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.
↩ 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:
↩ Reply Link to the clip of this scene.↩ Reply
↩ 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.
↩ 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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↩ Reply Believe it or not, this is a CGI Ferrari. And that is a movie from 2003.
↩ Reply I think the clarity is to blame.
↩ 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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↩ 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...
↩ Reply Link to the clip of the scene↩ 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.
↩ 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.
↩ Reply Happy Hacking!!!↩ 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.
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.
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:
The first thing you notice when watching Michael Bay's directorial debut Bad Boys is that the movie is not trying to be a Michael Bay film. There was no Michael Bay films prior to it. Bay was doing music videos and commercials before this film. And while those do have some of the style Bay will eventually bring over to his cinema pictures, here it seems he is actually trying something else entirely. The best analogy for the movie would be Tony Scott's 1993 film True Romance written by Quentin Tarantino.
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.
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 ).
Why do people go to cinema? A billion dollar question, isn't it? Well, if you ask the Austrian School of Economics you will see that people tend to buy things they value more than the money they need to spend to buy that very thing.
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.
D'une manière ou d'une autre, je ne connaissais pas le film de Luc Besson 2010 Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec. Excusez mon français. I will continue in English now. I just had a pleasure of listening to people speak French for 2 hours straight, because I just learned about the existence of a movie that for some reason passed my radar. As you know I'm a big enough Luc Besson fan that sometimes I take his personal life blunders personally. I knew about his more obscure Arthur films. And I am anticipating his upcoming 2 films, that nobody seem to know nothing about. But somehow only now I heard about the 2010 Luc Besson film The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec.
I don't know if you know but Flow was in fact done using Blender. At the 2024th Blender Conference the head of the animation department on the film Silly-Pélissier Léo even presented a talk about this. ( available on PeerTube ) Let that sink in.
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?