VOTD: VFX Artists React To And Analyze The CGI Of The 'Star Wars' Prequels

In the grand scheme of cinema, digital visual effects are still a relatively new endeavor. As technology has advanced over the years, so have visual effects. But sometimes it's fun to look back at now-dated used of computer generated imagery (CGI) of the past, and there's no one better to do it that a group of expert visual effects artists.

The YouTube channel Corridor Crew has gotten a big reaction from movie fans for their recent run of videos breaking down some of the best and worst visual effects in movies over the years. Their most recent edition takes a more focused look at the Star Wars prequels visual effects, which include some pretty egregious and laughable uses of CGI. Watch below!

When you have three movies where sets were surrounded by green screen and entire environments and characters were created with visual effects, you're bound to have some crappy shots. You might even have some shots that look great but have something in them that's not quite right upon closer inspection. For example, did you ever notice that a boulder in the podracing scene from The Phantom Menace explodes before an engine even hits it? That's...not how that's supposed to work.

Some of these mistakes and missteps can be chalked up to the fact that George Lucas and the visual effects crew at Industrial Light and Magic were still learning digital techniques with technology that was still being updated and even invented all the time. So they did they best with the tools they had at their disposal, and most of the time, they succeeded. But knowing what we know now, there are still some shots that simply haven't aged well.

What you might be surprised by is that Corridor Crew doesn't rag on the creation of Jar Jar Binks, at least not as a visual effects. For the time in which Jar Jar Binks was created, he was quite the sophisticated and impressive visual effect. They even go so far to call his creation a master class for visual effects in 1999. That's probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about Jar Jar Binks.

If you'd like to see more of these guys analyzing visual effects, follow the Corridor Crew on YouTube.