SWG Tales

Okay, I've been sitting here overanalyzing what's been bugging me about the Prequels, why they lack a certain air that the originals have, and I've come up with a short laundry list. It really boils down to the HOW that they're made, and I think a little bit less than the traditional "there's something wrong with the script/director" angle.

1). Digital Sets.

They're TOO lush. Even indoor scenes. They've become the star of the show at times. There's so much detail to them, and they're so artificially tuned color-wise that they pull focus from the actors. I can't tell you how much even during boring dialog scenes my eye is confused. I don't know what to look at. Hey, this action over here looks important, but LOOK AT HOW REAL THAT SHIP LANDING IN THE BACKGROUND LOOKS. It's a constant distraction, and it is starkly different (at least to me) than the sets from the originals. Even the interior of Bespin, which is the most detailed set I can think of (the Father/Son lightsaber battle comes to mind) is still tame by comparison.

A perfect example of this was near the end where Obi-Wan sneaks aboard Padme's ship. It's a long/wide shot, and there's SO MUCH going on in the background (because it's Coruscant) that I barely noticed Obi-Wan dropping down onto the gangplank and sneaking aboard. I was so confused during that scene I had no idea what I was supposed to be watching. Maybe that was just a bad shot call, and could have used a second angle tighter on the gangplank showing the sneak.

A perfect example of how this WORKS in the originals is when the Falcon arrives at Bespin. You know where to look. The shot was simple, yet elegant. No confusion as to who was coming off the ship, and they were even tiny and small on the screen.

At any rate, there was too much of this going on in all 3 prequels.


2). Blue Screen Acting.

It's been said that both Hayden and Portman are both capable actors, so what's the trouble? Well, half the time they're acting on a blank stage. It's hard to get "in a scene" when there's no scene to get into. I have some personal experience with this, doing motion capture acting, and while it's easy to sit in the director's chair and say "you're doing it wrong," it's really hard to get in the mocap suit, on a blank stage, by yourself (or with another actor), and be "on." I can only imagine how much more confusing it gets with a camera crew, the pressure of an expensive shoot, etc. Now, you don't just have "what's my motivation," you have "where the fuck are we?" to contend with. Some people get it, and can do it. Others don't.

Examples of this are just too numerous to count. I'd bet that over half the live acting film (not even counting action, which is nearly 100% blue screen) is shot against a blue-screen.


3). Digital Film-making.

This one's the clincher. Again, I have a bit of experience doing this for a living, and digital film-making is vastly different than celluloid film-making. The ability to literally "do anything" goes to too many people's heads (including my own), and you wind up doing more than the scene required. Normally, you'd think this is a good thing, but the oldest example of this is the "rotating camera." Once people had the ability to rotate the camera around the action, everyone wanted to do it, even though it breaks every rule of film-making. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. (The Exception to the Rule in this case is obviously The Matrix's Neo Bullet Dodge, because it was so incredible that you needed to see it in the round and slow it down to show off just how important and pivital to the film it was. This is different than having the camera rotate around two people talking about lunch.)

What winds up happening here is that there's no need to plan out shots in advance. You don't need to be committed to any directorial style, because hey, "fixing it in post" is now modus operandai. The whole film is "post," from shot one. I know for a fact that Lucas and his FX crew still storyboard out every single shot and do lyca reels in advance, but trust me, the power of the Digital Side is tempting. You fiddle with shots so much you actually start screwing them up. You change pacing. You lose focus. You stop seeing the Forest because you're so obsessed with the detail on that piece of bark on that tree there, and if you're lucky someone slaps you upside the back of the head and reminds you that the audience didn't come here to see bark on trees. No one will notice.

Unfortunately, I don't think Lucas has any head-slappers on staff. The man is notorious for twiddling, and I think it's the twiddling that muddies up the vision that was so elegantly portrayed in the originals.

At any rate, not trying to bash on Sith here, because I DID enjoy it. Just trying to outline why these leave a slightly different impression than the originals.

X'an I think your on to something!

Seriously though, I have thought about a lot of the very things you mentioned and I totally agree...
One of the best things about the Orignal Trilogy was how it made the viewer use his/her imagination to fill in the blanks. The Prequels have everything spelled out to a certain extent and I think that makes the fantasy part lesser for the viewer.

Well, you have me loaded with a tangent to analyze during my downtime, that's for sure. And intuitively, I'm already agreeing.

I definitely felt that, in general, the prequels were over "effected" sometimes but I never broke it down like that. Good stuff.

My 2 cents

1)Digital Sets

They problem with this obsession Lucas has is that it removes the veiwer from the movie. You sit the and watch it and know it is not real. The "luch" looks subconsiously tells you that what your looking at is not real and so creates a barrier from you becoming totally imersed in the story. The reason why this happend is because of Lucas' short comings as a story teller and a director. He has siad on a few occations that he doesn't like actors and if he could he would do a movie with out them. He has also stated that the stroy telling isn't in the lines of the script or even the actions of the charater but in the background hence the obsession with doint TOO much in the background. He wants the audience to be amazed at the level of complexity he has created there.

