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".
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.
Since the last post in this series the project I've been working on became way more ambitious. The original problem I was trying to solve, was figuring out how to use computer graphics ( mainly Blender ) to cut costs for an action scene in a movie I'm developing. It has cars, so the idea was to try to render some CG cars into real life footage. You can go read Part 2 to see my attempts at this sort of thing.
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 ).
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:
On the surface level 2014 Luc Besson film Lucy starring Scarlett Johansson is a scientific thesis that is trying to say some grand truth about the world, while pretending to be an action film, to make people go see it. On the other hand though, it is an action film that injects a lot of profound-sounding pretentious pseudo scientific bullshit, to make itself appear as something better than it is: a dumb action movie. Which one of them is it? Or did I miss something?
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.
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.
A lot of people say that Nicolas Winding Refn's 2011 film Drive is a remake of 1978 film The Driver by Walter Hill. And to some extent it is true. Both are about a getaway driver. And both drivers are these tough, melancholic characters played by a guy who's first name is Ryan. But that seems to be about it.
While Steven Spielberg was producing a Michael Bay film Transformers 4, Michael Bay was producing a Jonathan Liebesman 2014 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And like with a Spielberg-produced film The Poltergeist by Tobe Hooper about which people started claiming that Spielberg himself directed the movie in question. With the 2014 TMNT people started claiming Michael Bay was the actual director on this film. It is absolutely and utterly poetic that both Tobe Hooper and Jonathan Liebesman also made movies in the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise.
Ridley Scott has a full family of filmmakers. His brother Tony Scott is a legend. But Ridley also has kids. His son Jake Scott is a bad ass music video director that started already branching out into feature films. Luke Scott directed a cool little 2016 sci-fi horror film Morgan. And was a second unit director on a lot of recent Ridley Scott films. And then there is Jordan Scott, Ridley's daughter that wrote and directed the 2025 thriller A Sacrifice.
Directed by Richard Donner ( Superman, The Goonies ) from a script of Shane Black, Lethal Weapon is a film about cops. On the surface there is no concept to the movie what so ever. It is just simply a regular, straight forward police bromance. Yet somehow the movie moves.