Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

http://fxrant.blogspot.com/2024/06/hal-hickel-on-creating-tarkin.html

by trauco • 2 years ago

104 82 2 years ago

fxrant.blogspot.com

drunkencoder• 2 years ago

I wonder how this would have played out using deep fake technology

thih9• 2 years ago

Mandalorian Season 2 spoilers below.

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...

BolexNOLA9• 2 years ago

It is definitely better but it still has the problem of the original where his face just looks so stiff when he speaks.

ekianjo• 2 years ago

It was not very impressive to say the least. It looked fake the second it appeared on screen.

TillE• 2 years ago

It would've been fine if they kept it to a brief appearance, but the movie spends so much time with Tarkin, including closeups of the face which simply does not move like a human's.

Really bad call, takes away from an otherwise very good movie.

PaulHoule4• 2 years ago

I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.

nordsieck• 2 years ago

I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.

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.

BolexNOLA9• 2 years ago

8 has a few low points but overall I think it was great tbh. Took some risks and tried to get away from the importance of “who your parents are”/general “great man” nonsense a lot of heroic epics lean on.

9 on the other hand…oof. Don’t watch that.

ensignavenger3• 2 years ago

Rogue One is by far the best of the Disney "Star Wars" movies, and the only one that fits with the Lucas movies. Highly recommend it.

vundercind• 2 years ago

8 is at least the 4th-best Star Wars movie. Rogue one is distantly at 5th. All the rest are quite bad.

[edit] though 8’s quality is kinda useless, being in the middle of a trilogy. It’s hard to recommend.

bigstrat20032• 2 years ago

I liked the prequels overall (despite their flaws), but I can say you're definitely not alone here. I have seen a lot of discourse online where the sequel trilogy made people appreciate that at least the prequels had a coherent creative vision behind them. Lucas made plenty of mistakes in realizing his vision, of course. But he had one. By contrast, the sequel trilogy is painful to watch because they feel like they were designed by a committee (and the difference in creative leads hurts a lot too). Episode 7 in particular feels like they consciously tried to make a by-the-numbers Star Wars which passed muster with focus groups, but it had no soul at all.

rubyfan• 2 years ago

Agree, it was by far a much better story line and set of characters than The Force Awakens and so on. I generally like a lot of the series on Disney+ and get the sense you have a few different creative teams pushing this stuff.

tsujamin• 2 years ago

I remember leaving Rouge One _shocked_ that it was a self contained story, no post credits scenes, no need to commit to an entire trilogy or need to understand half a dozen recent releases.

Given Marvel and similar franchises at the cinema around the same period, it was a breath of fresh air (also a great film)

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014.

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".

PaulHoule4• 2 years ago

It was a prequel to one of the greatest films of all time so there is no way they can top that.

afavour• 2 years ago

It is very sad that this is the state of moviegoing these days. That said I’ve learned to just lean back and forget about it. I’ve missed more Marvel movies than I’ve seen (haven’t seen any of the Avengers movies beyond the first I think) and still enjoyed the recent Deadpool movie by just switching off my brain and enjoying the silliness. Same with the second most recent Thor movie… it’s when these movies get excessively self serious that it all unravels.

chaostheory• 2 years ago

That’s because many of the people watching already committed to three trilogies. Without the previous world building, Rogue One wouldn’t be as good.

grogenaut• 2 years ago

I loved that rogue one was was self contained. It's a great single mission movie expanding on a throw away line in a previous movie. Solo on the other hand was either way too long for a kid who stole someone's ship and did a joy ride and turned it into an outlandish tale or way too short for a 3 year career. Should have been either a side plot in a movie or a 3 episode arc. Per the movie he's been soloing for like 45 minutes or 63 parsecs total.

omoikane• 2 years ago

I didn't even notice that Tarkin was a CG rendition until this post. I thought they did a wonderful job.

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.

francisofascii• 2 years ago

I remember when watching in the theater, the audience reacted with awe. At the time is was a novel technique. Then it was followed up with Carrie Fisher at the end. And the audience loved it.

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

The synthetic Tarkin was well received and looked accurate.

The synthetic Carrie Fisher looked weird and wasn't so well received.

lordfrito• 2 years ago

A while back someone deepfaked the CGI Leia scene with footage of the actual Carrie Fisher as Leia in the original Star Wars.

It looked amazing. So amazing I'm surprised the CGI -> Deepfake technique isn't used more often in movies.

1123581321• 2 years ago

I remember the same. I saw it in a packed opening weekend; Tarkin’s was more of a cheer and Leia’s a wave of appreciative murmurs. Overheard only positive remarks exiting the theater.

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.

throwawayk7h2• 2 years ago

I recall discussing it with my family after stepping out of the theatres. I hadn't realized there was anything strange, most of us didn't, but one of my siblings criticized the "bad CGI" at length on the walk home and said they should have hired a look-alike instead.

layer8• 2 years ago

I remember a lot of uncanny-valley conversations back then.

Svip• 2 years ago

We had in our possession a life casting of Peter Cushing’s face. It was made not long after New Hope, so it was very accurate in terms of Cushing’s age, etc.

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]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk

greggsy3• 2 years ago

That was surprisingly well done

cancerhacker• 2 years ago

I recently watched George Millers _Furiosa_ and they used machine learning and cgi to manipulate the face of the pre-teen actress to more closely resemble the adult actress. With the amount of data available constantly being captured of todays actors I’m sure this will become more common - and the brief article I read about it in this case made a point of saying that they had worked with the actors Guilds to establish appropriate Compensation (in this case). But it was subtle and I wouldn’t have known without looking into the trivia.

