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?"

Comments

Original research paper

[diegoq]

You can read the original PDF paper here

The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[corebreech]

...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.

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[demonbug]

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.

I agree entirely. MR just took the same effects from the firtr movie and made them bigger. In most cases, like with the Agent Smiths fight, they also made it worse. The effects worked so well in the first movie partly because they were often new to the audience, but because while many impossible things were happening they at least looked natural. The second movie lost this - they seem to have spent a lot of time making the effects "big", but they seem to have spent very little time making sure the effects looked natural. It seems strange to say it, but the movie might have been a little more fun to watch if the special effects had been better - on par with the original, maybe (of course, it would have helped even more to have had a decent story rather than a load of pseudo-philosophical crap strung together by fight scenes).

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[Thjorska]

Did you not catch the part where he tried, several times, to fly away and kept getting dragged back down?

Maybe he should go on a diet, then.

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

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:

Neo: I guess you forgot what happened last time.
[Neo reaches for Smith, with a claw-like hand. We know he's going to rip out his Matrix. His fingertips move slightly into Agent Smith's suit, when, suddenly, his hand is thrown back as Agent Smith's suit ripples. Neo is knocked back, falling on one hand. ]
Agent Smith: You continue to underestimate me, Mr. Anderson. You didn't really think that would work again, did you? I take my job very seriously, and I like to be prepared for work.
[Agent Smith multiplies, surrounding Neo]
Neo: Whoa
[Neo looks around, knows he's not prepared for this, and decides to skip the fight. He takes off in his usual SuperMan style - but - wham - he doesn't get more than 40 feet off the ground before he's knocked back down - hard. We seem the shimmer of some sort of clear bubble over the courtyard when he hits]
Agent Smith: I've arranged for us to have a bit of privacy.

[ continue with most of fight scene ]

[ Neo notices one Agent Smith isn't joining the fight - off in the corner of the courtyard. Neo throws his pole at the building above the lone Smith, causing a shower of concrete rubble to rain down. The bubble shimmers away. Neo takes off again, this time with success ]

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.

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[jtdubs]

> 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

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[gosand]

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

The story was there, they just didn't give you time to digest it. The pseudo-philosophical crap WASN'T strung out, that is what made the movie seem like just a bunch of action sequences. They crammed all the story into one small portion of the movie (the Architect). During the first movie, you got parts of the story as you went along. Where they screwed up with the second was not developing the plot throughout the movie. There was no suspense. But I have faith that the third one will round the trilogy out nicely, and when watched all together, they will fit. At least I hope that will happen.

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[ajs]

MR just took the same effects from the firtr movie and made them bigger

No, the effects in the second movie were totally different.

Here's the process that you go through for the first:

Take n still cameras (usually 20-100) and line them up in a way that represents the "path" of the camera. Set up montion cameras at any points along that path (usually always the first and last positions along the path at a minimum).

That technique buys you an "impossible" tracking/slow-motion shot (things like the bullet effects are just standard CGI-additions later on, but because you have your well-defined camera track and timing track you can produce these in seemless perspective throughout the shot). You do this in a studio with a green-screen and then you map in a computer-controled background shot made at a different time, but along the same path.

Now, switch to Matrix Reloaded. You now have a totally different technique where something can happen that simply doesn't map to the real world at all. You go through the first part of the first movie's "bullet-time" process, filming real-world elements as required, and establishing your camera and timing tracks. Then you switch to 100% CG, for elements (e.g. Neo swooping in to pick up Morpheus and the Keymaker) that could never be fillmed, even against a green-screen with wires. The CG is based on the footage that you have, and uses textures, 3D-location information and other details that you have extracted, but ultimately it's the CG equivalent of rotoscoping.

they seem to have spent a lot of time making the effects "big", but they seem to have spent very little time making sure the effects looked natural

You don't realize it, but you just issued one of the largest compliments possible for this movie. You're comparing real-world composites to computer generated images and saying that they didn't look as natural, without actually realizing that you're looking at nothing more than a drawing! That's perhaps one of the most important benchmarks in modern computer graphics that I can imagine!

