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.
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.
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:
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.
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 ).
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.
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?
Megan Fox. Megan Fox is the only flaw of Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The script by Ehren Kruger ( who wrote Top Gun: Maverick and F1 ) was written with Mikaela Banes ( Megan Fox ) as the girlfriend of Shia LaBeouf's character Sam. But because of some drama behind the scenes ( which involved Steven Spielberg for some reason ), she ultimately dropped out of the project, in very late stages of pre-production. Forcing the team to quickly patch her character out in a very forced and obvious way, replacing her with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who worked with Bay on Victoria Secret commercials. That ultimately made the film very confusing, emotionally.
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.
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.
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.