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Star Wars VII - Open spoilers

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The shot at 2:40 hit me really hard. It's not even a film shot, it's just a bunch of people standing around. But it's a bunch of people in rebellion flight suits milling around a ship at sunset, and it's so good.

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Dammit, shouldn't have watched! I didn't know/had forgotten what GC's character was!

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Comic con footage is pretty good/clever: https://twitter.com/starwars/status/619684902762516480

Sorry, didn't mean to take a poo on the video. I am pretty excited about the new movies, and that three minute clip did a good job reminding me of how I felt watching the original trilogy as a kid. I am just afraid of letting childhood nostalgia take over, so everything about new Star Wars makes me feel conflicted. It's a dumb way to approach this!

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I got a laugh out of the part where he says "We're actually in a REAL Desert!"

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At the end of the day I think the green screens were the least of the prequel trilogy's problems. All the practical effects in the world couldn't save those moviese from incomprehensible writing, poor directing, boring cinematography, etc, etc, etc.

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If you don't think that The Force Awakens isn't going to also have giant green screen sets, then you are being a little naive. They're just a part of modern filmmaking, especially when budgets are so high. He used them in Star Trek, he'll use them here. 

I would never say it won't have any at all and I never said it here. What I'm talking about is 95% green screen use vs. 75% vs. 50% etc etc etc

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I'll admit that my view of the prequels is heavily influenced by the reviews / heavy sack beatings the Red Letter Media guys inflicted on them but it's my understanding that the problems the prequels had were far beyond heavy use of green screens. Or, rather it wasn't that they were used so much as why: because it was easier. The RLM guys make a pretty good case for the movies, despite being the result of thousands of people working thousands of hours on them, ultimately being the product of a lazy, washed up hack with a weak vision, but total control none the less, who didn't really care that much about what went up on screen so long as it meant he didn't have to get up out of his chair too many times to put it there. There are so many shots of George, surrounded by staff, making half hearted pronouncements about his vision while everyone around him forces themselves to smile while making vague agreement noises in a vain attempt to make him look good. So many super cuts of boring, easy compositions of people having boring conversations in stead of doing things. 

 

But nobody in Hollywood wants to throw a guy like George Lucas under the bus, or at least don't want to publicly, and so the market department needed to find a way to signal to the smarks in the audience that the sequel trilogy wouldn't be treated the same way Lucas treated the prequels. I think "practical effects", as it is used in the promo videos for VII, is the code they settled on to mean "these movies are being made by people who give a damn". 

 

I know it's just a reel of marking pap, but it does look like the people in that video are at least having fun. 

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Seeing a Drew Struzan Star Wars poster that follows the style of his posters for the prequel trilogy and special editions fills me with trepidation.

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I kept reading it's actually some ice planet in which they built that giant (probably) death laser. I saw another poster where they tried to cram in every possible character/thing though. 

 

I looked it up and I found it:

 

7aB6Y4e.jpg

 

It's so.... BUSY.  :tfart:  Otherwise fine, I guess...

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It's a piece of shit, and I couldn't be more disappointed. It's the worst Star Wars poster I've ever seen.

It's also the official poster, it seems. :angry:

We were being hyped for a real Drew Struzan poster, naturally featuring his art and eye for composition, not for a fucking suit made overcrowded Photoshop disaster.

 

I admit: I was probably looking forward to a new Struzan Star Wars poster more than the actual movie, so this ist just... nope™.

 

Please god, don't let this be true. Drew's just running late! C'mon!!

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I guess my days of thinking the Star Wars posters are terrible are coming to a middle.

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That doesn't look far off the typical Struzan Star Wars mess to me...

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Strongly disagreed.

 

That up there is just one big ugly unreadable central cluster of far too many figures that hardly leaves a square inch of room to breathe. Just for comparison, take the number of pictorial elements from the first SE poster.

 

c7e3935cb0417122342a860caa8cc714_special

 

That is probably not the greatest composition ever, but at least it's a composition.

