9 ms·

Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

104 points by trauco 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago
I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.
- nordsieck 2y ago
  > I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies. Not super surprising to me. I've only seen episode 8. And that was enough for me to be completely uninterested in seeing any new Star Wars media. It's made me strangely nostalgic for the prequel trilogy. At the time they came out I was a little sad at how poorly they compared to the original trilogy. But at least those movies wanted to be in the Starwars universe.
  - Forgeties79 2y ago
    8 has a few low points but overall I think it was great tbh. Took some risks and tried to get away from the importance of “who your parents are”/general “great man” nonsense a lot of heroic epics lean on. 9 on the other hand…oof. Don’t watch that.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      I watched 9 in 3-d on my Meta Quest 3. The villain in the last three movies is hard for me to take seriously because he seems to have stepped out of an episode of Doctor Who. I appreciate the last three movies though for outdoing themselves in scale as did early space operas such as Skylark of Space. I see Star Wars as a project that suffered because it went on for way too long; there were major changes in the external culture inside of and between the last two trilogies that make them hard to watch together.
      - Forgeties79 2y ago
        If you mean Snoke technically he wasn’t in the 3rd! But yes point taken haha
        PaulHoule 2y ago
        No, I think it's Kylo Ren who seems to have come out of Doctor Who but I guess Snokes might come from there too.
        Forgeties79 2y ago
        Ahhhh my mistake
    - lll-o-lll 2y ago
      8 was not great. David Mitchell puts it best. “My enjoyment was predicated on it amounting to something. It was an IOU to be redeemed at the point of pleasurable revelation, and as there was none, the IOU was never redeemed. Therefore, I hadn’t enjoyed myself.”
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - Forgeties79 2y ago
        Agrees to disagree I suppose!
  - ensignavenger 2y ago
    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.
    - squarefoot 2y ago
      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.
      - ensignavenger 2y ago
        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.
        squarefoot 2y ago
        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.
    - dwighttk 2y ago
      Connecting Rogue One directly to the beginning of A New Hope really made the Leia / Darth Vader interactions work differently though.
      - ensignavenger 2y ago
        Maybe you imagined the leadup to A New Hope differently, but I thought it all fit very well.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    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.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      No way. The Last Jedi is the second-worst Star Wars movie, only outdone (somehow) by its sequel. It was terrible.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - mattnewton 2y ago
        I liked it better than the force awakens but I think we could both agree they’re all safely in the “not worth watching” bucket so the order we stack them in there doesn’t matter. (9 definitely is on the bottom though)
      - dwighttk 2y ago
        And that is including the Holiday Special.
      - Forgeties79 2y ago
        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.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    I liked the prequels overall (despite their flaws), but I can say you're definitely not alone here. I have seen a lot of discourse online where the sequel trilogy made people appreciate that at least the prequels had a coherent creative vision behind them. Lucas made plenty of mistakes in realizing his vision, of course. But he had one. By contrast, the sequel trilogy is painful to watch because they feel like they were designed by a committee (and the difference in creative leads hurts a lot too). Episode 7 in particular feels like they consciously tried to make a by-the-numbers Star Wars which passed muster with focus groups, but it had no soul at all.
- rubyfan 2y ago
  Agree, it was by far a much better story line and set of characters than The Force Awakens and so on. I generally like a lot of the series on Disney+ and get the sense you have a few different creative teams pushing this stuff.
- tsujamin 2y ago
  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)
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014. The X-Men films have the property you want, with plots and characterization included in the movie instead of relying on you to bring them with you in your mind. (Are the later films good? They're not great, but if you watch one you'll come out with a sense that the movie had a plot, the things that happened were related to that plot, and the characters had reasons for the things they were doing. The films are quite inconsistent with each other, but they're very coherent considered individually.) The MCU films of phase 2 have already lost it. (For context, phase 2 starts with Iron Man 3 and is mostly garbage with the exception of Winter Soldier, concluding with Ant-Man.) My conclusion is basically just that someone at the MCU decided "we can save on the budget if we stop using writers".
    - totoglazer 2y ago
