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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."
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.
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.
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?
What's revolutionary is they shoot every scene with several cameras at the same time (or several times with the same camera), using different focus planes each time to cover the entire depth range.
Then they assemble them post-production and boost the saturation, for that very special cartoony-colors, always-in-focus look... otherwise known as how the photos of throw-away consumer cameras look like.
Yea, all the wasted effort... keep in mind the movie took at least twice longer to shoot because they had to use blue screens even for a scene with nothing special in it (only to assist the post-production assembling of the planes).
There are other ways than depth of field to emphasize an object, but its not easy even in stills photography. In movies i'd guess its going to be very hard to get the right "look" consistently. Good luck to them.
Not only the human one. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition#Supersti tion_and_psychology for example:
"In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he describes his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behavior in humans."
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
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...
Try this wiki link as a starting point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_time
Look at the History section.
The fundamentals of the Zoopraxiscope are that by placing a set of fixed cameras all focussed upon a subject and triggering them in order, you will be able to slice time and produce a movie. This actually predated moving pictures. This idea of synchronised stills cameras is what underlies all so called 'bullet time' or 'time slicing' technologies, although these days the images are interpolated digitally.
That's not the real problem The real problem is that in*real life*, you ayes don't focus everything like on a cartoon, so you will get a (maybe very cool film) but with a very unnatural view, that eventiually will get your eyes tired trying to absorb every bit of information on it. Focus exists naturally as a filter to select the needed info and get lower priority to the rest.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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)
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!
Universities refuse to accept work citing it because it's trivial for the student to modify wikipedia to match their paper.
At least I'm reasonably sure that Speed Racer won't be a carbon copy of The Matrix, or even have much in common with it (well, besides the drawn out action scenes with no conclusions or payoff... look, Neo just fought with Smith for 20 minutes just so he could run away like a little pussy, awesome!), so they still have that over George Lucas (recasting Palpatine as a women, Luke as a hobbit, Han Solo as Han Solo with a sword, and Darth Vader as some lame-ass in a skull helmet doesn't change the fact that Willow is so similar to Star Wars that it hurts.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I disagree. The problem with the sequels is that they didn't even use the same techniques that made the first movies cool - instead of bullet-time morphed cameras, they switched to CG puppetry. The fact is that 3d puppets can't hold up to real people in a fight scene. The car chase scene would've been good had the surrounding movie not ruined it. Look in Hellboy: good fight scene = subway brawl (real actors in costumes) bad fight scenes = everything afterwards (3D puppets). Plus, they completely ditched the bullet-time gunfights in the sequels, which were one of the neatest parts.
Reloaded was bad because it was utterly bereft of a plot. It was like a bad japanese RPG - they kept going to the Oracle to get quests.
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.
The real question is what's so revolutionary about a camera tecnique ripped off from Citizen Kane?