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Cubism For CG And Movies
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?"
You can read the original PDF paper here
--Tim
...to virtual cinema???
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.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
It is looking a little slow already. So in case it goes down, here is a link to the google cache.
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
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.
Hate me!
Reminds me of Panquake
http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/panquake/
Cubism?
"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" was cubesville, daddio!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I vote now to construct a counsel of Holy and/or Wise Men who can seal this technology away to prevent Quentin Tarantino from abusing it.
We could then possibly, umm, have Quentin Tarantino sealed away as well...
/* * pope1 */
Video games have used camera morphing and strange distortions for a long time. The Matrix was the first move I can think of that used those techniques successfully. They look cool and were good for a few movies. But taking them to the extreme is always going to feel like a Matrix/Video Game rip-off. Instead of making a movie that uses every excuse for a new morph, how about using traditional cinematography for 99% of the film and using one or two really cool and appropriate morphing effects.
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.
Filmmakers have been using split screen or worse (4 screen, in the case of timecode) to show multiple simultaneous perspectives.
P.S. Life would be so much nicer without ceaseless references to The Matrix.
...less Alyson Hannigan nude scenes? Bite your tongue!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
From these "modified" CG applications, how far are we from completely CGI movies that are indestinguishable from real life?
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
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
It's not there yet. Either the technology or the animators themselves. I hate to beat a dead horse, but the article already brought it up, matrix reloaded felt a lot more like the spirits within than the origonal matrix.
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.
As I think was said above, once this technology gets popular it is going to be abused. There are going to "trippy" movies where every scene has twisted backgrounds or characters and it's going to be so much "art." It's just like when someone gets Photoshop for the first time...every single image they produce comes layered with filters. Ever had a friend who was a guitarist and hung around with him when he got a new Wah pedal? Same thing...constant wah effect. It's pretty much human nature to beat new, innovative things to death. The challenge is finding the newest stuff to beat. I guess this is it.
Does your favorite actresses' boobs look a little large in that magazine or tv advert? Her waist a little thinner? It is already a mainstream business practice to make products and people more appealing to audiences. I've even heard they did it in the Charlie's Angel's movie to make Drew Barrymore look thinner.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I've got a convex mirror and a fish-eye lens. Anyone want to fund my startup special effects company?
-- Posting with Karma to burn.
How long until we see a movie done like this?
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.
Real simple.
The future of cinema 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.
Bowie J. Poag
Take a look at Neo in "Reloaded" when he is doing the kung-fu-rotary-ass-kicking-anti-smith-move on the sign post. It doesn't look like Neo.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I've been amazed at how much information we have learned to take in at once thanks to TV and computers. Commercials have become very good at hitting us with images that please us and make us identify with a product in a million ways in 30 seconds. Look at the coors light commercials from the "twins" campaign seen so much during football games last year. Amazing.
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.
crappy plot. Movies today are better suited for my cat than for me. Better sound effects, lots of lights and wierd looking stuff, but where the hell is a good story? Is the average person who goes to watch a movie so stupid they don't notice that the movie has no plot? Are the "stars" today so popular they can just show up and turn out a blockbuster?
I'll not be going to another major movie until I read reviews of one that actually has a plot, I don't care how cool the effects are, they need to morph in a fucking plot.
Another item I wanted to bring up was Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life. 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).
I'm going to take this opportunity to pimp Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 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.
Having looked at the distortion of the stills on the website, I wonder what the effect of a movie would be on the audience? Frankly, I think there is a good chance of mass motion sickness.
- Warriors of Zu Mountain
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*Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Andrew Glassner *had* a cool page on virtual cinema. Then it was slashdotted.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
My chin hit the floor, but only because it was a 200MB download.
Current Karma Status: Roadkill
For those of us that took history, we know that a very dominant and well-respected branch of painting before photography was naturalism. Both in landscape, of persons, and otherwise they strived to create perfect copies of what they saw, to "capture" nature in a picture.
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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
could CG characters eventually be cheaper than "real" actors?
Should CG take off, voice actors will demand pay raises.
Will I retire or break 10K?
1) Take a simple technology like QuicktimeVR or the like
2) Instead of viewing it as a QTVR, display it all at once like a regular image
3) Instead of shooting a single image like the above, shoot it at 24fps.