      I don’t think it’s budget, i think it’s about the churn. They want an assembly line of blockbusters at a predictable cadence. If you need a good plot it adds a lot of uncertainty into which script, how long it will take to write, etc. much easier to just take whatever the best thing laying around on the deadline day and keep moving forward.
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        > They want an assembly line of blockbusters at a predictable cadence. This is something that everyone wants. > If you need a good plot it adds a lot of uncertainty into which script, how long it will take to write, etc. This is true of everything too. Why would these common factors only lead the MCU to abandon the idea of plotting its movies? How come Moana had a plot?
- omoikane 2y ago
  I didn't even notice that Tarkin was a CG rendition until this post. I thought they did a wonderful job. I remember Rogue One as one of the better Star Wars movies, especially with how they patched up certain holes in other movies while remaining mostly self-contained. If Star Wars were software, Rogue One might be more of a "bug fix release" as opposed to a "feature update", and bug fix releases are the best releases.
drunkencoder 2y ago
I wonder how this would have played out using deep fake technology
- thih9 2y ago
  Mandalorian Season 2 spoilers below. This article looks relevant: “How Star Wars Deepfake Seriously Improves Luke Skywalker Cameo in The Mandalorian” - the youtuber that did that eventually got hired by ILM. There is also an example with Tarkin. https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-deepfake-luke-skywalker-mandalorian/ https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-deepfake-luke-skywalk...
  - Forgeties79 2y ago
    It is definitely better but it still has the problem of the original where his face just looks so stiff when he speaks.
    - mock-possum 2y ago
      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.
      - Forgeties79 2y ago
        Yeah looking at it again I see what you’re saying
ekianjo 2y ago
It was not very impressive to say the least. It looked fake the second it appeared on screen.
- TillE 2y ago
  It would've been fine if they kept it to a brief appearance, but the movie spends so much time with Tarkin, including closeups of the face which simply does not move like a human's. Really bad call, takes away from an otherwise very good movie.
francisofascii 2y ago
I 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.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  The synthetic Tarkin was well received and looked accurate. The synthetic Carrie Fisher looked weird and wasn't so well received.
  - lordfrito 2y ago
    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.
    - geerlingguy 2y ago
      Corridor did it and it was a great episode on how deepfakes were progressing (they're muck better now): https://youtu.be/_CXMb_MO3aw?feature=shared https://youtu.be/_CXMb_MO3aw?feature=shared
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        The most prominent difference between "original" and "deepfake" in the footage opening that video (of Tarkin, not Leia) is that the deepfake has much worse lighting. The second is that the deepfake looks significantly younger.
    - loloquwowndueo 2y ago
      Rogue One is from 2016. AI-driven deepfake couldn’t do that back then.
- 1123581321 2y ago
  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 viewings, broadly speaking.
Svip 2y ago
> We had in our possession a life casting of Peter Cushing’s face. It was made not long after New Hope, so it was very accurate in terms of Cushing’s age, etc. Not mentioned is that the cast he is talking about was made for the movie Top Secret!, where Peter Cushing plays a bookshop proprietor with a distorted face around a magnifying glass.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk
- greggsy 2y ago
  That was surprisingly well done
cancerhacker 2y ago
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 establish appropriate Compensation (in this case). But it was subtle and I wouldn’t have known without looking into the trivia. I saw and enjoyed _The Instigators_ last night and was thinking about how strong a physical impression some of the actors made on screen - Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, and Ron Perlman in particular.
- throwawayk7h 2y ago
  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.
  - greggsy 2y ago
    I thought the same thing and could only conclude that she was only picked for her current popularity
  - slyall 2y ago
    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.
rickstanley 2y ago
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 acting and facial features. I feel like, there should be more exploration of Star Wars in the aspect of "mundane" life, like it's done in Andor. There's a big universe already established. Andor really helped me understand 2 things of SW universe: the oppression which built up the motivation for Cassian to join the Rebels, and, effectiveness of the Empire, specifically the ISB. God, the exchange between Daedra Meero and Blevin, with an added mediation of the cunning Major Partagaz was excellent. Reminded me of the discussion in Jurassic Park about ethics.
- rrnechmech 2y ago
  > discussion in Jurassic Park about ethics. Care to elaborate?
  - avaldez_ 2y ago
    _Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should_ (?)
    - libria 2y ago
      Not sure why this was downvoted, but I also assumed they were referring to this scene, the Hammond + Grant + Sadler + Malcolm + Gennaro lunch debate in the original.
    - rrnechmech 2y ago
