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Wachowski Brothers and the Speed Racer Movie
Steven Weintraub writes "Susan Sarandon talks about the Wachowski Brothers Speed Racer movie and confirms the revolutionary way the brothers are making the film — the entire frame will be in focus like a cartoon."
I for one welcome our new always-in-focus overlords.
Focussing on an object draws the people attention to it. It's used as an artistic tool. If everything is in focus, then the public will most likely not even notice (unless they specifically check for this).
I hope they don't spend a lot of money/effort on this "feature", the way they did on the game-quality 3D graphics of the Burly Brawl (ref: Matrix 2).
Does anybody still pay attention to these guys? I mean, okay, people seemed to like The Matrix (although I never understood why) but everything since then has been uniformly awful. It seems like hitting on some lottery numbers and then playing those same numbers every day for the rest of your life in the misguided belief that they have some special odds of hitting again.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Now when the theater projector is slightly out of focus you won't be able to see ANYTHING.
So if I take a photo at, say, f/10 instead of my usual f/1.8, resulting in greater depth-of-field, this is revolutionary?
How can I patent this?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Goodness. That revolutionary way of composing a shot called deep focus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_focus and used as far back as 1922? Pull me up a chair and pour me one of those newfangled qahwat al-bnn all those crazy kids are drinking these days!
If everything is going to appear two-dimensional I wonder if the actor/background details will be minimised at all. Not really cell-shaded, but something less detailed.
Surely they will follow much of the original Speed Racer construction formula and have lots of close-up shots, re-used footage and the same 4 panels of background speeding by as Speed and Racer X do their thing.
If the story villains don't have polygonal moustaches than I'm not going.
I'll reserve a judgment until I at least see a trailer of the movie.
So it would appear that they're making some differences with color, etc., but yeah - I'd like to see a still or two at least.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Now we can have Persephone in focus ALL the time.
Lets hope they remember to include a real story this time, and don't just use the words to link the special effects scenes like the last two Matrix movies.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
As far as I know, they are not literally "brothers" anymore..
This is just a marketing hook to make them look as if they're at the front of movie making and get you talking about it. It doesn't mean the film will be worth watching. Can't say I agree with that sort of thing. It's just more compettitve behaviour that ends up being another race to the bottom. Waste of time.
It's the exact same effect you get when you shoot with a consumer DV camera and a small CCD? Awesome, now I'm on par with the big boys!
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
The brothers are once again drawing inspiration from comics. The original Matrix was shot in such a way that most angles looked like frames in a comic book. I think it's a good thing they try to think outside the box and push the limits on cinematography.
.: Max Romantschuk
This doesn't sound particularly new - if memory serves Citizen Kane did this back in 1941 (calling the effect "Deep Focus").
Perhaps they use tilt-and-shift lenses such as inherently used in large format cameras, and which can be bought at a high price for (D) SLR's...
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I'm interested finding out more about how bullet time appeared in earlier cinema, but I think there must be a typo in your link because the Zoopraxiscope has nothing whatsoever to do with bullet time. Please post the correct link.
If there is one.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Speed Racer ... Trixie ... Speed ... Mom Racer ... Racer X ... Pops Racer
Christina Ricci
Emile Hirsch
Susan Sarandon
Matthew Fox
John Goodman
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
The distinction between focus and out-of-focus areas is one of the two (!) new things that photography brought to art (the other one being motion blur). While there are some situations where you don't want OOF areas (e.g., landscapes), it is artistically stupid to deliberately focus everything. New, yes, and technically innovative, possibly, but it's dropping one of the most powerful tools in your toolchest. It's like a painter only using a broad brush -- yes, you can do some nice things, but there are many subtle things that are just impossible.
-Lars
I think it's funny that game developers nowadays always use depth of field in games to improve the realism by not having everything in focus and now movie makers try to put everything into focus to get a more unrealistic feel.
Quite ironic, actually.
kdawson quotes Steven Weintraub quoting Susan Sarandon talking about...oh, never mind.