4) Now move the POV within the same frame during the shot.
MSPDFs notwithstanding, this tech existed in the mid-90s. And before bullet time, there was multiple 16mm film camera work in a music video I saw back in 97, that I will need to put up or shut up at some point I'm sure.
When you stitch scenes together to make a seamless image, you are really creating a custom lens more than a camera, IMHO.
kulakovich
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 SIGGRAPH presentation, which, incidentally, had side-by-side comparisons of the real and virtual actors shot under controlled lighting conditions, there's basically one thing that gives the digital doubles away--somehow, I doubt people were checking the shape of the back of Agent Smith's head during the Burly Brawl.
I guess now I chalk a lot of this up to inability to completely suspend belief when I'm watching scenes that I know are physically impossible to shoot.
Also, some of those Burly Brawl shots are just head replacements, so look for those Agent Smiths that don't quite have the right face and then come back and tell me that all those CG bodies look fake.
There has been work like this over the past ten years at least. If you find a copy of the video "Beyond the Mind's Eye", there is some very nifty stuff (visually anyway) inside.
:)
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).
The images on the site remind me a lot of Escher's work more than anything else.
And worth every fucking byte.
Bowie J. Poag
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 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 is a list of some films using Surrealism in some form to render their visions of reality
Roger Corman talks about Surrealism in his films
Here is a good list of surrealism in films
As for the LexisNexis searches that cost is probably easy to calculate because they charge for use of the service and he probably used $300,000 worth of the service without paying for it.
And I'd guess that you think the RIAA's figure of $150,000 per song is reasonable as well. Would "We overprice our service, and we expect your honor to do the same" stand up in court?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Damn Microsoft!!! This article is just more evidence that Redmond's Most Evil Corporation continues to research ways of distorting the truth!!! Give me non-distorting aspherical lenses or give me death!!!! Linux Rules!!!! Yaaarrrrgghhh!!!!!!
direction, acting or cinematography aren't the key creative process in filmmaking... editing is (and because of the editing techniques he pioneered, D.W. Griffith can be said to be the father of modern cinema). Of course this all depends on if you ascribe to the auteur theory...
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.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Split screen, a precursor to this was done in many films of the '70's. Thank god they stopped doing this. Mike Figgis tried again in 2000 with Timecode. http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0220100/ Why would you want to do this? Its just harder on the old eyes to comprehend what you are watching. A good director can line up a shot to show all the things (the author) is trying to represent without spending a lot of money for some fancy "money shot". Some similar shooting was done with rules of attraction http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0292644/ and look what a dud that was. A good director can make a good movie on a shoestring budget. The last thing bloated hollywood needs is another money sink.... -kraemer
you don't need no fancIE looking glass to see which way the wind is bullowing the bullshipper's scams.
.billyonerror stock markup felons/member of the walking dead contingent.
.asp on that. when the lights come up, there'll be no going back, & no where to hide.
that's right, it's LIEk the bullined leading the clueless. you'd be better off reading a book about the lack of integrity involved in being won of those phonIE
no matter, as the lights continue to come up, their whoreabull greed/fear/deception based behaviours, will continue to dissolve into coolapps.
that's right. you/we cannot afford the badtoll that lies ahead, should the greed/fear based georgewellian fuddite execrable fail to be neutralize itself, with yOUR help.
it's also notable that J. Public et AL has yet to become involved in open/honest 'net communications/commerce in a meaningful way. that's mostly due to the MiSinformation suppLIEd buy phonIE ?pr? ?firm?/stock markup FraUD execrable, etc...
truth is, there's no better/more affordable/effective way that we know of, for J. to reach other J.'s &/or their respective markets.
the recipe is:
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. vote with yOUR wallet. more breathing. seek others of non-agressive intentions/behaviours. that's the spirit.
use key words/indexing to identify yourself/your products.
the overbullowned greed/fear based phonIE marketeers are self eliminating by their owned greed/fear/ego based evile MiSintentions. they must deny the existence of the power that is dissolving their ability to continue their self-centered evile behaviours.
as the lights continue to come up, you'll see what we mean. meanwhile, there are plenty of challenges, not the least of which is the planet/population rescue (from the corepirate nazi/walking dead contingent) initiative.
