined armies, they don't all move identically, even the most well coordinated are split seconds apart). AOTC and ROTS get past this a little bit by the overall "haze" or softness that settles over the entire picture (they are video after all, not film), but still. I think the Prequel CG looks the best in scenes where everything else is CG as well. When you start mixing live actors and CG, especially anytime they interact, it starts to show the seams.


So yeah, I say great job on the CG soldiers, they look great (much better than the crappy ones in the 1997 ANH SE that rode the Dewbacks). But they don't look as real as an actor in a costume, and if he'd done that for the close ups (panover in AOTC and the "helmet off" scenes in ROTS), the illusion would be complete for me.

Video games these days already use "level of detail" to save memory (models further from your view are less detailed, closer, more detailed). In sword movies, they've employed a similar technique using physical props for many years.. close ups they use a "real" weighted, pretty "hero sword" and far away they use cheap aluminum blades that they can bash away with that look like crap up close. So they can use the less realistic looking CG for the action shots and the far away multi-shots and the real deal for close ups. Thus you won't have to wory about filming two real troopers standing next to 20 other CG troopers that don't look as real. Those guys will be in the background.

I know people hate to hear it (and this has nothing whatever to do with the quality of the acting/directing or which franchise is 'better'), but I think the best demonstration in recent memory of CG+Live action & physical effects in the cinema done right is the LOTR trilogy.

[Havok]

Well put Kurgan. Although, that was like a buck fifty

[Kurgan]

Good point.

[Noble Ire]

To be quite frank, in all the times I've watched AOTC and ROTS, I can't recall ever being put off by the clone trooper animations. I was completely surprised when I heard that not a single costume was actually made and used for filming, and even now that I know, I still don't notice any differences between the CG troopers and suited extras unless I specifically look for them. For me, the hangar scene in ROTS was the only point where the illusion faltered, and I only noticed that lapse upon a second viewing, after hearing numerous complaints about it.

Kurgan, your points are perfectly valid, but I really don't think that the CG troopers negatively affected the films in any appreciable way. Nevertheless, I hope that the upcoming TV series does employ suited actors for clone trooper/stormtrooper roles; I suspect that they would be both far more versatile and less expensive in a TV production setting.

[Dooey Jo]

After hours of being innundated with images of CG troopers, you start to forget what the real thing looks like. But anybody watching a marathon of the movies in "George Lucas' intended order" (1-6, special editions only) will notice this.

You forget what the real thing looks like? All that means is that they look different. The rattling and clanking of the armour in the OT are mostly post-production sound effects (and apparently, the real suits made so much noise that they drowned the actor's speech), which they could easily have added to the PT clone troopers if they would have wanted them. Maybe they are meant to be different, just like the fact that the only storm troopers that don't look like they just came out from the factory, are the snow and sand troopers.


Let's face it, if they had added a few clone troopers in RotS that appeared to be dropping their armour or bumping their heads on doors (because those are the signs of real soldiers in armour, am I right. Yay SoD) and had never mentioned that they were all CG, no-one would have noticed a thing and would probably whine about other things, like how Jango Fett's armour is too shiny, or how crappy Yoda looks compared to Gollum (especially in that scene where Gollum catches a fish in a stream; that doesn't at all look like shit).

And I wish people would just fucking stop comparing Star Wars to Lord of the Rings, they are completely different films. Yeah, sure they used actors for the close-ups of people in the battle shots of RotK. Did you also notice how none of those close-ups are of people wearing identical face-covering helmets, and mostly individually different orcs which would be very expensive to model digitally? Did you miss that they also used real actors for all face shots of humans in AotC and RotS? For the few shots that are actually similar in the films, they tend to use the same approaches...

And of course Lucas didn't fucking have to make all the clones as CGI. He could have used freaking puppets and stop-motion if he had wanted to. Basically what you're saying is that you know better what looks good for a shot than people with literally decades of visual effects experience. Lucas has all the money he need to use whatever approach would work best.

[Kurgan]

I rest my case?

One doesn't have to be a multi-millionaire producer director or owner of a world renowned special effects company to see that the stormtroopers in costumes in the OT look more lifelike than the computer generated ones in the PT. And because the OT was made first, the PT equivalents are going to inevitably be compared to them. If only the Prequels existed, we wouldn't really be comparing them. Still, I swear to you, my SOD was interrupted whenever a helmet was taken off by a clone trooper. It was as distracting to me as if I'd glimpsed the zipper up the back of the "alien monster" fighting Captain Kirk. It doesn't make me get up and run screaming from the room, but it disrupts the illusion that was previously created, like a fly buzzing past one's face at a concert. I know what looks good to me and what convinces me that it's real (even if intellectually I know it's not or can't possibly be). It's not up to Lucas to decide what is real and what is not to me, it's up to him to create a convincing illusion if he wants his movies to have visual power, not simply to make people go "wow, that's almost lifelike polygons there, George! Better luck next time!"


