Every Miniature Model in the Star Wars Prequels 

Dantius It really is and even when the Prequel Haters/OT Purists are shown that they were wrong about the PT being nothing but cgi, they still in denial, trying to make them look bad and take the fun out of the expanded lore of SW, still claiming that it looks fake and that it was still overshadowed by CGI even when the evidence shows in their faces that it's not even remotely truth. It makes me sad, but in awhile it also makes me laugh. The Prequels are brilliant and no amount of hate/denial is going to wipe them from existence.

Squire Simpson That's true, sadly. People still like to say it looks fake, and they try to justify it by pointing out the actual CGI layered over the sets, ignoring the fact that it still looks pretty good, with a few exceptions. They also have problems with the actors having to work in so many bluescreen sets, ignoring that the final product still looks amazing. The problem they have is that there is CGI, not that the CGI looks bad.

Dantius And yet they don't even bother to point the finger at the Originals doing the same dang thing with the actors involved in blue screen because of nostalgia and their childhood. It's a very hypocritical move on their part in terms of practical effects and that goes for TFA as well in terms of cgi because they u plenty of it. I hate having to bite the Originals, but the hypocrisy has got to stop. The Originals blue screen=PE TFA Screen=PE CGI Screen=CGI So when George Lucas does it, it is wrong? They can never really backup prove that the use of CGI is a legitimate sin in SW filmmaking without speak out of their bias butts and act out of repulse and emotion and their narrow-minded ego.

Thank you for sharing the love for the prequels. Far from perfect they were beautifully made and told stories. I am grateful to have lived in an era when they were made. I remember the dark times before the originals when at least on the big screen fantastic stories were forgotten. Star Wars re-woke the joy of the true space opera. And the prequels told them even better. Thank you for being fellow travelers enjoying great stories told well!

The annoying thing is that the sequels have a TON more CGI than the prequels yet no one cares

True, and I think The Sequels used far more CGI than The Prequels

@@Deuteromis They did. There were things done digitally that the Prequels did practically. There wasn't a single miniature set used in any of the Disney movies. I'm certain there were more practical effects in one or two episodes of _The Mandalorian_ than in all five Disney movies put together.

@@Deuteromis Easily. Granted the CGI looks much better these days. But if you are kind of trained to know where to look or are just familiar with common CGI software, like Houdini then it gets easier to notice.

Truth

I think the problem's not with the CGI or practical. Its the less creative, non-visionary director, bad editing and the lack of good storytelling.

That's really awesome!

I love the water

GeeZeRFroG I never knew that. Yeah, that effect always looked incredibly good. Even in Battlefront 1 (2004) they showed the same waterfall in Naboo: Plains, and it always looks gorgeous.

Kinda reminds me of the Shrek grass problem

I meant that I liked the designs and overall look of the films. Sure, they definitely went OTT with the CGI. You can argue the technology wasn't used well by Lucas and the effects may have dated badly but I think it's a little bit unfair to judge the quality of special effects by the standards of what's available today. I don't know if you were playing video games back in 2002, but they definitely didn't look as advanced as the CGI in Attack of the Clones. In any case, you can go back to the original films and see some pretty ropy looking props, settings and fx (by modern standards). In the garbage masher scene for example, the Empire seems to use a lot of polystyrene as a construction material. Maybe that's why their TIEs are so easy to shoot down?

I thought exactly the same. I suppose what's wrong with the art direction is: the director spent all his time on that, and little time on developing the story or working with the actors.

psammiad Obi wan and Palpatine were great tho

im somewhat shure that the new triology has more CGI than models.

Yep, RotS had more practical affects in that one film than the entire OT trilogy combined. That should tell you just how insane it was.

With Tori Bellaci with him ;)

yes that him the only yedi on earth. he once said: duct tape is like the force: it has a light side and a dark side and it holds everything together.

HOLY MOLY

Yeah I saw a Chris Stuckmann video on Episode 1 were he was talking about how the ships in the original looked better because they were models and he compared it to a ship in episode 1 which was also a practical model.

Usually most of the time it's the opposite way around, people thinking the film used no CGI, and not giving any credit to the cgi artists, but for the prequels no one is giving any credit to the practical artists

Huge 'props' indeed.

Heyooo

we need star wars museum

Hopefully the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will include a Star Wars gallery, but maybe not due to licensing to Disney? Either way, I concur it must be done. lucasmuseum.org

I saw several of them a few years ago, including the HUGE eight foot AAT tank and Sebulba's podracer from Episode I, and they were insanely impressive. Like, I had no idea Darth Vader's helmet from Revenge of the Sith was actually built. They even had red lights in the lenses so that the displays they would composite later would cast light on the inner surface. That thing was incredibly detailed. Surprisingly few things were fake in the Star Wars prequels.

