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.
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.
> 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... :-)
> 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.