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Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

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Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#71

Post by dwighttk »

ensignavenger wrote: post #58
dwighttk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It originally seemed like Darth strongly suspected but wasn't certain that Leia had the plans. Their interaction sounds extremely odd since he knows for certain she has the plans and she knows he knows.

And letting the droids go is even more inexcusable.

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#72

Post by mixmastamyk »

greggsy wrote: post #70
mixmastamyk wrote: post #56

Enjoyed 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. ;-)

It would be infinitely easier to attract talent to a tropical paradise in the galaxy’s equivalent Hawaii than Alaska.

The facility was quite empty from my memory, largely automated.

Oh, reminds me of another issue. There’s that one droid, more capable than ten men and dozens of stormtroopers. Why didn’t the empire use those as soldiers? Haha, well only a movie.

Tarkin and Leia looked awkward but was ok for a few seconds in the theater. Home video, I’d say no.

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#73

Post by InvaderFizz »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #50
rickstanley wrote: post #32

I enjoyed Rogue One, they took a unexplored slice of the story after the legends thing and created this self contained, well written journey of a group that is only mentioned in the 4th episode. Takin may have felt a bit off (uncanny valley), but I think it was a good choice to have him included in the story nonetheless. I like the cold, unhinged personality of this character; I've grown used to Peter Cushing's actin…

> I enjoyed Rogue One... So did I: I love it that it ends just where episode IV start and I like it too, spoiler alert, that the likeable protagonist do not make it (which we knew from episode IV but still).

I liked everything except for how they just give up at the end. That annoyed me. Them not making it is fine, but them all giving up when it looked like there were many viable methods of escape annoyed me to no end. I still think it's the best Star Wars movie overall.

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#74

Post by slyall »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #53
cancerhacker wrote: post #23

I 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.

Going for the exact same look isn't usually important in recasting a character for for a younger/older version or even a straight recast. As long as look similar it is good enough and the rest is on their acting.

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#75

Post by Forgeties79 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #28
vundercind wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 is at least the 4th-best Star Wars movie. Rogue one is distantly at 5th. All the rest are quite bad. [edit] though 8’s quality is kinda useless, being in the middle of a trilogy. It’s hard to recommend.

No way. The Last Jedi is the second-worst Star Wars movie, only outdone (somehow) by its sequel. It was terrible .

TLJ is better than episode 2 by a massive margin. That film is absolute garbage. The only decent part is the battle of Geonosis. To place that ahead of it absurd lol.

I’d say it’s better than ep 3 too. Phantom Menace is the only respectable film in the prequels - and that’s if we can forgive the gungan nonsense.

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#76

Post by yowzadave »

kevingadd wrote: post #49
abetusk wrote: post #38

In 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…

What I find amazing is stop-motion animation—-I presume it is animated in one go, with no in-betweening possible (because of the difficulty in getting the model back the precise in-between state). Really remarkable that the animators can do it so effectively!

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#77

Post by squarefoot »

ensignavenger wrote: post #59
squarefoot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big whoops, I completely forgot about the Solo movie, probably because it was so bad I really removed it from memory. About 1,2 and 3 I probably have to rewatch them as I was so negatively impressed by them, especially 1 and 2, that they're the only SW movies I watched just once while I watch all others almost every year.

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#78

Post by Forgeties79 »

mock-possum wrote: post #45
Forgeties79 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely better but it still has the problem of the original where his face just looks so stiff when he speaks.

It also looks like his face is sort of floating superimposed over the front of his head. I feel like I notice that a lot with deepfake stuff, it’s like the generated patch they’re compositing overtop doesn’t quite move at the same rate as the rest of the thing.

