Cubism For CG And Movies 362
Aidtopia writes "Computer Graphics pioneer Andrew Glassner has a cool page on virtual cinema. The Matrix Reloaded introduced us to virtual cinema--re-rendering live action to show it in a way that would be difficult or impossible in real life. Glassner takes this much further by using unusual (and physically impossible) camera distortions, morphing multiple points of view simultaneously in single continuous image. Could this be the next big revolution in film? How long until we see a movie done like this?"
Original research paper (Score:5, Informative)
The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, is that why it sucked?
(just kidding, it sucked for entirely different reasons)
I don't see where the submitter gets off claiming that MR introduced us to *any* new cinematic technique, except perhaps for the fight scene with 200 Agent Smiths and not only was that done poorly but the whole thing could have been avoided if only Neo had done another one of his Superman jumps. In other words, it was gratuitous.
Yeah, I'm sure we'll see cubism in movies. It's another knob the show business kids can turn that will make their latest turd appear "original" and "daring", but I bet we won't see intelligent use of it for several years or more, not until a director actually has need for the effect as part of the narrative. Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might have benefited, for instance.
BTW, that's one of the things that made the original Matrix so unique... it's use of bullet-time was one of the very rare example of a new special effect that is put to intelligent use right off the bat. What a great movie.
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree entirely. MR just took the same effects from the firtr movie and made them bigger. In most cases, like with the Agent Smiths fight, they also made it worse. The effects worked so well in the first movie partly because they were often new to the audience, but because while many impossible things were happening they at least looked natural. The second movie lost this - they seem to have spent a lot of time making the effects "big", but they seem to have spent very little time making sure the effects looked natural. It seems strange to say it, but the movie might have been a little more fun to watch if the special effects had been better - on par with the original, maybe (of course, it would have helped even more to have had a decent story rather than a load of pseudo-philosophical crap strung together by fight scenes).
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Insightful)
The story was there, they just didn't give you time to digest it. The pseudo-philosophical crap WASN'T strung out, that is what made the movie seem like just a bunch of action sequences. They crammed all the story into one small portion of the movie (the Architect). During the first movie, you got parts of the story as you went along. Where they screwed up with the second was not developing the plot throughout the movie. There was no suspense. But I have faith that the third one will round the trilogy out nicely, and when watched all together, they will fit. At least I hope that will happen.
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:3, Insightful)
Special effects, in order to have the most effect and impact need to be invisible.
less=more most of the "unreal" effects could have been done better Ala the first matrix movie.
but remember that hollywood is not interested in good anymore...
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the effects in the second movie were totally different.
Here's the process that you go through for the first:
Take n still cameras (usually 20-100) and line them up in a way that represents the "path" of the camera. Set up montion cameras at any points along that path (usually always the first and last positions along the path at a minimum).
That technique buys you an "impossible" tracking/slow-motion shot (things like the bullet effects are just standard CGI-additions later on, but because you have your well-defined camera track and timing track you can produce these in seemless perspective throughout the shot). You do this in a studio with a green-screen and then you map in a computer-controled background shot made at a different time, but along the same path.
Now, switch to Matrix Reloaded. You now have a totally different technique where something can happen that simply doesn't map to the real world at all. You go through the first part of the first movie's "bullet-time" process, filming real-world elements as required, and establishing your camera and timing tracks. Then you switch to 100% CG, for elements (e.g. Neo swooping in to pick up Morpheus and the Keymaker) that could never be fillmed, even against a green-screen with wires. The CG is based on the footage that you have, and uses textures, 3D-location information and other details that you have extracted, but ultimately it's the CG equivalent of rotoscoping.
they seem to have spent a lot of time making the effects "big", but they seem to have spent very little time making sure the effects looked natural
You don't realize it, but you just issued one of the largest compliments possible for this movie. You're comparing real-world composites to computer generated images and saying that they didn't look as natural, without actually realizing that you're looking at nothing more than a drawing! That's perhaps one of the most important benchmarks in modern computer graphics that I can imagine!
