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I just bought the new Indiana Jones complete DVD box set (wide screen of course) and while watching the final sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as the special effects feature covering that scene, something came to mind. Why is it that this stuff still looks as real as it did twenty years ago when movies today using CG can't even do as good? Sure the Matrix wouldn't have looked nearly as nice if they used stop motion, or LOTR Two Towers would have never be possible with out CG, but why is the industery so relant on them? YTou know what most of the tunals in Temple of Doom were made out of? Tin foil, twenty years ago people were creative, not to day, they simply say go with some CG. Just once I'ld like to one last movie that conpletely doesn't rely on CG. Nightmare before Chirstmas is the closest thing I can think of. Bring back the mat painting, stop motion filming, and all the smoke n' mirrors that made that era great.

I dont think the special effects look particularly good - its always been easy to make out models, blue screen things etc.

Personally it should have been upgraded with added CGI like the first three Star Wars films.

When it comes to movies, It's over 100 years of cinematic experience versus less than 20 years computer knowhow.

Got the DVD set yesterday, I jumped to the end of the Lost Ark just to see if they "trimmed" the ending (like they do when shown on TV) thankfuly they didn't


Oh no no no no! That might have worked for Star Wars, but for Indy? Personaly I don't think that would look right.

(goes away whistling the Indy theme tune)

Indi's special effects are good for the time. But what amazed me was when I watched Twister, then I saw Wizard Of Oz and saw a really great Twister at the beginning. Forbidden Planet also has some nice effects for its time. There is one part in Indiana Jones that Bugs me (no pun intended) that is the part where he drops into a pit of snakes and his torch reflects off the glass that the snake is hidden behind. They should have edited that for the DVD at least.

Pincho.

That's the only problem with watching any movie so many times, you start seeing the mistakes.

I think spotting mistakes if fun . If you look at it as flaws in the storytelling instead of flaws in the story, they won't bug you nearly as much.

' But what amazed me was when I watched Twister, then I saw Wizard Of Oz and saw a really great Twister at the beginning.'

I thought the special effects in Twister were brilliant.. Wizard of Oz, even for the time as far as I'm concerned, looked fake .

Could'nt agree more Arrow, I think a lot of the artistry involved in special effects has been quashed by CG. I grew up across the street to one of the guys who did the special effects for the original Superman movie, back when someone flying was a big deal. In the old days, guys on wires were obvious, but the effect was still genuine, maybe because it was a stunt, and it wasn't easy - so you paid it some respect, CG is something you can do on a bog standard PC these days, so it's not as special IMO.

I think that LOTR still uses a lot of traditional techniques, you can tell they've invested a lot of time in getting the lighting good, and that's where CG falls down. I think most of the CG was used to expand the armies, rather than replace good old fashioned make-up, Gollum was 100% CG, but they had a guy in a silver suit act the part so shadows and lighting could be used. I reckon Gollum was pretty well done, a damn site better than that annoying git Jar Jar Binks. Probably the worst example of CG in a movie recently is The Hulk, very badly done from what I've seen, I don't plan on watching the whole movie.


Van-B

Gollum sucked big time, so did Jar Jar. Why do they have to do ALL CG based characters.. they never work like that. The best that I've seen are in Final Fantasy, but then again, it's completely CG, so they fit rigth in.

I love CG when it's used to enhance the scene, but the key is to use it subtly, not like they did in Matrix: Reloaded. Those "smiths" looked so fake, even though I saw the movie the first time, and there was a lot of motion.

People should just use CG to edit stuff in those movies, Not make it completely with CG. That way it would look much more realistic. I hate those standard crappy CG backgrounds that you see in all those scifi series, agh. Or even in some movies.

After a brief play with my camera, I became to realize one very important thing. When it comes to photographing / filming, Lighting is Everything. Good lighting gives you good results, and good source material that you can edit. Bad lighting creates bad source material for edits... and you know that's gonna suck.

i agree with arrow,the new star wars movies totally suck comapred to the others, cause they look so badly fake, atleast there was really something there when they used puppets in the first ones. lotr has some very nice cg work so that looks good, but i reckon a muppet style one would have been good. but yeah cg today isnt as impressive as eighties movies, especially the death star explosion, i so loved that rogue squadron used the original explosion in its game, very well done might i add, and thank god indy has hit dvd been waitin ages, but where the hell is the original star wars trilogy too! BRIGN THEM OUT LUCAS!

