I agree with what several people have posted that you frequently onlly notice the ones that are bad, and ignore the good ones. I was surprised to learn that a distant train in Out of Africa was really a model, for instance.
On the other hand, a bad piece of model work betrays itself in bad physics – despite cranking the camera fast to make motions seem ponderous, a model may wiggle too fast. Despite using water thickeners (like gelatin), scale models in tanks often have unconvincing waves. And so on. The miniature structures in Time Bandits, Batman, and Total Recall really bothered me because they didn’t look architecturally sound.
When I saw this (on the DVD special features), I couldn’t help but think of Bond looking at the miniature Bond in the miniature car and saying “I will call him Mini-Me!”
I agree with what several people have posted that you frequently onlly notice the ones that are bad, and ignore the good ones. I was surprised to learn that a distant train in Out of Africa was really a model, for instance.
On the other hand, a bad piece of model work betrays itself in bad physics – despite cranking the camera fast to make motions seem ponderous, a model may wiggle too fast. Despite using water thickeners (like gelatin), scale models in tanks often have unconvincing waves. And so on. The miniature structures in Time Bandits, Batman, and Total Recall really bothered me because they didn’t look architecturally sound.
When I saw this (on the DVD special features), I couldn’t help but think of Bond looking at the miniature Bond in the miniature car and saying “I will call him Mini-Me!”
I think this is a little trickier than that. The ships in the later Star Wars movies may have been technically better animated, but the art design for most of them was so poor that they still look noticable worse than the ship designs from the original movies. If you compare a Star Destroyer to a Trade Federation Battleship, it may be true that the Battleship has better definition, higher detail, etc. but that ignores the basic fact (yes, fact, dammit!) that the TF Battleship just looks stupid, and the Star Destroyers look really effin’ cool. The effect of this is to make the CGI look worse than the old models, because the CGI is being used to create worse looking things.
I watched 2001 earlier this year when it came on HBO. The special effects of 2001 do not hold up when viwed next to the current state of the industry. I can still admire the fact that they acomplished what they did in the 60’s, I can admire the fact that they got the physics of motion correct, and I can admire that they didn’t have sound in space. If we made 2001 in 2003 it would blow away the original in terms of special effects.
I know people love 2001 but I can’t for the life of me understand why people insist that the special effects hold up to this day. I suppose that’s another topic though. My apologies for the hijack.
Well, I think the problem is that you’re watching it on TV. I saw a 70mm print of it just a year or so ago, and the effects were flawless. Simple, basic, but amazing (without any digital touching-up and such)
I guarantee you that if you saw an original theatrical print of just about any film from the 70s, the effects are more sophisticated, but the technology is more transparent: visible matte lines, crude (by today’s standard’s) animation, clunky stop-motion.
The beauty of the Kubrick film is that the effects are large, but fairly simple, so the imagery has lasted the test of time. Sure, the effects are basic, but blown up to enormous proportions, they still hold up. Lots of “better” effects done 10-15 years (and beyond) can’t survive that scrutiny.
Yes, well when you have finished messing around with small apertures and depth of field and bright lights, the finished result always seems too bright or dark-
a full sized street scene doesn’t have such bright highlights and dark shadows, nor does it have the same focussing characteristics as a scale model…
you can get away with this in SF a bit more, because the light in space is bright and contrasty anyway.
at least it is in Earth orbit- the situation would be very different in orbit around Neptune,
or around Betelgeuse or Vega for that matter.
I think a lot of people look at movies from their past with rose colored glasses. If someone did a remake of 2001 and used the same techniques for special effects we’d be calling it cheesey. I did get to see all 3 Star Wars movies in the theater around '93 or '94. I don’t know if it was the original theatrical print but I could see how much special effects had progressed since '77.
I’m not saying that the imagery hasn’t stood the test of time. It’s just that when watching the movie it looked like models to me.
This is kind of what I was getting at. Now, i am not a big Star Wars fan by any means, but as an example:
I see the original ones where Luke is going through some forest or something…and it looks like an actual piece of machinery. It looks like something that can possibly exist. I compare it to the new first one and I see scenes where some kid is in a pod… and it looks fake to me. It’s [i[too* sharp, too hyper realistic.
" Say goodbye to those double-exposed, muddy coloured, blurry wobbly shaky-cam images. Give me razor sharp hyper-reality every time."
Well, that is assuming that using a model automatically means you will use shoddy film work. I think that using todays film technology, there needn’t be all these negatives.
That was my point. Most of the time you are seeing models, but it’s the superior camera motion and digital compositing and colour-correction that makes things look different to your eyes, and makes you assume the models are in fact digital creations.
The SW prequels are probably a bad example, because the spacecraft are a different combination of full-scale, digital, models, and mattes, in each shot, and sometimes change from one to another partway through the shot, so it’s really hard to know for sure what you’re seeing. Most of the time, I cannot tell what they’ve used, and I pride myself on my observation skills when it comes to effects.
Excluding hypothetical remakes, I saw 2001 on the big screen during its 2001 re-release at Seattle’s cinerama (a gigantic theater, I believe the largest in this locale - sans the Imax) and the effects were incredible, models or not. I don’t know how anyone could refer to them as anything less than seamless. I haven’t detected any graphical glitches that might reveal technical limitations of the time. However, with cgi, I’ve often found objects tend not to match their surroundings very effectively (unless the entire movie is CG). Either the object is too shiny, smooth, lighted incorrectly or whatever else; it’s just not very convincing (granted, not all the time, but a lot of it).