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 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.
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.
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 ).
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'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.
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.
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.
Suppose a family, fleeting from abuse, comes seeking shelter. Do you hesitate to take them in, provide for the basic needs, when the cause of their hardship is an old nemesis of yours. One whose family and yours have been at war since time memorial.
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?
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?
We are living in the most exciting era when it comes to M. Night Shyamalan. The era I would call "A lottery". M. Night started strong. Critical acclaim and commercial success hit him hard, when he was a young film-maker. They were calling him "the next Spielberg". Then doubt possessed his sole. Some critics said something about something he did. And there he went. On a downward spiral towards the bottom. The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth... M. Night never truly recovered from this turmoil. He did great films since: The Visit, Split, Knock at the Cabin. But he then made strangely not so great films in between: Glass, Old, the strangely The Happening esque ending of Knock at the Cabin. Going today to an M. Night Shyamalan movie is truly a lottery. You never know what you are gonna get. With Trap we all got a fucking jack-pot!