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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?"
...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?
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.
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.
No, lots of people want bullshit and nude scenes. It's always been thus. The arthouse and high cinema crowd is but one potential audience. For every Citizen Kane there have been 50 Shirley Temples.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The Godfather and the LOTR series are excluded because they are originally written works
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?
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
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?
or what those names mean for global gross...
That's kinda what I think. It's like Superman. I actually had that conversation a few times with different people. Why is there no really good way to make a guy look like he's flying? The better the special effects get, the bigger a problem this is. If you just go with a cartoon or a bluescreen, you can get away with the fist out in front and the sad little cape-flap, but when you have top-of-the-line CGI, it's way to easy to get bothered by the whole thing subconsiously. The more detail with aerodynamics and G-forces you get right, the weirder the whole "hey! he's flying!" thing gets.
Matrix had that problem. If you think about it, there wasn't really anything wrong with the way they made Neo fly, his coat flaps fine, he has that crazy wake thing going on, but he was flying and dragging cars along in his wake. Whether or not that would really happen if you flew a guy through a city at 90 billion MPH, it looks wrong.
That's what I like about this cubist guy. Maybe not cubism specifically, but we need people thinking about non-realistic ways to shoot things. We need somebody to play around and find out what trips off your subliminal wrong-o-meter and maybe make a Superman animation that isn't completely mathematically correct, but looks way better than one that is.