Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

[xipotec]

You can absolutely have suburbs in Star Wars, provided they are sufficiently different from our own.

Have the suburbs be multi-level with houses above houses, the paths being where flying speeders drop off passengers. Have the school transport be a hover pod in a tube. Have the lawns be purple mushrooms. have the roofs of the houses be covered in individually articulating tiles that capture the wind.

Make it visually reminiscent of suburbs, but at the same time completely alien. Visually we understand that the carpet of oddly coloured fungus is analogous to a grass lawn but it isn't so close that it feels like earth.


Part of the reason the OT had so many Earth elements (the primary reason actually) was budget and tech limitations. George didn't WANT halloween wolfman and devil masks for aliens. He didn't want the real world weapons to be easily identifiable as such, but they needed functional weapons for the effects so they tried to stick bits on them to make them look less like real world weapons where they could.

The intention was to NOT be Earthlike. Han didn't wear a cowboy hat and have a classic face off with the town sheriff outside a saloon while people shuttered their windows. Lukes Homestead was chosen because it was the most alien looking location (to Western audiences) available. Most people had no idea it was a found location, most assumed it was made for the film.



Disney repeatedly jump the shark and this new show does it again.

See, you may not be old enough to remember this, but the interior of the Lars home got a lot of criticism , as it felt too familiar then....

Still seems odd to have such a "modern" kitchen in that crappy desert ....
Lars also had a serious garage ..

 

[jaztermareal]

I could forgive the kitchen being modern since their house is likely very old, built long before they moved in while the kitchen could have been fitted more recently but as for it looking too earthlike I would agree. Having a table is fine but the rest needed to look more different. At least Lucas tried with making milk blue. That was one small thing that helped sell it as not too earthlike.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

I could forgive the kitchen being modern since their house is likely very old, built long before they moved in while the kitchen could have been fitted more recently but as for it looking too earthlike I would agree. Having a table is fine but the rest needed to look more different. At least Lucas tried with making milk blue. That was one small thing that helped sell it as not too earthlike.

It's budgetary.

If you aren't going to stay long in the "suburbs" in this show, then it's not much of a point to spend a lot of money to build some long term practical sets / spend more on SFX. Filming with a lot of kids carries a lot more complexity and expense. More regulation and more issues come up. Keira Knightley was still technically a minor when she filmed the first Pirates Of The Caribbean film. That was a huge addition to the cost and logistics just for that. But the production wanted her. Even adding just one minor changes things. An entire show full of them is another ballgame. New weapons kept being shifted into and out of the Stargate SG1 universe because it was a budgetary/logistics consideration. A lot of different shows, different genres, successful or not, all have to make some trade offs.

While it might not apply so much to this specific show, tradeoffs in the budget might mean one more excellent light saber battle. Or starfighters in an extended dogfight sequence. Something that usually ends up as well received fan service for a core audience. I could go a lot further into a practical budget breakdown of a modern show, but then it would just get ugly. No one typically wants to get into the minutiae of money laundering. They don't want to hear how public pension money is being gambled on bad projects to try to market to the lower end of a K-12 audience. They don't want to hear about Cartel dark money in the back end financing. Carve outs, entitlements, the problems with regulation, it's all kind of a stupid mess. I know people see Godzilla Minus One and think "Look at how amazing that looks for so cheap" What is cheap? That's relative. Cheap in the American film industry, in current times, is a different animal now.

Now the producers, writers and show runner can't say it's budgetary in public. They have to fabricate something that sounds better. But it's always money.

 

[jaztermareal]

It's budgetary.

If you aren't going to stay long in the "suburbs" in this show, then it's not much of a point to spend a lot of money to build some long term practical sets / spend more on SFX. Filming with a lot of kids carries a lot more complexity and expense. More regulation and more issues come up. Keira Knightley was still technically a minor when she filmed the first Pirates Of The Caribbean film. That was a huge addition to the cost and logistics just for that. But the production wanted her. Even adding just one minor changes things. An entire show full of them is another ballgame. New weapons kept being shifted into and out of the Stargate SG1 universe because it was a budgetary/logistics consideration. A lot of different shows, different genres, successful or not, all have to make some trade offs.

While it might not apply so much to this specific show, tradeoffs in the budget might mean one more excellent light saber battle. Or starfighters in an extended dogfight sequence. Something that usually ends up as well received fan service for a core audience. I could go a lot further into a practical budget breakdown of a modern show, but then it would just get ugly. No one typically wants to get into the minutiae of money laundering. They don't want to hear how public pension money is being gambled on bad projects to try to market to the lower end of a K-12 audience. They don't want to hear about Cartel dark money in the back end financing. Carve outs, entitlements, the problems with regulation, it's all kind of a stupid mess. I know people see Godzilla Minus One and think "Look at how amazing that looks for so cheap" What is cheap? That's relative. Cheap in the American film industry, in current times, is a different animal now.

Now the producers, writers and show runner can't say it's budgetary in public. They have to fabricate something that sounds better. But it's always money.

it costs the same to design and digitally render a scifi suburb as it does a weird alien environment provided the number of elements are the same and they have fairly equal complexity

 

[MeatHookGekko]

it costs the same to design and digitally render a scifi suburb as it does a weird alien environment provided the number of elements are the same and they have fairly equal complexity

 

[xipotec]

it costs the same to design and digitally render a scifi suburb as it does a weird alien environment provided the number of elements are the same and they have fairly equal complexity

Eh, not really. You haven't hire someone talented to create that digital painting, not just execute it.

In bytes an possessing power I totally agree. Whatever money they spend gets a certain quality. Thats mostly done by number crunching nerds , the artistic part is by artists.

But for artistic merit, that is definitely IS cost dependent.You can hire some guy to thrown in a prefab bathroom in your home, or you can hire an architect to design one.

Digital artists are just that. The more creative and different they are the more they will cost. Better designs cost more.

Weta has their prices as they are due to the artists and designers just as much as processing ability.

 

[jaztermareal]

Eh, not really. You haven't hire someone talented to create that digital painting, not just execute it.

In bytes an possessing power I totally agree. Whatever money they spend gets a certain quality. Thats mostly done by number crunching nerds , the artistic part is by artists.

But for artistic merit, that is definitely IS cost dependent.You can hire some guy to thrown in a prefab bathroom in your home, or you can hire an architect to design one.

Digital artists are just that. The more creative and different they are the more they will cost. Better designs cost more.

Weta has their prices as they are due to the artists and designers just as much as processing ability.

we aren't talking how well designed, we are talking theme of design. A very talented artist can design a super intricate and beautiful suburb, a mediocre artist can design a very basic typical looking suburb, but both are suburbs. The designs are based on what is requested of them, if asked to make an alien environment they will (very talented artist might come out with designs as imaginative as HR Giger while the less talented might splurge out something like he saw in GOTG) but both will be more sci fi if that is what is asked of them, so no cost isn't different when doing suburbs vs more alien environment. You might pay more for a talented designer to make a better version of either but the decisions made in this show are not based on budget but CHOICE, they wanted earthlike suburbs, so that is what they asked the designers to design and visual effects artists to render

 

[MeatHookGekko]

we aren't talking how well designed, we are talking theme of design.