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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
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
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.