Reading 06: CGI — Lay Off the Special Sauce
If it wasn’t already clear that I’m a huge sci-fi nerd, we’re back from break with another Star Wars based entry this week. Star Wars: A New Hope is widely considered one of the most influential movies of all time. The results of this movie: Industrial Light and Magic, THX, Skywalker Sound, and the focus on merchandising big-budget action movies would go on to fundamentally change the way people thought about and watched movies. George Lucas pioneered the field of special effects, and Star Wars is his doctoral thesis.
The production of Star Wars was a testament to doing more with less. Every effect was achieved practically, from using models and forced perspective to create large-scale space battles to recycling old props and old junk they found on the production lot to create a grungy sci-fi feel. Lightsabers were created with spinning tubes of aluminum foil. Even complicated visual effects, such as laser fire, were accomplished analog, in that case by drawing them onto the film after the scene had been shot. As “dirty” as some of these effects and methods were, they pioneered the field of special effects and opened the door to the idea of special effects filled movies that would become the CGI behemoths we see in theaters today.
With the advent of modern CGI tools, George Lucas decided to, unfortunately, revisit his masterpiece and use modern techniques to “improve” the movie and turn it into “the movie he truly wanted to make”. Thus, the special editions were born. First in 2004, then again with the Blu-Ray release in 2011, George altered or entirely replaced a number of scenes using CG. Most of the changes, though, wound up being minute alterations to technology in an effort to keep the movies internally consistent with the CGI-heavy prequels he produced 20 years later.
The result is a number of visually jarring scenes where individual elements clearly don’t match their surroundings. Part of the charm of Star Wars is that the effects aren’t the main focus of the movie. The movie is about the characters and their interactions, the effects are only there to enable and illustrate those interactions. Adding a bunch of poorly-animated CGI robots, animals, and rocks only serves to distract from the characters, and thus, the point of the movie.
CGI is a great tool that can create fantastic images and fantasy worlds, but it is just one option available to filmmakers. Movies today are all focused on who can have the most visually-impressive CG shot instead of who has the most interesting plot, and the quality of modern movies has suffered for it. When the longest section of the credits is computer animators, and your movie isn’t made by Pixar, your priorities probably need straightening out.