Because quote 'pratical' effects were old news at the time and computer generated effects (something EVERY film uses this day to the point that you can't tell it was made with computers in the first place) were the new thing that Lucas and his company took pride in extolling the virtues of, similar to how the company would go into detail about the sheer extensive effects they used back in the OT days when they pushed the special effects envelope back then. Personally speaking, I find this worship of models and effects to be pretty damn backwards from an 'evolve the medium' perspective.

I never got the impression they didn't use models when I saw the behind the scenes stuff in the bonus discs. Like, even Revenge of the Sith had a whole segment dedicated to the ginormous tree they built for Kashyyyk.

miniatures don't equal ENTIRE practical effects though. The Originals are still more practical

Michael McGrath you can tell in many of the shots that look heavily dated

no. its in their raw format

Michael McGrath nope

@@MichaelM28 No dude, shit I remember you, and still you get so much so wrong

The clones in the prequels look better than the clones in the live action series disney made

With Tori Belleci right behind him! And Grant Imahara is at 4:14.

I think it was the combination of parts of the scenes being CGI and the fact that you can tell that the actors weren't actually on a life size set that I and many others thought that it was all CGI.

That’s the problem, when I watched the Imperial attack on Hoth in TESB for the first time I would’ve swarm the AT-AT’s were touched up with CGI in the special editions, of course that would be wrong, practical and CGI are hard to tell apart sometimes

@@madam1331 Which scenes are you referring to specifically? Sure I think there’s a few scenes here and there where it’s clear they’re in front of a green screen. I don’t think it’s that frequent throughout the films though.

​@@skywalkerorder2170 I'm generally referring to any sets that had still required blue screen in some parts to help expand the scene we were looking at or where the set was real but the foreground objects that were the focus (like a ship landing) were CGI. I feel that Episode 2 is a good example as I didn't know that there were so many practical sets used in that film. I thought everything was CGI. Again I think a lot of it is attributed to how much CGI was used in the foreground or the main focus of what were watching (ie aliens or ships) that probably made us think it was all CG.

They essentially did a lot of compositing the miniature shots with the actors on the blue screen

Hello 2bricks

"This is fake" never understood this argument. it's a movie. Everything in it is fake. It's just that we have different methods of faking it. Digital Effects aren't "easier", they aren't "cheating", they aren't "cheap". They take a great amount of skill and talent to pull off. Technology is always improving, some effects are going to be dated, both practical and CGI. I always roll my eyes when someone insists that all the effects in the PT are absolutely amazing. No. Yoda looks shitty. Greedo looks shitty. Vader is very clearly wearing an uncomfortable plastic suit. But it's okay! They are old movies!

for course he wanst all bad but he had just one major flaw he could not write worth a damn, he could set up an amazing shot or come up with a beautiful new planet but he could not make people say things that made sense or create a plot that wasn't full of unnecessary holes or contrivances and do you know why the original trilogy was so perfect its because he wasn't the one writing it he was at his best when he had a team of people to work with and off of and he didn't have that in the prequels because he got cocky

Good Good👏👏

Actually, Lucas was the primary driving force for all of the first six Star Wars movies. No one fully understood what Lucas was trying to achieve with the original Star Wars, as it was too distinctive for the time. Lucas also had friends and colleagues proofread and critique the prequels scripts. Many of these people had worked with him in a similar capacity on the originals. The dialogue is just as hokey and corny in both trilogies. Harrison Ford once famously told Lucas on the set of the original Star Wars "You can write this shit, but you can't say it." What happened is a lot of people grew up hearing that dialogue and it became ingrained in their psyche. But when they hear dialogue of a similar quality uttered in the prequels it sounds off, because they didn't grow up listening to it.

Dan Waldman i think it also has to do with tone the OT is a lot more campy and the themes are simple so bad dialogue isn’t as immersion breaking when compared to the super serious drama with themes about politics and corruption

I am convinced that Lucas sold Star Wars because of all the hate towards the prequels. And yes the dialog was based on older movies. Watch a 30's romance. Painfully awkward and stilted compared to today's films. Lucas did it on purpose for style. It became popular to hate on the prequels, and it killed the end trilogy. I would pay good money to see Lucas's vision, but the odds of that happening, ok I won't tell you the odds.

I just can't fathom what you're trying to say here. If you didn't like what you saw on screen, why would it change your opinion to know what particular filmmaking technique was used to achieve whatever you saw? And if you can appreciate the dedication and expertise that went into creating and shooting physical models, why can't you appreciate the dedication and expertise that goes into creating 3D rendered models and characters?

There are still plenty of legit reasons to hate the prequels.