True, the foley artists dub in the sound effects, an excellent point. However we also see the armor physically rattle around. The CG armor
is "perfect" and doesn't do that. I'm not saying we need to have bits of the
costumes coming loose and falling off to make it "real" but these sorts of
things we've grown used to and when they don't happen at all, it turns our attention to the fact. Sort of like if you saw a gentleman walking along on TV and he had absolutely no wrinkles or blemishes in his skin, not a single hair on his head was out of place and there were no wrinkles whatsoever in his clothes. You know that those sorts of "visual imperfections" are normal and natural, so you might wonder if only for a split second why that is. Is he wearing makeup? The lighting? Special effects? Is he for real? If this type of visual is all we ever see of human beings, we might begin to buy into the idea that this is in fact what they look like (assuming we never see ourselves). Once we see someone who doesn't look like that the contrast is brought into focus. It's simple really. So we have the "real model" in the first series and the "computer imitation/interpretation" in the second.

That's why people will keep commenting on Jabba, Yoda, the stormtroopers, etc. Until either both are replaced so that they're the same (replace the "real" with cg in the OT) or the CG improves to the point where it looks just like the physical effect in the OT, there will be comparisons.


And the comparisons to LOTR are completely valid and relevant, since it has nothing to do with the type of movie, it's the fact that both movie trilogies made extensive use of CG to render certain things and other things were live action/physical effects. I think many people agree LOTR did so more convincingly than the Prequels, and wonder why Lucas didn't go that route. That says nothing of the overall entertainment value of the two series, only of the quality of the blending of the CG into the rest of the movie.

The idea that all people who comment or "notice" simply hate CG and don't complain until they're told something is CG and then attack it irrationally ignores the subjectivity of perception. Had I said "oh man that CG looks so stupid and fake!" and you pointed out "actually, that's a guy in a suit" then you'd have made a good point, but as is, it's speculation that the "whiners against CG" are just haters of CG.

If I had millions of dollars to blow on a sci fi movie and I knew what it was going to look like, I'd have used physical suits for close ups and copied extras as needed to create the illusion of identical troops, and CG for the far/massed shots or too-dangerous stunts. My goal would be to create a convincing illusion that doesn't distract the viewer. That isn't going to happen, but that's what I'd do. In contrast to the stereotype of everyone who notices the CG in the PT and comments on it (with something other than praise), there is also another stereotype, of the fan who proclaims everything that is CG is "awesome" and automatically an improvement over model/physical effects. I'm sure such people also exist, but that's not really a good argument against them either.


Whatever the case may be with such folks, I declare to you I'm not one of them. I knew the LOTR thing would piss people off (just look at the IMDB.com board for Empire Strikes Back), but that's just how it is. It remains the best recent example I've seen and one that will be familiar to all of us.


As for Gollum, we have nothing in the cinema to compare him to, except a cartoon made twenty years ago. Sure he doesn't always look real in PJ's version, and a human or trained monkey in makeup would have more lifelike. With Yoda, we have the original puppet (that didn't always look real either) to compare to. But I don't know of anyone anywhere who saw AOTC or ROTS who thought Yoda was a puppet or wondered "how did they do that"? A lot of people defend the CG Yoda saying that the battles with Dooku and Palpatine would have been impossible with a puppet or silly looking with a stop motion model. Of course even admitting agreement to such an argument doesn't mean that also every shot of Yoda, especially close ups, had to also be CG to "match."

I'm sure many people would be more comfortable if people left Lucas alone and stopped harping on the deficiencies of CG, but that's just how it's going to be. I remember back in the day, before all this CG stuff took the movie business by storm, my peers would make fun of movies made in the 70's or 80's when the special effects looked fake or you could see the zipper on the costume. It's not about attacking the specific medium just because it's not physically there, it's just when a special effect is not meant to draw attention to itself (but blend seamlessly in with the rest of the movie) but fails.

The real deficiency of blue/green screened stuff combined with live action elements on set/location is that many actors have difficulty creating a believable interaction when they're not playing off a character that resembles what we finally see. Talking to a microphone stand, an empty space or a stage hand holding a script is not the same as talking to another actor in character, in full costume. That may be a limit on their own acting abilities, but that's just how it is, and it's not something that arose specifically because of CG (though the process of CGing in lots of stuff does tend to present more occurrences of this problem).