      Of course. That is legendary. Thanks
- prpl 2y ago
  I liked Andor a lot too, because of the mundane, the prison/cruelty, the guerilla-like warfare, and betrayal. The mundane existed in episode 4 as well, at least at the beginning.
abetusk 2y ago
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 looks like in the article either the system they had in place captured facial expressions or an animator tried to recreate them, so I'm unclear why the facial movement looks so awful. Maybe they captured waypoints and then interpolated and we're seeing the aftereffect of the interpolated system? I don't know. I remember Logan coming out at around the same time and being blown away by the younger Hugh Jackman. This was a year later than Rogue One and the younger version didn't really speak, so maybe it's not a fair comparison but I don't think there was a good excuse to have such a bad model. Certainly later, with Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian or Carrie Fisher in the later Star Wars series, there was no excuse to have had it be so bad. [0] youtube.com/watch?v=_CXMb_MO3aw
- kevingadd 2y ago
  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, like high level 'gaze here, tilt head at this point, clear throat' sort of stuff without an artist ever going in and fussing over each frame to make it feel really natural. In 2D animation you have stages like this, there's the initial storyboard, then the keyframing, and then the inbetweening. The inbetweening can be surprisingly important since it comes down to making the motion between those "key" frames feel natural instead of just a linear interpolation from A to B. The same applies to 3D animation, you want to put anticipation in the right places, have momentum build up or dissipate, have objects overshoot their destination and then snap back, that sort of stuff.
  - abetusk 2y ago
    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. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
dwighttk 2y ago
None of these fake faces look that good out of the chute, and even the best looking ones look terrible a year later.
mmastrac 2y ago
I can't wait for a re-release of this particular film with the latest deepfake tech integration. It looks quite terrible in the original release -- enough to pull me out of the immersion of the film -- and the fan edits of those scenes are fantastic. The movie is certainly one of the highlights of the modern SW universe and deserves a bit of additional love to bring it to the modern standards for virtual actors. Not to say it wasn't an achievement at the time, but it's too far in the uncanny valley as it stands.
causality0 2y ago
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.
ane 2y ago
They could've used Guy Henry's likeness as-is. He already looks a lot like Peter Cushing. And his accent was impeccable
mixmastamyk 2y ago
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. ;-)
- greggsy 2y ago
  It would be infinitely easier to attract talent to a tropical paradise in the galaxy’s equivalent Hawaii than Alaska.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    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.
mrandish 2y ago
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 interest in trying to convince anyone to like the results more than they do, or to argue with anyone about how “real” our work looked in the film. I'm one of those who enjoyed RO but also immediately noticed the CGI Tarkin being "off", despite the fact I'd not heard about it and didn't go in looking for it (I had heard something about CGI Leia though). It's helpful that the OP mentioned in the intro that many people never noticed it. Although CGI Tarkin clearly stood out to me, I'm a pretty serious SW fan (having seen the original when I was 12 and the entire opening trilogy many times since). So I'm unusually familiar with Peter Cushing's appearance and mannerisms on-screen in the SW universe. Perhaps more significantly, I've also had a multi-decade career deeply involved in the creation and evolution of digital production tools and CGI as well as being a sometime professional (and, more often, hobbyist) film-maker. To be fair, once you start counting NAB and Siggraph trade shows you've attended by the dozen, it's reasonable to assume you probably can't see films or CGI the way most people do - and so I concede it's entirely possible CGI Tarkin was adequately executed for the majority of the intended audience. However, I think that may miss the more important point that, whether CGI Tarkin in RO was "good enough" or not, doesn't much matter in the long run. We've always known creating perfectly photo-realistic CGI humans is extremely difficult, especially substituting CGI for a particular well-known human in a well-known live action context. It's pretty much the hardest CGI thing there is. Like most things in CGI, I'm pretty sure we'll eventually master it but at the time CGI Tarkin was done - it was wildly ambitious and, IMHO, very likely to fail. So the fact CGI Tarkin didn't abjectly fail and was, at worst, mildly distracting to critical eyes, is something the team that did it should be proud of and those of us with those critical eyes should, at the least, be tolerant of and, preferably, celebrate as a worthy historical milestone on the long path toward perfection.
- Forgeties79 2y ago
  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.
fmajid 2y ago
I found Tarkin in Rogue One well done, after all Peter Cushing was really that gaunt and cadaveric in his later years. Leia, on the other hand, was a complete mess.