Ironic considering this video is myth busting in a of it’s self

Robert Underlee well it's hard to get a ton of people who are exactly the same size and build

we might one day get a film or tv show with live action clones

Unless you find 100 twins I doubt that to ever be possible xd

They were. But it was the armor that was never built. The Clone Trooper armor was CG instead of physical suits. I wish that they’d made a couple of physical suits for the troops that had their helmets off.

I think they should have made a real suit and then have the Jango Fett actor in it and then they could use the technique that they did in Back to the Future 2 and 3 were they combined two takes of the same actor in different costumes.

Jose P People weren't really criticizing any of the visual effects until years later.

The tree villages probably had to be made at a larger scale otherwise they might have been too fragile and hard to build

I disagree there’s a lot of things in films where people probably wouldn’t know the difference between a practical effect and an CGI one.

There are a lot more full sized sets and set locations in the Prequels than you might think: - The final battle scene between Anakin/Obi-Wan and Count Dooku aboard the Invisible Hand was a full size set. The only greenscreens were the windows. - The hallway and reactor room during the Qui Gon/Obi-Wan vs Darth Maul fight was an entire set built from scratch. - The Meeting Room in the Trade Federation Ship was a full set. - The podrace hangar was a full set, complete with full sized podrace engines. - Almost all the scenes in the Naboo Royal Palace are shot in real life locations in Italy. - The Naboo streets are also full sized sets. - Padme's apartment is a full sized set, including the little fountain it had. - Chancellor Palpatine's office is a full size set, and all the decorations in there are practical. - The interior of Dexter's Diner is a full sized restaurant set. - The hovels in Mos Espa are based on real houses in Tunisia. - Qui Gon's Funeral Pyre was a full set. - The Lars Moisture Farm visited by Anakin was the exact same location in A New Hope (also in Tunisia). They practically had to rebuild the entire thing just like the originals. I can go on and on, but my point is the Prequels used so much Practical and CGI effects, and not just 100% CGI.

I may be wrong but I think about half of the time the actors were on practical sets, or at least sets with the ground and some objects in the foreground.

Literally how I always fucking felt about the prequels. I do love the OT story wise, but that is literally the reason why I always preferred the Prequels. Not to mention how much Clone Wars expanded it.

My justification for the "Dialogue" is the fact that IT'S A GALAXY FAR FAR AWAY! And these Humans are not Terrains as well as all the other 👽 races! Also certain races have different vocal cords or prefer communicating in their own languages. So I personality wouldn't expect any foreign civilization to communicate exactly the same as ours unless it was entirely translated! Overall I'd rather usually criticize bad subtitles or dub jobs bad translations than dialogue in sci fi stories that take place outside our world. 🌎

The most cool thing of these Models is Kashyyyk!

Jack Harpe 3rd Yeah, but a lot of the dialogue is just plain bad. Anakin and Padme’s entire romance is completely forced, and anytime Anakin reveals his feelings to her it just comes off as creepy and borderline psychopathic. I’ve always defended the prequels, but that is one element I’ll definitely concede. There’s definitely some dialogue which is indefensible...just like sand. Which is coarse, irritating, and gets everywhere.

I think either the coloured lighting or some CGI after effects or just the consequence of the editing or colour timing is throwing the look off - There is something very odd looking about the prequels - even when it's a set they look fake as hell - perhaps it's the cameras they used.

Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were shot on digital cameras, which might be a big part of it.

@@ECHenry And from what I understand they were incredibly primitive digital cameras.

I definitely think AotC suffered by being shot digital. Revenge of the Sith looked much better. Still, they hold up better than just about any marvel movie which all look murky.

you have that they wrong way round

I'm a huge star wars fan... other than the prequels. And the new ones. And the old ones. But I love Star Trek. Except all of those ones I mentioned. Big fan though.

Atleast jj was somewhat loyal to the source material unlike johnson

They did make full sets with only bluescreen for the windows

I used to dislike the CGI clone thing (even though I still thought they looked really good) but, in hindsight, it's gonna be hard to make an army of extras with tye exact same body type. Don't have a problem with anything else, so whatever.

Technically it still used a computer to be finished. And some model shots (like Kamino) i dont think turned out well so they may have appeared to be bad cgi. When really they may have just been poorly shot or lit, using digital instead of film really seems to have hurt the visual look of Clones.

2:38 i mean look at that shot do you really believe that it was a miniature set without showing you the actual miniature in the backstage? It look more like a ps2 cut scene that an actual movie shot.

I thought revenge of the sith looked pretty good overall despite being digital video as well. Clones has a lot of shots that just turned out ugly.

@@Knightmessenger they still look ugly to me, specially in the "hello there" scene where obi-wan looked like he was in toontown from roger rabbit. I mean places like the opera and the mustafar battle look fine

No, you can see a dude on the right fixing it up. The figure in the middle is a scale model for reference.