So it's a pretty complex issue, not just a simple "CG sucks, non-CG doesn't" issue as some are making it out to be, even if some sound bytes make it appear that this is so.


And that's all I have to say about that (thank you, Mr. Gump).

[Elfdart]

I think one of the reasons Lucas used CGI clonetroopers is the same reason he used digital cameras instead of film: The more things that can be done digitally, the easier it is to reproduce everything in one complete image. A bright green Yoda will always look fake, no matter how well the animation is done, and Gollum's clammy pale skin will look more real. Speaking of color, one of the big problems with the older special effects is that getting contrast and color to match is almost impossible. If it's all done digitally, matching colors and contrast is much easier.

The special effects in LOTR have two major advantages:

1) Unlike Star Wars, which Lucas wanted to resemble Golden Age Technicolor films, LOTR had a lot of the color bleached out -probably to look like the old watercolor pictures people tend to associate with Tolkien. Large parts of the movie take place in dark caves, tombs, swamps, and forests -so it's a lot easier to hide mistakes and things that just haven't been perfected yet.

2) There is no fad of Jackson-bashing like there is of Lucas-bashing -at least not yet. There aren't (yet) vast numbers of creepy thirtysomethings who are convinced that if only Lucas had listened to them (or some other stand-in for these real-life Mary Sues, like Gary Kurtz or Marcia Lucas or the caterer -you know, the real creative force behind Star Wars), the prequels would have been kewl and their childhoods would have never been raped.

I'm glad Lucas is willing try something new and not rest on his laurels when it comes to technology. I remember when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out and everyone thought the cloud effects were so awesome, but by the time Ghostbusters came out three years later it was more dated than parachute pants and Members Only jackets.

Whatever minor faults there are with the clonetroopers in the prequels, they are a big improvement over the stormtroopers in ROTJ, with their cracked armor that in many cases didn't fit. For large-scale combat, it's the way to go.

[Darth Wong]

What is it with these people who announce triumphantly that they can tell the CGI isn't real? Oh wow, you're a goddamned genius! You can tell that the CGI isn't real! Would you like a fucking award?

Meanwhile, when it's puppets or models you can tell it's not real just as easily if not more so, but it's a different kind of unrealism: one that you are more familiar with and prefer for some fucking reason. Oh wow, that stop-gap animation is so cooool, right? Of course, a blind man could tell that it's little models rather than giant walkers, but it's old school so it's all good, right? And you'd have to be brain-damaged not to notice that Yoda in the OT looks like a puppet rather than a living, breathing creature, but ... you can tell the CGI one looks fake! And the old Yoda was a puppet, but he was a real puppet, right? And hey, how about that Rancor, with the awful compositing and glacial movements? Well gee, you can't tell that's not real, right? And if it were CGI, it would have been much more fluid but ... you'd still be able to tell it's not a real monster! Oh no! Epic fail!

[Lord Revan]

What is it with these people who announce triumphantly that they can tell the CGI isn't real? Oh wow, you're a goddamned genius! You can tell that the CGI isn't real! Would you like a fucking award?

Meanwhile, when it's puppets or models you can tell it's not real just as easily if not more so, but it's a different kind of unrealism: one that you are more familiar with and prefer for some fucking reason. Oh wow, that stop-gap animation is so cooool, right? Of course, a blind man could tell that it's little models rather than giant walkers, but it's old school so it's all good, right? And you'd have to be brain-damaged not to notice that Yoda in the OT looks like a puppet rather than a living, breathing creature, but ... you can tell the CGI one looks fake! And the old Yoda was a puppet, but he was a real puppet, right? And hey, how about that Rancor, with the awful compositing and glacial movements? Well gee, you can't tell that's not real, right? And if it were CGI, it would have been much more fluid but ... you'd still be able to tell it's not a real monster! Oh no! Epic fail!

a good example of this school of thinking was the people who thought that Davey Jones in POTC(2&3) must have been a really complex mask/suit because it looked too real to be CGI (it was more or less fully CGI).

as for the Rancor it's kind of funny how much more real the really crude CGI models in the Jedi Knight game series look to the movie puppet.

[Flagg]

I don't give a fuck what they use as long as it looks good. About the only time I was annoyed by CGI was when they were first starting to use it in place of physical spaceship models. I think that using a combination of physical models and CGI looks the best, but the stuff from Episode 3 looked great and the stuff from BSG is looking better every season. I honestly don't understand the aversion to CGI.

[Jim Raynor]

It's just a stupid fanboy bandwagon. SW fanboys want to display how "old school" they are, so they bitch endlessly about how cartoonish the CGI in the prequels supposedly is. Even though the originals used puppets and freaking stop-motion.

