To me one of the most interesting things about Rogue One was how differently the Tarkin and Leia recreations were received, at least in person. Of course we know that online everybody is a critic and hates both of them, but that wasn't what it was like in the theater. I went with a large group and half of the group didn't even realize Tarkin wasn't real, while the entire group and and a good chunk of the theater audibly groaned when they saw Leia.
Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
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Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#52They could've used Guy Henry's likeness as-is. He already looks a lot like Peter Cushing. And his accent was impeccable
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#53I recently watched George Millers _Furiosa_ and they used machine learning and cgi to manipulate the face of the pre-teen actress to more closely resemble the adult actress. With the amount of data available constantly being captured of todays actors I’m sure this will become more common - and the brief article I read about it in this case made a point of saying that they had worked with the actors Guilds to establis…
The adult actress, however, doesn't really resemble Charlize Theron from _Fury Road_ though. She did a great job, but I wonder if they couldn't have picked someone with a greater resemblance.
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#54I remember when watching in the theater, the audience reacted with awe. At the time is was a novel technique. Then it was followed up with Carrie Fisher at the end. And the audience loved it.
I remember the same. I saw it in a packed opening weekend; Tarkin’s was more of a cheer and Leia’s a wave of appreciative murmurs. Overheard only positive remarks exiting the theater. Sometime after that the imperfection and potential inappropriateness of the technique gained more cultural traction. It wasn’t until after The Last Jedi was released that Star Wars stopped getting the benefit of the doubt during first v…
I recall discussing it with my family after stepping out of the theatres. I hadn't realized there was anything strange, most of us didn't, but one of my siblings criticized the "bad CGI" at length on the walk home and said they should have hired a look-alike instead.
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#55I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.
I remember leaving Rouge One _shocked_ that it was a self contained story, no post credits scenes, no need to commit to an entire trilogy or need to understand half a dozen recent releases. Given Marvel and similar franchises at the cinema around the same period, it was a breath of fresh air (also a great film)
I loved that rogue one was was self contained. It's a great single mission movie expanding on a throw away line in a previous movie. Solo on the other hand was either way too long for a kid who stole someone's ship and did a joy ride and turned it into an outlandish tale or way too short for a 3 year career. Should have been either a side plot in a movie or a 3 episode arc. Per the movie he's been soloing for like 45 minutes or 63 parsecs total.
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#56Enjoyed RO but having the datacenter at the tropical beach planet made no sense. Think of all the taxpayer money that could have been saved locating it on Hoth. ;-)
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#57In my opinion, the failing of Tarkin was one of animation, not so much rendering. If you watch some of the deepfake videos where they swap the original actors face over the CGI version (e.g. [0]), to me, it looks better but the movement is still unnatural. The lips curl, the head bobs, etc. all have a "linear interpolated" look that makes it seem like it was hand animated rather than motion captured by any actor. It…
If it looks interpolated, that suggests to me that the people creating it were in a hurry - and film VFX operations are well known for crunch at this point, so it seems possible that they simply didn't give it enough attention. Mocap without lots of hand touchups would normally look very noisy/jittery from what I know, so if it looks unnatural and "interpolated" it was probably hand animated in a very coarse way, lik…
It's a question of cost, knowledge and time. Avatar was in 2009 and the motion capture there was well beyond what was on display in Rogue One.
My take on it is that ILM had their own in house animation process and rather than admit that it was costly, slow and gave abysmal results, they doubled down and tried to push it through.
Again, there might be some excuses that can be made for Rogue One, but none for Mandolorian and the later Star Wars movies. The Luke Skywalker scene was deepfaked days after the episode aired [0] and, again, the DeepFake version is much better but still horrible because of the animation.
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rogue One is by far the best of the Disney "Star Wars" movies, and the only one that fits with the Lucas movies. Highly recommend it.
Connecting Rogue One directly to the beginning of A New Hope really made the Leia / Darth Vader interactions work differently though.
Maybe you imagined the leadup to A New Hope differently, but I thought it all fit very well.
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rogue One is by far the best of the Disney "Star Wars" movies, and the only one that fits with the Lucas movies. Highly recommend it.
This. Loved every minute of Rogue One, it worked great as a self contained story, then the finale blended so gracefully with the beginning of Ep IV. That is how a prequel should be made. Newer SW movies aren't that good, but at least they also aren't as bad as Ep. I, II and III, while it seems they're going on the right direction with most of the series.
See, I have to disagree,.episodes 1, 2 and 3 were far and beyond superior to the Disney episodes.
The characters and story fit in the universe. Disney created an alternate reality for their garbage. The Han Solo movie having so much potential and it was the worst of the bunch, worse then the Holiday Special.
Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The synthetic Tarkin was well received and looked accurate. The synthetic Carrie Fisher looked weird and wasn't so well received.
A while back someone deepfaked the CGI Leia scene with footage of the actual Carrie Fisher as Leia in the original Star Wars. It looked amazing. So amazing I'm surprised the CGI -> Deepfake technique isn't used more often in movies.
Rogue One is from 2016. AI-driven deepfake couldn’t do that back then.