Speed Racer's Visual FX Uncovered

Marco Trezzini writes "View exclusive interactive samples of the digital building blocks behind the Speed Racer movie in VRMag's in-depth interviews with award-winning Matrix visual FX guru John Gaeta, Dennis Martin, Lubo Hristov, and Jake Morrison. Including Virtual Reality panoramas of the movie locations, turn tables of the mach 5 and 6, and many making of videos unveiling the secrets of the visual effects. Link to 'Speed Racer uncovered' and to John Gaeta's interview." The first time I saw the trailer for this movie, my jaw hit the floor. Nobody makes live action "Cartoons" that look like this. I guess that makes me believe there is no way the movie can be good.

Re:Why the Instant Dismissal?

[KlomDark]

They changed to the "humans as batteries" because they judged the average viewer coudn't comprehend the idea of "humans as co-processors" idea in the original story. So it got Hollywooded, and we are all slightly dumber for it having been changed to a "lowest common denominator" story. :(

Why I hate blockbusters and CGI-fests

[elrous0]

$100 million on the special effects

$40 million for the leading man and leading woman

$100,000 for the script

Re:Why the Instant Dismissal?

[SCHecklerX]

The science of the Matrix was pretty laughable, I mean the machines are smart enough to build human farms, but too dumb to use satellites to capture solar power.

To me, it makes more sense that the humans were part of the computing power that gave the machines intelligence. That would also explain a lot of other things in the movie. The nice thing about the matrix is they didn't try to explain everything, allowing you to figure out what you would (the battery thing was a dumbed-down idea that could have been done much better, IMHO).

Re:It's not "Speed Racer!"

[Junta]

Not to mention the fact that Anime tend towards trying to make animation as real as possible,

No, by and large that is not what Anime tends to do. There are examples of attempts to look realistic, but by far they attempt to show fantastical and/or exaggerated things/colors. Take one look at the chosen color palette for a work of Anime, and it's obvious they are not even aiming for realism. Other things like using eye size to roughly indicate goodness/innocence, all the various exagerrated cues, etc etc. For example, Ghost In the Shell, I could see being argued as aiming for realistic color schemes/physiology, while Armitage deviates. Those are two pieces of sci-fi drama relatively close in genre with different artistic styles.

Speed Racer definitely fell into the category of unrealistic/stylized on purpose, so it seems an appropriate fit.

But then at the end of a day, it's just supposed to be a fun movie, and we miss the fun by overanalyzing it to death.

Re:Why the Instant Dismissal?

[Anonymous Coward]

"thermodynamically the whole human battery thing never made any sense to me. "

It was never supposed to. Nearly all the information fed to Zion by the machines, and subsequently relayed by Morpheus to Neo in the first film, was obvious, obvious falsehood.

The truth:

The machines 'scorched the sky' to protect themselves from Humanity. Humans are dependent on solar power, not machines -- no sane human capable of using such technology would ever willingly do it. On the other hand, making humans dependent on machines to survive as a species keeps them from attempting to destroy Machinekind (as they attempted to do in the first Human/Machine war).

The machines kept humans in the Matrix because the machine society was programmed not to let the human race go extinct. Only a human with admin rights to the Matrix servers could make the decision to end Mankind (although individual humans are clearly expendable).

Humans raised in the Matrix don't know anything about the laws of thermodynamics because the Machines control everything they learn. So it makes total sense to people trying to escape it that the machines could somehow be dependent on humans, rather than the other way around, and it's important to the machines that Zion believes this -- the whole purpose of Zion is to get people out of the Matrix that don't fit in, if they realized they were doing something beneficial to the system they might stop. Everything Zion knows about the conflict was, likewise, given to them by the machines, so they've no real way to figure out what's going on. That old guy who talked to Neo in the second film seemed to have an inkling of the situation, but had no hard-science context to express it with since he'd never learned any real science.

Needless to say, none of the Matrix AI programs would have any need to understand physics outside of the Matrix either.

Re:Why the Instant Dismissal?

[vrmlguy]

Also, the science in movies like 2001 and Bladerunner is laughable from some peoples' perspectives. You can't hold your breath and go into a vacuum without rupturing your lungs, but this is done in 2001. That may seem minor to a layman, but if you are someone in the field of space travel, it might look like space opera to you.

From http://physics.suite101.com/blog.cfm/how_to_survive_a_vacuum [suite101.com]:

If you have the misfortune of being exposed to a vacuum, for instance, if you are a character in a science fiction story, your body will not explode, but your blood and other fluids may boil, given a long enough exposure. Frost will form in your mouth as your saliva rapidly evaporates. Your ears will pop. Eventually you will die of asphyxiation, if you haven't already had a heart attack from panic.

You have about a minute and a half to get to safety. Before exposure, or immediately after initial exposure, you should exhale and remove all the air from your lungs. Otherwise, the air pressure will rupture the delicate alveoli, the air sacs, in your lungs. That is not an injury that's easy to recover from. There is not much else you can do.

The only accurate depiction of vacuum exposure in fiction can be found in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie the main character is exposed very briefly, and handles the situation well.