2) Blue Screen Acting

I've studies acting for 3 years and I can tell you that one of the hardest things for an actor to do is create the place for yourself but I can also tell you that if you cannot get it write the impact on your preformace is not horribly altered to the degree that it was for the actors of RotS. What I say in the acting was the figer print of an over abrassive director. I've delt with a few myself. They're the types that tell you exactly how they want you to say specific lines and if you deviate in the slightest they'll yell cut and have you do it again. The fact that Lucas doesn't like to deal with actors tells me that he probably went around and told the actors to deliver their lines exactly like this and in doing so made the delivery forced and ruined the performance. There's alot more I can say about acting and get into why you dont do that to an actor but I'll save that for another time if anyone is at all interested.

3) The Heroic Journy

The one thing that made the original trillogy so amazing was accually one of the oldest formulas in story tellin, the heroic journy, also known as the monomyth. The Ordinary World, The Call to Adventure, The Reluctant Hero, The Mentor, Crossing the First Threshold, Tests; Allies; and Enemies, Approaching the Inner Most Cave, the Supreme Ordeal, The Reward, and The Road Back are all elements of the Heroic Journy and can be found in every event of the original trillogy. Lucas followed it to a T in ANH, ESB, and RotJ. In the prequells he threw that formula out the door and it really bit him in the ass.

I'm getting deja vu

I have to say that with all the digital filming and stuff, you lose the ability to make something "out of focus".

With analog film and cameras, the Focal point is, well... Focused. The background is naturally out of focus. Even our eyes create this effect. It's what truly gives things three dimensions.
with GL's method the backgrounds are as focused as the characters you are watching. It takes it from 3D to 2D.

looking back, the fight scene with dooku is the same setting as the end of ROTJ. Where the grand battle is outside in the windows.

I was kinda dissapointed by the "biggest space battle" and it's too bad Lucas probably wont release an extended version like LOTR. I now have to say the LOTR movies beat the prequels.

Overall I did like Ep3.

warsloth wrote:I have to say that with all the digital filming and stuff, you lose the ability to make something "out of focus".

untrue

watch when obi-wan is riding the varactyl, lots of blur there

I forgot to mention motion blur... that's a point I was going to mention. there's so much motion in some scenes it makes things blurred. I wouldn't say they are "out of focus" (I'm a former analog photographer, so don't beat me down too much. As far as I know digital motion blur is not the same blur you get with motion on analog film. Also if the images are synthetic then how is it real blur? oh, and do you think that's air you are breathing now?)
With the "fake" backgrounds and settings, it really feels "fake"
All the little details, like the damage and dirt added to things even has a staged fake feel to it. At least the old desert troopers had real paint on their real costumes. What is real or fake though? Maybe someday when people can't leave their homes for fear of the deadly sun cancer, maybe it wont make a difference.

warsloth wrote:I have to say that with all the digital filming and stuff, you lose the ability to make something "out of focus".

The irony here is that with digital filming, you actually have greater control of if you want something in focus or not in the background. You can instantly change your camera lens from 35mm to 50mm to a wide-angle fish-eye with a drop-down menu.

You can even make things more blurry in post if you don't want the digital lens on your camera to emulate the real camera depth of field. You can add motion blur to arms or sabers or whatever you want even.

The problem here is that Lucas chose to leave those BG elements in focus.

hmmm thanks for the enlightenment x'an. That was something I noticed, but I just figured it was due to the Super Resolution Backgrounds, and the absence of a real camera being used to film real settings.
There is something that seemed more real about the models and stuff though. maybe because there is a physical object. It seems like everything in the new ones is so clean. If you read the stuff from the Tydirum (or whatever) fanfilm they talk about why they use real settings and stuff.
It may be cheaper in some cases to CG ship interiors, and settings.
There is something about a real setting that just looks and feels real. It wasn't so bad In Ep3. But the best example is a good marriage of CG and real actors and costumes like you get in LOTR. It's not that I like the LOTR universe better, its that they did a better job with the cinematics, and they have a better story. You can't beat Tolkein's story. And if you think about it, Jerrel is right about the JOURNEY thing... (sorry to make that so obvious Jerrel, just playin) It's the same formula you see in a lot of things. IE: Conan, LOTR, Kingdom of Heaven, Indiana Jones, etc.

It is a serious matter, that the whole of the prequels are nothing but a bad story, amazing and expensive effects, and incredible marketing. I feel realy tempted to make some jokes about GL and his money grubberness.
The whole ending of Ep3 made me recall something that pretty much summed up my opinion of the prequels: It's like there was a project with a deadline, and the end was just thrown together to conclude the matter.
take that statement and reverse it. Its like he had and ending down, but pulled the "prequel" beggining out of his ass. I hope what Im trying to say makes sense.

I disagree, LOTR had some really mis-matched lighting on the actors in some scenes, they did not seem to fit into the background very well.

Jotun wrote:I disagree, LOTR had some really mis-matched lighting on the actors in some scenes, they did not seem to fit into the background very well.

I still have to agree that Weta did a hella better job with their CG than ILM does. I've always contended since the first LotR movie came out that ILM lost the crown to the guys at Weta.

As an aside: Weta's still guilty of playing shots backwards. There's at least one shot in RotK (I'm pretty sure it's RotK, might be Two Towers) where they took a slow truck-in/pan establishing shot on a town with flags flying and ran the footage BACKWARDS because they thought they'd like to see it pull out instead of in (or vice versa, I really don't remember what the final direction was). Normally this isn't a problem unless there's a fountain/waterfall, a fire, or flags waving. There's TONS of pennant flags in the shot.

So the flags are totally doing that "Velcro Fly" (reference for us geezers) video effect where they're waving INTO the wind. I expect that level of bone-headedness for people shooting cable advertising.