Now, I will say that your reaction was very common, and I think the W bros. made a mistake here. They *should* have come up with a framing technique that brought us a little further out of reality so that the virtual shots were clearly NOT supposed to blend in with the physical camera shots. Something like a color-shift or going to black+white or some sort of "Neo-cam" would have made it clear that we were no longer seeing the movie through our own eyes, but through the heightened perceptions of Neo's "one" powers.
it would have helped even more to have had a decent story rather than a load of pseudo-philosophical crap strung together by fight scenes
I suggest you re-examine the path you're being lead down. You begin to understand The Matrix movies a bit more when you divest yourself of the illusion that there's anything supernatural going on and when you further accept that all of the philosphy in these movies is in one of two categories: the stories that various parties tell eachother in order to maintain control or the struggle between humans and machines.
If you look at any scene in that movie with those ideas as your lens, it starts to make a lot more sense, and you start to see just how devious the third movie can get....
The fighting is exactly the same. Did you just look at the Seraph vs Neo fight and say "lame fight, no reason for it" or did you ask, "hey wait a minute: there's no reason for them to fight... what's REALLY going on here?" I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, but I'm pretty sure that we're going to find out that that fight was a distraction technique intended to get Neo to think in terms of "attacking" problems rather than "solving" them. Certainly when he then meets with the Oracle, he only approaches it in terms of conflict, and that is important because the council leader (who is almost certainly the previous "One") had given Neo the first part of the puz
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I saw the first film, with the whole "the Matrix is a lie so machines can use us as batteries" story that Morpheus told, I found myself saying, "what a shitty explanation! You could drive trucks through the holes in that story!" From that point on, I chose to simply enjoy The Matrix for the wire-fu superhero fun-fest that it was, and shrugged of the story as typical B-Movie sci-fi dressed up in half-understood Buddhist claptrap.
The story for the second movie, while mostly obfuscated by action sequences that misdirected rather than explained, was much better. Not only better sci-fi, but better Zen allegory as well.
The final scene, in which Neo shuts his eyes and stops the robots with his mind, then passes out, opens a lot of interesting possibilities. It hammered home the point that "Zion", rather than being a wasteland city in the real world, is really just a bit-bucket for storing the minds of those who reject The Matrix. All those people are still plugged in, including Neo. As we exited the movie, a friend of mine suggested that the reason why Neo seemed to pass out was because when he stopped the robots, it was because his mind reached a state of enlightenment which saw through this second layer of illusion, and he woke up, finally exiting the Matrix.
My wild-assed guess: In the third movie, Neo will actually end up protecting The Matrix. It will turn out that the machines are actually benevolent, with the exception of the fallen angel known as Agent Smith, who will threaten to take down the Matrix and all of humanity with it.
By the way, if you have not rented "The Animatrix" yet, I recommend it. About half of the short anime features are really good, and the rest are not too bad to sit through. My favorite is probably the one made by Watanabe (director of Cowboy Bebop) which features a private eye who is hired to track down Trinity.
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:3, Informative)
What drove me crazy was the dialogue. The Neo and Morpheus characters continually made the philosophical discussion sound like it was being carried out by a bunch of drunken fr
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:3, Interesting)
How does it do that? I still don't buy that Zion is another construction. I think that Neo's use of his power outside the Matrix involved the same sort of awakening of awareness as did his use of his powers in the first movie.
In the first movie, he had to truly accept that the Matrix was an artificial construct of bits and bytes be
Re:The Matrix Reloaded -- SPOILERS (Score:4, Interesting)
Were some of the scenes over-long? Yes, the Smith scene and the dancing could have been cut in half. However, it's very disappointing that people focus on these problems and conclude that the movie was a waste of time.
I don't believe critics who say there was no plot development are thinking through the issues presented in Reloaded. Think of it as a blurry picture that comes more into focus: while the subjects haven't moved much, the additional detail can provide much more insight into the situation -- and what might happen next.
Raising the concept of backdoors, keys, and renegade programs illuminates so much of the background, and implies so many repurcussions (some of which the parent mentions), I'm surprised more geeks didn't enjoy the movie for that concept alone.
Suddenly, there's no "one" AI that's controlling the Matrix. And, significantly, the Matrix isn't a single-function program (to keep humanity enslaved). It's more of an operating environment, in which separate AIs with their own (sometimes conflicting, often independent) desires exist. This completely changes the fundamental concept of the Matrix and, if you think about it, exposes many of the Architect's words as half-truths at best, lies at worst.