EVERYTHING is going to change, despite the lameNT of the evile wons. you can bet your
we weren't planted here to facilitate/perpetuate the excesses of a handful of Godless felons. you already know that? yOUR ONLY purpose here is to help one another. any other pretense is totally false.
pay attention (to yOUR environment, for example). that's quite affordable, & leads to insights on preserving life as it should/could/will be again. everything's ALL about yOUR motives.
take care, we're here for you.
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?
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 window?
Or how about when a signer for the deaf is added in a little oval window on the bottom corner of the screen?
How about the instructional guitar videos, where there are three shots - one so you can see the fingering of the chord, the picking pattern, and an arial shot? Plus, there may be music notation composited in as well.
Nothing especially new here, especially since it's filching from cubists. No one even paints in that style anymore - why emulate it on film?
Remember when video could first stagger frames in the futurist style (sort of like mouse trails - think Nude Descending a Staircase). That was overdone to death, and fortunately we never see that effect except on bad sci-fi reruns.
Special effects are best when you don't notice them, and let the story stay in the forefront.
Remember animated gifs? I remember seeng one for the first time and thinking, cool. Then everybody had one, and they went from uncool, to annoying, to laughable.
I wonder if animated gifs will make a comeback in twenty years, giving "retro" web pages that 1997 look.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
MR was enough for projectile vomiting.
After being '/.ed' I think it will be quite a long time til' we see a movie done like this.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
My chin hit the floor, but only because it was a 200MB download.
Bah...
~: wget http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/xanadu14.mpg
6% 12,622,192 294.62K/s ETA 10:37
(Had to delete the progress bar to make the lame Lameness filter happy). Precisely why I love to ssh into my home system. Will be ready and
waiting for me when I get there.
Unless you're on dial up, in which case I apoligize...
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.
You were supposed to be in Hollywood, making sure they didn't screw up my favorite movie.
Not posting the good plot ideas on slashdot 12 months too late.
Nice going bill, you dropped the ball on this one.
For more than 20 years people talked about "Interactive TV". Interactive TV did not take off at all.
What really became the way to go is The Internet.
I feel that "virtual cinema" is going to repeat "Interactive TV".
Cartoonland has been doing unusual prospectives since the 1930s. One highlight is the Beatles yellow submarine trip through fantsyland. Another highlight is Linkletters's recent "waking Life" animation/film hybrid. The film part is that most of the animation is traced from film (rotscoping). However there some interesting distortionsof physical reality, perhaps having to do with the films theme.
You may remember some of Glassner's excellent books on computer graphics here and here.
I sat at a table at the computer graphics conference Siggraph 2003 while Andy caught up with some of his friends (cough, not me, cough).
So I was interested to hear what graphics oriented tasks he had been doing.
He talked about writing a script for a short for, oh - about a year. And then talked about the challenges of making short films (not feature-length) on a working-class-salary-sized budget. He considered it a sabbatical.
No progress in writing new CG books <<sigh>>, but interesting to see what he's been up to.
I really liked the artistic effects in Waking Life. While it might be considered a cartoon, it isn't. I believe that the way it looks is a movement of its own.
Testify, Brother!!
The music never dies
Brought to you by the word "transclusion" and the letter "X"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
http://www.glasswings.com/
I can't stand all these stupid effects.
What purpose does it serve to show something in an impossible format?
That freeze and rotate crap is very, very old already.
And showing something blow up 8 times from 8 different angles. When was the last time you saw something like that? Or showing a bullet in slow motion as someone ducks it?
Once again, I beat the dead horse and state that special effects are mind opiates for the shallow minded general public. And the other purpose they serve is to distract from the fact that;
1. The plot either sucks or is non-existent.
2. The "actors" or "actresses" suck. They can't act. (Neo comes to mind)
They overload the senses with bullshit so you don't notice that the movie is total crap..
That's a fact....
I'm not going to say this is *not* the future of cinema, because anything is possible, but their has to be a compelling reason to use such trippy viewpoints.
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 explain it, well, do I need to say that this isn't going to work in a mainstream film?
