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Visual Effects Oscar Shortlist
nurble writes "The short list of films being considered for a best visual effects Oscar was released today. The biggest news is that the final two installments of the Matrix trilogy were snubbed in favor of Universal Studios' "The Hulk," New Line Cinema's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," 20th Century Fox's "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," Universal's "Peter Pan," Buena Vista Pictures' "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," Warner Bros. Pictures' "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" and Fox's "X2". Finalists will be announced following the effects "bake-off" on January 21st."
Anyways, I think it's cool they nominated a movie whose visual effects were subtle but convincing.
MATRIX REJECTED This is bad - Matrix 2 (Reloaded) had plenty of hi-tech CGI and good visuals also Matrix 3 was not bad... PLENTY OF MONEY WAS PUMPED AND A LOT OF SCENES WERE WORTH A AWARD (No Doubts) But Lord of the Rings 2 http://lotr.com/us/ must be good I have seent he 1st one it was cisual treat no doubts
19th century New York was recreated on the lot of Cinecitta studios in Rome. When George Lucas visited the massive set, he reportedly turned to Scorsese and said that sets like that can be done with computers now.
When I saw TPM and AOTC, I thought the effects were really cool and impressive, but not 'realistic.' They looked too perfect. I think if Scorsese had seen ROTK in 2002, he might have decided to use computers for the sets. Peter Jackson has definitely raised the bar.
Hows that it is an amazing mistake - Its the best foilm inanimation this season ! LOTR is cool but...
I was in geek heaven during the whole movie. I saw things in Return of the King I have never seen in a movie before. The rich story blends perfectly with the FX to make them almost real. Even with all the bloopers, it's believable (I didn't notice them). I don't think that anyone will come close to the quality that is Return of the King for ten years. They might get better tech running the show, but nothing like the sheer wonder between the cast, story, crew and director in RotK.
Don't forget Titanic :P
And yeah, I think Matrix 2 or 3 deserved a nomination. I mean, what on Earth is Pirates of the Caribbean doing in that list? The CGI skeletons were just grotesquely bad. The highway fight in Matrix: Reloaded, on the other hand, was one of the coolest things ever. Sure, the movie was dull, but that's not what the visual effects category is concerned with.
I just watched "Reloaded" on DVD and was appalled by how obvious the CGI was in the big "army of Smith" fight scene. From all the cool "bullet time" photography and Hong Kong wire action we shifted to Street Fighter 6. It was a great looking video game, but it was still painfully obvious when they switched over. It's one thing for distant battle scene but when you are "close" enough to see facial expression, or lack thereof, it's just not cutting it. The faces were smoothed over and static.
Morpheus addressing Zion early on didn't convince either. It looked washed out and projected.
It probably didn't help that I just saw ROTK a few days ago on the big screen. I'm still amazed at how well that was done. There was barely a single moment of being distracted by obvious CGI even though it was far more ambitious than Reloaded. My suggestion, stay away from close-ups of human faces in CGI action sequences.
Even speech is still very tough. The only moments of CGI weakness in Gollum, who was staggeringly well done, were speaking close-ups, not action. So many muscles go into saying the letter "M" and it's a familiar look to every human (unlike leaping around on a mountain ledge).
Except, of course, the scenes in question had the camera at ground level or even slightly below (those pits made that possible).
The problem with models is that the material that you make things out at full scale have different properties than what you use to make the model out of. And this gives them away very easily.
For structures, it's the apparent weight of things seems oddly off. This is especially evident when things are collapsing as in Isengard. Also the way in which things respond to stress and break apart (or don't). There are parts where wooden structures are being washed away where they have that distinctive "I'm just a model bade out of balsawood" type look to them.
There are also focus issues which belay the intended distances involved.
All of these things give the effect an distinctly less than authentic look at times.
Other scenes the models are amazing, like the staircase in Moria.
David Whatley
They didn't only use Pixar's renderer, and here is a dark tale of what Pixar did to another small startup Exluna
Notice how that link goes to Nvidia? There's a reason why. Quite a few years ago, a rather genius programmer left Pixar and started up his own company to write a competing renderer called Entropy. Pixar's renderer, while very fast and the basis for many effects and animation piplines throughout the industry, was getting a bit long in the tooth. It didn't have any raytracing abilities (outside of some clever hacks), and completely lacked the global illumination abilities that were neccassary for some believable lighting models.
Why do I bring this up? Because Gollum was almost exclusively rendered on this renderer. Pixar's Renderman was not capable of doing some of the stuff they needed for that beautiful skin shader at the time they developed Gollum.
Pixar didn't take lightly to this. They launched a lawsuit against Exluna saying they were violating certain patents they held regarding some antialiasing algorithms. Never mind that the renderer was far more advanced and was a complete drop in replacement for Pixar's competing product. This was a straight up ploy to get rid of the competition.