As the parent says, think in terms of control. If you were writing a program with the kind of importance and autonomy as the Matrix, would you let a "known bug" run around and possibly bring the system (and civilization) down, particularly when most of the "bug's" choices need to be made outside of your control (ie., the "real world")? I think not -- you would put your program in a carefully constructed sandbox, maybe two.
This, again, changes the fundamental assumptions we were given in movie 1. "Reality" isn't reality. It's simply another construct. If not, why would Neo have power "outside" of the matrix? Why would a Smith clone be able to control a human? (Think of the look of surprise on Smith's face when his clone gets sucked into the phone line.) Is the Council Leader the prior "One" (per parent), or a more subtle AI, working to manipulate Neo into making the correct choice? ("Correct" from the AI's perspective, anyway).
Or, think about it this way. The AI knows that certain types of brain (the conspiracy-theorist, the paranoid, the hacker) will always question the Matrix. Rather than lose these "crops", why not create an alternate Matrix, one which feeds their paranoia? By letting them think they've dropped out of the Matrix and are fighting against it, they would happily live their lives thinking they're free--while still under control.
Meanwhile, we're introduced to new allies, new villains, and a clear view that human political maneuvering continues to play a big role in daily life. Seeing Zion, with Neo being the quiet savior while Morpheus acts as the bombastic orator with the cult of personality, made even the dance scene tolerable for me. How these opposing forces work out in the next movie will be very interesting.
That film, Revolutions, is named with the typical ambiguity of the Wachkowskis. One matrix inside another...where does it end? Will there be a revolution, or only another revolution? What is the real real world like? As my friend said, if Revolutions ends and the camera zooms out to show it's all a kid playing a video game ("Now available! Play on Xbox, PS2, GC or PC!"), we're going to hunt down the brothers W and lay down some serious hurt.
No plot? Heh. Watch it again.
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:3, Funny)
I think what he was trying to say is that if it looks like a bad real-world composite, rather than a good computer generated effect, then that's a big step forwards for CG. Now, obviously reasonable people can differ as to whether it actually looked like a bad real-world composite.
As a brief aside, one thing I found most amusing about Matrix Reloaded were the battlesuits. They moved like they were done in stop motion, like the cargo lifters in A
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:3, Funny)
Did you not catch the part where he tried, several times, to fly away and kept getting dragged back down?
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Funny)
Did you not catch the part where he tried, several times, to fly away and kept getting dragged back down?
Maybe he should go on a diet, then.Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Interesting)
But they were too busy trying to top their CGI that they forgot to come up with a good plot. It wouldn't have been hard either. For instance:Right, so maybe it's a bit corney, but that's what you get for 3 minutes work. Maybe with $130M one could do better, but one has to want to in the first place.
You asshat. (Score:5, Funny)
Not posting the good plot ideas on slashdot 12 months too late.
Nice going bill, you dropped the ball on this one.
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:2)
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Insightful)
Neo is basically god in the matrix. He has nothing to fear from anything inside.
Here is Agent Smith, sans ear plug, and obviously not exploded.
neo stays to fight, precisely because he isn't losing. he's near god, and he has absolutely nothing to fear. so he fights to see just how strong Smith has become, to see what he can learn from Smith.
when he decides he's seen/learned enough, or is actually scared, he leaves.
as for not trying to blow up agent smith - well, clearly smith didn't stay blown up - and he only learned new tricks from the experience. so if i was neo, i sure as hell wouldn't run the risk of giving him another powerup.
the important thing would have been for the wachowskis to convey this better. perhaps have Neo explain to morpheus and trinity back on the nebuchadnezzar that he was starting to lose and freaked out... or that he was actually scared.
put a little tension back into the movie. also, perhaps explaining to someone that he was afraid of trying to jump inside smith again, for fear of amplifying his power yet again.
i mean, they had a brand new driver for the ship, it would have been easy to do some basic exposition. this new driver would have heard and seen how neo could destroy or defeat agents at will - he'd have asked why he ran, why he didn't blow up smith, etc.
but yeah, the wachowskis flaw was that they didn't recognize the scene was weak.
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, but Agent Smith has no control over the Matrix. No chance of putting up CGI shields or "coming prepared."
He doesn't work for the Matrix anymore anyway. His maverick attitude was hinted at in the first film when he was questioning Morpheus. He took off his earpiece (symbolically cutting off his communication link to the rest of the machines, the Matrix, his superriors, etc.) before telli
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:5, Interesting)
> MR introduced us to *any* new cinematic technique,
Then you didn't really look into it much, did you? The Matrix was one of the first practical uses of a reverse rendering technique.