What were you expecting?
Some of the ideas in the article remind me of the Hulk. Yeah, tons of people didn't like this movie, but I liked the risks Ang Lee took in trying to convey a comic book feel by using multiple panels, split-screens, etc. Sometimes Lee's compositions were distracting or redundnant, but at moments they gave a multi-character perspective that worked quite nicely. Like when you simultaneously see Banner watching Betty watching the experiment. (Cross pollination between comics and film is a fun geek topic, e.g., the Watchmen, Matrix, Ghost World, etc.)
You betcha, I love it so much I downloaded it twice!
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
http://www.glasswings.com/
Thats one way to slow the /. effect... 403 the entire server... *sigh*
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
To be honest, I think this technique is too complex for moving picture. In moderation I can see where it can be useful and where the effect would be enhanced by movement. One of the pictures indicate where the techniques goes waaaay overboard! This in a movie would confuse the hell outta the majority of people!
I guess, everything in moderation eh?
Matrix Reloaded bashed, and Xanadu praised all in the same /. thread... This must be where the Earth opens up beneath me and swallows me whole...
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 that scene made more sense as something Neo would have done.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Would a completely CG movie be economical?
;p
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.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I don't know about this streching one scene as it is 3 or 4 scenes, rather one scens from different angles, and blending it all together. From what I can gather, the purpose of this is to show the same thing from various angles.
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 a lot of overlapping areas where you can see one character (or more) in 2+ cameras.
I don't see how it is very much different than that, except that one streched out scene would be a pain to try to follow....
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
I .. uhhh .. wow. That defies description. Sorry. I can't stop watching it.
Wow, looks like they're finally able to do digitally what they did in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1919. But what they are NOT able these days, so it seems, to do is create a compelling STORY LINE.
Human perception is 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 on the moon and on Mars. Maybe we start by filling in the details and then get more sophisticated (or lazy) and expect the technology to do more of the work.
On the other hand, realism is more than just "making it look real". You could argue, for example, that The Simpsons is more "real" than Leave it to Beaver. It certainly is a more accurate portrayal of modern attitudes.
I know your post is talking specifically of kind of a "Turing Test" for CG: can you tell which portions are CG and which were not. I am just continually fascinated by the way humans work.
As a humorous aside, it is ironic that we continue to raise our standards for CG in movies while our expectations for human actors seem to be in serious decline
Could someone please explain what it is I'm watching? I don't get it. Is this just a clip from the movie?
Oh no, it's true! The future of cinema is going to look exactly like the past.
why don't we go to the motherlode of great SF and Fantasy novels that have never been turned into film
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 of a good old story.
The Matrix Reloaded introduced us to virtual cinema
So virtual cinema means shoddy writing, uneven pacing, and lousy acting?
Apology accepted. However, my impending connection to broadband is so close I can smell it, so I might have it downloaded by Christmas either way.
Current Karma Status: Roadkill
When I saw the filename, I feared it would be exactly what it is.
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.
jesus christ, that's a 200 MB MPEG!
Text here and images here.
Wow.
The interesting thing is that it looks like Britney Spears and Michael Jackson are the ones implementing this sort of multi-hominid-synchronized-movement system. Maybe there is some sort of connection?
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
I'm so glad that download stalled 1/4 of the way through.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I downloaded that!
I think I hate you.
Shouldn't Aidtopia write instead, "Computer Graphics pioneer Andrew Glassner HAD a cool page on virtual cinema."
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
There's 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back!
I know what your doing, thats a Sciencetologist(sp?) recruitment video!
You can't fool me!
"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."
:-)
Actually, that's not the case. There are scores of individuals out there, usually with forms of autism, with perfect sight but neurology that can't grasp things in three-dimensional space well at all. They can't pour liquid into glasses accurately, often walk into solid objects or walls, can barely guess the relative size/volume of objects, and generally struggle with *any* task related to distance, size, or depth perception. It's a real PITA, believe me. I can detect screen refresh rates up to 120Hz, and anything below 100Hz hurts my eyes, yet *everything* I do that is motion-related has to be conscious, as I can't tell where the hell things are.
