Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
fxrant.blogspot.com
fxrant.blogspot.com
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.
Care to elaborate?
The mundane existed in episode 4 as well, at least at the beginning.
The writing in that scene is on par with the best in HBO. The political maneuvering and intrigue are reminiscent of House of Cards, and Partagaz stands out as a truly formidable leader.
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).
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
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.
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.
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]
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.
9 on the other hand…oof. Don’t watch that.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
And letting the droids go is even more inexcusable.
[edit] though 8’s quality is kinda useless, being in the middle of a trilogy. It’s hard to recommend.
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.
Given Marvel and similar franchises at the cinema around the same period, it was a breath of fresh air (also a great film)
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".
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?
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.
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.
The synthetic Carrie Fisher looked weird and wasn't so well received.
It looked amazing. So amazing I'm surprised the CGI -> Deepfake technique isn't used more often in movies.
The second is that the deepfake looks significantly younger.
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.
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.
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.
Really bad call, takes away from an otherwise very good movie.
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-skywalk...
> 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.
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.
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... :-)
I also remember being blown away by TSW haha