should of used models not cgi

You hit the nail on the head there with your comment about SyFy (morons apparently think that by changing the name they don't have to show any science fiction?).

Instead of licensing the treasure trove of amazing stories cheaply from the Asimov, Dick, Clarke, Heinlein, etc estates - they hire a bunch of schmucks who can't even make a good cheesy monster movie right. It doesn't take a lot to make a decent cheesy monster movie - but these guys fail each and every time since you can't have a good movie when you start with a stupid idea.

Why do we have 'bug invasion 3', and 'killer swarm' and *beep* with similarly forgettable names when they could do the Foundation series one chapter at a time.

Or continue with the Dune books... they could do God Emperor of Dune in a similar style to Clone Wars, since he is a giant worm after all it wouldn't be cheap to do with practical effects, but the 'computer assisted animation' would make it possible to do a lot of sweet sci-fi classics on a shoestring budget compared to how Hollyweird does it.

Even if they did them low budget and with cheesy effects, if they have a good story at the base it will be MUCH more enjoyable than a movie whose dialog was mostly ad-libbed on set by people with limited vocabularies, or REALLY cheesy stuff that makes soap opera dialog look like normal speech.

Why they blow the money on one after another stupid cheesy monster movies and/or disaster movies is beyond me - especially since most of them couldn't be called Science Fiction at all. Having a mutant bee character doesn't mean it's sci fi.. it means you have a mutant bee. Add to that, they're not even funny... they're just bad. Many of them would be hard to give the MST-3K treatment to since there's so little there to laugh at other than showing you the film while they point at the screen and laugh, because it's really THAT bad.

That channel did start out for the real sci-fi fans out there. Then they got a different president who blows goats and doesn't know what sci-fi means.

BTW: as to the original thread...

When blending the different on screen elements together there are several techniques that they could have chosen to do. Matte cutting was a slightly crude way to do it, but it was a little cheaper and faster than the alternative.

The alternative was doing full Rotoscoping - where they would have essentially created a background mask for each model in each frame. It takes longer to do, although it produces a much smaller border effect, especially if lighting has been carefully controlled so it meshes well with the background it is applied over.

Each model would be re-filmed with its custom mask to make a film with just that one element. Then all of the elements are joined on top of the background and the image is shot again. 24 times per second...

Can't blame Lucas for cutting crude polygon mattes at the time though - the first Star Wars was expected to bomb miserably by the studio, and if I remember correctly, they were threatening to dump the film even when he was editing it if they didn't wrap up the SFX fast enough. These are the same type of morons, by the way, who keep doing monster movies on SyFy instead of doing some Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke. They're all dead, so the rates should be fair... and they're award winning stories!

The best they've done recently are remakes of The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland... doesn't sound too 'SyFy' to me... sounds more 'classic English literature' to me. :D The most recent actual sci-fi work I can remember being done was Earthsea (by Ursula K. LeGuin), and some friends who have read the books said it wasn't a good adaptation at all.

Of course BSG was outstanding on all levels... I wonder how that quality slipped in with this current management. That whole company so needs somebody who understands what targeting a demographic means... it means actually putting crap on their channel that they'll actually like and respect. For a channel that shows science fiction, it should actually show science fiction most of the time - not monster movies.

Reruns of old good stuff is far preferred over new product of inferior quality. Even if it's in black and white. (the horror!)

You know, it's interesting. I grew up watching the original Star Trek, and the mat lines in the special effects shots were not at all noticeable in the first several years I watched it.... but at one point the mat lines became more and more visible, to the point that you could literally see a different-colored square or polygon or whatever where, say, a shuttle was in the image, like a great big discolored-patch on the screen. In fact, you could see those discolored-patches getting more and more prominent in the image as years went by.

It was pretty clear there was some sort of deterioration that was taking place with the film copies themselves that was causing those special effects shots to change appearance, as if one part of the film image was reacting differently than another part of the film image on the same piece of celluloid.

And then they went back and remastered all the film copies from prints that had been specially preserved somewhere under controlled conditions, and ALL those discolored-patches disappeared.

I'm pretty sure something like that must have happened with film prints of the original Star Wars trilogy, too.

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Should have used models huh...

This movie is taught in film and visual effects schools along side TRON and Young Sherlock Holmes.

This is a classic through and through.

just watching the movie again aftera long time and i think the CGI scenes still hold up to a degree.I watched The Final Destination the other day and the CGI in that looks so fake and that was made last year and In Attack of the Clones some of he bAckrounds look fake The Last Starfighter backrounds still look oright to me!and that CGI knight from Young Sherlock Holmes still holds up and so does The Abyss who agree's...I agree while they used CGI with Tron that looks Very Dated but still enjoyable

Not "should of"; the preposition "of" doesn't make any sense at all in the middle of a compound verb such as "should of used".

It should be "should have". Conversationally that tends to be converted into the contraction "should've". That contraction sounds a lot like "should of", but it isn't "should of".

Yes, I love the 80s. My favorite decade for movies. I love the CGI in the Abyss but I just can't like the CGI in The Last Starfighter. As I said before, I still liked the movie but I had GREAT expectations for the FX being this an 80s film. I wasn't expecting CGI at all. I was expecting models, models and models. Maybe some stop motion, and then more models.

The original CG does not bother me one bit, but that is because I am transported back to the 80s when I first saw this movie and the special FX looked great.

I would personally love to see a special edition of this movie with updated CG. Identical editing, pacing, audio etc. Just 2010 CG. They could do it again in another 25 years if CG continues to evolve.