To people like me, the world looks no more three-dimensional than a photograph does to you. I don't know what the term is for this specific neuro-visual problem, but I know it is related to autism, scotopic sensitivity syndrome, and synaesthesia. All things to look up for a very interesting look into how some others perceive the world.
I didn't know there were any Alyson Hannigan nude scenes! Gimme gimme!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Goddamn it, Alan Moore must have seen what Hollywood did to his work last time (with LXG). Maybe he'll retain creative control and keep it from sucking. Or maybe it'll chow ass like the last one.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Perhaps it doesn't look real because a thousand copies of the same guy battling a helicopter-spinning guy in a trenchcoat doesn't look very real to start with.
Nothing is really supposed to look all that real in the Matrix.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Amusingly enough, Keanu Reeves gave up millions of his salary to the special effects team on the Matrix sequels when the studio was concerned that ticket sales wouldn't cover the cost.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Offtopic, but when else can you bring this up?
An example of the epic feel of the third movie, of which the sequel was merely a "pop action" setup for according to Joel Silver:
http://dondavis.filmmusic.com/audio.html
It's called Neodammerung, which means, you guessed it, "New Dawn." Very creepy. It's like you can hear the series winding down to conclusion.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Why are geeks so self-congratulatory about the slashdot effect which takes even less consciousness than a mute flash mob...?
Hear hear. I hope that, lost in the noise of "it sucked" comments, there are more people who rightfully respond with, "no, you just didn't get it."
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.
It's obvious. Every person i've shown this to has had their chin hit the floor.
Oh god my eyes!!!! the burning! Make it Stop!!!
How dare you trick me into downloading and watching that horrid piece of the 80's..
Now I have to go back into therepy because of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh my God, my eyes!
MY EYES!
Make the BURNING Stop please!
Swallows your what?!?
Yeah, I did that on purpose, for grins. Really. :-)
Actually, most of the original Matrix movie was stolen from a book called The Wonderland Gambit, Book One: The Cybernetic Walrus written by Jack L Chalker (more famous for his Well of Souls series). The first twenty minutes or so was essentially identical to the first two chapters of his book. This was so much true that I looked for his name in the credits the first time I watched the movie. He also wrote a book entitled The Identity Matrix, which was a bit of a different concept, so apparently the authors of the Matrix mixed and matched from Chalker's ideas.
Last I heard, Chalker was planning on suing the writers for theft of his ideas, but I have no idea where that went.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Never fear. If Hollywood's not your bag, there's a world of hope out there.
I can't wait.
There was a great example of this on the Beeb show "Coupling". In one scene, the main character stumbles home, drunk, and the scene splits and starts runnning clocks at the bottom of the screen an hour apart. His girlfriend enters the same scene an hour later in the adjacent frame.
She notices things out of place (but are in place in his time frame), and picks them up. One by one, he stumbles about, knocks over a vase, etc., creating the scene in the adjacent frame. At last, he calls his own answering machine on a mobile and leaves a message, which she listens to simultaneously. Very cool stuff.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
First of all, "The Rules of Attraction" was hardly a dud. While it may not have made a hundred million at the box office, like "Matrix: Reloaded", it also didn't cost a hundred million to make. In fact, "The Rules of Attraction" turned a very tidy profit for all those involved, particularly in Europe, where sensibilites toward cinema are slightly more advanced than in the United States. The split screen shot you mention was highly lauded by Cahiers du Cinema as a unique addition to cinematic grammar, which is really what this discussion is all about.
You ask why people would want to employ this technique, and it is certainly not because they want to do a "fancy money shot". The source material written by Bret Easton Ellis was non-linear by nature, and the literary devices he used required the invention of compatible cinematic devices. But because film is linear by nature, a grammar had to be employed that would compliment his original intentions.
Split screen allows you to show spacio-temporal moments simultanously. I chose to merge the split screen as a way to reinforce a connective moment between characters. Cinema's a language, and like language it's always evolving.
