Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Is there any way to keep the garbage out of the GOOD fora and in the cesspools like the Red Room where they belong?

A look at a character from the prequels returning in Rogue One...

It's possible that they just hadn't inserted the crawl yet at the time of the event. But it does seem from most of what Lucasfilm has been saying, that they do not plan to use the crawl for any of the spin-offs. I'm actually fine with that. Part of the purpose of the crawl is inserting transitional exposition, but the stand alones don't have a defined before and after, so maybe there should be no framing as done in the triple trilogy. JMO, of course.

Another new ad, though shorter, it has a few clips I've not seen before. And it looks to me like

Bail Organa
http://makingstarwars.net/2016/11/first-look-at-bail-organa-from-rogue-one-a-star-wars-story/

Check out the 22 second mark in this trailer:



This film, however, does give me pause, however, in terms of continuity. Remember that in one of the stupid prequels, Christopher Lee shows off the plans for the Death Star, implying that they had everything all worked out. I can't imagine that they'd design the Death Star first, and have a spot labeled "Insert undeveloped superweapon here." So, this would imply that some of the events we're seeing took place before the creation of the Empire. Yet we're already seeing things that appear to indicate that the Empire is already in place when we meet Jin's father. So, either Palpy had waaaay more shit going on behind the scenes than we saw in the prequels, or, and this is what I'd prefer, they've decided to toss out most of the crap from the prequels.

Well, the Death Star had other weapons besides the superlaser, and Star Destroyers are capable of planetary bombardment, so it might be that - YES, the Death Star was originally conceived as just an unstoppable juggernaut for power projection following the Tarkin Doctrine of rule through fear. Adding the superlaser was an extension of that once the Imps figured it was workable.

Save that it was visible in the hologram in the prequel, which means they had to have already conceived of the idea.

The Rebels cartoon recently suggested that the Geonosians were wiped out by the Empire and construction of the Death Star moved. Presumably Jyn's father then took over.

What, the big dish? No, that was for HDTV. Sidious was all over that shit, till the idea of blowing planets up instead grabbed him. It's a natural progression once you realize there's 500,000 channels and nothing on - assfuck Alderaan with hot plasma.

Ironically "this baby comes with a hot plasma" is how the HDTV was sold to him in the first place.

But then you risk pissing off the one guy who liked the prequels.

Another new teaser.


Don't read this piece if you don't want a big spoiler. Seriously. I think they've figured out a pretty major point about the film, and it'll be really interesting to see how they pull it off in the film.

If you liked that piece, then read this one as well. (The link is, in itself a spoiler, so I used a tinyurl link so anyone mousing over it won't get spoiled if they don't want to.) It explains some potential dynamics the previous spoilerly link revealed. And like the author of that piece, I'm sorry that they only way they can accomplish it is via CGI.

That's been a rumor for quite some time.

What a foul stench. (said in my best fake Brit accent)

Pics
http://makingstarwars.net/2016/12/r...-at-disneylands-launch-bay/#jp-carousel-35661

for all it's being CGI'd (most likely), I think that the guy who stood in for him could've played the part.

I mean, we're ready for new actors to take on Han and Lando's parts, and Peter Mayhew ain't gonna be around as Chewie for much longer...

I wouldn't want a new actor playing his part throughout an entire movie, but if we could get a scene or two with some digital magic and maybe some voice work like they did with Alec Guinness, in TFA, I'd be fine with that. I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what they did.

That was actually Alec Guinness -- they just cut and pasted part of another word. I don't see a problem with a differen actor, and agree that the guy who portrayed him in ROTS would be just fine.

That said, CGI characters are looking pretty good these days. Just consider the difference between Maz Canata (sic) and Jar Jar

In the now-decanonized EU, the Death Star (not to be confused with the Separatists' (canon) Great Weapon which was captured by the Empire and seen at the end of Ep 3) was built around Despayre, which it promptly destroyed in a test-firing. We could be seeing that, or something like it, in the trailers. Another possibility is a more limited test firing, which would explain why it took long enough to destroy the planet that there appears to be many seconds of footage (Alderaan took, what, somewhere between 1/12 and 1/6 of a second?). Perhaps only something to crack or melt the planet's surface, or just break it into chunks without the full kaboom we see in Ep 4.

I'm pretty sure they're blowing up Jedha (the Jedi planet).
That'd give more gravity to Tarkin's line to Vader about "you my friend are all that's left of their religion".

Kevin Smith spoiled the opening style instead of the crawl.

Actually,

How close are we to completely convincing digital recreations of famous actors in new productions?

I've been hearing about this possibility for a couple of decades now.

We can do it now, if someone's willing to pay the cost, and spend the time letting the computers render the images.

You're talking about something I'm not familiar with.

So what are we looking at cost and time wise?

Let's say you wanted to produce a Star Trek movie with a major character a Starfleet officer played by James Coburn or Earnest Borgnine.

It depends upon how you want to do it. The best way to do it would be as follows:

Pick the age range you want for the actor, say Borgnine when he was 45. You then scan every image from film, TV, and stills, you can find of him at that age, tagging them with a description of his facial expression. You'll also need audio recordings of him, but those don't have to be from that narrow of a range, as voices don't change as much as faces do, once you're out of puberty. You then hire an actor who's a talented physical mimic, meaning they can watch how someone moves and imitate that person flawlessly.

That actor, while wearing a motion capture suit, and a facial capture rig that looks like this:

performs the part you want Borgnine to play. Software in the computer will then combine the movements of the actor, along with the facial expressions done by the actor, with the stored library of Borgnine images, so the end result will look like Borgnine is performing the role, rather than the mimic you hired. The more processing power you can throw at this (think supercomputer levels) and the longer you let the software run, the better it will look. Give it at least six months to a year, and you'll be able to come up with something that'll look dead real. Throw less computing power at it, or spend less time than that, and you'll get something that looks good, but is obviously computer generated.

The other way to do it is to pick a few movies Borgnine did when he was in the desired age range, and structure your script around the way his character moved in those films. So, if he doesn't run in any of those films, you can't have him running in your movie. You then digitally exorcise him from those movies, CGI on him the appropriate clothing for your movie, and drop him into it, altering the audio as needed. He'll have a slightly flatter look doing it this way, and there'll be problems with things like film grain, but they can somewhat be corrected.

Neither method is something someone could realistically do on a home computer, or without expensive software and highly skilled operators. You can do something like that now, with various programs, but they're designed to allow you to drop your face on to that of an actor in an existing film, and it's pretty easy to tell that it wasn't really you in that film.

Shatner doesn't quite sound the same as he did in TOS, but that would be a neat way to revive Kirk somehow.

In regards to the Death Star superlaser, in some of the Expanded Universe publications there are suggestions it was originally developed to smash uninhabited planets down to their cores for mining purposes (strip mining on an epic scale) and the Empire later refined it as a weapon system.