104 points by trauco 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago

I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.

nordsieck 2y ago
> I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies. Not super surprising to me. I've only seen episode 8. And that was enough for me to be completely uninterested in seeing any new Star Wars media. It's made me strangely nostalgic for the prequel trilogy. At the time they came out I was a little sad at how poorly they compared to the original trilogy. But at least those movies wanted to be in the Starwars universe.
- Forgeties79 2y ago
  8 has a few low points but overall I think it was great tbh. Took some risks and tried to get away from the importance of “who your parents are”/general “great man” nonsense a lot of heroic epics lean on. 9 on the other hand…oof. Don’t watch that.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I watched 9 in 3-d on my Meta Quest 3. The villain in the last three movies is hard for me to take seriously because he seems to have stepped out of an episode of Doctor Who. I appreciate the last three movies though for outdoing themselves in scale as did early space operas such as Skylark of Space. I see Star Wars as a project that suffered because it went on for way too long; there were major changes in the external culture inside of and between the last two trilogies that make them hard to watch together.
    - Forgeties79 2y ago
      If you mean Snoke technically he wasn’t in the 3rd! But yes point taken haha
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        No, I think it's Kylo Ren who seems to have come out of Doctor Who but I guess Snokes might come from there too.
        Forgeties79 2y ago
        Ahhhh my mistake
  - lll-o-lll 2y ago
    8 was not great. David Mitchell puts it best. “My enjoyment was predicated on it amounting to something. It was an IOU to be redeemed at the point of pleasurable revelation, and as there was none, the IOU was never redeemed. Therefore, I hadn’t enjoyed myself.”
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Forgeties79 2y ago
      Agrees to disagree I suppose!
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  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.
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    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.
    - ensignavenger 2y ago
      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.
      - squarefoot 2y ago
        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.
  - dwighttk 2y ago
    Connecting Rogue One directly to the beginning of A New Hope really made the Leia / Darth Vader interactions work differently though.
    - ensignavenger 2y ago
      Maybe you imagined the leadup to A New Hope differently, but I thought it all fit very well.
- vundercind 2y ago
  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.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    No way. The Last Jedi is the second-worst Star Wars movie, only outdone (somehow) by its sequel. It was terrible.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - mattnewton 2y ago
      I liked it better than the force awakens but I think we could both agree they’re all safely in the “not worth watching” bucket so the order we stack them in there doesn’t matter. (9 definitely is on the bottom though)
    - dwighttk 2y ago
      And that is including the Holiday Special.
    - Forgeties79 2y ago
      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.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  I liked the prequels overall (despite their flaws), but I can say you're definitely not alone here. I have seen a lot of discourse online where the sequel trilogy made people appreciate that at least the prequels had a coherent creative vision behind them. Lucas made plenty of mistakes in realizing his vision, of course. But he had one. By contrast, the sequel trilogy is painful to watch because they feel like they were designed by a committee (and the difference in creative leads hurts a lot too). Episode 7 in particular feels like they consciously tried to make a by-the-numbers Star Wars which passed muster with focus groups, but it had no soul at all.
rubyfan 2y ago
Agree, it was by far a much better story line and set of characters than The Force Awakens and so on. I generally like a lot of the series on Disney+ and get the sense you have a few different creative teams pushing this stuff.
tsujamin 2y ago
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)
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014. The X-Men films have the property you want, with plots and characterization included in the movie instead of relying on you to bring them with you in your mind. (Are the later films good? They're not great, but if you watch one you'll come out with a sense that the movie had a plot, the things that happened were related to that plot, and the characters had reasons for the things they were doing. The films are quite inconsistent with each other, but they're very coherent considered individually.) The MCU films of phase 2 have already lost it. (For context, phase 2 starts with Iron Man 3 and is mostly garbage with the exception of Winter Soldier, concluding with Ant-Man.) My conclusion is basically just that someone at the MCU decided "we can save on the budget if we stop using writers".
  - totoglazer 2y ago
    I don’t think it’s budget, i think it’s about the churn. They want an assembly line of blockbusters at a predictable cadence. If you need a good plot it adds a lot of uncertainty into which script, how long it will take to write, etc. much easier to just take whatever the best thing laying around on the deadline day and keep moving forward.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > They want an assembly line of blockbusters at a predictable cadence. This is something that everyone wants. > If you need a good plot it adds a lot of uncertainty into which script, how long it will take to write, etc. This is true of everything too. Why would these common factors only lead the MCU to abandon the idea of plotting its movies? How come Moana had a plot?
omoikane 2y ago
I didn't even notice that Tarkin was a CG rendition until this post. I thought they did a wonderful job. I remember Rogue One as one of the better Star Wars movies, especially with how they patched up certain holes in other movies while remaining mostly self-contained. If Star Wars were software, Rogue One might be more of a "bug fix release" as opposed to a "feature update", and bug fix releases are the best releases.

