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Live-Action Anime: Casshern
Silverhammer writes "Apple Japan is hosting the trailer (Quicktime required, of course) for an upcoming movie called simply CASSHERN. There have been many attempts at so-called 'live-action anime', but this is possibly the most impressive attempt I've ever seen. Part 'Final Fantasy', part 'Brazil', with CG and green screen work that puts even 'LoTR' to shame. (Hat tip: Penny Arcade)."
More impressive than the original matrix?
The Wachowski brothers were very much anime-motivated in that movie...
Anyone else think slashdot should always include a BitTorrent seed when pointing to a huge file?
-Colin
The 3d textures for Gollum were nothing short of revolutionary. Then there is compositing him into the scene, having matched the lighting. The motion, and subtle clean up animation.
The mishmash of effects, especially in an age where so many people think of computers as hammers and all effects shots as nails, in and of itself was noteworthy.
Systems like Massive will help usher in a new age of epic story telling.
It's not perfect. We humans are extremely perceptive, particularly when it comes to motion. But there isn't a great deal of room left for improvement.
No, you're not a heretic, you understand. People have to realize the HUGE amount of people that work at WETA - I've heard horror stories about their sweat-shop type atmosphere (which goes for the likes of ILM as well). They have a large number of people, each working on a very small task, 99 percent of which require no creativity at all.....personally I'd rather work for Pixar or a smaller independent f/x house than ILM, WETA, etc.
;).
Of course once I graduate college we'll see who will actually want me to work for them, and I might change my tune a little bit
At any rate, CASSHERN looks awesome....definitely looks like great cinematography and use of color...what I love most about Japanese filmmaking.
I belong to the ______ generation.
i guess i could agree with you here. but to me, Gollum was pretty damn impressive and i hardly saw any faults, with few exceptions obviously. the work is definitely painstaking and i think there wasn't much room for 'creative freedom' simply because if you're going for realism, there really isn't much room for error or personal input, especially if you're working with a team of animators, coders, compositors, lighters, etc., who must all have the same output and feel. i don't know, as a striving 3d artist, i felt the work done at Weta is currently unbeatable right above ILM, in terms of realism (praise 'Hulk' here). what's great about this community is that there's always room for improvement and that's how it should always be because that's what keeps those paychecks coming in.
the creatures will always look fake for the mere fact that at some level we know the coloring's off from the real world.
If the creatures look fake, it will have nothing to do with not having some ridiculous color depth.
You were probably born after 1987.... Ever see a black-and-white TV? Not many colors there. However, even on a black and white TV, creatures like Ricky Ricardo look real and creatures like Gollum look fake. It is not the colors that does it, it is the way they move.
Do you have any fucking clue how much 2^128 really is? Even if we could resolve individual photons over the entire dynamic range of our perception we wouldnt be able to perceive differences with so much precision.
... and that aint going to happen at 128 bit per component, not even 32. More like 8-10, so by your reasoning EVERYTHING should look fake.
The dynamic range of intermediate calculations is entirely seperate from the coding bit depth. Most movies are telecined at some point for part digital processing
For the record, double precision floating point calculations are used extensively in CGI. So it aint just 32 bit.
The future of the film industry is going to be amazing as filmmakers are finally unshackled from the limitations of physics in creating special effects. Imaginations are going to run unchecked, and thousands of great stories that have been trapped in the realm of books and cartoon will be unleashed.
LOTR, SpiderMan, and Xmen (as well as numerous other great CGI movies) were just the appetizer for the feast of fantasy we'll be dining on during the next 20 years. It's going to be fantastic.
Ok, I call BULLSHIT on your post. Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Are you just pulling numbers out of the air?
Or perhaps a better explaination is that you're confusing internal representations with output formats. My younger brother tells me that LightWave uses some 192-bit internal format, but I'm not going to be some wannabe loser and claim that it creates "192-bit color". Gee, perhaps they're using floating point numbers. 3 x 64 = 192, oddly enough. Or maybe they're using single precision, which gives us 6 x 32 = 192. I don't know exactly what the six numbers are, perhaps RGB with a surface normal.
