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.
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.
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.
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 ).
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?
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.
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:
Watching the opening scene of Brian De Palma's 1998 film Snake Eyes makes you realize that this motherfucker is trying very hard. We have 13 minutes of Nicolas Cage running around a very crowded set. The scene is clever with its camera, giving us multiple layers of exposition in the same time. Like there could be a TV on the foreground and Cage on the background. And they seem unrelated at first, but the scene establishes most of it's plot details right in this very shot. And then the shot ends ( 13 minutes later ) at the exact moment, the script drops the "inciting incident". De Palma is really trying hard to direct the shit out this movie.
Ever since Piranha IIJames Cameron shown his friendship with Luc Besson. Both directors are obsessed with marine biology, both are obsessed with strong female characters and both have a strange fascination with the youth. Luc Besson's Leon, The Family and Arthur films have strong child characters in some rather fucked up situations. James Cameron with Aliens, Terminator 2 and the Avatar franchise does the same thing. But have you ever thought how similar both the Terminator and Leon actually are?
In my review of Ambulance I argued that Michael Bay is the Lars Von Trier of action. And now I gonna argue that Pain & Gain ( his 2013 crime comedy ) is the most Lars Von Trier he ever been.