In normal 3D graphics a scene is constructed out of triangles and textures are created to map onto those triangles. Once the scene is complete a virtual camera can be moved through it with ease.
MR took the opposite approach. They used stereoscopic cameras to generate a 3D model of the world out of photographs of it. They then used the photograph as the texture for this world. Now, you clearly noticed that the Neo and the Agent Smith's were fake in the Burly Brawl. Did you also notice that the buildings, the sky, the ground, the lamp post and every other part of the scene were fake?
They invented and used new rendering and modeling techniques as they went. They invented a suite of software tools to make such things much easier for future projects.
> except perhaps for the fight scene with 200 Agent Smiths
> and not only was that done poorly but the whole thing
> could have been avoided if only Neo had done another
> one of his Superman jumps. In other words, it was
> gratuitous.
I'm sorry, but have you ever seen an action movie before? They aren't very good when the protagonist avoids all conflict...
Justin Dubs
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:2, Informative)
fight scenes (Score:2)
First, I'll disclose that I'm not a matrix freak. That said, I really agree with the notion that pointless, prolonged fight scenes really kill a movie. That's not to say fight scenes aren't cool - but when they don't make sense they detract from the plot.
I'm not saying Agent Smith and Neo should have sat and talked about their feelings. The script just should have been better so t
Re:Perhaps (Score:3, Insightful)
Has it become cool to bash MR's effects? (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, though, it's like everyone's doing it.
Anyone who listened to George Borshukov's talk about virtual cinematography and the Matrix Reloaded at SIGGRAPH 2003 knows how much work went into modeling the characters for all the virtual cinematography scenes. Referring to the first Matrix's bullet time techniques as being "the same" as what's going on here makes no sense, since they're two totally different means of achieving that type of camera style.
Given the stills that were shown during that SIGGRA
Re:Has it become cool to bash MR's effects? (Score:2)
Ok, well here's the deal. They looked like crap. Just go download the Quicktime trailer of Matrix Reloaded, and pause it on the scene where the Agent jumps on the front of the car (A Dodge Intrepid, I think?) -- he looks like he's gumby wearing a suit. Shrek was more realistic and had more dept
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:2)
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:2)
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:2)
Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us... (Score:2)
google cache (Score:5, Informative)
Re:google cache (Score:2, Informative)
To hell with special effects. (Score:5, Interesting)
When do we get to see a good movie with a good STORYLINE again? The Godfather and the LOTR series are excluded because they are originally written works. I mean, Matrix 2 looked cool yet it was still boring as hell. I don't need to have a degree in temporal mechanics to undersstand it, I need some serious acid instead! People want more story, less bullshit and Alyson Hannigan nude scenes.
Did you just say... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Did you just say... (Score:2)
My apologies for the ambiguity. There is a serious shortage of Alyson Hannigan nude scenes and I meant to imply that the world would be a better place if Alyson would enlighten us all by revealing all of her beauty. *swoon*
Re: Did you just say... (Score:3, Funny)
It should be 'fewer Alyson Hannigan nude scenes'!
Or not...
Re:To hell with special effects. (Score:2)
When you get over your elitism and are willing to enjoy movies that aren't overencumbered with special effects and celebrity actors and actresses.
Re:To hell with special effects. (Score:5, Insightful)
So it was, so it shall be.
Sometimes I dont want to follow a plot, and rather just relax and watch shit blow up.
Last weekend, par example, Godzilla was on one channel, Out of Africa was on another. I watched Godzilla. It was even one of the later really stupid ones, with Godzooky and all the monsters living on monster island together.
The Hollywood remake of Godzilla was crap, know why? They tried to saddle my nuclear dinosaur friend with the energy beam breath with a plot.
Bah. Plot shmot, Godzilla just shows up and smashes Tokyo or battles monsters until he gets bored. There's your friggin plot, Hemingway.
Same with video games. Sometimes I dont want to play a super intricate RPG, sometimes I just want to blow stuff up or beat the crap out of zombies.
So just relax. Some movies go for the arthouse set, some just for pure entertainment.