So they'll have purple, green, red; every color except black.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I wish that makers of 3D films (primarily IMAX) would do this. Too often I would get a headache from trying to focus on the 'out-of-focus' background stuff. I always found it difficult to keep my eyes only on what the filmmaker wanted.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Magoo_(movie)
My transgendered friend suggests using the new gender and name universally, even when referencing events prior to the change. You might do the same thing for someone whose name changed in marriage ("Mrs. Smith used to have a cat before she was married" seems like a reasonable enough statement).
Alas, I'm very poor at remembering to do it this way -- probably because she moved away from the state long before the change, and I've only seen her on rare occasions since... leaving me with stronger memories of her as a guy.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
it is artistically stupid to deliberately focus everything.
When we look directly at something, everything else in our field of vision goes blurry. But we don't notice that, because our brains automatically filter it out. Subjectively, our entire world always stays in focus, because wherever we look, we focus.
Now, used "artistically"... Yes, blurry backgrounds force me to miss details that the director doesn't want me to know yet - Who blurrily crept up on the protagonist? Did that car in the background belong to the prime suspect? Gaffer or extra or shadowy main character?
As someone easily distracted in real life, however, I find such forced attention-drawing one of the single most annoying techniques in modern cinematography (right after glaringly stupid protagonists, but I'll save that for another rant). If the director wants to limit my knowledge to first-person rather than omnipotent observer, fine, just keep any extra detail out-of-frame, rather than out-of-focus. But if I wouldn't actually have missed those details as an actual observer, it just pisses me off that the director denies me them, in effect saying "sorry, I consider you too dumb to notice this, but can't help teasing you a bit".
Now, the use of over-saturation, that might give a neat effect or it might look like crap. But I would like to see everything always in focus. Nothing "artistic" about it.
There... corrected that for you...
...didn't Disney, even circa Snow White, have some sort of elaborate tower system for simulating "depth of field" with cells? Actually, I take it back - even BAD cartoons will often just have blur in the background to save money and allow re-use of shots (e.g. the transformation scene in just about every Japanese TV cartoon).
To be fair, maybe the answer to making something look like a cartoon is to exaggerate the flaws of cartoons - so lets not pre-judge it until we've seen it.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Wow, have you seen HDTV quality movies? You can see every hair clearly.
So now is the time that all-focus will contribute to the wow-effect.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I've read that with big screens and hi def people don't take in a whole picture like on an old 19" analog TV, they scan the "view" like in real life. How annoying when part of the virtual world is out of focus.
I've already noticed that myself but, instead of thinking big like the Brothers, I've just mused that our local TV stations might have to invest, as practical, in lenses with somewhat better depth.
A few things in the interview suggest that they've actually captured multiple depth frames so they can turn the actors and props themselves into drawn style. It sounds like the backgrounds *will* be cartoons. This could be very wierd to watch - real human (and chimp) motion as a cartoon.
A film where the script, the acting and now the image are all flat and two-dimensional !
Woo-hoo! Next they'll invent super-xylem vision, so they can all be wooden as well!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
As a side question, when refering to a trans-gender indvidiual in the past tense, which pronoun do you use?
The correct answer is "whatever sex they actually are," since no amount of self-mutilation actually changes their sex.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
In fact, the comic book "look" is actually the Citizen Kane "look."
The "serious" comic book artists of the 1940s were influenced by Citizen Kane and the use of odd "camera" angles, deep focus, views angling up that show the ceiling (traditionally avoided in cinema before Citizen Kane because the top of the set was open and angling up would have shown lights, catwalks, microphones, etc.) derived from it.
This was no secret... it explicitly acknowledged by them... I'm trying to remember where I read a comic book artist mentioning it in an interview.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'm getting a huge kick out of these heated debates over such a tiny bit of crappy information. Sarandon says she doesn't understand it, then proceeds to give a really crappy description which amounts to "everything is in focus" ... and suddenly the /. readership are experts on the subject (and why it has been done before, and how they'd do it better, and why one of the Wachowski brothers chopping his nuts off makes him a sister, etc etc etc).
Personally I couldn't glean almost anything useful from the article.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
It's ironic that they would choose this movie to highlight such an effect. As a cartoon watcher in the 1970s, I noticed that Speed Racer was one of the few that would on occasion actually use out-of-focus backgrounds in some scenes.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
you polluting bitches. When a coin in Al Gore's coffer rings, a soul from environmental purgatory springs! All must bow to the church of Gaia!!!