Now, I will say that your reaction was very common, and I think the W bros. made a mistake here. They *should* have come up with a framing technique that brought us a little further out of reality so that the virtual shots were clearly NOT supposed to blend in with the physical camera shots. Something like a color-shift or going to black+white or some sort of "Neo-cam" would have made it clear that we were no longer seeing the movie through our own eyes, but through the heightened perceptions of Neo's "one" powers.

it would have helped even more to have had a decent story rather than a load of pseudo-philosophical crap strung together by fight scenes

I suggest you re-examine the path you're being lead down. You begin to understand The Matrix movies a bit more when you divest yourself of the illusion that there's anything supernatural going on and when you further accept that all of the philosphy in these movies is in one of two categories: the stories that various parties tell eachother in order to maintain control or the struggle between humans and machines.

If you look at any scene in that movie with those ideas as your lens, it starts to make a lot more sense, and you start to see just how devious the third movie can get....

The fighting is exactly the same. Did you just look at the Seraph vs Neo fight and say "lame fight, no reason for it" or did you ask, "hey wait a minute: there's no reason for them to fight... what's REALLY going on here?" I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, but I'm pretty sure that we're going to find out that that fight was a distraction technique intended to get Neo to think in terms of "attacking" problems rather than "solving" them. Certainly when he then meets with the Oracle, he only approaches it in terms of conflict, and that is important because the council leader (who is almost certainly the previous "One") had given Neo the first part of the puz

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[*weasel]

this scene used to bother me as well. but if you think about it a little, it almost makes sense.

Neo is basically god in the matrix. He has nothing to fear from anything inside.

Here is Agent Smith, sans ear plug, and obviously not exploded.

neo stays to fight, precisely because he isn't losing. he's near god, and he has absolutely nothing to fear. so he fights to see just how strong Smith has become, to see what he can learn from Smith.

when he decides he's seen/learned enough, or is actually scared, he leaves.

as for not trying to blow up agent smith - well, clearly smith didn't stay blown up - and he only learned new tricks from the experience. so if i was neo, i sure as hell wouldn't run the risk of giving him another powerup.

the important thing would have been for the wachowskis to convey this better. perhaps have Neo explain to morpheus and trinity back on the nebuchadnezzar that he was starting to lose and freaked out... or that he was actually scared.
put a little tension back into the movie. also, perhaps explaining to someone that he was afraid of trying to jump inside smith again, for fear of amplifying his power yet again.

i mean, they had a brand new driver for the ship, it would have been easy to do some basic exposition. this new driver would have heard and seen how neo could destroy or defeat agents at will - he'd have asked why he ran, why he didn't blow up smith, etc.

but yeah, the wachowskis flaw was that they didn't recognize the scene was weak.

Re:The Matrix Reloaded introduced us...

[Golias]

I'm with you on this one.

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.

google cache

[Wiggin]

It is looking a little slow already. So in case it goes down, here is a link to the google cache.

To hell with special effects.

[Dark Lord Seth]

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.

Re:To hell with special effects.

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:To hell with special effects.

[podperson]

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?

Oohhh, weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of Panquake

http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/panquake/

The Coming Terror

[pope1]

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...

Wearing it out?

[insecuritiez]

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.

Re:Wearing it out?

[stratjakt]

The movie industry seems to lack creativity lately.

Lately? The movie industry has always been the same. For every piece of "great cinema" there have been 1000 goofy mass-appeal movies.

I'm tired of folks with selective memories pining for the olden days.

In the sixties we had great movies like the Elvis series, or Frankie and Annette or Santa Clause vs the Martians! Gack. Or, worse, the sappy melodrama and atrocious acting of the 40s and 50s.

Did you just say...

[Atario]

...less Alyson Hannigan nude scenes? Bite your tongue!

Completely CG movies

[StewedSquirrel]

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

Ho Hum

[bahamat]

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.

Abusing It

[Ro'que]

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.

Done In Advertising

[N8F8]

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.

Easy to do

[theuglykid]

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.

The future of cinema is right here (follow link)

[Bowie J. Poag]

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.

correction

[Zardus]

Andrew Glassner *had* a cool page on virtual cinema. Then it was slashdotted.

According to Stanley Kubrick...

[sielwolf]

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.

You asshat.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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.