Re:To hell with special effects. (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that's WHY THEY HAVE GOOD STORIES. Most good movies are adaptations of novels (e.g. "The English Patient"), or of several books on the same subject (e.g. "Lawrence of Arabia"). Instead of either (a) writing half-assed scripts or (b) taking a Philip K. Dick short story and converting it into a vehicle for the future governer of California why don't we go to the motherlode of great SF and Fantasy novels that have never been turned into film:
1) "Forever War", by Joe Haldeman, has been optioned pretty much continuously since it was published, but never gotten a green light.
2) Where's "Neuromancer" -- the book from which everything in the Matrix (including its name) that didn't come from Kung Fu movies was stolen? Again it's been optioned continuously but never green-lighted.
There's a boatload of great novels (and comics -- how about making "Watchmen" instead of "LXO" or "The Dark Knight Returns" instead of "Batman") waiting to be made into films. Why are we making $100,000,000 films of atrocious scripts?
Re:To hell with special effects. (Score:3, Informative)
William Gibson's script for Neuromancer is out there and IMHO... well, let's just say that it isn't much better than the one he had for Johnny Mneumonic.
Actually much of the non-HK stuff wasn't from Neuromancer but the Grant Morrison comic book series The Invisibles (an astounding piece of work. It sta
Not a Heinlein fan, are you? (Score:2)
Because you can't turn a 400 page novel into a movie without major changes which Hollywood will probably screw up, and because "The Puppet Masters" and "Starship Troopers" proved that even easily filmable stories lose a lot in the wrong hands. A good book is not a guarantee of a good script or a good movie, and I'd rather watch a bad movie with a new story than a bad movie that might infect my memories o
Re:To hell with special effects. (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, Watchmen is being made into a movie already. See?
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2003- 07/16/11.00.film
enjoy! I am looking forward to it. I thought this info had already reached the /. crowd.
Re:To hell with special effects. (Score:2)
Look at that list later, after the third movie, and I think you'll be surprised. One element that you point out is already clearly crucial, but you're so programmed to expect it to be gratuitous that you're blind to some very obvious hints you're being given.
Question: Do you believe that Neo saw the future, or was he shown what someone wanted him to see in order to manipulate him. If the former, t
Re:To hell with special effects. (Score:2)
Oohhh, weird (Score:5, Informative)
http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/panquake/
The Coming Terror (Score:5, Funny)
We could then possibly, umm, have Quentin Tarantino sealed away as well...
Wearing it out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get my wrong, I love the effects. They look great. But c'mon, when someone has a good idea you don't beat it to death. You subtly modify and expand on it to create something unique and equally pleasing. The movie industry seems to lack creativity lately.
Re:Wearing it out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lately? The movie industry has always been the same. For every piece of "great cinema" there have been 1000 goofy mass-appeal movies.
I'm tired of folks with selective memories pining for the olden days.
In the sixties we had great movies like the Elvis series, or Frankie and Annette or Santa Clause vs the Martians! Gack. Or, worse, the sappy melodrama and atrocious acting of the 40s and 50s.
Re:Wearing it out? (Score:2)
And in the seventies we had incredible flicks like the Star Wars Christmas Special [slashdot.org]. Ah, the great ones live on forever.
Re:Wearing it out? (Score:2)
Re:Wearing it out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where the heck have you been? What about Spiderman/X-Men/Daredevil/LXG/The Hulk/Whatever?
Blade, Wes Craven's Vampires, Dracula 2000, Blade 2, Wes Craven's Vampires: Los Muertos?
That's recent. It's been going on since cinema started, and perfected by television. Bleed it until it's dry, then bleed it some more!
Re:Wearing it out? (Score:2)
You're thinking of JOHN CARPENTER's Vampires, right?
Re:Wearing it out? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what I liked about "Titanic". (About all I liked, but watching is part of being a good boyfriend). You didn't notice the effects much. They used them to get impossible camera shots, to imaprt the sense of size without blowing $$$ on huge sets.
Something to notice in the future is how much of movies are
Completely CG movies (Score:4, Interesting)
Final Fantasy is the closest we've come, but it was still clearly CG. If you try to, there are a few brief seconds where you can suspend the belief that it's CG and it actually looks real. Maybe in the future it won't take effort... but instead will take effort to see that it is CG instead of live-action.
