Why was Yoda a puppet in Ep 1, but CGI in Ep 2 and 3? Was there actually some kind of tech breakthrough that didn’t happen in time for Ep 1?
Was it just to give Lucas something to re-do in 5 or 10 years?
Remember tha SW Ep 1 ws made in the mid 70’s when the notion of high end CGI was in the grid line stuff seen in Tron. Full motion photorealistic CGI was not even on the table until miod to late 80’s and then only in stuff like the earlyPixar technology demonstration projects.
Umm… heh?? Ep 1 was released in 1999, and probably made towards the mid nineties. Ep 4 was made in the mid 70s, and Yoda did not appear.
For the OP, the IMDB trivia section lists the following for Yoda:
Tests were conducted to see if Yoda could be realized digitally but it was determined that the technology was not up to scratch. A CG model of Yoda was nevertheless created, but only used in one shot, a long shot incidentally, during the scene on Naboo near the end where Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda discuss Anakin’s future.
so it sounds like there was CGI progress between ‘phantom menace’ and ‘attack of the clones’ - probably not a breakthrough, just that enough time hadn’t passed for the CGI techniques of the late 90s to develop and mature to the task.
Ah, should have looked on IMDB, thanks.
And that is why you fail.
Wait, isn’t this where the thread breaks out in a vidid and inspired discussion of why puppet Yoda is superior to CGI Yoda?
If by “vivid and inspired” you mean “pointless and pedantic”, then yes!
I think both the puppet Yoda from the OT and the CGI Yoda are fine. The puppet Yoda in Episode I was horrifying.
One thing I don’t understand. If the CGI was good enough to make one of the sidekicks (who is on screen a hell of a lot more than Yoda,) all CGI, then why couldn’t it be good enough for Yoda?
I suppose because Yoda had already been introduced to the Star Wars galaxy and therefore had an established set of facial gimmicks and body language characteristics.
IIRC Jar Jar had a stand-in who was in a motion capture suit. It would be harder to find a human that resembles Yoda in stature enough to use one.
Yeah I’m right - http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue154/interview.html search for ‘motion’ and you’ll find the actor’s answer.
Elaborate? I haven’t watched Episode I too many times (actually, watching it at all is “too many times”) and have not seen it for years.
Why do you consider the puppet to be fine in Eps V and VI but horrifying in Ep I?
You’ll have to watch ep. 1 again. The puppet not only lacked the detail of the original Yoda, but he was lit terribly (when your set is mostly CGI, as oppossed to a swamp.) He just looked very bad. Where the Empire Yoda let you believe that he was a living breathing thing, the Ep. 1 Yoda just looked like a puppet. The CGI yoda of the Episodes 2 & 3 were much better looking, although I could have done with a little less of the jumping around.
I realize that if George Lucas had had access to the CGI techniques of today, then the original Star Wars would have been entirely different. But what really did the Star Wars galaxy come alive, oddly enough, was how astonishingly low budget it was compared to the universe they were trying to convey.
I believe, for instance, that the Death Star was actually a plastic landscape built on a ping pong table. They really had to strain themselves to get the creativity going.
And the beauty of using a puppet in a swamp is of course that it blends into the environment. *It has the exact same lightning as the studio. * The unlimited possibilities of CGI are, when it comes down to it, really quite limiting because of all the sudden freedom.
The original Yoda puppet was designed and built by Stuart Freeborn, who styled him after his own face blended with Einstein’s, and of course with big pointy ears.
The puppet in Episode I was built by Nick Dudman, whose only inspiration seemed to be his memory of how he thought Yoda was, rather than an actual puppet to imitate from. Or that’s how it appears to me - he just completely cocked it up big-time, not managing to get hardly any of it right. It’s not even the right shade of green.
In the Episode III Special Features, there is a brief scene shown flashing back to Episode I (fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering), but it’s Yoda as a digital model this time. It could be inferred from this that they will have a digital version of Yoda in a future edition, but then again, it may remain just as the test that it was.