Why Does Attack of the Clones Look Like a Video Game?

I think a lot of the "it looks like a videogame" things also come from more video-gamey camera work - lots of complex panning and following shots that don't feel real because they're just a digital camera flying through a digital model. Real cameras can't really do it so it ends up feeling unnatural to us, but it's the norm in video games, so we associate it with those.

Sorry but I have to vehemently disagree that Watto was digital. It was quite clearly my mother-in-law.

I worked on this movie! Wow, great video, you absolutely nailed it. One thing that's hard to fully appreciate -- and explains a lot of the quality control issues -- is how incredibly difficult and time consuming it was to actually review final frames. You couldn't pull up the high-resolution composite on your machine and play the entire thing in real-time, unless if it was a very short shot, maybe 20 frames or less. You could play a low-resolution proxy video (which already was quite revolutionary compared to just a few years prior), or you could painstakingly step through the high-resolution frames one by one as they slowly loaded into memory, but there was neither enough memory nor enough I/O speed to just stream 2k final frames to your monitor for review. In order to review the frames you either had to transfer them to a custom type of review hardware that could play them in real-time, a transfer which could easily take 30+ minutes, assuming you could even book one of the few available review stations, or you had to send the final frames to film and review them in film dailies 12-36 hours later depending on how fast the shot was developed and delivered back to the facility. All of the combined to make it very difficult to catch the kinds of errors you point out for the volume of work that was being done, i.e. hundreds of shots in progress every day at any given time.

Learning that Lucas meant the prequels to be essential tech demos really puts a lot about them into perspective.

It’s crazy how our brains register all these so small details without us realizing, and it’s so fine tuned anyone can see it, but almost no one can describe it. Very fascinating.

It was The Guy From The Banking Clan who first really stood out to me as a character who was clearly not in the same physical space as the live actors.

I actually prefer to watch the prequels on DVD instead of on Blu-ray or 4K. The lower resolution helps hide a lot of the imperfections

I miss the days when Attack of the Clones was the worst Star Wars movie.

As a VFX Supervisor myself, this is a very good breakdown

The lack of real clone troopers is almost the biggest problem i would say. Outlandish creatures and worlds, there we can suspend or disbelief. The armor that we know what it's supposed to look like we can't

I think the video-gamest shot in Attack of the Clones is when Yoda draws his lightsaber. There's a dramatic, swooping, mathematically perfect camera move that completely betrays the unreality of the moment while also exposing the flatness of the floor. It's the opposite of the modern style, which is to "shoot " CG moments as if there are physical cameras, treating them as real subjects.

On the full HD edition of revenge of the sith, during the elevator scene at Grievou's ship, Obi-Wan's hair reflects the green screen

What's so interesting to me is how Attack of the Clones looks in relation to the other Prequels. Together, they feel like they're each from different stages of CGI. The Phantom Menace was groundbreaking in its scale of CGI, and while there is a lot of CGI in the film, plenty of practical effects were still there because they just couldn't do everything with computers like they could later. By the time Revenge of the Sith came out, the technology was mature enough to look great in every shot, and could be used consistently throughout the film. Attack of the Clones, on the other hand, feels like the awkward stage between them. There's a sense of empowerment that CGI can do anything, but they don't have the technology or manpower to do it all to the level of success they would hope, so it's stuck looking really artificial and not very impressive.

This is the best Prequel CGI analysis I have ever seen. I have watched hours and hours of BTS Prequel content, seen the movies more times than I can count, yet you managed to show me something I'd never seen before every 60 seconds! I really hope you do more Star Wars videos like this as this was an absolute joy to watch, thank you :)

18:27 Is this why episode 3 yoda looks significantly better than episode 2 yoda?

I actually remember an article in Maximum PC magazine in sometime in 2002 after Attack of the Clones in theaters was released, it was a roundtable about the new graphics cards from nVidia and ATI and the graphics engines that would leverage them. At the time, the Yoda model was the most sophisticated piece of CGI set in a "realistic environment" the world had seen, and one of the statements were saying "in 10 years time we should be able to run the Yoda model in real-time and make it interactive in a video game," so yeah that kinda plays into the whole subject matter here. How about that, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

As a digital compositor, I noticed this video in my recommendation and thought "Hey, what can it possibly say that is new to me?", but I love Star Wars so I watched it. And by God, I was wrong. This video is amazing, watched it breathlessly. Bonus points for mentioning that every delay by every other departments makes our work harder.

Most valuable piece of info I got from this video was that Anakin fidgets with his hands a lot (which I hadn't ever realized), connecting that line about finding comfort in fixing things to a detail in Hayden's performance that subtly keeps the character's trauma real. Yet another detail showing how well Anakin was portrayed. Whole video is pretty dope though +1 sub

As a former SFX and VFX Artist (TD) I agree with the animations. But the biggest “video game” feeling are the poor textures. Color saturation often is too much or too little, the occlusion isn’t there and it all lacks surface imperfections— that also goes for the characters. Skin is very blotchy and certain areas are well bled through and have more rose (or olive in case of a yoda I guess) and others don’t. And little pores, little freckles and little bumps all the imperfections add up. When I worked in SFX make up, it was very easy to add those. And initially when you literally dissolve wax clay and put it on a chip brush and flick it on, you get a heart attack, because your modeling looks terrible. But you noticed that when you continue and vary the amount of solvents and later those imperfection and then gently blend them in, instantly adds realism. This is not (still not) easy to do in digital. And color matching is a lot easier now, I actually wrote plug-ins for Nuke pipelines to automatically set black, white and rgb levels based on a reference block. Which only require the smalles (artistic) changes from an compositor. But that’s only as good as the imperfections, in the shader and material. lol: you get to the occlusion now 😂

I feel there’s always a lot of “make them watch this hand, instead of this one” is used. What I mean is, that I myself never caught any of the mistake even though my brain knew there was. Things either moved too fast, or my attention was focused elsewhere in a shot instead of what is an obvious mistake. It’s funny how the brain knows something is off, but not too sure exactly what it is. Interesting video, I learned a lot here!