Would a completely CG movie be economical? Beyond just the "geek appeal" of a pure CG movie, I mean... In mainstream movie making, could CG characters eventually be cheaper than "real" actors? Somehow I doubt it.
Stewey
Re:Completely CG movies (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Completely CG movies (Score:3, Interesting)
We're getting closer. I'm a pretty regular video game player, but I was at a party were a GameCube was playing one of the new football games. The game was put down (but not paused) on some penalty announcement, and it took me at least 10 minutes and 4 or 5 glances before I realized it wasn't a real game.
Sort of the same way chatbots can already pass a weak variant of the Turing test
Re:Completely CG movies (Score:2)
A big part of that is how well these games mimic the camera angles used in television broadcasts. That part was done fairly well at least as early as Virtua Racing (the arcade edition with the separate s
Re:Completely CG movies (Score:2)
Of course, what I wonder is how long before some sporting event (my bet is Golf) is quietly produced fully in CGI and broadcast with nobody, who wasn't physically on that course on the day in question, the wiser...
As to cheaper... take a look at the salary of a given actor in a big h
Toy Story... (Score:2)
There was this little movie a couple of years ago... Toy Story I think it was called... don't know how it did...
Yeah, this doesn't answer your true question... is it economical for an "adult" movie. Of course this just plays back into the Western cinema idea that animation is just for kids.
Re:Completely CG movies (Score:2)
Final Fantasy looked like CG because it was supposed to. I recall reading an interview a few years ago from someone at Square who said the initial renders looked TOO realistic, and was against the "spirit" (pardon the pun) of the movie.
They want back and made them look more CGIish.
CG, reality, and perception (Score:3, Interesting)
There are reports that the first people who heard a phonograph thought there was an actual orchestra. They found the effect *real* enough, even though it would sound scratchy, fuzzy, and fake to us today. As we become more familiar with a technology, our expectations go up. It is possible to spend $10,000 or more on a stereo system and still complain that it just isn't the same as live music.
We tend to project and fill in the details: finding shapes in clouds, seeing a face
Re:Voice actors (Score:2)
Note to self: Develop advanced voice-synthesis technology before Holywood does.
Ho Hum (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, MR was ruined by crappy CG. They should have done all the same stuff using bullet time instead and it would have come out a lot better.
I'm not anxious to see the next disappointing CG movie.
Re:Ho Hum (Score:2)
Abusing It (Score:4, Insightful)
I second the motion (Score:2)
I wonder if animated gifs will make a comeback in twenty years, giving "retro" web pages that 1997 look.
Done In Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy to do (Score:4, Funny)
-- Posting with Karma to burn.
Oh no (Score:2)
And, as in the case of The Matrix, how long until we see 20 movies done like this. How long until it becomes so cliche that you want to projectile vomit all over the screen just so that no one will be subjected to it anymore?
Of course, it was cool the first time.
Too late! (Score:2)
MR was enough for projectile vomiting.
The future of cinema is right here (follow link) (Score:5, Funny)
The future of cinema [ibiblio.org] isn't gonna look anything like what this article talks about. It's obvious. Every person i've shown this to has had their chin hit the floor.
SWEET JESUS (Score:2)
Re:The future of cinema is right here (follow link (Score:3, Funny)
MY EYES!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Oh man, it's like I'm 6 years old again, and forced to hear all my mothers favorite music. No wonder I'm a synthpop geek now.
Re:The future of cinema is right here (follow link (Score:2)
Information perception (Score:4, Interesting)
This technique takes it to a whole new level by throwing so many points of view at us at once. At the moment, we pretty much get information (and an emotional response) on one person or or thing at a time. This is going to let us take multiple people into account all at once. At first, we (as a movie watching culture) will be slightly confused by the images, and the cuts could not be as rapid as in the matrix. But, once we get used to it, we can combine quick moving images with distorted perspective to make people get LOTS of information at once.
Personally, I think it's going to drive us nuts, literally. It would take a lot of work on your brains part to take in all of this information at once. Trying to reconcile what two people are feeling at the same time (imagine the two people's emotions are at odds!) and come up with an appropriate emotional response. I think after a few years of this, a new disorder will pop up that will make ADD look like normal in comparison.