Also. The point being that it's part of our makeup to create significance, whether there is any or not and whether we can rationally explain something or not.
In fact, as one of the other posters pointed out about the pigeons, it may well be a feature of the way brains work. We may well find out that any life which uses something like a neural network to generate consciousness will be prone to superstition and religion.... Which becomes interesting when you start building big neural networks into machines.
Deleted
...sorry, reflex.
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*Could* be some kind of camera that's able to directly shoot HDR images.
I *heard* this could be possible even with normal CCD arrays in one pass by not stopping a certain amount of time and looking which charge each cell holds, but stopping the amount of time each cell needs to charge. But, like I said, that's hearsay and I'm no expert in this field. I'd be glad if a fellow slashdotter who knows more could explain if that's possible.
Ok, enough whining. Let's all pretend, for a moment, that the Wachowski brothers aren't completely retarded. Let's pretend they actually put at least some thought into how they spend their budget. Let's pretend these filming techniques aren't a complete waste of time.
And let's pretend that not everyone on Slashdot is a mind-reading, all-knowing, super-genius film expert. Can you suspend your disbelief enough for that ?
Now we know about the classic technique of "deep focus", which is a cheap (as in "free") camera trick that's been around for over 80 years. If that technique were sufficient to fulfill the artistic vision, and if it were applicable to the varied environments of a modern hollywood film, it is safe to assume that the Wachowski brothers would have saved themselves a lot of time and money and used that archaic technique, as many others have done before them to great effect.
In the end, they probably decided that "deep focus" wasn't enough. They want absolutely pristine shots that defy reality, to try and distinguish this film from the countless other cartoon adaptations that have all sucked in immeasurable ways. In brief, they're trying to do it different than everyone else, and hopefully better.
I mean really, what's the point in doing the same thing as everyone else ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Do you think they will keep the original sound of the AutoJacks when the Mach 5 jumps? Those are classic. I hear those in my sleep. Ah, did anyone think it was a nice gesture that they let Peter Fernandez (English voice actor for Speed Racer) play a part in the movie?
The way Susan Sarandon talked about putting two or more or more images together makes it sound like focus stacking. I've been wanting to try this, and the wiki link points to some free software to do so. I wish it had an explanation of how its done. I'm guessing they do DWTs or FFTs on all but one of images and grab the high detail or high frequency components and then add them to the complete DWT/FFT of the remaining image and then IDWT/IFFT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
What she was mentioning could also be interpreted as a layman's impression of some kind of a high dynamic range setup. Like this camera for "photo-realistic lighting of CG characters" (a still camera). And look at this example of HDR motion blur, which would make a lot of sense in speed racer, as it would let them put more detail and brighter, more vivid color into the blur, which they could use to blur landscapes they are racing through, or CGI cars that are racing by the camera.
They could be combining HDR and multiple zplanes/lenses to capture the entire light field, perhaps capturing the same scene in layers for automated effects similar to bluescreen (think layers in photoshop or the gimp) and bringing parts into focus as they like in post (by calculating the image from synthetic aperture data perhaps). The description does not mention multiple light beams or multiple camera lenses though so it seems HDR and setting up shots laboriously, from z=infinity to closeup, which would explain why the actress had to wait so long just to shoot a short part. The description of brilliant backgrounds and "all the colors that were not in matrix" also points to a hyperrealistic style which makes the backgrounds much brighter and sharper, like in HDR photography.
I love movies that use a gimmick right from the start. Such movies almost always tend to have bad writing/directing, and thus stink on the whole. I wonder if they've written an ending for this? The brother have three other writers working with them. Not many writing credits on them. Best movie of the bunch is Dragonheart. Most of the other titles are kind of embarrassing.
Sigh.
We'll see.
Hey, you all notice that any picture of Trixie has an M on her shirt? That's because Trixie's name is Mitchi.
Matrix was my new Star Wars... after the sequels, the Wachowski brother and his Wachowski sister Dot became my new George Lucases. How could they fall completely to shit after just a few years?
Personally, I'd rather see Archie Bunker in the Mach 5. "Go, speed racist, go speed racist, go speed racist goooo!"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Racer X was actually his brother the whole time!
