Great movies of the '80s with revivals

• About A GaL

  1 Sep 05, 22:08

  Originally posted by DrTech:

  Is it me or did I sense a great deal of sarcasm in the post?
  
  Anyway, it's a "I think" statement. I can't find the concrete evidence, but I have a slight recall of how Lucas started the whole thing on CG. In fact, he released all of his tools into the industry for free and it was then improved on further in the future, spawning what we see on the movies today.

  If u compare the old Star wars trilogy with the ones which came out after 2000, can see the difference?
  I had seen documentaries on special effects and found out that they used miniature puppets against static backgrounds to show spaceships and vehicles flying. U can see some fakeness in some scenes
  
  It was not until the movie "The Abyss" that the new CG effects came about. Later Cameron improved it so much in Terminator 2
• DrTech

  1 Sep 05, 22:12

  Originally posted by About A GaL:

  If u compare the old Star wars trilogy with the ones which came out after 2000, can see the difference?
  I had seen documentaries on special effects and found out that they used miniature puppets against static backgrounds to show spaceships and vehicles flying. U can see some fakeness in some scenes

  You are comparing perfection to creation. It is true that Jurassic park or whatever you are referring to right now has greater graphics compared to the Original Trilogy. But if you go back a little to the facts, ILM was the masters behind the special effects for the very films you are talking about.
  
  What I'm trying to say is, Star Wars / George Lucas kickstarted digital effects in the movie industry and then refined it.
  
  EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_and_Magic (wikipedia is your friend)
• About A GaL

  1 Sep 05, 22:16

  Originally posted by DrTech:

  You are comparing perfection to creation. It is true that Jurassic park or whatever you are referring to right now has greater graphics compared to the Original Trilogy. But if you go back a little to the facts, ILM was the masters behind the special effects for the very films you are talking about.
  
  What I'm trying to say is, Star Wars / George Lucas kickstarted digital effects in the movie industry and then refined it.

  http://www.exn.ca/starwars/culture.cfm?ID=19990412-55
  
  Real special effects took off after Star Wars too. Up until 1977, the only space movies to look truly realistic were 2001 and Silent Running, thanks to fx wiz Douglas Trumbull. But he was still moving models and cameras by hand, and compositing layers of effects inside the camera. It took a team (called Industrial Light & Magic) led by John Dykstra to introduce cameras that could repeat a particular motion over and over again, with precision.
  
  Each X-Wing, each Tie-fighter, each explosion was filmed separately over a blue background, with the camera moving. Later, the blue was used to create a "matte" that was a punch-out of each ship; the many layers (sometimes dozens) were finally overlaid to create the final shot.
  
  Although this was a breakthrough procedure, it was still tedious, time-consuming and limiting. Foreground elements were physical models, built by hand and blown up by hand too. Background elements were paintings, without movement. Lucas' frustration with the limits imposed on him for Star Wars, Empire and Jedi led ILM to push the boundaries of computer special effects. ILM did the first "morph" (one shape changing to another) in 1988's Willow, the "pseudopod" in The Abyss (1989), the liquid metal robot in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993).
  
  For ILM, the 1999 Phantom Menace was the culmination of more than two decades work. The vast majority of the effects in the film have been created digitally, on a computer. "Effects" is perhaps the wrong word, since many of the sets and even characters are now computer-generated