I disagree with this, there's nothing inherently better about practical or CG. It's all a matter of its application and the artists behind them. The Yoda puppet worked because George was smart and got some of the best puppeteers around to bring the character to life. By the time the Prequels came around, George became (overly) enamored with tech which wasn't quite fully mature yet and likely did not give the artists at ILM the time needed to do things right. He probably didn't have experienced enough animators working on those senses and that will greatly affect the quality of your work, and it applies to both practical and CG.
I disagree. Practical will always beinherently better because they have a specific gravity to their existence, because they're actually there. Actors will always be looking in the right place because they are interacting with a physical entity. There are certainly some things that you can't do with practical effects, at least not easily, and that took creativity from filmmakers. Today, when the sky is the limit, a lot of directors don't stop to ask themselves if they should do it, just because they can. It winds up looking terrible and unrealistic.
That's hardly true and is all just perception. In both CG and practical that weight is all achieved via artistry and is not inherent. For instance, take spaceship scenes shot with models, that weight you see/feel isn't because it's a physical model, it's all in the camera work because the model is typically fixed in place and it's the camera that moves and makes it seem like that the model is moving. In CG ,it's the exactly same, it's all in your camera movements that will lend the feeling of weight to your shot. And if you're talking puppets, it's the skill of the puppeteer that makes the puppet seem rea; and not the puppet itself which typically weighs a fraction of what it would weight if it were a living being. This is esp. true in any scene in The Mandalorian where an actor picks up Grogu, even though it's a physical puppet the way the actors pick it up make it readily apparent that it's a puppet weighing only a few pounds as opposed to a living being that should weigh at least twice as much.
Sorry, but I can still tell Grogu is a puppet: it looks fake to me no matter how much "weight" they visually try to add to it. As for the weight of physical models: they retain a quality even when poorly shot that CGI has a very hard time trying to match. I can tell a CGI model (even when well done) as opposed to a physical one by sight: the CGI one always looks "off" to me.
To think that most of the models shot in 2001 were photographs of the physical model affixed to a glass plate with the camera moving and the photo in a static mode (all of the Nukes around the Earth, the Orion, some shots of the Aries-1B, etc).
Again, works both ways. There's plenty of time that models look like models and it knocks you out the scene, or that the miniature is a clearly a miniature and it doesn't the same thing. Neither one comes off better all of the time.
Well actually... if you take a flashlight and aim it just right while whooshing the ship around the room...
Good point. And from someone I know how actually studies the real scientific aspects of things like this, it's a horribly inaccurate analogy.
That hurts my brain just thinking about it.
Here. Let me borrow your pen ...