drunkencoder 2y ago

I wonder how this would have played out using deep fake technology

thih9 2y ago
Mandalorian Season 2 spoilers below. This article looks relevant: “How Star Wars Deepfake Seriously Improves Luke Skywalker Cameo in The Mandalorian” - the youtuber that did that eventually got hired by ILM. There is also an example with Tarkin. https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-deepfake-luke-skywalker-mandalorian/ https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-deepfake-luke-skywalk...
- Forgeties79 2y ago
  It is definitely better but it still has the problem of the original where his face just looks so stiff when he speaks.
  - mock-possum 2y ago
    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.
    - Forgeties79 2y ago
      Yeah looking at it again I see what you’re saying

ekianjo 2y ago

It was not very impressive to say the least. It looked fake the second it appeared on screen.

TillE 2y ago
It would've been fine if they kept it to a brief appearance, but the movie spends so much time with Tarkin, including closeups of the face which simply does not move like a human's. Really bad call, takes away from an otherwise very good movie.

francisofascii 2y ago

I 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.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
The synthetic Tarkin was well received and looked accurate. The synthetic Carrie Fisher looked weird and wasn't so well received.
- lordfrito 2y ago
  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.
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    Corridor did it and it was a great episode on how deepfakes were progressing (they're muck better now): https://youtu.be/_CXMb_MO3aw?feature=shared https://youtu.be/_CXMb_MO3aw?feature=shared
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      The most prominent difference between "original" and "deepfake" in the footage opening that video (of Tarkin, not Leia) is that the deepfake has much worse lighting. The second is that the deepfake looks significantly younger.
  - loloquwowndueo 2y ago
    Rogue One is from 2016. AI-driven deepfake couldn’t do that back then.
1123581321 2y ago
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 viewings, broadly speaking.

Svip 2y ago

> We had in our possession a life casting of Peter Cushing’s face. It was made not long after New Hope, so it was very accurate in terms of Cushing’s age, etc. Not mentioned is that the cast he is talking about was made for the movie Top Secret!, where Peter Cushing plays a bookshop proprietor with a distorted face around a magnifying glass.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk

greggsy 2y ago
That was surprisingly well done

cancerhacker 2y ago

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 establish appropriate Compensation (in this case). But it was subtle and I wouldn’t have known without looking into the trivia. I saw and enjoyed _The Instigators_ last night and was thinking about how strong a physical impression some of the actors made on screen - Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, and Ron Perlman in particular.

throwawayk7h 2y ago
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.
- greggsy 2y ago
  I thought the same thing and could only conclude that she was only picked for her current popularity
- slyall 2y ago
  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.

rickstanley 2y ago

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 acting and facial features. I feel like, there should be more exploration of Star Wars in the aspect of "mundane" life, like it's done in Andor. There's a big universe already established. Andor really helped me understand 2 things of SW universe: the oppression which built up the motivation for Cassian to join the Rebels, and, effectiveness of the Empire, specifically the ISB. God, the exchange between Daedra Meero and Blevin, with an added mediation of the cunning Major Partagaz was excellent. Reminded me of the discussion in Jurassic Park about ethics.

rrnechmech 2y ago
> discussion in Jurassic Park about ethics. Care to elaborate?
- avaldez_ 2y ago
  _Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should_ (?)
  - libria 2y ago
    Not sure why this was downvoted, but I also assumed they were referring to this scene, the Hammond + Grant + Sadler + Malcolm + Gennaro lunch debate in the original.
  - rrnechmech 2y ago
    Of course. That is legendary. Thanks
prpl 2y ago
I liked Andor a lot too, because of the mundane, the prison/cruelty, the guerilla-like warfare, and betrayal. The mundane existed in episode 4 as well, at least at the beginning.

