Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

I can die happy now

https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=D_u-V4p6wzc

That's extremely interesting.

Two big questions:

1) Are the costs involved ever likely to come down an order of magnitude? I'm not talking about to where someone with a personal computer can do it but somewhere between a personal computer and a massive studio set up?

2) Could you do it with lesser known actors of which there is less visual and audio material of? Say you wanted to do the original Battlestar: Galactica with Richard Hatch, Lorne Green, and Dirk Benedict? (though to be fair thanks to Bonanza and other works there is probably a huge amount of Lorne Green material).

Hatch and Benedict were both so stiff in BSG, I don't think you'd need much material to capture that effect.

The power of computer chips doubles roughly every 18 months. The top-of-the-line PC that you can buy today (granted, it'll set you back $11K or so) would have been a multi-million dollar supercomputer less than 15 years ago. Even a dirt cheap smartphone today will have more processing power than a laptop did as recently as 2001. So, yes, the price is going to come down. And quite quickly. Within the decade, the latest chips available will have more processing power than the human brain. By 2045, it's estimated that for $1K you'll be able to buy a PC that has more processing power than all the brains of humans who've ever lived.

Sure. There's 20 or episodes of the original, plus most of the cast starred in other TV shows and movies, so there's lots of audio to choose from. You wouldn't even have to go looking for a particular word or inflection of that word, the software can adjust for that.

Here's a video of Roger Ebert using an early version of the software to "talk" on the fly. If it wasn't being done on the fly, it could be even more realistic. (The first 30 seconds of him talking are done with software similar to what Stephen Hawking uses, and not representative of what the technology is like.)

Oh, and one of the Star Trek fan productions (don't remember which one it is, but their episodes are set during the TWoK era) mine the films for sound effects. I heard an interview with one of the people involved with the productions and he talked about how the only time you ever hear a hand phaser fired in the films is when Kirk & Co. are down in the Genesis Cave. They had to extract the sound of the phaser from all the "extraneous" noise (i.e. screams, background music, etc.) in the few seconds when you hear the phaser being fired. So, some of this is already being done.

One of AICN's reviewers posted a review of a screening of 30 minutes of footage, including the first 12 minutes of the film.

Reaction was lukewarm at best. Pacing & editing is said to be screwed up. Reviewer was not enthusiastic at all.

Kirk shot Klingon with a hand phaser in "TSFS", and Valeris fired one in "TUC".

It's been a while since I heard the interview, but apparently, there were problems with those phaser sounds. It may have been that they weren't identical or that there was some other problem. Really, though, it shouldn't be difficult to come up with an identical sound using inexpensive sound effects software these days.

You can't judge the pacing of a movie on 12 minutes.

Very interesting Tucker.

If you don't mind I would like to ask you one final question since you seem to be all over this. You and Ed629 seem to know a great deal about using computers to create original material.

How far away (or is it doable now?) are we to being able to do realistic looking "virtual sets" by computer? I know one of the Trek fan film series does that already and inserts their own volunteer actors into them but IIRC the results are rather poor looking.

It is like watching the sets of a low budget, 1950s era science fiction movie.

that's a question of time, costs, and aesthetics. If you know what you're doing, you can acheive that now. It takes, however, having someone who knows that they're doing when it comes to things like rendering an image. Everything you see in this pic:



was done in the free software program Blender. It can't model everything perfectly, but if you know what you're doing, you can design around that. Combine that, with stock footage bought online, and you can come up with something looks at least as good, if not better, than a SciFi original production from just a few years ago. All with little more than your basic home PC and a smartphone. (And a greenscreen set.)

It, of course, takes time to learn the software (lots of YouTube videos will show you how to use it), and then time to render (usually mintues to hours), but most importantly, it takes an eye for understanding what you can do with the software. If you watch this trailer:



You'll notice the action scenes with the CGI robots are all at night in the "rain" (much of it is CGI'd). That's because it's easier to do it that way. Now, that film was made 10 years ago, with software and gear the average person could afford back then, so the stuff's even better now. You probably wouldn't be able to render Queen Amadinnerjacket's mirrored spaceship from the PT, but then, why would you want to? Doing sets that looked like those on DS9 would be fairly easy. TOS-type sets would be a little harder, since they were better lit, but not impossible. Doing the bridge on JJAbramsprise would be almost impossible to do in a realistic period of time with what most people have access to. But again, why would you want to? It's like someone combined Superman's Fortress of Solitude from the first Christopher Reeves movie and an Apple store.

Like a monkey, ready to be shot into space! A space monkey!

I thought Benedict's performance was pretty good though you might be right about Hatch. Essentially Benedict has played pretty much the same character no matter the production he has been in whether Battlestar: Galactica, the A-Team, Walker: Texas Ranger, or that movie about an asteroid ripping a gash in the moon that causes havoc on Earth (he plays a NASA scientist at odds with Stephen Baldwin's character about how to "fix" the moon)

Hmmm, this doesn't bode well.

As much as I enjoyed TFA, I'm much more excited about Rogue One.

Not necessarily, it could just be that Rogue One is closer to A New Hope.

Frankly. Lucas' comments on TFA were interpreted a specific way to increase the . He might just have become more careful in anticipating that, and/or more emotionally adjusted to the idea that other people are making SW movies now.

I was very apathetic about Rogue One, but the more I learn of it the more interested I am. It seems to be doing the nostalgia more effectively by complimenting the OT and telling an original story in the same environment, rather than being a lazy remake like TFA was. I enjoyed TFA, but I've seen it three times now and on each viewing I've found myself less impressed with each watch. I think it really is style over substance.

His criticism was that moviemakers today are afraid to use imagination and try something different. Personally I think that is a very fair assessment of the very "safe" nature of TFA. It's my main criticism of it, and one I concluded before I heard his remarks. If I can spot it then the creator of it all sure as hell can.

For all the mistakes of the prequels, one accusation that can never be made is that they're weren't creative in terms of world building.

I remember a short story by Steven Utley (the Silurian Tales) that took place partly at a Hollywood dinner party. There a young actor was complaining about "losing jobs to John Wayne" saying "He's been dead 7o years and he's a bigger star than ever".

But.

If the use of this technology mentioned above comes into widespread use, wouldn't it create jobs for the kind of actors that Tuckerfan mentions below. That is the "talented physical mimics"?

Only for a few years. Technology will quickly progress to the point where you don't need humans at all.

Wouldn't it create more tech. jobs?

Would you still be needing the scanned images of actual actors?

I think the "not needing actors" idea is bollocks. Thee sole use of such software to date has been to resurrect dead performers or de age existing performers. In each occasion, via either deleted or pre-existed footage in terms of the former, or new dialogue from the latter, it has never been a case of an actor and his performance being created from scratch. I think that will continue to be the case because you cannot computer generate the human quality - and that there is Alresford a backlash over CGI use for inanimate objects is a testament to that.

Indeed. Serious actors/actresses often have some very, very subtle nuances that I think are basically non creatable by a computer program.

I think the very best they'll ever be able to do in creating characters from scratch will be a "high school play" level of quality.

Of course creating characters from scratch is kind of a dream of nerds (including myself) everywhere.

I think in 5 or 10 years we'll likely have libraries of motion-captured movements for most things an actor can do, ready to be used for various digital body models. An excellent actor's individual performance will still be better, but eventually, it will turn into the equivalent of a hand-crafted, expensive piece of art for connoisseurs.

10 Days.