Also, lets look at your numbers. Firstly, you're always counting an alpha channel. But alpha is only needed for compositing, not for final output. Secondly, most of us here are using 24-bit (8,8,8) or even 15/16-bit (5,5/6,5) true-colour display modes. Have you noticed any colour ringing or banding because of the lack of precision? I rarely have, and even then it was back when I used a 16-bit mode. 24-bit (i.e 8 bit components) is just fine for almost any work. About the only place it would be inadequant is perhaps doing X-ray or some other type of medical imaging. Now you're not only trying to tell us that Hollywood currently uses 32 bits per component but that the human eye can see 128 bit components? BULLSHIT. You do realise that for every bit you double the number of possible values? So 96-bit colour (3 x 32) has 16 million TIMES the number of values PER COMPONENT than 24-bit colour? My god, can you even comprehend how many different shades of colours that would produce?
Sorry to come down hard on you, but I think you sound like just a confused adolescent with bit-inadequacy issues. You're confusing internal representations with output formats. For internal work, sure you need extra bits to guard against rounding errors. You'd probably scan any film with a 12 or 16 bit scanner (i.e 36 or 48 bit colour), render to either a similar precision or even HDRI formats (floating point, 96 or 192 bit colour) and keep any intermediate images at the highest precision you can. And for compositing you'd have an alpha channel (or three for chroma-key work). But when you process it for final output, you throw away the alpha (which hopefully equals 100% by that stage) and round everything down. For DVD, that means converting to the YCrCb colour space, subsampling the croma channels to half size (i.e 4:2:2 sampling) and encoding. For a film "printer", it might take 36 (3x12) or 48 (3x16) bit RGB, or maybe just 24 bit.
</rant>So in other words, you pulled the numbers straight out of your ass with a reference to what somebody told you some time, and got moderated up as informative. I love Slashdot!
MPEG2 video on a DVD/SVCD is digital with 8 bits per color channel. If Gollum looks "fake" and Frodo not when you are watching Return of the King at home, it won't be because of the color depth. It might be that the color and lighting calculations, with regard to shading techniques and blending, do not give a realistic enough result: but this has nothing to do with the color depth that human vision can percieve.
I agree, though I believe it goes far beyond special effects.
A lot of people would point to the "Old Hollywood" as the golden age of movie making, but I believe we are on the threshold of what will be seen as the real golden age.
Movie making, special effects or not, is becoming much, much cheaper. What we're going to see in the coming years is an explosion of non-Hollywood movies (U.S. and non-U.S.) that are first-rate in terms of polish. So-called "independent" films are going to look as good as any other and have far more impact than they do now. Hollywood will no longer enjoy the position it has enjoyed since its inception.
There is a wealth of talent out there -- actors, writers, directors, cinematographers, makeup and set designers, computer graphics artists -- that exist on the fringes (especially the actors, writers and directors), ignored by the money-chasing, unimagintative, group-think of the Hollywood studios. The talents of these professionals will finally be able to find a vehicle for their expression that will have a world-wide impact.
Even more amazing than filmakers being unshackled from the laws of physics will be the results of filmakers being unshackled from the "laws" of MGM, Newline, UA and so forth.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
The future of the film industry is going to be amazing as filmmakers are finally unshackled from the limitations of physics in creating special effects
This reminds me of an MPAA propaganda/commercial that was shown last time I went to the movies: We see a stuntman describing how he does an exciting but dangerous job. And then he says something like 'see, so don't download MP3 because it puts guys like me out of work and insults all our hard work'.
I had two immediate thoughts on it: first, "what has mp3 have to do with movie stunts?". But more importantly, my second thought was: "too bad CGI will have your job way before that, sponsored by the same organization you now support".
Ironic, isn't it? This was probably not the way the ad creators intended the message to come through. Oops.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Enjoy a movie like this? Are you kidding? OF COURSE!
The USA has been exporting massive amounts of 'cultural products' for the last 100years. To everyone *outside the USA* (or english speaking countries), it is in a 'second language', yet, its still they eat it up.
Now, consider this trailer again, imagine that it wasnt in Japanese -- what would you be thinking of this movie? It frankly looks terrific. If this movie were coming out of America, it would be MASSIVE. One of these days soon IMHO, Japan is going to drop a blockbuster on the USA. Its cultural products are very much palatable to the American Cultural Sensibilities (for bad as well as good, the USA->Japan post WWII influence is imense) -- Japan is very much due to have its own modern Culture play well in Peoria.
Maybe this movie is it, maybe not, but Japan is becoming a more influencial player in international 'style' and culture. And really, being a fan of Anime is not a pre-requisite. Im sure this movie will stand well no its onw.