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".

Play

It's a live-action action short, shot on a budget of mere $0 ( if you are not counting the electricity ). The cars themselves were made in Blender, while the live-action part of the film is shot on a very cheap Canon Power-Shot camera.

This short film was a part of The 8 Year Olds project. In the end of that film's script I written a car chase scene. And since I wanted to persuade a real Israeli company to make it, I had to prove that a car chase could be done very cheaply. So I did this short.

This short is also the first movie that I made with variable aspect ratio. For a very long time big movies with sequences designed for the IMAX experience had special shots shot on different cameras. Usually most of the dialogue and boring scenes are shot on 35 mm film using an anamorphic lens. Those are the regular wide-screen frames that you are probably familiar with. IMAX has it's own film format. It's 55 mm and it's a lot taller than the regular anamorphic picture. But it's also a lot more expensive. So movie productions tend to use it only when the shot deserves a special treat. So it's used for action scenes, or for epic composition shots. Suddenly the frame "opens up" height-wise and the sharpness of the picture quadruples. And you take in the epic shot as a lot more epic than what it could be in a regular movie. You can see this effect very profoundly in films like The Dark Knight, Tron Legacy, Interstellar, Transformers 5, Tenet and many others. I did it here too. Sometimes the frame is full 16:9 and sometimes it's widescreen. I tried choosing aspect ratios to give a certain feel to the movie. I hope I succeeded.

Another fun fact is that I tried to hide the fact that the movie was shot on a crappy camera by intentionally adding more noise. I tried to emulate the look of the 16 mm film. Which is weird, because the jumps of aspect ratios happen usually only to 55 mm. Which is not even close to be similar in look or in feel.


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