Too much volume in my Star Wars

Even though they all take place in a galaxy far, far away, one of the great appeals of the Star Wars movies has always been the use of real world locations. Places like Tunisia were are vital as Kenny Baker or Ben Burtt to the overall success of the series, grounding it in the real, making it all feel lived in.

Most of those locations were exotic areas of our planet, but you only needed a touch of freaky technology or creatures to make it feel truly out of this world. The real snow used for Hoth made the giant robot camels much more palatable, and it really felt like the giant redwoods of northern California went on forever around the moon of Endor.

Getting off the soundstage that had mostly been used for science fiction in the past made Star Wars stand out, just as much as the lightsabers and roaring spaceships did.

Some of the more modern Star Wars films and movies still follow this lesson, and use locations well, even if they are not always aware of what they have got. I still find it very funny how there was a shot in Rogue One that was used early on in the hype cycle - featuring sinister stormtroopers wading through the water of a tropical paradise - and the weird disappointment when there wasn't so many shots like that in the finished film, because the filmmakers just didn't think to get more, and were apparently more focused on the weird and dull business with a space claw machine sequence instead.

The prequels got some grief for the overuse of greenscreen silliness, but still made use of some fine locations for the palaces of Naboo, and back on those endless sands of Tatooine. But in recent years it's been all about the Volume, the VFX technology that provides magnificent backdrops for all the space adventuring.

And it's such a huge effort for something that is not needed, because that first great lesson of film-making from Star Wars that often gets ignored is that you use what you've got in the wild, and make it otherworldly by slapping a power convertor onto a tree trunk or something, or have some strange creature's skeleton blowing in the sand. The shamefully lost art of matte work literally painted over the seams, and that was all that was needed.

There's just a lot of suspension of disbelief in watching Star Wars - being able to hear explosions in the vacuum of space is just the start of it - but it's a lot easier to take Boba Fett seriously when he is in an actual physical space.

For someone who does truly enjoy a lot of Star Wars movies, I spend a lot of time complaining bout them, but I assure it, it's only because I cafe. I can usually find the good parts in any of the movies

(the TV shows are a different story, and the animation stuff has always felt completely dispensable to me,) and sometimes all it takes is a glimpse of the real world being shot up with lasers to keep me happy.