Fanboys hold the SW prequels to different standards than other recent visual effects filled blockbusters. Nobody bitched about Spider-Man's fake-looking jumping and swinging, or the "burly brawl" in Matrix Reloaded, where Keaneu Reeves is CLEARLY replaced by a CGI cartoon character in the middle of the fight.

Bitching about CGI in general is just way overdone. Sure, some effects look fake or cartoonish, but that's true for many past effects throughout movie history. The technology can't make things 100% life-like, but at the least it allows you to film scenes you otherwise can't do.

[Havok]

CGI ships and backgrounds are usually fine and, most of the time, done excellently. The CGI I don't particularly like is main character CGI. This is of course just a personal problem I have.

In my earlier post in the thread, I stated that I did not like the CGI clone troopers. Now, I don't not like them because they are done poorly, I don't like them because I notice them sometimes as "off" and it just draws me out of the movie, if even for a second or two.

I had the same problem with Gollum in LOTR. The character and the work put into getting him on screen is by far the best achievement yet in CGI main characters, but every now and then I just notice things... like a foot that doesn't hit the ground right or a shadow that is off, small, and really nitpicky stuff, but I notice, and like I said it just pulls me out of the movie.

Surprisingly enough, the main character that was done in CGI that I seem to have the least amount of problems with, CGI wise, is Jar Jar.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Surprisingly enough, the main character that was done in CGI that I seem to have the least amount of problems with, CGI wise, is Jar Jar.

That actually tells me all I needed to know.

[Darth Mordius]

Eh. I find that if CGI is done poorly, there tends not to be enough weight to movements, and it looks bad. When non-CGI is done poorly, it looks bad. I don't care so much about the technology as long as it looks good.

or the "burly brawl" in Matrix Reloaded, where Keaneu Reeves is CLEARLY replaced by a CGI cartoon character in the middle of the fight.

Thats because everyone was bitching about the fact that the scene existed at all. God that movie sucked so bad.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Nobody bitched about Spider-Man's fake-looking jumping and swinging, or the "burly brawl" in Matrix Reloaded, where Keaneu Reeves is CLEARLY replaced by a CGI cartoon character in the middle of the fight.

Actually, I remember at the time there was a good deal of bitching concerning both issues.

[Dooey Jo]

And the comparisons to LOTR are completely valid and relevant, since it has nothing to do with the type of movie, it's the fact that both movie trilogies made extensive use of CG to render certain things and other things were live action/physical effects. I think many people agree LOTR did so more convincingly than the Prequels, and wonder why Lucas didn't go that route. That says nothing of the overall entertainment value of the two series, only of the quality of the blending of the CG into the rest of the movie.

He didn't go that route precisely because he is not making LotR. The Balrog sequence maybe looks good, but there is no fucking Balrog in the PT, nor any characters that need perspective-fiddling to look small or big. Things that work in some shots simply will not work, or be way too impractical, in other shots.

The idea that all people who comment or "notice" simply hate CG and don't complain until they're told something is CG and then attack it irrationally ignores the subjectivity of perception. Had I said "oh man that CG looks so stupid and fake!" and you pointed out "actually, that's a guy in a suit" then you'd have made a good point, but as is, it's speculation that the "whiners against CG" are just haters of CG.

No, they are haters of Lucas' CG. There are plenty of things that look like crap in LotR, yet I don't see hordes of people complaining about how they should have used this or that technique instead. The hordes that complain about the effects in SW, do have a very strong tendency to praise Peter Jackson, or the use of models in the OT.

In contrast to the stereotype of everyone who notices the CG in the PT and comments on it (with something other than praise), there is also another stereotype, of the fan who proclaims everything that is CG is "awesome" and automatically an improvement over model/physical effects. I'm sure such people also exist, but that's not really a good argument against them either.

I haven't seen much of that stereotype actually.

As for Gollum, we have nothing in the cinema to compare him to, except a cartoon made twenty years ago. Sure he doesn't always look real in PJ's version, and a human or trained monkey in makeup would have more lifelike. With Yoda, we have the original puppet (that didn't always look real either) to compare to. But I don't know of anyone anywhere who saw AOTC or ROTS who thought Yoda was a puppet or wondered "how did they do that"? A lot of people defend the CG Yoda saying that the battles with Dooku and Palpatine would have been impossible with a puppet or silly looking with a stop motion model. Of course even admitting agreement to such an argument doesn't mean that also every shot of Yoda, especially close ups, had to also be CG to "match."

They used a puppet in TPM. No-one liked it of course. I also know of no-one who wondered how they did Gollum.