Yeah looking at it again I see what you’re saying

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#79

Post by Forgeties79 »

mrandish wrote: post #63

This is fun to read and also a valuable contribution to preserving the historical details of how it was achieved. I especially appreciate his tone in approaching what had become a somewhat contentious subject: > Hi, I was the animation supervisor on Rogue One, and as such I was intimately involved with the creation of Tarkin. > I’ve decided to chime in for one purpose only, to clarify the process we used. I have no i…

As someone who has worked in production for almost 15 years now it is very refreshing to see such a generous take. Really and truly. I often find colleagues to be incredibly insufferable, nitpicking every single decision and everything they watch with no humility at all. Then the same people become incredibly defensive when people nitpick their work and tell them to “get a life” or some other “you’re too picky” comment.[Insert “oh my god the plot made literally no sense and they never respected The Line:TM:”]

Everyone is basically attacking each other instead of sitting back and going “you know what? They made a goddamn movie and it was fun.” I still see some folks online nitpicking like this who haven’t made anything in 5+ years. You know what? When (royal) you get off your ass and actually pick up a camera again, when you take a risk again and subject your art to scrutiny, you can regain the right to lecture everybody about how you would have done it “so much better.” In the meantime, appreciate the hard work and try to celebrate the accomplishments of a production.

Sorry I know that became a rant. All of this is to say it’s nice to see someone applaud the hard work of others and see that what they accomplished was no small feat.

Re: Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

#80

Post by mrandish »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #79
mrandish wrote: post #63

This is fun to read and also a valuable contribution to preserving the historical details of how it was achieved. I especially appreciate his tone in approaching what had become a somewhat contentious subject: > Hi, I was the animation supervisor on Rogue One, and as such I was intimately involved with the creation of Tarkin. > I’ve decided to chime in for one purpose only, to clarify the process we used. I have no i…

As someone who has worked in production for almost 15 years now it is very refreshing to see such a generous take. Really and truly. I often find colleagues to be incredibly insufferable, nitpicking every single decision and everything they watch with no humility at all. Then the same people become incredibly defensive when people nitpick their work and tell them to “get a life” or some other “you’re too picky” comme…

> it is very refreshing to see such a generous take.

Thanks. I agree with what you've said. Creating at a high level IS hard. We should all strive to begin online interactions from a default position of grace, charity and generosity - especially when it comes to 'hot take' opinions on creative work. As creators ourselves, it helps to remember we don't know the constraints, budgets, time frames, tools or client direction other creatives were working under. It also helps to have been around long enough to have one's once strongly held opinions gradually become obviously wrong over time :-)

As for evaluating CGI Tarkin in particular, I think the only fair way to assess that work is by first putting it in historical context, as it was created nearly 10 years ago now. It needs to be interpreted as a significant step in the long evolution of trying to create photo realistic CGI digital humans. Starting with, for example, this humorous 1988 Siggraph video which plays even the idea of Synthetic Actors for laughs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzRluq7_45c). Watching that clip today, I realize it's almost impossible to see it with 1988 eyes - even though I was in the audience at that Siggraph Film and Video Show and remember being very impressed by the quality achieved. The progress over just a dozen years when I saw Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within on opening weekend was remarkable to my 2001 eyes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrzIRXJNXkM). Although that film is best known today as the most widely seen poster child for the term "Uncanny Valley", it also deserves respect for being the first major feature film to achieve the level of quality necessary to 'discover' the uncanny valley. Given this historical rate of progress, it shouldn't be too surprising that 2016's pre-rendered CGI Tarkin is already matched by the best of 2024's real-time games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpsRNCKiVCk).

To me, film CGI should be evaluated no differently than other types of CG creative works, as they're all based on new, rapidly evolving technologies and tooling. For example, arcade and console games. Back around 20 yrs ago, I can remember some guys I knew bagging on 80s console and arcade games as "low-res, pixely crap" compared to their then state-of-the-art PS2s. Yet today notable examples of early pixel art are considered pure and beautiful, with the look of many of those classic games now being revered by millions of gamers - not for their perfection but for their artistic excellence in spite of their technical limitations. Fortunately, while my early-2000s friends were busy dissing low-res 'crap', I was busy finishing my collection of well over a hundred different 80s and 90s home computers and gaming consoles (including every model of Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, Sinclair, Amstrad, Spectrum, etc). And I acquired them either for free or for less than $25 at thrift stores and eBay. So, occasionally maintaining historical perspective in the face of trendy hot takes can even pay off... :-)

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