by Blender Dumbass Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
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I often hear how good action film-making is always clear and easy to follow. Camera isn't shaking like crazy and editing isn't filled with ADHD mania. Yet the more I think about it the less this makes sense.
โฉ Reply For example, take the bridge scene from David F. Sandberg's film Shazam! 2. The direction of the scene is very clear. The shots are long and smooth. Every box in an internet guide for a "good action scene" is ticked. And yet you have this:
โฉ Reply Link to the clip of this scene.โฉ Reply
โฉ Reply Look at these cars. On paper everything about them is correct. In closeup shots you can see that the cars are modeled well and textured to the standards. They have the surface imperfection maps and everything. The animation is solid. Yet watching this sequence makes you feel that the cars are very, very CGI.
โฉ Reply Shazam! 2 had a reported budget of something between 110 to 125 million dollars. They had the money to do this right. And cars are one of the simplest things to render. Video games from the turn of the century had very realistic depictions of cars. Every 3D rendering website or forum will have hundreds of super-realistic car renders. Hell even films like Bad Boys II that were made 2 decades before Shazam! 2 had much better CGI cars.
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โฉ Reply Believe it or not, this is a CGI Ferrari. And that is a movie from 2003.
โฉ Reply I think the clarity is to blame.
โฉ Reply Think about it. It should be a high intensity moment of incredible tension. Yet the shots are so calm and so precise that you don't feel anything at all. You don't know what to feel. You notice small rendering errors from overworked and underpayed artists. And your brain comes to a conclusion that it must be CGI.
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โฉ Reply Take for example Lucy from 2014, by Luc Besson. It has a chase scene which has a lot of clearly CGI cars. It was made a decade after Bad Boys II and a decade before Shazam! 2. Yet the cars look ( on a technical level ) worse than in both of those films. Still though, watch the scene in motion...
โฉ Reply Link to the clip of the sceneโฉ Reply ... and the direction of Besson is so fucking good that the CGI-ness of the cars could not bother you less. You almost don't even notice it. The scene fucking rules. And while Besson could have made a slow, readable action scene. It would not have made you feel the speed and the anxiety of the moment.
โฉ Reply I think this is how Michael Bay does it too. He can pull off invisible CGI work in 2004, or groundbreaking CGI work in 2007. Or push the whole industry forward while nobody else ( pretty much ) can replicate it, because he prioritizes Adrenalin. Because he wants the audience to feel the scene more than to understand it.
โฉ Reply Happy Hacking!!!โฉ Reply
Think about it. It should be a high intensity moment of incredible tension. Yet the shots are so calm and so precise that you don't feel anything at all. You don't know what to feel. You notice small rendering errors from overworked and underpayed artists. And your brain comes to a conclusion that it must be CGI.
A movie where execution was so good, even though the special effects were pretty low-budget was Godzilla. I remember getting so engrossed in the moment, the epic scale of destruction that I totally forgot it was just some man walking around a miniature city.
On unrelated but somewhat related note, in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (2003) there were talking cat characters. The problem with having cats in a TV series:
1. They're cats, making them do anything you want is 10x harder than with dogs;
2. They don't talk.
Instead the director went with a more creative approach, what if the cats were plushies. And it worked! Watching the show, I was engrosed in the talking plushies. The only means they formulated the emotions visually was by changing the eyes. Do you need anything else?
I often hear how good action film-making is always clear and easy to follow. Camera isn't shaking like crazy and editing isn't filled with ADHD mania. Yet the more I think about it the less this makes sense.
I'm in the middle of developing a movie in which there is a car chase. You know me I can't live without a car chase. But this time I'm trying to make the movie properly. By "infiltrating the movie industry" as some people suggested to call it. Which means ( since I live in Israel ) I need to write something that is possible to do in Israel. Getting $40 million to shoot a first feature film in Israel is not something that I can expect to happen. So instead I need to come up with something else.
Lunatics! is a Open-Movie project by Rosalyn Hunter and Terry Hancock. I was following their socials ( mainly their Peertube account ) for quite some time now. And today, about an hour ago they released an unfinished version of episode one. Why does it matter? Well, they are working on it, if I understand correctly, since 2003, ( based on this video ). This unfinished episode is, therefor, 23 years in the making. My Moria's Race short-film with its 3.5 years is nothing in comparison.
I don't really know if all articles in this series are equal. So it could be part 4, or part 6 or part who knows what. But today I want to dump my thoughts about this video I did recently:
Telling a story of the difficulties I went through to model this one building in Blender. The cringe, and the trauma and all of the bleeding in between.
So a real cinema movie project is being developed, and as explained in my previous article about it I don't have the money to shoot a real chase scene. Instead I gonna use CGI as much as possible, to cut down the costs ( but not my sanity ).
Edgar Wright with his 2017 film Baby Driver shows that he can make some awesome clean action if he wants to. And yet watching his 2007 film Hot Fuzz you feel like something isn't quite wright. The camera is too shaky and the editing is too quick. Is he trying to "hide something"? No! He simply imitates Michael Bay, that's all.
Our main character Ivan Danko ( Arnold Schwarzenegger ) is introduced with a shot showing his magnificent muscular butt-cheeks, right before a fight breaks out between naked men in the snow, all trying to scream words and sentences in Russian, sounding utterly stupid doing so. That is how Red Heat, a 1988 Walter Hill movie, begins.
Again I found a movie that makes me question my own ideas as a filmmaker. Havoc ( directed by Gareth Evans ) is so stylized and fucking awesome that they had to go a CGI route for a lot of the shots to even be possible in the first place. Which created a similar situation, which I discussed in my review of Shazam! 2.
Somehow, for all these years I avoided the first ever Die Hard movie, even though I had watched the sequels. And even though the sequels are varying in quality, the first film is a fucking masterpiece.
There is a certain sense among cinephiles that the danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier is nothing but an edge lord, making his films simply as a sort of pornography designed to outrage people. It does not help his case that his films are some of the hardest films to watch. And it doesn't help that his movies tend to touch upon uncomfortable things in very uncomfortable ways. Yet I don't believe Lars Von Trier does any of that for laughs.
When I reviewed Havoc I wrote about this strange feeling that I dubbed "short orgasmic blackout" when I see a stupidly serious, angry face of a female character that is really cute. And one of the most cutest actors living these days is fucking Ana de Armas. Let me illustrate. We see young Victoria Comte playing Eve ( the main character ) while being 11 ( Comte was born in 2013, do the math ), and then the film says "12 years later" so now she is 23. Yet de Armas playing her is 36 ( at the time of filming ). She plays somebody almost half her age and it works. Why? She is fucking cute! That's why. And because of that I knew I was probably getting the "short orgasmic blackout" the movie.
Predator: Badlands is Dan Trachtenberg's third Predator movie after Prey 2022 and Killer of the Killers 2025. And strangely enough non of these movies have any kind of connection to one other. They are not sequels. They are stand alone films, different in style and tone. Telling different stories and having different structure. The only thing that binds them together, so to speak, is the fact that they are all technically a part of the Predator franchise.