Steve Albini has even already written a catchy theme song for the movie.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The thing I wonder is: who is the other guard they were talking about?
Probably an orangutan.
Frankly, it'd be a hell of a lot more fun if instead of stacking images taken at different focal depths, they used a spinning disk confocal camera. Then they only have the subject _in view_ and everything that's out of focus doesn't even show up.
...Arehteyalsogoingtohavequickcutswithanimatedback groundstomakeitlooklikethere'slotsofstuffgoingonbu tthey'reonlytalkingveryfastawww?
During the end credits, I believe, the Mach 5 speeds toward the camera, Speed jumps out, time stands still, and the camera does a "Matrix-Style" sweep of 90 degrees until it's pointed at the driver's side instead of the front.
So, when we talk of a "Matrix-Style" effect, we should have all along been speaking of a "Speed-Racer-Style" effect.
To be fair, maybe the answer to making something look like a cartoon is to exaggerate the flaws of cartoons - so lets not pre-judge it until we've seen it.
Are you saying that we should wait until after we've seen it to pre-judge it?
The Matrix sequels which people bash on religiously, still broke box-office records, and sold quite well on DVD. V For Vendetta did well at the box office, and sold well on DVD.
So yes, studios still very much listen to these guys, and they should.
The major flaw with the Matrix sequels was the script, which had too much exposition. V For Vendetta proved they could take a lengthy graphic novel that is heavy on exposition, and not overload their movie with it. And from AICN's script review of Speed Racer, it will be a movie that focuses primarily on intense action sequences.
In case anyone forgot, Matrix Reloaded, horrid exposition and all, still happens to feature perhaps the most insane freeway sequence in the history of film. The State of California wouldn't let them film it on any of their highways because they said the script for that sequence was unfilmable, and it was guaranteed to kill people in the process.
I'd wager that any real student or lover of film is still very much interested in how these guys will continue to innovate in later movies, even if their previous films have flaws. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a perfect film. Even my absolute favorites still have glaring flaws.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
... if anyone remembers Star Blazers...
I used to watch it religiously after school in 3rd grade.
Dark City openly ripped off the visuals of City of Lost Children, and heavily lifted plot elements from Dune. It was a decent, overlooked movie, but it is in no way in the league of a movie like The Matrix which refined American cinema.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I'm still disappointed that the rumor I once heard, that the Wachowski brothers would direct Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Conan the King", did not come to pass.
I mean, I wish I could get a copy from a parallel universe where that movie was made....
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
So you'll refer to any transgender person by their birth gender no matter how many obstacles they've faced in their life? and no matter how awkward it is in the situation?
And what will you do if you've mistakenly outed someone that wasn't transgendered? just making you look silly..
I was working with a monkey...I'm sorry a chimpanzee - he doesn't like to be called a monkey.
A relative of the Unseen University's librarian, perhaps?
That's far too pink an attitude to be worthy of the Subgenius link. Get some Slack!
where the entire frame was out of focus for large parts of the movie.
(Instead of doing "real" pretend fighting, the actors
just stood near each other drinking coffee while the cameraman danced
all around.)
-1 off topic, yes I know.
Nobody talks about bound ever, their best movie to date.
But what can you expect from people who try desesperatly to find differences in quality between star war IV and star war I.
I LOVED Star Blazers!
the history of the world
Bob assigns sexuality according to His plan.
If you need to know more, you will be enlightened through the proper channels.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
agreed .. digging at the imdb entry for Speed Racer reveals the Sony F-23 which was unveiled last year with a japanese spec sheet here. The only major camera innovation i've seen in hollywood recently is the 3ality stuff who have probably upgraded their rig to use the latest Sony CineAlti. Done correctly you should have multiple images layered like the old disney cartoon/cell techniques to give an almost 3-D effect on a layered screen without the need for 3-D glasses .. (it looks pretty cool if you've ever seen it) .. but if you don't know what you're looking at i could see where someone just says that it just looks like it's all in focus due the crispness of the image that better reflects what we can naturally see than a typically transposed camera shot
The camera in question is oakley's spinoff camera brand, Red Digital Camera.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
I seem to notice more people calling /. out on it. Which is nice, for balance and all.
Study some embryology.
