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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
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
Reminds me of Panquake
http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/panquake/
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 */
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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?
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.Current Karma Status: Roadkill
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.
> 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
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.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"