I wondered why Vader’s crew didn’t just open a bleed valve the moment they broke into the rebel ship. Would have saved a lot of mucking around with light sabers.
Also that guy with the storage device should have chucked it through the door the moment he got there. Vader was primarily interested in the data, and might have gone right past the rebels to work on the door.
I can’t watch the opening segment of A New Hope anymore without inserting the alternate lines.
The original Vader Sessions is far superior: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xs6plv_vader-sessions-hd_fun
It was kind of hilariously sad that they shoehorned him in the movie just so he could say “WELL, I’M OFF TO ALDERAAN, SO I GUESS THAT’S WHERE I’LL ACTUALLY BE HANGING OUT SHORTLY AFTER THE EVENTS OF THIS FILM. SO LONG THEN.”
Still, I can’t blame him for wanting to be in at least ONE watchable Star Wars movie.
I can’t watch without throwing in a “what?!?” every line.
I saw it with two (30-something) people who’d never seen a single Star Wars movie before. Neither one had any idea that Tarkin or Leia were CG. I think that knowing that they’re CG makes us look for ‘tells’, which is why doing CG humans is so difficult.
Darth Vader’s description of Leia’s mission doesn’t quite match up with the events she escaped from in Rogue One. “Several transmissions have been beamed to this ship by rebel spies”, while technically true, ignores the massive space battle in support of a ground assault that Leia was the only one to escape from.
I get the desire to end with a climactic space battle, but maybe Rogue One would have fit better with just the Tantive IV sneaking by to receive that vital transmission. Less violence, more stealth and subterfuge.
Except the opening crawl mentions that big battle all ready. And Vader knew this ship specifically had nothing to do with the battle. So his statement still holds true for me.
The opening crawl for Episode IV might need a couple tweaks.
…Rebel spaceships, striking sneaking from a hidden base, have won their first victory achieved an important tactical goal against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, stealthy non-violent espionage mission, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.
The mouth always seems to be what gives away the game the most. However, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that it’s because the meshes they’re using treat mouths as projections. That may still be true to some extent in games, but in big-budget Hollywood CGI, faces are extensively modeled to replicate the real thing, cavities and all. I think the problem is really more a result of how they animate them. Facial animation at this level is done with high-resolution motion capture tracking of a real person’s performance, and that movement is then mapped onto the “bones” and connections in the target model which are responsible for manipulating the mesh’s polygons.
For characters that don’t cross a certain “human-ness” threshold, it works great (Maz was animated with this technique in The Force Awakens, and I don’t recall anyone complaining about her performance), but despite the considerable amount of work that’s gone into making sure that these animation rigs closely model the constraints and extents of real human muscle and bone connections, they’re still not perfect. As a result, the mouth and cheek area is just never quite expressive enough during a highly emotional outburst, or it squidges around over the skull just a little too much when it moves. Given those problems, I think you’re right that Tarkin works as well as he does because Cushing’s mouth movements were always so restrained.
That said, the technique has come a long way since its early use in Polar Express (so many dead-eyed children… shudder), and it’s even improved a lot over Tron: Legacy’s Young Jeff Bridges/CLU rig from 2010 (which was impressive but occasionally really obvious). I think it’s at a point now where, when used judiciously and playing to its strengths, it’s good enough to fool most people - especially when, as @nungesser noted, they aren’t expecting someone to be CG. My mom also had no idea that Tarkin was digital, and it wasn’t until I started intentionally looking at him with a critical eye that I started catching the little things that gave it away.
Not super-crazy about the transition (speaking as an editor here . . .). Edge wipe could have sealed the deal. The fade to black sorta rings down the curtain and stops the “flow”, IMHO
I think you mean STAR WIPE.
HAHAHA! Way back in my grad school days when we’d be looking at a cut and it was just so wretched none of us knew what to say, there’d be silence for a bit and somebody would finally say, “You know what this needs? Right there – star wipe, and you’re out.” And we’d all die.
It amazes me to this day Avid still has a whole category for Box Wipes. Comes in handy for ShamWow! commercials, I suppose.
Those Kurosawan edge wipes which were so prevalent in the original trilogy (and even the dreaded prequels) are something there wasn’t enough of in Force Awakens, for me. There was a lot of high-speed match-cutting from place to place, and the pace as a result was a little more breathless than in the other films. Once of the things I like about the use of transitions, generally, in the original was – when we’d change location, we’d have a soft-edged wipe to an establishing shot, and we’d rest on that for a beat (Death Star, Star Destroyer, new planet, whatever). It just slowed things down a little bit, gave us a moment to orient ourselves, and gave the storytelling just a bit of room to breathe; and the resulting contrast with the more rapid-paced cutting in the action scenes felt more exciting as a result. I enjoyed TFA a great deal but, with a few other minor quibbles, the transitions bugged me.
Leia’s ship didn’t participate in the fight, but it was present at the battle. The claim of a diplomatic mission seems like an extremely transparent lie now. It still seems Leia and Vader are talking about something completely different from the events in Rogue One.
It’s only really the word “battle” that does it though, which I admit I’d forgotten about. A strike could be a quick hit-and-run thing by only a handful of ships. Also, it’s not exactly the battle itself that was won in Rogue One; the rebels sacrificed a sizable fleet just to get those plans out. It was a victory, but the victory was stealing the plans; they didn’t defeat the Imperial fleet.
Video Toaster had the best wipes.
0:29 is my favorite. It’s like if Patrick Nagel for some reason designed a screen wipe.
If Vader can effortlessly and singlehandedly take out two passageways of armed and prepared Rebel troops, why does he bother sending in stormtroopers in ANH? Not that he gives a shit about their lives, but he seems to be a lot more effective on his own, and he probably enjoys the badassery.
(Raises hand) Would one of you Star Wars Super Fans be able to say how Darth Vader tracked the rebel ship through its jump to hyperspace to its destination? Or was there a way he knew they were headed to Tatooine?
We don’t know precisely how much time had passed, or even if the rebels were first headed to Tatooine. Perhaps they had been discovered and chased there. There’s nothing I’m aware of that says the death star OR the rebels immediately went to Tatooine.
When I walked out of the theater, my phone notified me that Carrie Fisher had just passed. I rather liked her brief cameo.
What I like just as much though was using the ‘docking clamps’ visible in the star destroyers bay in the ANH opening, to have been holding the ship at the end of R1.
Wasn’t a rebel ship. Was a diplomatic vessel (Tantive IV) in service to the House of Organa.
So there! 
[quote=“SocialMaladroit, post:57, topic:97574”]was there a way he knew they were headed to Tatooine?
[/quote]
Yeah I have no idea. They followed them because the Tantive IV isn’t near as fast as the Falcon?
(eta: confirmed, the Falcon has a 0.5 drive, the destroyer a 2.0 drive (possibly a 1) , and the Tantive IV isn’t listed in nerd sources, but isn’t going to be as low a number (and therefore as ‘fast’ in hyperspace) as the Falcon. Likely a 2, as it’s just a flying convention center.)