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.

throwawayk7h2• 2 years ago

The adult actress, however, doesn't really resemble Charlize Theron from _Fury Road_ though. She did a great job, but I wonder if they couldn't have picked someone with a greater resemblance.

greggsy3• 2 years ago

I thought the same thing and could only conclude that she was only picked for her current popularity

slyall• 2 years ago

Going for the exact same look isn't usually important in recasting a character for for a younger/older version or even a straight recast. As long as look similar it is good enough and the rest is on their acting.

rickstanley• 2 years ago

I enjoyed Rogue One, they took a unexplored slice of the story after the legends thing and created this self contained, well written journey of a group that is only mentioned in the 4th episode.

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.

rrnechmech2• 2 years ago

discussion in Jurassic Park about ethics.

Care to elaborate?

avaldez_2• 2 years ago

_Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should_ (?)

prpl• 2 years ago

I liked Andor a lot too, because of the mundane, the prison/cruelty, the guerilla-like warfare, and betrayal.

The mundane existed in episode 4 as well, at least at the beginning.

avaldez_2• 2 years ago

God, the exchange between Daedra Meero and Blevin, with an added mediation of the cunning Major Partagaz was excellent.

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.

https://youtu.be/iKl0F640914?si=Mkgy-BTM1cp8m5rQ

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

I enjoyed Rogue One...

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).

InvaderFizz• 2 years ago

I liked everything except for how they just give up at the end. That annoyed me. Them not making it is fine, but them all giving up when it looked like there were many viable methods of escape annoyed me to no end. I still think it's the best Star Wars movie overall.

Kon5ole• 2 years ago

Rogue One and Andor seem to me to be perfectly adjusted SW stories for the fans of the originals who are now 40+ years older. I hope Andor gets to stretch its legs fully story-wise, there is immense potential in the buildup so far!

cortesoft• 2 years ago

Andor is one of my favorite shows of all time, it is such an amazing and different portrayal of what the Empire meant.

dmvdoug• 2 years ago

Yes, Andor is far and away the best SW content produced in recent years. What I really want to see is what happens with Daedra Meero. She’s such an interesting character. She says at one point that the Empire’s cracking down and sharp authoritarianism is only playing into the rebels’ hands. But of course that is what the Empire is, given that it’s run by a Sith. So we have a “good” Empire employee who wants to be effective at her job. How does she reconcile all those things? What does she do after the Death Star destroys Alderaan? Does she really buy into the Empire and its ways 100%? I’d love to know more about her backstory and frontstory, so to speak, from Andor.

abetusk2• 2 years ago

In my opinion, the failing of Tarkin was one of animation, not so much rendering. If you watch some of the deepfake videos where they swap the original actors face over the CGI version (e.g. [0]), to me, it looks better but the movement is still unnatural. The lips curl, the head bobs, etc. all have a "linear interpolated" look that makes it seem like it was hand animated rather than motion captured by any actor.

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

kevingadd• 2 years ago

If it looks interpolated, that suggests to me that the people creating it were in a hurry - and film VFX operations are well known for crunch at this point, so it seems possible that they simply didn't give it enough attention.

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.

abetusk2• 2 years ago

It's a question of cost, knowledge and time. Avatar was in 2009 and the motion capture there was well beyond what was on display in Rogue One.

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU

yowzadave• 2 years ago

What I find amazing is stop-motion animation—-I presume it is animated in one go, with no in-betweening possible (because of the difficulty in getting the model back the precise in-between state). Really remarkable that the animators can do it so effectively!

dwighttk4• 2 years ago

None of these fake faces look that good out of the chute, and even the best looking ones look terrible a year later.

mmastrac• 2 years ago

I can't wait for a re-release of this particular film with the latest deepfake tech integration. It looks quite terrible in the original release -- enough to pull me out of the immersion of the film -- and the fan edits of those scenes are fantastic.

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.

causality0• 2 years ago

To me one of the most interesting things about Rogue One was how differently the Tarkin and Leia recreations were received, at least in person. Of course we know that online everybody is a critic and hates both of them, but that wasn't what it was like in the theater. I went with a large group and half of the group didn't even realize Tarkin wasn't real, while the entire group and and a good chunk of the theater audibly groaned when they saw Leia.

ane• 2 years ago

They could've used Guy Henry's likeness as-is. He already looks a lot like Peter Cushing. And his accent was impeccable

mixmastamyk2• 2 years ago

Enjoyed RO but having the datacenter at the tropical beach planet made no sense. Think of all the taxpayer money that could have been saved locating it on Hoth. ;-)

greggsy3• 2 years ago

It would be infinitely easier to attract talent to a tropical paradise in the galaxy’s equivalent Hawaii than Alaska.

mixmastamyk2• 2 years ago

The facility was quite empty from my memory, largely automated.

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.

mrandish2• 2 years ago

This is fun to read and also a valuable contribution to preserving the historical details of how it was achieved. I especially appreciate his tone in approaching what had become a somewhat contentious subject:

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.

BolexNOLA9• 2 years ago

As someone who has worked in production for almost 15 years now it is very refreshing to see such a generous take. Really and truly. I often find colleagues to be incredibly insufferable, nitpicking every single decision and everything they watch with no humility at all. Then the same people become incredibly defensive when people nitpick their work and tell them to “get a life” or some other “you’re too picky” comment.[Insert “oh my god the plot made literally no sense and they never respected The Line:TM:”]

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.

mrandish2• 2 years ago

it is very refreshing to see such a generous take.

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... :-)

fmajid• 2 years ago

I found Tarkin in Rogue One well done, after all Peter Cushing was really that gaunt and cadaveric in his later years. Leia, on the other hand, was a complete mess.

Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

Related Stories