I’d say there’s truth to everything in there. But it’s a certain kind of truth. Most shots in most movies are about actors. Actors framed from their torso up or a closeup of just their face and shoulders. So for the cars smashing being “only about 30%-40% of the film,” yeah, it’s 30-40% of the film. The rest is actors sitting behind a wheel pretending to be driving. It’s because you don’t want to actually make actors drive cars.
They’re busy pretending to be someone else with a huge emotional burden with ten strangers and a crowd of lights sitting on one side while thinking about how they need to finish their move at the right time so the editor can match with another shot and not have to throw the whole thing away for continuity. All while someone from the film company paces around talking about how much money they’re spending. On top of that, Theron makes twenty million to do a film. You don’t take an insurance cost like that and say “get in front of that explosion,” you swap out a similar looking person who has accepted that they receive a sum of money to possibly die while making this movie.
There’s a lot of closeups of actors crawling around vehicles. People aren’t going to put a crane rig out in the desert and have drivers move parallel for a hundred feet, they’re going to stay in a medium shot and fill in some details later. But the long shots, where trucks are driving and they are blowing up and wrecking into stuff? That is totally happening and that’s a rarity these days. So is having actors crawl across those cars in the first place. If you can animate Pratt talking to a trio of raptors, why bother building an expensive car and flying it to the middle of nowhere? Because the real thing shoots better and sells the audience the story.
Pickups like the mouth and lips? That gets really expensive pretty quickly. A post-production cost for something like this is about 2-3 times the cost to just put her in costume and say the line.
And that has been going on forever in movies. Just that the projected backgrounds are way better these days.
Also can you imagine the cost/risk/logistics of a long dialog and driving sequences in something like Fury Road if you are actually moving the whole time? Over yep lets just mount this on a frame for the rocking motion, some fans for wind, and take out the scaffolding and add moving background in post?
No, we’re talking about the closeups, see this link, near the end there is video where Furiosa is climbing over a car. It’s not physically moving because that would be dangerous as hell without a visible harness and whatnot. So, while the effect of her climbing all over the real car is real, the cars are not actually in motion at the speed they would appear to be, which is a logistical/fiduciary nightmare that Hollywood has long figured out how to solve.
ugh. i think transformers looks horrible. the stories – if there are any, can’t tell – gets undermined by a terrible sense of space, proportion, weight, and lighting.
if the entire movie was cg – no practicals, no real world sets – it might work. ( the shot choice and editing would still need lots of work. ) but, the contrast between the cg that’s present and the real world – i think it’s at the very lowest end of the big budget movies.
( the one thing they do excel at is basically exploding your brain into oblivion. i think that’s basically why people keep going. )
And if you watch similar stuff from the 30s it is totally obvious they do that as the had a static car/airplane/whatnot with the oh so obvious back projection running. The dangerous stuff is all done in a long shot and in very short takes.
Heh.
I will argue the first Michael Bay one was fun and enjoyable because the story didn’t pretend to be anything more than lets have big robots fight each other on earth. The rest…well I got nothing.
As a big fan of the comics as a kid (although not the TV series, oddly), I argued for years that a live action version was technically doable .
Definitely by the time this advert came out.
And I really thought that there was enough in the comics by Bob Budiansky and Simon Furman that could be turned into movie plots (almost certainly nostalgia talking, I’m sure the extended toy-advert aspect of the 80s stuff would be more obvious to me these days).
But then they gave the job to Bay, and decided to go with incomprehensible CGI wankfests that last for ever, have so much motion blur and camera movement that you can’t tell what’s going on, dumped almost all of the old robot designs and characterization, and ruined the whole thing.
yeah! one thing cg does allow are stories which would be literally impossible to depict otherwise. it’s super cool what some teams are able to put together.
( i do feel bad for some directors. they place the cg as the core element of a scene, point to it with every shot, and shout: “hey everybody, isn’t this cool?” meanwhile, everyone watching – and probably the art team as well – is groaning: “no!” )
The examples you quote are not “CG”, they are compositing. CG is (the dumb term for) creating imagery with digital tools. Compositing is the combining of different existing elements in the same frame.
not to mention the infinite use of the music from inception:
[H]ow does Zimmer feel when he sees a new commercial that apes his bold Inception score? “Oh, it’s horrible! … even I get confused!.. By the time we got to The Dark Knight Rises, the studio sent over a trailer with that temp track, and they actually apologized for it. They said, 'We put the Inception music in there because we didn’t know what else to do."
…
So where did all those BRAMMS originally come from? “That sound was in the script,”
Ah, nothing like a sequel of a remake of a movie of an urban legend.
But The Scorpion King 4 is my favorite direct-to-video sequel of a sequel of a sequel of a spinoff prequel of a sequel of a remake of a movie of an urban legend.
