Originally published at: How Marvel Studios locks in most of their movie visuals years before the cast is set | Boing Boing
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Blockquote no matter how good a movie is on its own, it’s always going to end in some kind of weird CGI train fight like in Black Panther .
Peyton Reed: “Okay, but you’ll have to do a deal with the Thomas the Tank Engine people.”
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I know you’re merely referencing this @thomdunn, but I really don’t understand the negative attitude toward the MCU films. I am, admittedly biased as I grew up in the late 70s - 90s in which most of the storylines originated and was heavily invested in comics, but the idea that it’s some sort of degradation of cinema is laughable, at best. The vast majority of cinema has always been trash and all of it has pandered to specific demographics. The earliest silent film directors dove immediately into pushing hard in developing disbelief-suspending visual trickery and it hasn’t let up since; they just look more realistic now. The MCU was able to crank out 21 films in 12 years that are almost all regarded as good-to-excellent films on their own merits and also weave an incredibly complex storyline encompassing more character arcs than War and Peace (ok, not really). It all just strikes me as “kids these days” reactivity. This video really substantiates how thoughtful and methodical they were in bringing the source material to life.
Now, the DC films… they’re just bad. This has been your hot take of the day.
Edited for clarity.
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What motion-picture studio doesn’t ultimately make a product?
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Half of Renaissance painting was about visual FX.
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It’s called storyboarding. It has been around since there were movies, and it probably dates much farthere back for live theater. The writers work with the visual artists and produce a comic strip with words and pictures as was done for the cover movie in Argo.
You need this more with visual media than verbal narrative. A writer doesn’t have to worry about blocking, where people and things are in the scene, if the end product is a sequence of words, but if the story is going to be acted out or animated someone has to worry about it, ideally before screwing it gets too expensive to fix.
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Yes. Except the first Wonder Woman movie.
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I assumed he meant “extremely expensive products that have to appeal to the broadest international audience possible”. Previs makes perfect sense in those terms, especially when a studio is pushing out two such pictures a year, plans to keep doing so, and wants to continue being seen as creating quality work.
Also, certain action directors (read: Michael Bay) could do with constraints like third-party previs to make their big FX-heavy scenes more coherent and intelligible to the viewer.
On the rare occasions when a Marvel movie falls flat, the fault usually lies with writers who try to take a “kitchen sink” approach by throwing in every hero and villain they can without creating a narrative that can hold them in a coherent and satisfying way. It can’t be blamed on the characters they’re given to work with or on previs that emerges from their stories. Marvel generally learns from these lessons, though, especially since Disney bought the studio.
I like Nolan’s Batman films, but they sort of stand apart from the rest of the DC movies.
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The difference here is story boarding is typically done by the creative/directing team after a script is written in prep for shooting. And well after visual design is set.
What happens with Marvel Studios is some of that work is done centrally by effectively an editorial group before anyone is hired to make the movie itself.
A specific story boarder translates the script under direction of the director and core tech staff. Cinematographer and what have.
It is not a comic strip. But effectively a chart of shots and framing guides. Often times involves no words or only set and camera directions. And may not involve any of the visual design elements of the production at all, at their simplest being basically stick figures with arrows to indicate camera and lighting elements.
It is an organizational tool used to convey the director’s intent to crew (and cast), and later a structural guide for post. They’re typically quite incoherent and very rough outside of that context.
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Hey, that’s not fair. It could also end in a CGI fight against faceless minions with a skybeam.
I at least thought that was a clever way to subvert the Obligatory CGI Battle Sequence
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Exactly. I was meaning “product” like “content” to distinguish from “a film with an inherent artistic intention.”
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I love the Marvel movies just like I love super hero comics. I was just trying to nod to the fact that, yes, they’re also big-money products for the Disney corporation, and thus carry all the same mass market baggage as any popcorn flick.
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I liked Wonder Woman and Shazam and the half of Aquaman I got to see on a plane trip a while back.
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To be fair, I don’t dismiss that there’s an inherent artistic intention in the MCU movies. There are talented and thoughtful creatives involved in them who do try to bring something more to them than lots of explosions and fights and CGI. While I haven’t watched it, I hear WandaVision is apparently doing some innovative things within the genre.
But yes, the primary goal of Marvel is to produce content that will generate a lot of money by pleasing an international lowest-common denominator audience. In the case of Marvel/Disney that’s not something I’ll turn up my nose at, since they don’t cheap out on achieving that goal and also have a commitment to quality.
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I mean one time it ended with the hero dying like so many times. Basically annoying a giant space face into going away.
One could make the obvious point that they’ve been storyboarding these movies since the sixties; they’re comic book movies, and they work very much like how Marvel comics have always worked.
If you look at the multi-volume Handbook of the Marvel Universe from the eighties, not only does it contain much of the plot, characters and imagery from the MCU movies, it’s recognisably the same overarching idea, which is to create a giant imaginative space that’s sufficiently weird and exaggerated to allow decades’ worth of sci-fi, horror, war and romance stories to be mashed into a single mega-narrative (even when those stories retell and contradict one another many times).
All blockbuster adaptations are translated into over-the-top spectacle, driven by exciting set pieces. The difference with the MCU films is, that’s already their native language.
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I’d much rather see what Edgar Wright had in mind.
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I was never much into comic books growing up, but was fascinated by portions of the OHOTMU that I read during 9th grade electronics class. Had it not been for that background knowledge, I don’t think the MCU movies would have clicked as fully for me. Even now, every time some new character, species, or world is introduced, it rings a faint bell from that era.
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I think the criticism from directors is culture clash. I think Hollywood is too obsessed with the idea of an auteur director and directors aren’t happy being “cast” like actors are—they’re probably unfamiliar with the process, too.
This “previs the whole movie” is exactly what animated movies have done since Snow White. They usually have two directors, nobody knows their names, and they’re there for ~5 years for the project. This would shock a film director but is necessary for planning and budget reasons.
This is only tangentially related: I heard the Cinematographer Roger Deakins speak comparing live action and CG (he consulted on movies like Wall-E and How to Train at our Dragon). He said CG is awesome because you can put a light anywhere and don’t have to worry if they’re in frame or have to hide it behind something, but the process is miserably slow. He can go shoot a whole feature and come back a few months later and they’re working on the same sequence.
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