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:
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.
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 ).
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.
In 1994, just before Bad BoysMichael Bay directed a music video for a song "Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are" by Meat Loaf ( Michael Lee Aday ), which shows striking resemblance to his 2001 film Pearl Harbor and has some interesting choices that echo throughout his career. Choices that beg for a psycho-sexual analysis.
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.
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.
Our main character Ivan Danko ( Arnold Schwarzenegger ) is introduced with a shot showing his magnificent muscular butt-cheeks, right before a fight breaks out between naked men in the snow, all trying to scream words and sentences in Russian, sounding utterly stupid doing so. That is how Red Heat, a 1988 Walter Hill movie, begins.
There is a certain sense among cinephiles that the danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier is nothing but an edge lord, making his films simply as a sort of pornography designed to outrage people. It does not help his case that his films are some of the hardest films to watch. And it doesn't help that his movies tend to touch upon uncomfortable things in very uncomfortable ways. Yet I don't believe Lars Von Trier does any of that for laughs.