VII VFX News Posted by John Hoare on 16th June 2005, 22:34 Now, we all know about the horrible 2-D blurry Starbug as featured in Red Dwarf VII – courtesy of a mountain of good but unusable model shots and a budget crunch. It’s interesting then, that a glimpse of a lovely 3D Starbug (as seen in Re-mastered and VIII) can be seen at a couple of points; notably in the title sequence. It’s still not as good as the physical models, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most shots in the series. I wonder where that fits into everything? If there was a nice CGI model of the ship, and adequate puter processing power, why wasn’t it used for the other shots? Purely time? And was this nice CGI Starbug always meant to be used alongside the physical models? I wonder if the VII DVD will shed some light…
Hmmm. From Mr Veale’s Flibble interview: http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/index.cfm?frameset=flibble/veale/veale_fs.html&page=veale.html “Flib: The shots Mr Flibble liked most were of Starbug passing over the camera toward a sun – what made those so good? Veale: Basically Ed [Bye] wanted air-to-air shots of Starbug flying around, and to do that I had to give him shots of Starbug on a blue screen, which were then composited in. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the technology to composite it with motion blur, so we had to add a post effect which made it look a bit weird. The sunrise shots were separate shots which I envisaged, I did about two or three of those which were complete with the backgrounds. [There was] a little bit more time spent on those, and the rest of the shots were put together in the edit suite.” Blimey. It does look like a completely different model. The difference in quality is *amazing* – it’s a whole different level. If they’d all been like that, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad…
I love the shot of Starbug swinging past underneath the VII numerals. That was one of the coolest things about series VII.
Interesting that nobody mentions the blue screen bug used a few times in series 6 like when it goes into the worm hole in ‘Rimmerworld’. Ant the ‘space filth’ vehicle in ‘Emohawk’. Bothered by this? I’m not, and, although models preferred , do not let it spoil my enjoyment of any series.
> Interesting that nobody mentions the blue screen bug used a few times in series 6 like when it goes into the worm hole in ‘Rimmerworld’. I’ve mentioned it before. That particular shot is crap. I don’t know why they chose it for the title sequence. The wormhole itself is fine, but the Bug is horribly 2-D. > Bothered by this? I’m not, and, although models preferred , do not let it spoil my enjoyment of any series. The difference between VI and VII is the sheer amount of bad effects. The odd dodgy Starbug shot, fine. Nearly all of them – not fine. Effects *do* matter to a series – because bad effects can really drag you out of the feeling of the piece.
I wish they’d just used library Starbug flyby shots in some instances in VII. But then we would have been complaining about that (maybe). Imagine how good those VII shots could be if done now. If GNP had the money they should redo the entire series’s effects (or better still, reshoot Series VII so that the model shots fit in with the stories!), they need to add in the CG ship from Series VIII to the end of Nanarchy instead of that extraordinarily bad looking insert of the original model. I’m not slagging the original model, but it looks so so so so out of place in that shot. Why not just erase VII & VIII from existance and start afresh, basing the new Series VII around those model shots. Dum de dum. I need a poo.
