Starwars, but IN 3D!

Really? I'd call that the best of the prequels. Or most fun, anyway.

^Its only fun if you define "fun" as some of the worst romance dialogue ever written "acted" by some of the most wooden actors of all time.

I'd say that the films were a combination of Narm and So Bad, It's Good.

edited 5th Oct '10 8:49:47 PM by Mattonymy

Attack of the Clones is bad primarily because Anakin kills a bunch of sand people and Padme doesn't care. She does not care.

Revenge of the Sith on the other hand, is kick-ass, at least imo.

Attack of the Clones, I found rather slow and stiff up until the end. So 3D or not I am not intereted seeing it in theaters.

Is it a sign that my brain is turning to mush that I'm more excited about the upcoming Blu-Ray set of James Cameron's Avatar than seeing Star Wars in 3D?

I'm torn about whether to see it, because even though I like the originals I'm kinda iffy about what Star Wars really represents, the corporatisation of Hollywood. See, what I liked about Avatar was, even though it had a derivative and laboured message story about how technology is bad, it did have legitimate leaps in cinematic innovation other than the 3D.

Star Wars to me is an artifact of a time when a lot of children's entertainment I grew up with hadn't been made yet, Pixar didn't exist in our minds and as far as we knew the Prequels were the most exciting thing to happen since... the Jurassic Park sequel Lost World.

Yeah, as much as I appreciate the mythic experience of Star Wars my appreciation of it starts with Alec Guinness and ends there. Really he's the only reason I still watch the original trilogy,

AngryJoe says it all, really.

@New Geek, I loled very hard at your post. Anyway I feel very similar, I remember eagerly awaiting the Prequels, hell I still have my ticket for the midnight showing of Episode 3(skipped middle school graduation to go see it). They were BIG deals but in hind sight the movies were bad.

Whats odd is I kinda predicted this. Lucas has always wanted to be in the forefront of cinema tech, Cameron kinda bumped him off. I figured Lucas would do SOMETHING, maybe he will surprise us and the 3-D conversion will be the best we have seen.

I liked that Angry Joe thing.

Doesn't change anything. I'm going to see episodes IV-VI in cinemas.

^^ Well, if he's trying to best Cameron, (but he's probably going for the money) it'd probably help his case if he wasn't trying to do something fundamentally impossible. (i.e. Add 3D detail to 2D film)

While Piranha 3D was shot with 3D in mind, it was still a conversion from 2D film, I assumed? I haven't seen it though.

The tragic thing is that Star Wars can never be replaced.

It permeates our pop culture so bad that removing it would cause a rift in reality, collapsing upon itself.

It breaks my heart to admit that I can't erase Star Wars in their unaltered forms from my memory. The CGI alterations are just TOO TERRIBLE!

I don't mean for this to be taken as Flame Bait but I personally do not understand the opposition to 3D. Sure it costs slightly more, but for what it's worth, when 3D is handled good (like Avatar, How To Train Your Dragon, Toy Story 3, and Piranha 3D) it's worth it. Sure there are a lot of films that handle 3D badly, or use it to simply cheapen effects, but HEY! those kinds of movies were already using cheap effects even before 3D came out. Don't blame the medium, blame the marketers.

I can't speak for the other examples you mentioned, but Avatar was filmed with 3-D in mind. There's a significant difference between preparing a film for 3-D during production, and trying to digitally add it in after the fact.

Based on the name, I assume Piranha 3-D was as well.

edited 8th Oct '10 10:55:03 AM by TobiasDrake

I agree and films that were shot like that originally are one example of how 3D effects can be really good. But it doesn't mean that for 3D films that weren't originally captured with this can't be good (for instance the first new 3D movie I saw was the re-released The Nightmare Before Christmas, and I thought they pulled it off beautifully) For me, I just think the current opposition to 3D is really moreover based to preconceived notions of how we think movie experiences should be. It's the same way how "Talkies" were vehemently hated when they first came out too.

Again, don't blame the medium. Blame the marketers.

^^ Not quite. Cameron still does stuff like focus-pulling, which has no place in 3D.

And IMO, the difference between TNBC and Star Wars is that TNBC is animated. If you want to make an animated film 3D, you can just re-render it, and if you can't do that, then adding the second channel by computer won't look too tacky. Adding a second channel to a Live Action film is nigh-impossible. The CG simply isn't good enough, as Avatar's Uncanny Valley complaints demonstrate.

edited 8th Oct '10 11:54:00 AM by Yej

You seem to be forgetting, however, that The Nightmare Before Christmas wasn't CGI film but instead Stop Motion and thus impossible to re render reshoot everything for 3D. Therefore, the same rules that apply in transitioning a Live Action Film to 3D applied to the 3D TNMBC. It's not nigh-impossible for a live action film to undergo the same high quality change, if the creators care enough about it.

edited 8th Oct '10 1:07:09 PM by Mattonymy

If there were some way for Lucas to reshoot the space battle scenes from the OT in CGI without losing their essential... simplicity, I think is what I'm going for... I'd be all for it. There's a qualitative on-screen difference between models and CGI that still hasn't been fully overcome in modern special effects.

