Starwars.com new Vanity Fair content which includes the name for Andy Serkis' role in The Force Awakens:



Supreme Leader Snoke.

...because in 1977, when ANH was made, motion tracking dots were the most important factor in getting the movie to look the way it did...

Sorry, I have to call out LFL/Disney etc. for pushing the "we won't rely on CGI so much" line of bullshit that was out there so aggressively when shooting began, when they actually are relying on it quite a bit. It feels disrespectful of George Lucas, and his vision for the untapped potential of the medium.

So when Andy Serkis was cast and everyone on Earth knew that he would be playing a mocap character you were good, but when it is confirmed you are irate?

that name sucks. Snoke. doesn't exactly send shivers down my spine. "When Lord Snoke finds out about this..." really?

The most interesting thing about the mocap is the necessity for it in the first place. Going into speculation mode, motion capture for Serkis tells me he’s either playing a cyborg guy missing chunks of his face or (and probably more likely) an alien — and a non-human being in charge of what’s left of the Empire, which was pretty much a No Homers Aliens Club in the movies, is pretty intriguing to me.

I'd say they're still batting above .500 with the ST names so far. The reality is that if Snoke is an awesome character, his name will start to become cool. On its own, Boba Fett is not a cool name. I remember it sounding lame in the 80s. It's a cool name now because the character is fucking legendary.

Good:
- Poe Dameron
- Captain Phasma (I think it's a good callback to goofy serials)
- Maz Kanata

Bad:
- Snoke

Indifferent:
- Rey
- Kylo Ren
- Finn

George was always pretty good with names but I still remember the hand-wringing about names like Count Dooku.

SUPREME LEADER Snoke is not a cool name and never will be. What, is he from North Korea??

Well, if his character is interesting, I give two shits about the name. Seriously... Jabba is not a name that is particularly impressive, but a giant clime lord slug is. I'm inclined to not bash this film until I see it, because I'm hoping that everyone learned from the prequels how not to make a Star Wars film.

Eh, I wouldn't say I'm irate. I love great CGI when done to create the element of fantasy and escapism that Star Wars, and many other films, have achieved in recent years. All I'm doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of filmmakers distancing themselves so publicly from CGI in the lead up to making the film, while still, in softer voices, continuing to push the envelope of what can be done in the medium.

It felt like a underhanded chop at Lucas' use of the style for the prequels, which of course, is the simple-minded path to take when addressing the most recent films. I admit, I will defend Lucas to the last breath, as I'm doing on this interesting, but ultimately fairly insignificant issue.

They're mostly pandering to the general audience who believes that every single shot in the PT is CGI, when we know there were just as many models built as there were in the OT and that there is plenty filmed on location (mostly for TPM).

The best way I can sum up the failings of the PT VFX is to steal a quote from Jurassic Park: they were so preoccupied with whether they could that they never stopped to think if they should.

Nobody is complaining about Maul v. Qui-Gon v. Obi-wan battling in a massive room filled with energy generators, a dogfight in the asteroid belt, Watto, or even battle droids (well, some people complain about battle droids but that's for another reason).

Like you and I many fans of sci-fi and blockbuster adventure films don't dislike CGI at all. The more fair criticisms of the PT VFX aren't that there's a lot of CGI - it's that there's a lot of unnecessary and awful-looking CGI.

I'm talking CG clone troopers with floating Jango heads, CG floating fruit, CG stunt doubles riding CG alien cows and so forth. This shit didn't need to be done in CG and if GL was insistent that there needed to be an Anakin riding a silly space cow scene, it could have been done in a practical way (with a combination of animatronics, close ups and costumed animals) as to not take the audience out of the movie.

What's clear from what we've seen on TFA is that there is an emphasis to shoot on location and build sets, props, costumes, and creatures when the designs allow for it. When something is designed that can't actually be accomplished practically they'll use CGI. It's a more disciplined approach and we will see how it pays off.

Whether it translates into a good movie or not is yet to be determined.

For the most part, I thought TPM and ROTS had an acceptable balance of practical and digital. In some cases, digital effects were actually better than what could have been done practically, like replacing awkward puppet Yoda with CGI Yoda in TPM.

The pendulum swung into crazy town on AOTC, and I think this is the movie that left so many people scarred for life on the idea of heavy CGI use in Star Wars movies. Good actors might be able to maneuver their way around poor writing and average direction, but asking them to do that while having to completely imagine the surroundings and characters they're supposed to be interacting with is just asking for trouble.

I like what we've seen so far out of TFA on the effects front. Granted, we haven't seen a lot, but there hasn't been anything really glaring sticking out like the copy & pasted clones, cartoon Geonosians and Padme stuck in a Super Mario Bros. level (the droid factory conveyor belt) in the AOTC trailers.

They have always said it would be a balance between "practical" and CGI effects.
Kathleen Kennedy said they were using "all the tools in the toolbox," then the anti-CGI Internet nuts decided to misread that as "NO CGI," when in fact CGI is one of those tools in the toolbox.

As for the name "Snoke," so what? It's a funky name for an alien character in a Star Wars movie.
Like we've never had that before...

Good discussion here, and very good points made by many of you.

In watching the PT these days, I agree that AOTC's effects seem the most forced and dated. I also feel like AOTC, in general, felt more rushed as a production than the other two PT films. Could AOTC have at least been a better-looking film with a 2003 release date?

The dialogue and acting are what they are - beauty is in the eye of the beholder - but the visual effects in AOTC, 13 years later, feel to me like they were done to a "good enough" level, not indicative of the standards Lucas had for the other 5 films.

As much of a tease as motion dot trackers on actors' faces are, I'm just anxious to see what final form they take.

Yeah, TPM still looks good and ROTS took a lot of things learned over the last two movies and made great improvements, but AOTC looks more dated than either of them.

Snoke is still a lot better that Droopy McCool or Sleazebaggano.

or jar jar

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Swokes_Swokes

My first impression of the name Snoke was that it read like the name of a bureaucrat.

Might there be a call back to the purple clad Emperor advisers from ROTJ ?

https://youtu.be/sw2pzpQJRVE wonder if its pronounced like "snuke"

I was thinking more along the lines of "Boss Nass" - the leader of some indigenous species.

I thought of a ruler akin to the one from Battlestar Galactica. Another possibility being a grotesque sultan like Jabba.

On that note, while it is easy to assume that he and Kylo Ren are Sith, maybe they're not actually Dark Lords AKA Darths?

So far, nobody has mentioned a Darth title, not for one character...

"It was quite an unusual situation," Serkis tells us in the new issue of Empire. "I worked specifically with Domhnall Gleeson and with Adam Driver. My first day was basically standing on a 25-foot podium doing Lord Snoke without the faintest idea what he looked like... or in fact who he was! I was very high up, totally on my own, away from everybody else, but acting with them."


http://www.empireonline.com/movies/news ... der-snoke/

filmwaffle.com /comment-the-meaning-of-supreme-leader-snokes-name-in-star-wars-the-force-awakens/