Re:Information perception (Score:2)
It seems like a lot of what he is talking about (Score:3, Interesting)
Another item I wanted to bring up was Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life [wakinglifemovie.com]. Aside from being one of my favorite flicks of all time, the film cast aside a traditional narrative structure along with using some really interesting visual techniques to emphasize the experiences of the characters. I'm not knowledgeable enough to accurately describe these techniques, but they involved to a large extent moving perspectives around, showing characters faces and bodies distort themselves depending on what they were feeling or saying, or having objects appear out of nowhere to provide a sort of running commentary on the current scene. I believe the majority of the film was filmed digital and then overlayed with animation 'effects,' for the lack of a more superlative word...effects doesn't approach what this movie is. Check it out if you haven't seen it (and if you like rambling philosophical non-linear films with a lot of visual beauty).
Re:It seems like a lot of what he is talking about (Score:2)
Applying Escheresque distortions to POV (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going to take this opportunity to pimp Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [overstock.com], as it discusses how images of distorted and recursive perspective like this reflect the nature of our consciousness and perception of our environment, among many other related topics.
New techniques? (Score:2, Informative)
would be a good example. Once people get over the newness of all these special effects from Asian film makers, maybe we can go back to go back to action scenes where people actually do THEIR own stunts unassisted. THen we'll never have to see Jackie Chan on wires again. *sigh*
correction (Score:5, Funny)
Natural development... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then along came photography, which although the pictures were poor at first they took much of the glory out of it. A simple machine was doing what artists of traditional art schools had had a "monopoly" on for centuries. So, art took lots of new ways and became more of an art of expression, not representations of reality (though there were of course many such artists before that time, too).
The same with CG. Now we strive to reproduce reality, like in Final Fantasy and similar (at least the people, I won't speak for the spirits). But once that is done reasonably well, I have no doubt we'll see movies taking the power of CG turning it to other expressions of art - I hardly think reproducing the actors like a photography does is the pinnalce of CG evolution.
Kjella
work in progress (Score:2)
My personal favorite is the flyaround of a Mac IIfx motherboard done by Apple Computer, but that's just me.
No, there is no plot; it's basically a long-form music video for Jan Hammer (or Thomas Dolby or Kerry Livgren in the other members of the series).
Cubism vs. Surrealism in Films (Score:3, Informative)
Cubism, being a movement in painting that attempted to depict a more complete illustration of the painted subject by showing it from a number of different perspectives, was influential in forming the visual depiction of many directors/photographers. Here [ruspoli.com] is an analysis of Truffaut and Eisenstein making the same argument
Surrealism extended cubism into the fantastic world of dreams and provided a fresh perspective that allowed the auteur to look at what did not exist before, recreating reality, as it were.
Surrealism is not new - check out Salvador Dali's own rendition of the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound in 1045.Here [moviem.co.uk] is a list of some films using Surrealism in some form to render their visions of reality
Roger Corman talks [othercinema.com] about Surrealism in his films
Here [insomnium.co.uk] is a good list of surrealism in films
Re:Cubism vs. Surrealism in Films (Score:2)
The time travel scene in Star Trek IV (yes, the one with the whales)
The "Matriculated" section of The Animatrix
I can't think of any others offhand that I thought were effective, but I have a lousy memory when it comes to movies.
According to Stanley Kubrick... (Score:5, Insightful)
An implicit question of the last, oh, 28 years in movies (using Jaws as the start... maybe 2001?) is if big special effects are an editing process (and, thus, creative) or just the next step in set design? Bullet-time and wire-fu may be neat tricks, but do they add anything to what the story is saying (heck, it's quite possible that movie A can use both to say something while movie B can just use them as garnish)? But even The Matrix's big selling point isn't the action (or what differentiates it from say Ballistic: Ecks versus Sever). If it was limited to non-CGI techniques from 30 years ago, would the movie suffered anything more than "realism"?
So this article has this neat cubism thing. Another tool in the workbench. But film isn't painting. Visuals are a means not an end. Maybe someone will come along and blow us away. But Memento and Irreversible work by using a cut and paste method developed a century ago, not an advance in digital postproduction.
Can WE Handle It? (Score:3, Interesting)
This pretty interesting and his example drawings did look like they offered a fascinating view. My only question is if we people could handle it.
Take Fox's "24" for example. I don't know if they were the first, but I saw it there first so please excuse me if credit seems to be going to them.