To this day, the Exluna developers still say they did not violate those patents and that they would have won in court. However, winning in court would have destroyed the company. Instead, they sold the company to Nvidia, where they are working on some even more advanced stuff, but under the protection of a larger and well financed (and lawyer'd) company.
There are may other Renderman based renderers out there, all of varying capabilities. Pixie, while technically advanced and written by a brilliant graduate student at berkely, has a few rough edges and is missing some important features. Aqusis is progressing nicely, but doesn't have many features that I rely on. Mental Ray, while not renderman compatable, has all the features and more, but you pay for it in speed. Right now, I'm using Pixie for my tests. It's free for me, but I wouldn't trust it in production just yet. For production I would still choose Pixar's Renderman, which has since incorporated much of the lighting features available in other renderers (somewhat pushed by the demands of their clients, but mostly because they used a lot of those special lighting tools in Finding Nemo).
For more information on all available Renderman capable renderers and how to use them, I suggest visiting the Renderman Repository
Alright, back to work for me. I'm supposed to present this skin shader after new years.
Rich
but the couple ROTK scenes that involve the dead army contain almost everthing in Pirates.
while I liked Pirates, nothing about the effects really wowed me.
in ROTK, there are many great effects scenes, and the two where the Rohan rode into the orcs, and the dead army galloping across the sea into battle were amazing.
What the hell, Ive got karma to burn.
I actually liked the Hulk. I actually thought it was a very entertaining movie. I liked the way they transformed the comic book to the screen, I liked the transitions and most of all I liked the over-the top special effects. No they did not look realistic. No, they were not rendered on a l33t WETA beowulf cluster. But they were fitting to the theme and supported the story (which was thin, but what the heck, its a fricking comic).
Of course, Return of the King should win. But I really think the Hulk deserves a nomination.
And Pirates of the Carribean. I mean come on, sure it was a good movie but the effects were lame... the skeletons looked like marrionette puppets half the time.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie and am a long-time Tolkien fan.
But, the effects in "Master and Commander" were far more polished, integrated, and all-in-all believable than most of the effects in ROTK.
Maybe I watch movies with too keen an eye, but there are at least a dozen instances in ROTK where the effects mesh so poorly with the surrounding terrain, or characters, that it knocks out my suspension of disbelief. There are no such moments in "Master and Commander".
Gollum is great but is a far cry from perfect. Much like with "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", his character works well enough with the story that the obvious falsity doesn't really matter... but that doesn't mean we've entered the virtual actor era. Gollum is a spiffy cartoon, but still a cartoon.
I understand that sentimentalism will make ROTK the overwhelming geek favorite for every category it's nominated for, but in this case I don't think it's deserving.
Best Supporting Actor, Best Adaptation, though, I'm all for ROTK. Though it doesn't really matter... the Oscars are usually meaningless except to bolster DVD sales or the careers of those who receive them. But in LOTR's case they are especially meaningless as LOTR does not need its DVD sales bolstered and the movies have made so much money that the careers of all involved are secure, Oscar or not.
I hadn't seen any other movies on the list but the matrix sequels, so I donno how the special effects were in the other movies.
forget the final award but not even a nomination for Revolutions?!?! Whoah
To my knowledge the wachowskis had to send only Revolutions for the Oscar nominations ( Yohooo the Academy has some rules/guidelines too )
May be the ppl who decide the nominations had thought that there aren't visual effects other than the super brawl at the ending.
For their benefit i'll try to list down a few
i) The opening sequence
ii) The hovercrafts and all the places they move along ( mostly tunnels )
iii) Smiths, smiths and more smiths with the oracle, seraph and sati
iv) The Dock with the APUs and whatever other structures
v) The fight with the swarms of sentinels and the diggers
vi) The surface with the earth with those huge guarding machines churning out the squiddy bombs (sry this fool doesn't know what they're called), the sentinels again, the breeding fields, neo's orange vision and the machine city
vii) the super brawl
( Note : The next poster can do all these things on his pc with maya or 3dsmax )
Flame me but I guess all these as a whole deserve atleast a nomination.
But who "really" cares for an oscar??
which finally brings us to the question that drives us
what is reality??
But isn't the special effects award for special effects, not plot?
I agree that Jurassic Park had a kind of stupid plot, but I felt that my money was well spent for the effects alone. I mean, the Mona Lisa doesn't have much of a plot, but apparently people still like to look at it.
CGI is just expensive eye-candy that does little more than add up the cost of film and drive the theatre admission prices sky-high.
Even if one film has great CGI and is a bit hit, it does little more than cause a rash of high budget copy-cats that are never as good and serve to re-enforce the already too-high admission prices.
I would rather have twenty well-written well-acted non-CGI films costing $5 million each (and costing $3 - $5 each for admission) than one bloated $100 million CGI comic-book turkey.
Do the math, Hollwood, you would be getting twenty admissions at $3 instead of one admission for $10. Plus there would be more work available for the technicians and set designers that you 'claim' to care about in those idiotic commercials that we have to watch before movies.