I'm sure many people would be more comfortable if people left Lucas alone and stopped harping on the deficiencies of CG, but that's just how it's going to be. I remember back in the day, before all this CG stuff took the movie business by storm, my peers would make fun of movies made in the 70's or 80's when the special effects looked fake or you could see the zipper on the costume. It's not about attacking the specific medium just because it's not physically there, it's just when a special effect is not meant to draw attention to itself (but blend seamlessly in with the rest of the movie) but fails.

It's interesting to note, however, that from everyone I've talked to that are not "involved" with Star Wars, as a fan or "old schooler" or whatever, the complaints are almost always about how annoying Jar-Jar is, or things like that. They don't seem to have a problem with the effects (the complaints about LotR are about how it is boring as shit).

[Jim Raynor]

Nobody bitched about Spider-Man's fake-looking jumping and swinging, or the "burly brawl" in Matrix Reloaded, where Keaneu Reeves is CLEARLY replaced by a CGI cartoon character in the middle of the fight.

Actually, I remember at the time there was a good deal of bitching concerning both issues.

Every movie is going to have its critics. But the criticism towards other CGI-filled movies is nothing compared to what I've seen towards the SW prequels. Spider-Man is almost a sacred cow in some comic fan circles. Matrix and even Matrix Reloaded were considered cool before Revolutions destroyed all interest in the franchise. If people criticized the effects in those movies, they didn't dwell on it. Meanwhile it was trendy for dedicated SW fans to bitch about the CGI in the prequels.

[Vympel]

Well, I'm a heretic. I've said before, if they could somehow contrive a way to make the Stormtroopers in the original trilogy CGI, I'd welcome it. The CGI Clones of RotS especially look better in every single way- they move like soldiers, not extras in costumes, because they motion-captured soldiers to animate them, and the costumes are perfect. No embarassing malfunctions that permeate the original trilogy- loose pauldrons, the abdomen piece sticking out in front of the chest piece, breaks on the back of the greaves visible, all that stuff.

[Flagg]

Well, I'm a heretic. I've said before, if they could somehow contrive a way to make the Stormtroopers in the original trilogy CGI, I'd welcome it. The CGI Clones of RotS especially look better in every single way- they move like soldiers, not extras in costumes, because they motion-captured soldiers to animate them, and the costumes are perfect. No embarassing malfunctions that permeate the original trilogy- loose pauldrons, the abdomen piece sticking out in front of the chest piece, breaks on the back of the greaves visible, all that stuff.

If they could redo every single FX sequence and puppet with CGI I'd have no problem with it. As long as they keep the original versions in circulation, anyway.

[starfury]

What is it with these people who announce triumphantly that they can tell the CGI isn't real? Oh wow, you're a goddamned genius! You can tell that the CGI isn't real! Would you like a fucking award?

Meanwhile, when it's puppets or models you can tell it's not real just as easily if not more so, but it's a different kind of unrealism: one that you are more familiar with and prefer for some fucking reason. Oh wow, that stop-gap animation is so cooool, right? Of course, a blind man could tell that it's little models rather than giant walkers, but it's old school so it's all good, right? And you'd have to be brain-damaged not to notice that Yoda in the OT looks like a puppet rather than a living, breathing creature, but ... you can tell the CGI one looks fake! And the old Yoda was a puppet, but he was a real puppet, right? And hey, how about that Rancor, with the awful compositing and glacial movements? Well gee, you can't tell that's not real, right? And if it were CGI, it would have been much more fluid but ... you'd still be able to tell it's not a real monster! Oh no! Epic fail!

Basiclly Seems like another Excuse for Fanboys to bitch about the SW presequels, I remember when you had a thread back about the rather stupid reasons the SW Presqeuel trilogy was singled out for all these bullshit. As Jim Raynor put it, It was Sort of cool and Trendy to bash the SW presequels and conveiently forget about the Shitty Matrix sequels, etc.

Well, I'm a heretic. I've said before, if they could somehow contrive a way to make the Stormtroopers in the original trilogy CGI, I'd welcome it. The CGI Clones of RotS especially look better in every single way- they move like soldiers, not extras in costumes, because they motion-captured soldiers to animate them, and the costumes are perfect. No embarassing malfunctions that permeate the original trilogy- loose pauldrons, the abdomen piece sticking out in front of the chest piece, breaks on the back of the greaves visible, all that stuff.
_________________

Essantially the fac that ROTS Armor look like real armor as opposed to pieces of plastic put in a random fashion to resemble armor on the OT Stormtroopers, other the helmet style, which was intentional, the armor design of the PT was better in every then rather fake and shitty Stormtrooper amor of the original.