Roger Avary
Now this may be merely corrolary to the discussion, but there are less advanced techniques for viewing something from multiple angles in cinema. For example, in XXX (stop groaning I didnt say it was an example of fine cinema, bear with me) the scene where he uses an old barn as an impromptu ramp for his newly aquirred dirt bike, while in the air, with the explosions all around, the bike and rider were simultaneously filmed from several (not sure how many) cameras from different heights, positions etc. When seen in the movie this stunt begins fluidly with one camera tracking but then one perspective of the jump is shown, then going back in time a bit, if not all the way, a good bit, to give you another perspective and is repeated a few times. It's all very quick because Cohen didnt want to do the stunt in slow mo to grab attention, so it's all filmed at regular speed. So in the movie the "ramp scene" takes considerably longer than the actual jump, but you're given considerably more information while seeing it in real time. FYI, this can all be gleaned from listening to the making of featurrette on the dvd. In point of fact, he actually refers to it as a cubist style of filming. Be it presumptuous or not, it is interesting to my mind at least
Si hoc legere scis nimum eruditionis habes sed iliud latine dici non potest.
Revolutions - that says it all, doesn't it - wheels spinning (revolving) within wheels.
Maybe that's the point of the title?
For some links related to Andrew Glassner's topic, see this section on Non-traditional perspective (for viewing and modeling) in "Stylized Depiction: Non-Photorealistic, Painterly and 'Toon Rendering"
Straying a bit from these ideas of putty-cameras and five things at once,
We're coming to a place in computer graphics where we can film anyone and put them anywhere with anything doing anything we want. It's up to our imaginations. And so, like so many have implied, it's the way, not the means, where creativity and entertainment potential is held. So where is the story coming from? I don't know what format will be popular in twenty years, if it will continue to be the two-hour epic, or if everyone will be reduced to a 5-second attention-span limit, with some kind of internet playlist with all the latest daily clips, each worth a laugh and five seconds of your time. What I do know, is people will still be producing these things.
I've been noticing more and more improv-based sketch comedy shows, and I really love those, being an improvisor myself. Improvisation takes writing out of the picture, and gives each actor the role of "writer" for the character they're depicting. It's a great way to keep everyone consistent with their character goals, etc. But the problem with improvisation, is unless your scene is themed (like the new Comedy Central show Reno 911) costumes or props are left entirely to the imagination, like the case in many live improvisational acts like ComedySportz, where all props and environments are suggested and mimed.
With technology capable of digitizing people and putting them anywhere doing anything, having a strong team of improvisors acting out an epic on the spot becomes more than a performance for one night- When captured into a reverse-rendering computer like used in the MR, you could give any improvised story all of the scenery, props, locations, even character appearances and final editing that would be neccessary to turn a real-time brainstorming session into a major motion picture.
If this became commonplace and expected ability from an actor/writer/story-former, movies would be filmable real-time, and the post-production team would fill in all of the specific camera shots, costumes, aesthetics, and whatnot, movies could be made in less time than ever!
When this kind of software becomes commonplace, no longer will the big movie be in the hands of big industry- with anyone able to make anything, the popular Idea will be the only element powerful enough to actually sell a movie.
I want one now.
It's MUCH more interesting if you play it on "fast forward" with a side benefit of being less time consuming.
And to think I waited a 1/2 hour for that...
Needle Nardle Noo
Glassner's site www.glassner.com is back up again.
But I worked most of that out.
The problem was that I didn't really give a flying rats ass about anything in the movie.
And none of what you said was "the plot". It might have been the "moral" or the "meaning", but it wasn't "the plot".
Didn't I used to do this playing Quake 1 by setting the view angle to 360 degrees?
I was confusing at first, but then no one could seek up on me.
Blade, Wes Craven's Vampires, Dracula 2000, Blade 2, Wes Craven's Vampires: Los Muertos?
Um... yeah... I'm gonna just back away real slow now... what? oh, that stake... um, just a little safety measure...
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!
The guy's still saying the effects looked like ass, which they did. If the effect sucks, the effect sucks. It doesn't matter that it sucked less than we should expect it to.
You don't realize it, and forgive the flame, but you just revealed yourself as a complete horse's ass.
We'll probably see this in music videos any day now. Especially from bands that look boring.
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.
Remember how Agent Smith said that when Neo "merged" with him some of his code got mixed up or exchanged and that's how Smith is able to do some of the things he does? I'm pretty sure Neo's brain got mixed up a little too and got some of Smith's "code" in his brain. Parts that let him control machines, that is. So I'm pretty confident Neo will realize this in Revolutions and use his newfound powers to save the day. Wahoo.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Would a completely CG movie be economical?
