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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".

So James Cameron is in Italy, having a fever. I mean of course he is. He was just involved in a nightmare project that is Piranha II. While there he has this fever dream of a nightmarish scenario. A metal skeleton coming out of a fire.



Being a descent artist Cameron sketched his dream into a painting. And then reverse engineered a story around said painting. What is this metal skeleton? Why is he scary? What is this fire? And so on and so forth.

This gave Cameron a kick-ass movie-script. A movie-script for The Terminator.

He went from studio to studio trying to pitch his script to various people. And those people liked the script. There was one problem though. He insisted on directing this movie himself. And all he had to show was fucking Piranha II which he himself was ashamed of. Obviously nobody wanted to work with a "first time director" ( because obviously he didn't tell nobody about the Piranha movie ), until he found Gale Anne Hurd. She decided to risk it with Cameron and bought the rights for The Terminator for $1. And also ended up marrying James Cameron. With her help they managed to pull $6.4 million ( which is not a lot of money for a movie like this ) and that allowed him to actually make the damn thing.

Watching The Terminator after Avatar 3 or something is quite a strange experience. Back in those days James Cameron didn't have all the money in the world. He couldn't make every shot absolutely perfectly. Hell The Terminator is a low budget, effects picture.

Some scenes feature a vary noticeable stop motion effect of the terminator skeleton. Stop motion always looks a little fake because of it's hand made jittery nature and complete luck of motion blur. ILM in the 80s found a way to use a computer controlled camera to add camera motion blur to stop motion shots. But the movement of the limbs and stuff, of the puppet itself would always be motion-blur-less. Which makes it stand out from the rest of the film.

In a lot of scenes ( where-ever possible ) instead of the stop-motion Terminator they used a puppet. These look a lot better because the motion is smoother and there is proper motion blur. But the puppet has less articulation. So there is a tradeoff.

As far as I can see, the majority of the action scenes depicting the war with the machines in the future is done with a heavy usage of rear-projection. Some miniatures or even drawings are shot onto a piece of film, for the background. That is then projected onto a big screen ( kind of like a cinema screen ). And in front of which they put a set for the actors. James Cameron would use a lot of the same rear-projection stuff later on Aliens.

In a way, if not for rear projection, this movie would not have happened. Of course you could technically use a blue screen and an optical printer to achieve these shots. But those types of shots look way worse usually. Compositing of hair, for example is still challenging even for digital tools in 2026. Imagine trying to make good looking shots for an entire war sequence in 1984 on film. With no computer in sight. The choice to use rear-projection instead, was pretty much obvious.

In the chase scenes, this film uses under-cranking ( shooting slower, so the footage plays faster than it was ). Usually under-cranking with cars looks like shit. Car physics and car weight and stuff looks funny when the footage is sped up. But somehow Cameron managed to largely avoid this here. I mean, the shots were relatively simple. Which means that less of the car physics is visible. And therefor less of this funny feeling is present. But he also cuts frequently to shots on normal speed, to try to throw you off from the technique used. And it works very well.

No wonder this movie was a hit.

Moral of the story: If a first time director comes to you with a kick-ass script which doesn't seem to need too much money. Go for it. You may land of new James Cameron. c:1

Happy Hacking!!!

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  Troler c:0 February 27, 2026




It was rare, now it's extinct

  Troler c:1 February 27, 2026




Is that line intended to advertise your movie - The 8 year olds?

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