Golem and the Brethen Demoned actually looked pretty damn good in LOTR ... also alot of the beasties did too.
Like the Ogre in the first film, and there are several Orc's that were and were shown close up that I bet a good few people missed.

I only tweaked onto them the 3rd watch of the film cause the lighting was slightly off when the camera changed position.
You have to admit getting 10,000 people into Orc makeup though for simply scenes would've been a nightmare and a half.
But most of them weren't actually CG in the traditional sense, infact the armies were done quite cleverly.

What they did was create the terrain and then they scanned in each of the orcs that you see in makeup in one of the first scenes.
They have them doing actions ... then they generated that onto the computer, then they combined that with a large number of actual made up orcs.

so although there was only around 3,000 extra's they had tags to keep the position, the cameras position was then fed to the camera - so you have alot of real orcs and even more fake orcs ... but most people who had to spot who was real and who was fake was unable to

Golems lighting was off throughout most of the movie which made him stand out a little ... needed to be softer with more GI Rays if you ask me - however when he's in the woods with all of the shadows and such, he looks blood realistic even with the skin defects looking pretty good.

And as i said the Brethen Demon was just awesome when gandolf is fighting him , although his is a mythical creature you couldn't really do in Real Life very easily ... the whole look, lighting and even the flames & smoke were pretty much spot on and just flowed without you feeling there was any problem with it.

I think that Lucas has gone insane with CG in SW1 & 2 and most of 1 looks very fake and annoying, but in 2 it was alot better.
The animation were still very ropey...

the most major problem with CG is a) details, static models that aren't really affected by sweat/heat/cold/etc... tend to look fake and b)lighting
personally i think Blizzards CG department should do more of the Film Level CG work - i mean if you've ever played Diablo2/Warcraft3/Starcraft and such you'll have seen how good those guys are. Alot of attention and detail goes into thier work that most other animators just don't bother with.

Shaders are fantastic little things that are now seeping into the entire graphics package industry and quite frankly they are what allow people to create truely realitic stuff because you can program a shader so that it'll create the responses and reacte to the stimulae from within a given graphics scene...

meaning that if you want your model to sweat and for it to affect your characters rendering when they're hot YOU CAN now. You want the oil in the skin to change which can either add alot of anistropic or blur to an oylar-blinn you can now.

it gives you the ability to program your graphical pipelines to make your scenes truely interact with each other on a graphical level rather than a scene level.

Smeagol/Gollum is the best CG character ever.

The boy has a life-size cardboard stand-up poster thing of him, and the detail is immense, much cleaner detail than you'd ever see on screen - which tells me that they put a lot of care into it.

He has a little talking 6" figure of him, my fiance just phoned me to tell me she bought a huge figure with a lot of speech on it today, and I have a Smeagol t-shirt . I've been a fan ever since I read The Hobbit as a kid, god knows how many years ago that was!


Van-B

I think Gollum was really, really well done. He didn't look like I'd imagined him too, or even very much like Tolkein described him, but he is easily the best CG character I've ever seen.

Gollum looks quite a lot like I imagined him to look. He looks a lot like a CG too, but I've only seen the trailer. Maybe he has some better realism during the film.

Pincho.

You will probably have to wait long after Episode 3 has been released on DVD first, that's probably late 2005 or early 2006, and even then Lucas may wait a another year on top of that for 2007, which would make it the 30th aniversary of Star Wars. That I believe is when he will release them.

If it continues to make money then he will drag this franchise on for as long as he can.

thats true e.c. Fugging lucas and his money making ability, i say we storm his house and stop him from releasing number 3, (nodoubt it will suck) and then steal the original trilogy film.

My Three Star Wars Videos are without the CG, but with the special FX surround sound. I think they are the best versions.

Pincho.