This isn't universally true, though; the OT is subject to a ton of Special Effects Failure that could indeed use some cleanup. For example, it's really easy nowadays to see the stop-motion photography used in the Hoth and Endor sequences, and even though the special edition releases of the OT cleaned up a lot of the blocky artifacts around ships in the space battles, it's glaringly obvious that they're using models in some places.

I was rewatching The Empire Strikes Back the other day and during the Bespin duel sequence, I couldn't help but think, "Hey, Luke's falling into a matte painting!"

As to how they'll effect a 3D conversion that isn't cheesy - well, if there's one thing I trust Lucasfilm and ILM to handle, it's effects work.

Plotwise, it's still the same stories. They aren't going to reshoot the entire series, so anything you liked or disliked about the films will still be present. Anakin won't be any less whiny or annoying, and neither will Jar Jar.

As for Lucas himself, hey, if people will pay money for it, why not do it? Sure, we'd all like it if he'd come up with some new material every now and then... or would we? The fanbase for the Star Wars franchise is so broken that just about anything Lucas tries will be labeled Ruined FOREVER.

edited 12th Oct '10 7:37:40 AM by Fighteer

Honestly, I'm in favor of anything that makes the movies look better. I do not mind the CG alterations at all. In fact I'm in support of them.

I hate it when people claim CG is "fake-looking" when in fact it looks much more real than models.

^ Watch Jabba in ANH:SE. Then watch Jabba in ROTJ. THEN tell me the CG looks better.

^I have to agree. I vastly prefer models because they just look more real, since it is an actual physical thing being filmed. Granted, it's easier to do special effects with CGI spaceships but still, I prefer the models.

Because (and this is partially why I don't like the prequels as much) when I see something made out of CGI (even good CGI) my brain still takes a moment and says "Oh, that's CGI." And it partially breaks my suspension of disbelief and pulls me out of the movie.

For example: Yoda in the prequels looks less real to me than the Yoda of the original trilogy, simply because in the prequels I can tell that it's CGI and fake as opposed to a real, physical thing.

And maybe that's just me, but w/e. Sorry if this post makes little sense, I'm a little tired and very scatterbrained right now.

edited 12th Oct '10 9:09:27 PM by RabidRainbow

I'm reminded of a fan commentary for the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. They were discussing why it's nicer that the Vogons were puppets instead of CG. Puppets really exist. They were physically present with the actors, they can react to each other, etc.

I'm still firmly against attempting to convert old 2D film into 3D, because it's destined for failure, just like converting B&W film to color is destined for failure.

It is possible to film meaningful character interaction with CGI. One tool, used in Lord of the Rings, is to have an actual actor on stage, who gets swapped with the CGI model in post-production.

Further, technology will only get better at producing photorealistic CGI, so the Uncanny Valley effect will continue to recede over time, at least for work produced by the quality studios.

While converting 2D to 3D may be problematic, there's no reason (other than time and money) why Lucas couldn't invest the effort to "reshoot" the OT's effects sequences with modern technology.

As I said before, one of the things that I keep noticing more and more as I rewatch the old films is how primitive many of the effects look. Before CG, there wasn't a cost-effective method of showing Deflector Shields on starships, so it's all implied - for example, by having blaster fire "explode" near a ship without damaging it. Another example is the cockpit POV sequences. Those are very clearly a camera stuck in a model being moved through more models. Consider how the limitations of photography limited the ability to effectively realize those scenes, and how much more awesome they could look if completely redone.

The Battle of Endor is yet another case. With all the complicated fighting going on, we only got one shot of capital ships engaging each other, for about 3 seconds. The destruction of the Executor is supposed be the climactic spectacle shot of the battle, but I'll be damned if I don't look at that scene each time now and say, "Yep, it's a SSD model crashing into a Death Star model, with an unrealistic gout of flame spewing out."

It should be possible to redo those scenes with modern CGI while still keeping them as they were intended to appear. Work on the principle of, "This is how we would have made it look if we'd had the technology at the time."

I have. CG Jabba in A New Hope looks loads better than lump-of-rubber Jabba in Return of the Jedi. I don't care what's physically present and what isn't; as long as we know, on an intellectual level, that there really isn't an alien monster sitting there, I'd rather see a realistically rendered one the actors can't see than a dead piece of plastic they can. As for the wretched Hitchhiker's Guide film adaptation (really, I love the books more than life itself, but that movie made me cry Tears of Blood), I'll admit that the Vogons looked good for what they were, but they would have looked even better if their arms weren't obviously being manipulated with pieces of string.

I'm not worried so much about Uncanny Valley as I am "this person is interacting with a character that is obviously not there! You can stick as many motion control points on a stuntman in a green suit as you want, but when you stick a CG character in the place of a person, it just doesn't look right. With real people you get a gut feeling confirming that the character occupies real space. This feeling can also happen with giant puppets. With a CG character, this feeling does not happen.