Old-school space kino had better visual effects than modern CGI stuff

2001: A Space Odyssey
2010
Star Wars
the Star Trek movies
Alien
...

Granted, it was only the top-tier space movies that had great effects like that, but still.

Other urls found in this thread:

vimeo.com/58429056
vimeo.com/122058147
youtube.com/watch?v=msPCQgRPPjI
vimeo.com/174782388
youtube.com/watch?v=EP1ut8KG5eM
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

After I saw how complex and time consuming the cgi in modern films is, I just do not see why real models are fundamentally more difficult or expensive in the age of digital compositing.

Agreed. You can even have the best of both worlds and use computer-aided model work, with computer controlled cameras filming real models, and so on. They were already doing this in the 80s, for example in Blade Runner. Maybe all the people who knew how to do good model work just aged out of the industry?

I plan on doing it myself, writing a script at the moment that uses a fair few models, will be buying a motion control rig and a 4k camera. I come from the audio world, I'm used to slip editing audio for days and days and days on end just to get a drum track sounding 5% better. I can learn how to roto or composite.

Wonderful, I wish you success. Maybe we'll see the results here at some point down the road.
What I always wonder with that old-school model work is:
1) How do they film it so that you can't tell it's all happening in a big room... basically, how do they hide the background? Is it just high contrast lighting?
and
2) Do they use cameras in a special way that helps hide the smallness of the objects? Meaning, is there some level of soft focus or other optical technique used that helps things look "bigger" somehow?

They definitely look better if you're just looking at a shot of them but then you realize how scale is almost always fucked up, it's difficult to do convincing motion, it's almost impossible to shoot more than a few models at a time in a single shot. Empire and Jedi took years and years and are the only real exceptions and they conquered that with time and money that most productions simply don't have.
You might say 'but user now cgi has led to a whole bunch of puke and it's all stupid busy' and I tend to agree but that's a stylistic failing and not a limitation of the technology like the problems I described with model work.

>Empire and Jedi took years and years and are the only real exceptions
What about the opening of Star Trek: The Motion Picture or the shots in Alien which show the Nostromo in motion? Those always looked great to me. Are there some flaws I'm not noticing?

Not that guy, and I know nothing about making films, but I think this video funded through kickstarter uses methods you're referring to - vimeo.com/58429056

There's a link to a wired article about how they made it, and there might be more stuff on the kickstarter page for it.

>How do they film it so that you can't tell it's all happening in a big room... basically, how do they hide the background? Is it just high contrast lighting?

You don't, you generally film against a green or blue screen (2010 was done slightly differently). Everything that is that particular colour gets removed through either old school techniques or digital compositing, then what's left is free to be composited.

To get the various lighting effects, models would be shot in various passes with lights on, lights off etc, then overlaid over each other. This is why you needed motion control rigs, to ensure that each pass was identical.

>Do they use cameras in a special way that helps hide the smallness of the objects? Meaning, is there some level of soft focus or other optical technique used that helps things look "bigger" somehow?

You use a combination of forced perspective, model making techniques and the models themselves are "studio scale" which can get pretty fucking huge. The TIE Fighters in Star Wars were bigger than your torso. Bigger ships use scale tricks. For example, you have a frame of reference for the size of a window, so if a dot on a ship represents a window,you have a clue for the overall scale. A Star Destroyer has thousands of tiny dots.

You can for sure get a similar look with cgi, so a lot of it is stylistic. This guy goes into great detail about why the prequels and even Rogue One and TFA don't look like Star Wars in one particularly big way:

vimeo.com/122058147

I think the issues with models looking real really started to dissipate with digital compositing which means you can complete the process much more quickly and convincingly. Also, there's no visual jarring difference like there is between a shot element and a cgi element. A model is another shot element. You can spend countless hours and dollars trying to match a cgi shot to a shot element with fake lens distortion, color matching to the sensor of the cameras you use etc, and still risk it not matching, or you could just make a model, film it and composite it.

Cool, there's some nice visual work in that film. I also like, in addition to the models, how they did the various computer screens. It looks modern but, because of the color schemes they used, it doesn't look annoying in that "Apple store" way.

youtube.com/watch?v=msPCQgRPPjI

Part of the huge time, and therefore cost, sink in old model effects was tedious stuff like this which takes minutes now.

Thanks for the description, user. I'll go research more about the details of that kind of stuff. Is there any reading or watching material you'd recommend?

vimeo.com/174782388

...

Independence day used tons of models, it was probably the absolute peak of special visual effects, the CGI fits really well with the rest, the models are digitally composited so look phenomenal.

youtube.com/watch?v=EP1ut8KG5eM

Hivemind.

Special and* visual effects. What's also great about Independence Day is that the digital elements are done stylistically like the model shots so the difference is negligible. They also constantly change so that you don't get used to an effect. Old films often did this; one shot would be a model, another a puppet, another stop motion, another in later years cgi. Jurrasic Park for example.

I already posted it but Mike Verta explains really well here the difference style makes when doing cgi shots:

vimeo.com/122058147

That's a really interesting video. I'd subconsciously picked up on that "sliding" effect of the star fields in SW, which is not actually quite realistic visually, but somehow creates an interesting effect and "feels" realistic... but that guy consciously noticed and articulated it.

Cont of ... It's probably been a really long time since I've seen the non-special edition SW, though, so I might be misremembering my impressions of it.

the difference is not what you can do buy how you execute it.
with cgi directors try to make movies into videogames. stop

Kubrick is hack and people who like 2001 are just pretentious "movie intellect"