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They're both compositions - boring, careless ones; Struzan's just has a slightly smaller number of things slapped on.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love Struzan's posters for stuff like Back To The Future, The Thing, Coming To America, The Goonies and Adventures In Babysitting, as well as his teaser/alternative posters for stuff like Jedi, New Hope (the "circus poster"), Last Crusade and Hellboy II. But half his work is just lazy "throw a bunch of faces and scenes at the page and don't worry about how they work together" stuff, and all his main Star Wars posters come under this banner for me.

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While I disagree, this doesn't offend me in particular. After all, I'm not looking for Struzan stuff because of Star Wars... I'm looking for Star Wars stuff because of Struzan.

 

I can't say that I'm a particular fan of the floating faces montage, but there are ways to do it and ways that fail. The new official Star Wars VII poster is an interesting collection of failures in that respect, while a lot of Struzan posters get things visibly right. It's obvious that this poster was meant as an hommage to Struzan, but it's an hommage by someone who doesn't understand the artist he's referencing.

 

It's really hard to make a hitlist of personal favorites among Drew's works, but while there probably wouldn't be a Star Wars poster among them, iterations of the floating face theme could certainly be in there.

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It's obvious that this poster was meant as an hommage to Struzan, but it's an hommage by someone who doesn't understand the artist he's referencing.

 

The colour scheme and lens flare are certainly very Struzan-y, but the composition, image choices and brush style (or whatever the technical term might be - I'm no art expert!) also feel a little reminiscent of some of the original posters - I wonder whether the intention was to link the two styles? If it were me I would have gone all the way old-school and jettisoned any Struzan feel, to strengthen the ties to the original trilogy, but I guess a lot of people think of Struzan's style as the standard for the enitre series now and perhaps a change back to that 70s/80s style would actually alienate a lot of them...

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The color scheme of Disney's artist is particularly abysmal. It's essentially four rather intense patches of color, three large red, blue and orange patches and one green hideous counterpoint that no one needed in the first place. I know of no Struzan poster that misfires similarly. Struzan is known for intense color, but all within a fairly limited gamut; in the New Hope SE poster above, the only intense color is e.g. orange, while the blues are fairly muted (of course, this poster's color range is particularly limited, and there are posters of his where local color determines a far broader color range). Other posters of his even have a monochrome feel to them (often orange, which e.g. looms through his Indy work). 

 

As to brushwork, arghh. That Disney thing is of course made digitally, so I can't even begin to compare. Struzan draws, paints and airbrushes on gessoed ground. The visible brushstrokes on his art are unrelated to the application of color. These strokes are the very first step of the painting, before even the preliminary drawing is applied to the illustration board.

 

I would definitely have preferred if they just went with another artist, a digital one or whatever. At least I would have preferred that over what we have now. An individual style – like Olly Moss'! – would have been so infinitely much better than this disgrace of a botched hommage. There's a reason no one tells us the name of that "artist". :mellow:

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Every Star Wars poster starting with the Special Editions has been pretty gross and aimless. The actual original 70s/80s ones were great, as was the Phantom Menace teaser image with Vader's silhouette (regardless of how shit the actual movie was). This one continues to be boring and bad like 99% of the 90s+ posters.

I respect trying to make defenses for the Struzan stuff because he is great at what he does and they are painted posters instead of Photoshop and whatever else, but it's clear that even he didn't care about the Special Edition and Prequel one sheets the way he does about other clearly transcendent work he's done.

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Jesus why blue and red?

 

Also never realized the crossguard guy was also some kind of Darth Hockeymask. Makes the design even goofier.

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Oh whatever, I'm still pumped up to see this movie. What I like most though is the implication that what the Rebels pulled off in Return of the Jedi was so mind-bogglingly huge that it's considered a tall-tale within the Star Wars setting. That's a first; until now the galaxy has been portrayed as taking everything as historical fact and at face value.

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Up until now, all the marketing materials have been this weird mix of "It's new and fun and great!" and "It's that thing you like from your childhood, it's just the same but a little bit different!" so I think I'm just going to sit on the tickets I bought and ignore all marketing materials from here on in. I'm going to go see the movie regardless, so all the marketing materials that are just a little unsettling in how they're sending their message don't have to matter to me.

 

Buying early sets you free, I guess???

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