I hope they use the XXX remix of the Speed Racer techno remix from mid-1990's. :-D
Trixie will be played by Lindsey Lohan.
Frustrated with Speed's obvious lack of interest in women,
she ends up having sex and doing lines with Chim Chim.
Actually, it's more like Wachowski siblings, as one of them changed sex some time ago.
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
This is one turd I hope to avoid at the box office.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I'm actually interested in seeing this movie, but I gotta say you aren't selling me on it.
Pro-Choice or Anti-Choice?
Hmmmmm?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I was under the impression that it was now Siblings... not brothers... per say.
Did someone say cake?
there is a daft punk video on youtube. it's a cartoon that blurs the backgrounds in a way that i don't imagine was practical until digital technology.
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
WTF?
If this were a politics story you might have a point but this is about a movie.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Uh, they're not the Wachowski "Brothers" anymore. One of them had a sex change and is now a woman.
Seriously.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
...if you set it to its widest angle and find the right focal point. My cheapo Powershot A75 for example, is in focus from 3 feet to infinity whenever I set the focus to 7 feet on the widest angle. Longer lenses can also achieve infinite depths of field quite easily, as long as you add more light. Also, the smaller the diameter of the lens, the more easily it can achieve infinite focus (and conversely the more difficult it is to achieve focal separation), which is why 16mm films use focus-shifting effects so much more rarely than 35mm films. In fact, infinite depth of field is SO easy to achieve these days (unlike in the days of Citizen Kane, when Orson Welles had to borrow every light on the studio lot to achieve it), that this stuff Sarandon says about layering different films simply makes no sense. This would definitely NOT be required to achieve infinite focus in this day and age. She must be confusing two different goals. I suspect that the layering is going to be used to have much finer control of exactly how much focus or motion blur they put on separate elements (exactly what you would need, BTW, to mimick the sorts of 'motion effects' you see in anime) -- which means this the-frame-is-always-in-focus-for-the-entire-film stuff is probably just not true. I could shoot a film exactly like that with a hi-def camera TOMORROW with absolutely no extra equipment. So something just does not add up here.
Often didn't even bother with backgrounds at all. They would just animate in some streaky lines instead.
I know kung-fu!
Woah.
I'll admit that I never really watched much of the original, but wasn't Speed Racer one of the few cartoons that actually used focus and blurring to delineate foregrounds, backgrounds, and, well, speed?
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
Huh? Hide it? That suggests that Slashdot is fearful in some manner. I don't think anybody here can be accused of hiding their belief systems. There's certainly enough argument and debate whenever social questions come up. It takes a fearful mind to think in terms of hiding.
And by Liberalism, I assume you mean the state of mind where people think openly and do not restrict themselves to fear-based models of living. That's bad. . , how? Indeed, that's the whole mode of the Light Side, to reject fear and darkness, and if you think Slashdot is growing light, (which it might even be, but only by a few percentage points; I still see lots of ignorant and misguided commentary. I think the latest poll merely suggests that people don't like the Bush admin), then that's reason to feel a bit better about humanity as a whole. But honestly. There's still a lot of choice to be made by a lot of people. This world is still very much filled with fear and hate-driven policy.
Anyway, what does any of this have to do with Speed Racer? You seem pre-occupied.
-FL
Didn't think of that did you? No, the solution here is clearly to outline the subject of the frame with dancing ants. Behold Photoshop: The Movie.
the way one frequently sees artificial "focus" in animé. And given the Ws' known fondness for the stuff, could this be where the inspiration came from?
I am trolling
And it didn't require a million dollars of HD camera equipment and post facilities (considering Snow White had a complete product cost of 1.5mil).
Revolutionary, nah, it's Hollywood...
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
"It". There's a neuter pronoun in English for a reason.
Obstacles my ass: you're born with a penis, you're a man. Stop playing dress-up and do something useful with your life.
I can't sit through an entire 3D movie because only part of the scene is in focus. On a normal film that's okay but in 3D your eyes think it's their fault and try to re-focus, straining them.
Imagine how many mistakes people are going to spot now everything is clearly visible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Camping on quad since 1996.
It happens.
Camping on quad since 1996.
unless they changed the chromosomes. they are still the same gender as they were at birth.
Everything else is just an expensive and elaborate costume...which is ok.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on