abetusk 2y ago

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 looks like in the article either the system they had in place captured facial expressions or an animator tried to recreate them, so I'm unclear why the facial movement looks so awful. Maybe they captured waypoints and then interpolated and we're seeing the aftereffect of the interpolated system? I don't know. I remember Logan coming out at around the same time and being blown away by the younger Hugh Jackman. This was a year later than Rogue One and the younger version didn't really speak, so maybe it's not a fair comparison but I don't think there was a good excuse to have such a bad model. Certainly later, with Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian or Carrie Fisher in the later Star Wars series, there was no excuse to have had it be so bad. [0] youtube.com/watch?v=_CXMb_MO3aw

kevingadd 2y ago
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, like high level 'gaze here, tilt head at this point, clear throat' sort of stuff without an artist ever going in and fussing over each frame to make it feel really natural. In 2D animation you have stages like this, there's the initial storyboard, then the keyframing, and then the inbetweening. The inbetweening can be surprisingly important since it comes down to making the motion between those "key" frames feel natural instead of just a linear interpolation from A to B. The same applies to 3D animation, you want to put anticipation in the right places, have momentum build up or dissipate, have objects overshoot their destination and then snap back, that sort of stuff.
- abetusk 2y ago
  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. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU

dwighttk 2y ago

None of these fake faces look that good out of the chute, and even the best looking ones look terrible a year later.

mmastrac 2y ago

I can't wait for a re-release of this particular film with the latest deepfake tech integration. It looks quite terrible in the original release -- enough to pull me out of the immersion of the film -- and the fan edits of those scenes are fantastic. The movie is certainly one of the highlights of the modern SW universe and deserves a bit of additional love to bring it to the modern standards for virtual actors. Not to say it wasn't an achievement at the time, but it's too far in the uncanny valley as it stands.

causality0 2y ago

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.

ane 2y ago

They could've used Guy Henry's likeness as-is. He already looks a lot like Peter Cushing. And his accent was impeccable

mixmastamyk 2y ago

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. ;-)

greggsy 2y ago
It would be infinitely easier to attract talent to a tropical paradise in the galaxy’s equivalent Hawaii than Alaska.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  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.

mrandish 2y ago

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 interest in trying to convince anyone to like the results more than they do, or to argue with anyone about how “real” our work looked in the film. I'm one of those who enjoyed RO but also immediately noticed the CGI Tarkin being "off", despite the fact I'd not heard about it and didn't go in looking for it (I had heard something about CGI Leia though). It's helpful that the OP mentioned in the intro that many people never noticed it. Although CGI Tarkin clearly stood out to me, I'm a pretty serious SW fan (having seen the original when I was 12 and the entire opening trilogy many times since). So I'm unusually familiar with Peter Cushing's appearance and mannerisms on-screen in the SW universe. Perhaps more significantly, I've also had a multi-decade career deeply involved in the creation and evolution of digital production tools and CGI as well as being a sometime professional (and, more often, hobbyist) film-maker. To be fair, once you start counting NAB and Siggraph trade shows you've attended by the dozen, it's reasonable to assume you probably can't see films or CGI the way most people do - and so I concede it's entirely possible CGI Tarkin was adequately executed for the majority of the intended audience. However, I think that may miss the more important point that, whether CGI Tarkin in RO was "good enough" or not, doesn't much matter in the long run. We've always known creating perfectly photo-realistic CGI humans is extremely difficult, especially substituting CGI for a particular well-known human in a well-known live action context. It's pretty much the hardest CGI thing there is. Like most things in CGI, I'm pretty sure we'll eventually master it but at the time CGI Tarkin was done - it was wildly ambitious and, IMHO, very likely to fail. So the fact CGI Tarkin didn't abjectly fail and was, at worst, mildly distracting to critical eyes, is something the team that did it should be proud of and those of us with those critical eyes should, at the least, be tolerant of and, preferably, celebrate as a worthy historical milestone on the long path toward perfection.

Forgeties79 2y ago
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.

fmajid 2y ago

I found Tarkin in Rogue One well done, after all Peter Cushing was really that gaunt and cadaveric in his later years. Leia, on the other hand, was a complete mess.