Hollywood is at the same point that the dot-com industry was in 1998: obsessed with own image of self-importance and convinced that it can do no wrong. Or, rather, Hollywood is the US car industry in the 1970's before the Japanese wiped them out with better, cheaper, and more reliable products.
Will Hollywood go crying to the feds for a big bailout like Chrysler when a New Wave of beautiful exciting foreign films wipes out their slate of $150 million comic-book turkeys in the coming years? (like in the early 1960's when the French New Wave films wiped the floor with gas-bags like 'Cleopatra'?)
Besides, the best source material for CGI never gets filmed. None of Harry Turtledove's alterative history novels have ever been optioned.
Nor have any of the best books by Whitley Strieber, like "Lilith's Dream" or "Nature's End".
I noticed a visual improvement in Gollum, and I've sinced learned that they tweaked his skin and joints since the last movie. For instance, when he wakes up, you can see his lips sticking together when he opens them, like real lips would. His facial animation is also much more realistic and natural. My favorite shot is when he and the two hobbits are hiding and peering over at Minas Morgul.
Also, I noticed a shot of a Warg that looked much, much better than those of The Two Towers (even in the audio commentary, Peter Jackson points out that they don't sit well in the shot, because they were rushed CG at the last moment...seems a lot of vital CG was rushed in that movie).
I know most people despise special releases of movies as per Lucas, but in this case, I really am hoping for a special box set release in maybe 2005 (or perhaps when The Hobbit gets made into film), so that Peter Jackson has the opportunity to go back and perfect all the old effects shots that don't quite work. As cool as the Ent battle was, it looks a little off. Also, a few shots of Gollum come to mind (like his closeup during Sam's speech in Osgiliath...he looks horrible...and over all, he could use a little more mass and weight, a little too bouncy). And he has mentioned in the past that he'd like to go back and put the final rendition of Gollum into Fellowship of the Ring.
Imagine if all the old effects shots were re-rendered using the latest technology, so that Gollum, Ents, Wargs, and even Balrogs looked even more realistic than they already did. Particularly the Ents, which I thought could have been more "treeish." They seemed just a little too plastic. Some cleanup could be done on the water effects and the destruction of Isengard. And maybe Galadriel's transformation in the first film could be redone into something better (mostly so that you can hear what the hell she's saying and understand what is going on...the over-the-top vocal effect drowns it all out).
So, I really do hope for a "Super Special Extended Edition" for these movies someday, maybe even in super-high-resolution format like the recent T2 DVD offers. I'd gladly shell out.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Back in the mid-90s, a guy named Larry Gritz wrote a RenderMan-compliant renderer called BMRT (Blue Moon Render Tools) that could do raytracing and global illumination. BMRT was made freely available (though closed source) over the internet. He was eventually hired by Pixar to work on their own RenderMan implementation called PhotoRealistic RenderMan (PRman for short). This, if memory serves, was around the the same time that Pixar was working on A Bug's Life.
Eventually, Larry Gritz left Pixar, and he and a few other people started Exluna. You see, Larry had managed to keep the copyright to BMRT while he worked at Pixar, and he intended to use BMRT (which, while producing film-quality images, was very slow and buggy) as the basis for a new, production-quality Renderman renderer called Entropy.
When it came out, Entropy got a lot of attention from VFX people. Not only did it cost less that PRman (something like $5000 per CPU for PRman vs $1700 per CPU for Entropy), it could do more. You could turn off Entropy's raytracing and global illumination if they were too slow for your liking or if you didn't need them, but the fact that they were available if you wanted/needed them (and you didn't have to do any ugly hacks to enable them) made a lot of people take a long, hard look at Entropy. Since Entropy was RenderMan-compliant, it was basically a drop-in replacement for PRman (as others have mentioned).
Throw into the mix the fact that Pixar was no longer the only major contender in the computer animated feature business. DreamWorks had done two successful computer animated features (although they used Pixar's PRman to do the rendering). BlueSky Studios was doing a computer animated feature called Ice Age, had their own proprietary renderer (CGI Studio), and unlike Pixar's PRman, it could also do raytracing and global illumination (it isn't RenderMan compliant from what I've heard, though, but that doesn't matter since CGI Studio isn't commercially available). BlueSky's renderer was also production-proven, having been used on various BlueSky projects since somewhere around 1996 (BlueSky used it to do the CG aliens in Alien: Resurrection in 1997, for example).
Facing serious competition in both the computer animated feature business and in the renderer licensing business for the first time, Pixar was probably getting nervous. So, they did the natural thing: bring out the lawyers. Since Exluna's founders were ex-Pixar employees, that gave Pixar everything they needed to file a lawsuit (albeit a shaky one) against Exluna.
The dispute, according to Pixar, was over trade secrets and a (bogus) software patent issue. I don't remember the exact details, but it was over some Pixar-held patent for a technology that Entropy didn't even use. The official response from Exluna, as posted on their website during the lawsuit, follows: