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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).
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!
Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!), but they even managed to mess up the sequels. They do seem to be about the gimmicks :o The car scene that they spent millions on in the second movie wasn't even any good. Good car chase scenes don't even need expensive cars or special effects to be good, they just need good drivers and interesting locations/stunts
which is totally what she said
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.
How substantive do you think a movie with a girl who flys a helicopter whilst wearing a mini skirt and go-go boots can be? Don't even get me started on the kid and his pet monkey.
As far as I know, they are not literally "brothers" anymore..
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...
Don't you mean "the reason why science exists"?
Oh come on, that scantily-clad, elaborate dance scene in the cave was genius and essential to the storyline.
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Assuming for a moment I don't like V for Vendetta (a fair assumption, I found it to be awful) they've made three movies since The Matrix. I'm sort of shocked I had to spell that out for you, since you had the list right in your post, but I'm happy to provide such services to the cognitively challenged.
Also, I am smoking Camel Turkish Silver. Don't see the relevance, but I'm happy to answer you.
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Its not just game devs. Animators try real hard to make their animations have that 'film' look. I think Nick Park did motion blur in some of his early stuff - possibly the early Wallace and Grommit shorts. Since then I think he's taken every trick in the cinematographer's book, even borrowing from Spielberg with the crash-zoom shot where you zoom out whilst tracking the camera up to the subject, keeping the same size and making the background do crazy things. I bet there's some lifts from Citizen Kane in his work too. Marvellous.
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)
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!
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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.
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But that was the problem - the first one was completely fresh and different (for mainstream audiences not into anime and extreme martial arts) - the sequels were obliged to follow broadly the same style, but by the time they came out, bullet time, wire-work Kung-Fu and "extreme" fight scenes had become cliched. Have you noticed how tame the bank lobby shootout scene looks today, compared with the first time you saw it? The long delay (probably not helped by the death of two cast members and the post-9/11 hiatus for any film in which things got blowed up) didn't help.
Its not as if the plot of the sequels was any sillier than the first movie (the whole humans as power sources thing - holy thermodynamics Batman!) just that the first film was such compellingly brilliant eye candy that your brain's services were not required, and we never worried about why someone punching you in VR should give you a fat lip in reality. By "Reloaded" we'd seen it all before (with freeze frame, commentary and white rabbits too, thanks to the original's role in popularizing DVD) and were starting to worry about plot holes.
...plus the first film had the "advantage" that it came out fairly close to Star Wars Episode one, and benefitted from rather favorable comparisons... (NB: I still think that Universal should have gambled and released "Serenity" head-to-head against "Revenge of the Sith" - then they'd have been a story, and people love to root for the little guy).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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!
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
When I first saw that scene, my first thought was, "They're doing it in Yoda's bed!"
Redundancy is good And also good.
>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 think you're relying too much on your premise that the Wachowski Brothers aren't retarded.
They did one thing well. The Matrix. Reloaded was on the fence, and could have been saved by Revolutions. But it wasn't. It crashed, burned, and died way faster than Trinity did. Then they did V for Vendetta. Cool story, but they didn't write the story. They shaved Natalie Portman's head. It wasn't a terrible movie, but it was an unremarkable movie. Only the broad overtones of the story had merit, and they didn't invent those.
No, I'm still pissed at them for ruining the Matrix. If they would have just left it as it was, they would have been known simply as the people who created one of the most amazing sci-fi movies ever, instead of the people who ruined one of the most promising sci-fi trilogies ever.
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which is totally what she said
Racer X was actually his brother the whole time!
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.
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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....
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Thanks for getting that stuck in my head all day...
bastard.
The camera in question is oakley's spinoff camera brand, Red Digital Camera.
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TFW, would Yoda say.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
What? Didn't you ever pay attention to the lyrics? The whole song is ABOUT sex and violence.
/Ouch, something is poking the inside of my cheek
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...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.