Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that movie looked so fake.
I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure most of that is done in post-processing.
The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.
The Volume is pretty cool. A practical version of this that's often overlooked is Oblivion (probably because the plot is naff). The "sky tower" set is physical with 270 degrees of front projection to handle the sky. It would have been a lot harder to convincingly re-create all the optical effects and not worry about what light would look like scattered off glass or other occluding objects.
Yes, but using LED walls like that has a drawback: The scene is baked in. Although it generally looks better than greenscreen, you can't change it afterward.
By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything green screen. They weren’t even building chairs and benches the actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases.
It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well.
I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits).
What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.
Ep I, II, III are bad in so many ways that they may end up aging the best. It's impossible to take any of it seriously, from the infidelity of the world of the first trilogy, to the ludicrous characters and situations, to the radically morphing production values, to the utter incoherence of the plotting. For an adaptation of a beloved franchise to be mishandled so badly by its original creator... it has to be something very special. I predict it will require a bit more time to become appreciated, and its substance will be regarded as having been totally misunderstood and overlooked at its inception.
Or it is meaningless tripe beyond all reckoning.
The cool thing is that everything is being coded and sequestered to history no matter how bad it is, so the future of history looks absurd and dire: everything will be recallable, but the work of reviewing it all must overwhelm its value. The act of remembering will become an ultimate adventure.
It's really fun to ask someone who was a kid after Ep I/II/III about their view of it. Lucas at several points in his career very candidly suggested Star Wars was always for kids. (It was related to criticism about Ewoks. It was related to criticism about Ewok Adventures. It was related to criticism about Star Tours. It was related to criticism about each of the Prequels and several components thereof. And so forth.) "Is it fun for a twelve year old?" was in many ways George Lucas' overriding criterion.
Of the twelve year olds I have met since Ep I/II/III, they've all generally enjoyed them.
I feel the same criteria generally applies to Ep VII/VIII/IX: for the most part 12-year olds don't see the flaws, they see the fun.
I also think history is far kinder to the prequels than contemporary opinion at the time was. (You can see it directly in some of the Ep III 20th Anniversary video essays showing up this year.)
Ah, the prequels, famous for their kid-friendly themes like senatorial debates and child murder. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but I think there are objective ways in which the originals were more competently made than the prequels were that are not explained by the "boomers vs. millenials vs. zoomers" nostalgia angle that you suggest.
I didn't say anything comparing them to the "originals" nor did I say it had anything to do with generation demographics. I said the factor I believe to be most at play is relatively the exact opposite of nostalgia, the prequels play to novelty and seeing them for the first time with the eyes of a child. They are cartoons of whimsy and wonder.
For the most part the senatorial debates and child murder both happen off screen, the screen pays a lot more attention to the muppets and droids and lightsaber duels. (The toys and the action figures.) Ep. I and II both have a PG rating and III is PG-13. Most of the Star Wars movies have PG ratings and the PG-13s are rare. They've all been "family friendly" since the beginning. It's a part of why kids love them. It's a part of why Disney paid a lot of money for them. It's a part of why they are closely tied to the (US) family friendly Disney+ brand. Are you upset that these are considered "kid-friendly" movies?
