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Comment by blazespin | Hacker News Reader

The big thing about Force Awakens I missed was the advances in technological film making. That was always George Lucas most important contribution to film. He always raised the bar.

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I thought the effects looked amazing. Since the turn of the millennium we've had movies switch over almost entirely to digital effects, but pure cgi still just doesn't look really real. It's missing some ineffable emotional weight that makes its fruit not quite believable. TFA, in trying to recreate some of the look of the original films using practical effects, also had the effect of saying, look what we can do when we combine real things that are actually in front of the camera with state of the art digital effects. I don't think I've seen a big special effects movie that looked so actually real since the golden age of practical effects in the 90s – movies like Jurassic Park come to mind.

I hadn't come across the term "practical effect" before, and Wikipedia defines it as meaning no use of computer generated imagery. Jurassic Park used a lot of CGI for the dinosaurs so I'm not sure what you mean by your comment.

Jurassic Park used something like 3 minutes of computer generated effects. Most of the dinosaurs you see on screen are actual puppets and robots.

Edit: the internet says 4 minutes

Dunno. It makes no difference to me.

At least TFA tried to go practical effects again instead of all-CGI.

The overuse of CGI in the prequels have made them age badly. All the environments are starting to look like video games.

Yeah, but I'm not sure they looked good at the time either. Sure, they might have been impressive for CGI, but they don't look real to me, and I don't know if people thought they looked real at the time. I think that's probably because they used so much CG they weren't able to put the required work into each environment to achieve photorealism.

The touched-up "THX Enhanced" versions of the original three movies, where they digitally removed some of the matting artifacts and such, had more convincing and better-looking SFX than the prequels, for the most part.

Movies like Jurassic Park and Independence Day that came out before the prequels (well before, in the case of JP) that used a blend of models/animatronics and CGI looked way better. The visuals in Ep. 1 were an obvious step backward the day it was released, no hindsight required.

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