Hello... Pixar's been making $$$ with completely CG movies...
On the other hand, CG that imitates "real life"...
The major flaw of Final Fantasy the movie was that it was money and technology wasted on crap story and bad directing. (Another reason why the people there look strangely robotic is that you had these Caucasian CG models acting and speaking with Japanese mannerisms, thus making the scenes utterly surreal and "wrong")
Although Pixar doesn't aim to look "like the real world", You'll notice that the Pixar movies are well-written (and a lot of the humor is aimed at thinking adults). I think it's the big difference.
FF: the Spirits Within's crappy writing and direction put a stigma to the entire CG movement and set the genre (completely-CG "realistic" movies) back bigtime in terms of studio backing.
That gets my vote as most distopian vision for the future EVER! Clockwork orange, 1984, Brave New World all paint a happy vision of what tomorrow may hold when compared with that truly horrifying 10 min. sequence
This is just split-screen with some headache-causing morph between the different camera angles instead of a black border. That's revolutionary how? Split-screen is hard enough for most audiences to follow (it can be done well, but almost always isn't), why introduce a squashed-up picture into the equation?
Unimpressive.
You realise that it is a sure sign of nerd-dom if you catch onto something being nerdy just as it becomes trendy once again.
M.C. Escher played a lot with distortions and multiple perspectives. I remember one ultra-cool graphic, where you look simultanously at a couple of houses from the bottom and from a position above.
What is the ceiling of one the houses from one perspective is the floor of the same house from the other. This made me crazy everytime, I looked at it.
Does anyone have a link for this?
Just another factoid to help bolster your reality within a reality concept: Remember when "the Architect" says that Zion has been destroyed 6 previous times, and that they (meaning the programs) are getting good at it? Of course the "real" world is not real. But then again, to God, or as The Wachowski's would have you believe Neo to be: Buddha, how real is real, where do you draw the line... As Morpheus so succinctly put it... What is reality, a series of electrical impulses translated by your brain. Things that make you go hmmmm
If you can't baffle 'em with brilliance, befuddle 'em with bullsheize
There is one major limitation with improvision. You will see it if you think of the cases where improvs are used and are common...doesn't it seem like improv is mainly used in comedies? Why?
Well, the problem with improv is that it doesn't really work well for many things other than comedies or something like that. Dramas with a lot of emotion (crying, anger, etc) are hard to improvise. The actors and everyone else basically have to be in a particular mindset. Comedies, in contrast, simply require that the content be funny. I think this is why you see a lot of improv comedy and very few (if any) improv dramas. This doesn't mean that it won't work but just that it isn't very effective...
As far as movies not being in the hands of large corporations... well, my theory is that capitalism with its false God, the free market, will always result in oligopolies and monopolies. Regardless of what happens, large corporations will dominate a particular industry. It is in the interest of a company to monopolize an industry. This is what happens in the real world and this is what business schools teach you: steal market share, lock out competition, erect barriers to entry, etc. If you were running a movie company, you would try to create a monopoly too. If you succeed, you will end up with a monopoly (or at least an oligopoly); if you fail, someone else will end up with monopoly (or oligopoly)...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Its all about determinism: Newton, Laplace, etc.
A few possible outcomes:
1. After lots of exposition and some introspection Neo resets the Matrix for the 7th time for the good of humanity. The movie ends by showing the scene from the first movie of Neo the 7th waking up in front of his PC.
2. After lots of program infighting (I love how this movie is more or less Tron) Neo defeats something/someone (with the help of persephone) and the machines and humans have a stalemate/symbiosis that gives the humans more autonomy.
3. Neo wins by defeating the programs or getting the humans off-planet - say Mars and they live in their little VR world while protected from the elements.
4. Mindfuck: the matrix is nothing like we've been shown or its a box in a box within a box type of thing thus the ideas of escape, liberty, etc are non-applicable and the movie ends with a long winded explanation - this time from Persephone and her speech and the architect's speech put together makes a sort of free will/dualism statement that may end in either of the above scenarios.