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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?"
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!
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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 $130M one could do better, but one has to want to in the first place.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> I don't see where the submitter gets off claiming that
> 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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
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 telling Morpheus "I hate this place."
Almost immediately in the second film it is explained that when Neo entered Smith to defeat him, Smith was set free. He is no longer an agent of the Matrix, but is a rogue AI that is capable of breaking the rules in some interesting ways. He no longer has any authority or even any contact with the powers that control the Matrix.
There is no "real" Agent Smith that Neo can kill to defeat him. Every copy is Smith is identical and independent. They are all the real slim shady.
The reason the "burly brawl" went on for so long, even though Neo or Smith(s) could have escaped at any time, is because they were sizing each other up. They both might have been hoping for a decisive win when the fight started, but once they really got going, it became fairly obvious that neither was going to win. Neo could keep outfighting Smith, and Smith could keep coming with more of himself. Therefore, once Neo decided he had enough, he chose to withdraw.
Fighting to a draw is a classic shop-worn convention of Kung Fu and samurai movies. It simultaneously establishes the greatness of the hero and the challenge that he faces.
Besides, it was one of the best scenes in the movie. If I were hired to edit the film, and asked to cut it down for time, I would have kept every last second of the Burly Brawl and the highway chase, and dropped the entire cave-dancing scene. They thought it would be clever to juxtapose tribal dancing with a sex scene, but it didn't quite work, and it's not like nobody's ever noticed the sexuality of dance before.
I find it endlessly amusing that people who found the ham-fisted "explanations" behind the first movie completely missed the clever and subtle nuances of the second one. Look, kid. Reloaded and Revolutions are the movies that the W brothers always wanted to make. The only reason for the first one is that you can't do a superhero serial without an origin story. The first movie established the visual style and feel of the series, but most of what you thought the story was about was simply misdirection. Get over it.
When I saw the first movie, the biggest problem I had with it was that if the machines really did have total control over the Matrix, they should have been able to simply kill -9 Neo, or delete the air around him, or the city block he's running through. Why try to smash in Trinity with a truck when you can simply make the phone booth she ran into not be there anymore? The second movie went a long way to explaining what initially appeared to be flaws in the first one. Specifically, the goal of those running the Matrix was never to kill Neo or Trinity
I'm not Buddhist myself, but I've recently been paging through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." One of the central themes of the book is about how everything, including technology is all part of the Buddha. If you watch Reloaded with that in mind, certain elements of the film tend to make a lot more sense.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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
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 before he could use his powers. In the second movie, I think he has just realised that reality is no more than a collection of electrons, and that the same rules apply inside the Matrix as out, not because outside the Matrix is a simulation, but because all of reality is able to be manipluated, as long as you recognise its true nature.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face