Speed Racer's Visual FX Uncovered 274
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.
Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think that's exactly fair. There is some way the movie could be good. The original Matrix had neat (maybe not original) effects but it also had a very sound core science fiction theme along with a lot of great drama and situations. The dialog wasn't the best but I thought the story was very very strong. My 50+ year old aunt and uncle watched it when it came out and the one thing they remember from it is the story. Not the special effects or dialog or who was in it but the possibility of this Man Vs Machine universe.
I'll admit when I saw the Speed Racer trailer, my brain didn't comprehend anything that happened. I couldn't tell who was what, what I was looking at or even what kind of conflict the movie centered on. I was utterly stupefied. I'm not afraid of admitting that, it was just confusing and I've never seen or read any Speed Racer material so I have no precursor or knowledge of what the theme is.
If this movie is relying 100% on its stunning visual effects, it's going to be a summer blockbuster and nothing more. It isn't going to age well and might go down as being a standard to watch on the latest plasma screen until next summer when a better movie comes out. There is, however, still a very likely possibility that one or more elements comes through to save the movie. Whether it be the directing, the acting, the story or even the music.
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:1, Interesting)
Sounds like it's true in some ways to the original "Speed Racer", HA HA.
Re:Go in with no expectations at all (Score:5, Interesting)
A little? Every time I see the trailer, I think to myself, I've got to go see that movie when I'm tripping balls. I just hope my eyeballs don't pop out of my head!
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they came out liking it, everyone would assert "Oh, they're a bunch of tools, the movie is teh l4m3".
I, for one, plan on going to see this flick and reverting to age 8 for an hour and a half, irrespective of whether the movie is so content-free as to qualify as a political speech.
Neener, neener, neener.
visuals remind me of Tron (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Go in with no expectations at all (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hollywood is dead to me (Score:3, Interesting)
And really? A Thundercats movie? That's just fucking sad.
why slashdot commentary bugs me so (Score:2, Interesting)
This film is certainly about visual appeal. But i can say that with just a teensy bit of knowledge in that domain, it is readily apparent to me that this is a spectacular triumph.
The film captures the recently popular technique called HDR or High Dynamic Range photography, but they manage to do it at 24 frames per second at IMAX resolutions and keep it going for 2 hours. All of the motion blur, lens flares and other camera artifacts are clearly intentional and separate from anything having to do with their cameras, most likely in order to emphasize a sense of scale or motion. Notice how the backgrounds are in focus, crisp and sharp along with the immediate foreground- this is surely the most essential element of creating the live action cartoon feel that the brief snippets of trailer are hinting at.
But the most important thing I'm able to extract from the limited glimpses I've had is that they employ all of this to convey the sense of big heavy cars racing at hundreds of miles per hour and flipping through the air as gracefully as a ballet troop in full deployment.
So what good does the optimistic assessment do me? For one thing, it gives me some joy in the anticipation. More importantly, I get the satisfaction of being truly sophisticated without sitting in a traffic jam down on Snark St.
Re:Why I hate blockbusters and CGI-fests (Score:5, Interesting)
Next time you see an ad for Crazy Animal Doing People Things starring Al Pacino as Every Character Al Panico Has Ever Played and Cameron Diaz as Generic Bimbo, just walk away.
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:3, Interesting)
My own interpretation is that the machines are actually obedient to the last drop. They are trying to create a perfect world for humans, and the entire contrivance that is the Matrix is really a massive system designed for the machines to understand what will constitute a perfect world for humanity. I think of the Oracle in the Matrix in the sense of the 'oracle Turing machine' described by Alan Turing in the paper "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals", as a special type of state that the machine can go into that consults an external 'oracle' that directs the evolution of the system in a way that might not be possible for an ordinary Turing machine.
The machines are not doing any of this for their own sake, which would actually make no sense at all to my mind, as all the effort they expend towards doing what they do would be pointless. The only problem was that the machines were mis-programmed in such a way that they elevated a sub-goal into a super-goal, in exactly the way described by Nick Bostrom here [nickbostrom.com] (section 4.4). Find a perfect world for humanity, the machines were asked, and they complied by placing all of humanity into a virtual world that it is constantly trying to manipulate to come across what it finds constitutes perfection for humanity.