blenderdumbass . org
Articles
Is clarity in action a bad thing?
January 12, 2026๐ 20
https://blenderdumbass.org/ : ๐ 2
https://blenderdumbass.org/comment?url=articles%2Fis_clarity_in_action_a_bad_thing_&warning=&text=%3E+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%27t+feel+anything+at+all.+You+don%27t+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.+%0D%0A%0D%0AA+movie+where+execution+was+so+good%2C+even+though+the+special+effects+were+pretty+low-budget+was+%5BGodzilla%5D%28https%3A%2F%2Fblenderdumbass.org%2Freviews%2Fgodzilla__1954__is_a_choir_of_destruction_and_loss%29.+I+remember+getting+so+engrossed+in+the+moment%2C+the+epic+scale+of+destruction+that+I+totally+forgot+it+was+just+some+man+walking+around+a+miniature+city. : ๐ 1
https://blenderdumbass.org/articles : ๐ 1
https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/2d_compositing_for_vfx_explained : ๐ 2
https://blenderdumbass.org/blender_articles : ๐ 1
https://www.google.com/ : ๐ 1
https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/i_bled_for_this_blender_3d_model : ๐ 1
#filmmaking #cgi #vfx #cars #movies #films #michaelbay #lucbesson #shazam2 #lucy #badboys #action #cinemastodon #b3d #blender3d
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".
3 Minute Read
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.
โฉ Reply
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.
c:0 โฉ Reply
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 scene
โฉ 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
5
Find this post on Mastodon
Is clarity in action a bad thing?
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/CGI_cars_michael_bay.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 20 โค 5 ๐ฌ 108
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.
#filmmaking #cgi #vfx #cars #movies #films #michaelbay #lucbesson #shazam2 #lucy #badboys #action #cinemastodon #b3d #blender3d
Part 2: Developing a Way to do Action Scenes Without Money
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/vfx_honda_2.png)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 119
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 ).
#vfx #cgi #cars #blender3d #blender #b3d #movies #filmmaking
Part 3: Developing a Way to do Action Scenes Without Money
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/cgi_vfx_part3.png)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 33 โค 1 ๐ฌ 2
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.
#vfx #cgi #cars #blender3d #blender #b3d #movies #filmmaking
AI is Box-Office poison
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/box_office_poison.png)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 20 โค 2 ๐ฌ 4
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.
#boxoffice #movies #ai #chatgpt #sora #cgi #vfx #film #cinemastodon
I bled for this Blender 3D Model
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/building_108.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 35 โค 3 ๐ 1 ๐ฌ 4
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.
#vfx #cgi #architecture #blender3d #blender #b3d #movies #filmmaking #health #medicine #art #mastoart #3dart #blender3dart
Developing a Way to do Action Scenes Without Money
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/vfx_honda.png)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 86 ๐ฌ 4
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.
#vfx #cgi #cars #blender3d #blender #b3d #movies #filmmaking
Lunatics! Episode 1 has dropped. And I have thoughts!!!
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/blenderdumbass/lunatics6.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 17 โค 3 ๐ 1 ๐ฌ 5
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.
#lunatics #openmovie #libre #blender3d #b3d #animation #review #movies #cinemastodon #film
Blue Steel 1990 is the seed that grew into the reason Avatar didn't win best picture
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/37/Blue_Steel_%281990_film%29.jpg/250px-Blue_Steel_%281990_film%29.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 12 โค 3 ๐ 1 ๐ฌ 3
So it's 1990 and Kathryn Bigelow writes and directs an action thriller about a police officer. The police officer is female and the movie almost refuses to sexualize her. Bigelow casts a nice half-Jewish girl Jamie Lee Curtis. And pretty much the whole movie, not a single shot of her emphasizes or admires her body ( apart from one sex scene where we see a very erotic closeup of her stomach ). Making that movie technically feminist. Few years later, in 1994, as James Cameron ( who was married to Bigelow between 1989 and 1991 ) is trying to find the actor to play the wife in his film True Lies. He is reminded of Blue Steel by Bigelow. And decides to cast Jamie Lee Curtis in his film. Giving us that very strange, almost pornographic scene where she does a very erotic strip-tease scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger. More than a decade later, in 2009, both Bigelow and Cameron make a movie. And both of those movies are nominated for the best picture. Yet Bigelow takes home the price. Did Cameron lose due to his pussy curse?
#bluesteel #KathrynBigelow #JamieLeeCurtis #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #michaelbay
Bad Boys 1995 is a Tarantino picture gone Bayhem!
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a8/Bad_Boys.jpg/250px-Bad_Boys.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 17 โค 1 ๐ฌ 3
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.
#badboys #michaelbay #willsmith #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Was the 2014 "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" directed by Michael Bay?
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/09/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_film_July_2014_poster.jpg/250px-Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_film_July_2014_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 16 โค 1 ๐ฌ 4
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.
#tmnt #michaelbay #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Havoc ( 2025 ) is a pornographically satisfying violence movie
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/54/Havoc_%282025_film%29.jpg/250px-Havoc_%282025_film%29.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 15 ๐ฌ 2
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.
#havoc #tomhardy #GarethEvans #film #review #movies #action #martialarts #cinemastodon
The Driver 1978 is not quite the original Drive from 2011
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a1/TheDriverPoster.jpg/250px-TheDriverPoster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
๐ 27 ๐ฌ 6
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.
#theDriver #WalterHill #action #film #movies #review #cinemastodon
Powered with BDServer
Plugins
Themes
Analytics
Contact
Mastodon