Every so often, they'll show several frames of different perspectives at once - but each in its own box/frame (like a pictures frame). On occasion, especially when not too much is happening, it's not hard to watch them all. When something really starts happening, they focus on that particular frame and continue. If they were to do that through the whole show, I would think it would be too much to take in and you would miss things.
Now add this cubism approach. The frames are no longer isolated but morphed together. Looking at a single pictures like on his site still takes a little time to determine what exactly you're looking at. Adding motion would most likely complicate that. If that were done through the whole movie, I would think you would most definitely miss things...and would probably need a large bottle of asperin afterward.
Even take peripheral vision. Unless someone is purposefully trying not to look at something off in the "corner of their eye", the observant person will notice something in their peripheral vision and turn to it. This may not be the best example of how people like to focus on things, but it does add to the question...
That question being, like my subjects asks, can we people handle such imagery? What does the /. community think?
Re:Can WE Handle It? (Score:2)
It would definitely take some getting used to. Despite the fact that I'm part of the MTV generation, I can't keep up with the editing in the action scenes of many movies today. The cuts are just too quick for my old brain. Perhaps we'll have to learn how to watch these new films, or only the younger generation will develop an appreciation for these kinds of distortions.
What pulled me into the article was the second image with the boy and girl waiting on opposite sides of the street. The convinced me t
Should WE Handle It? (Score:2)
It's not a question of whether we can, but rather whether we should.
What is gained by employing these effects? What is the cost (not $$, but in number of audience members who lose the thread, the distraction, loss of suspension of disbelief).
And finally, and virtual camera setup that is complicated enough to need to show the viewer a diagram to expla
Re:Can WE Handle It? (Score:2)
Re:Can WE Handle It? (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you seen Timecode [imdb.com]? Directed by Michael Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) and starring Salma Hayek and Holly Hunter, Timecode was done using multiple cameras and a single shot. Yeah, it could be better, but technically it's impressive. Figgis intelligently has the other subshots go s
Re:Can WE Handle It? (Score:3, Funny)
AFAIK Timecode was also shot entirely in ONE TAKE. Impressive, kinda like the Honda commercial [honda-eu.com] of lore...
Picture in Picture (Score:2, Interesting)
How about the "split screen" shots in commercials where one housewife is scrubbing mountains of dirty dishes, while in an identical household the other is leaving a sparkling room because she's used Sudzy brand soap?
Or, more usefully, the picture-in-picture golf sports shots where you see a widescreen of the golf course, and a closeup of the putt in another wind
this ignores fundamental neurological effects (Score:3, Interesting)
But it all ignores a fundamental neurological truth: the part of your brain that says "that's a cool idea" (or anything else) is a nice one, but it's not the one in charge of figuring out what's going on in a scene. Anyone who has had sight from birth is pretty well hardwired to spatially understand things from a three-dimensional model consistent with our ordinary experience.
As a result, while techniques like this one can be intellectually satisfying, they really don't serve the purpose of narrative -- sure, you're presenting the information in a more efficient (and intriguing) way, but we can't process it nearly as quickly. The film becomes something that has to be mulled over, rewatched and considered to be fully appreciated -- and the gimmicky nature of the technique can only distract from any real emotional resonance that the underlying work has. Such a film is only really going to succeed on an intellectual level, and consequently it's automatically going to be shoved into the "art film" ghetto -- where these techniques have been all along.
This is cool and all, but it's really just a digital polishing of ideas that have been around a long time. I don't think this guy is going to find his voicemailbox full of frantic messages from Jerry Bruckheimer.
Yellow Submarine (Score:2)
Waking Life (Score:2)
Time Code (Score:2)
Ever see Time Code? It's one story. The entire film is filmed in real time with 4 cameras. No cuts or breaks. So the movie is split into 4 and you see them all at the same time. The sounds fade in and out from the screens and sometimes are blended together. One story, 4 angles. And
Re:Neo on a stick (Score:2)
Re:Much better effects, and (Score:2)
well then you'll wait forever.
The blow things up, karate chop, car race , spy naked chick movies NEVER EVER had plots worth a damn. it's part of the Genre called an action flick they are supposed to be shallow (although not as shallow as Triple X... that one Sucked horribly for an action flick)
You want Plot, Great Cinematography, a story that is riveting???
Start With Schindler's List, or The Piano for older
Re:403... (Score:2)