Prometheus

I enjoyed that movie. Even though it had a bunch of silly moments they didn’t ruin the movie for me as they did in “The Dark Knight Rises“.

The movie’s genre is less science fiction (since everything in the plot that has a “science” label on it is so stupid it hurts) and more a stock splatter/horror movie where people get killed off one by one because of their obviously stupid and careless actions. The plot is advanced by stupidity only, to be honest. If anybody would act like scientists instead of school children on a field trip to the zoo, there would be no plot.

But again, that didn’t keep me from enjoying Prometheus. It was adequately scary and gross and there was a lot of eye-candy. I don’t care if it doesn’t answer some things or whether it is a seamless prequel to Alien. So yes, I liked it for its looks, not for its personality.

What made me scratch my head though was Roger Ebert’s raving four-star review of Prometheus. Magnificent – intriguing – spellbinding! Seriously? It was high production value popcorn cinema. But it certainly doesn’t deserve adjectives that Ebert usually uses on obscure art-house dramas.

The 3D trailer for Resident Evil, on the other hand, was the worst thing I ever had to endure behind stereo glasses.

Link: The Editing Room’s abridged script for Prometheus touches on all the plot holes.

7/10 (the “better than average” level)

Object Removal Video Tutorial

My next video tutorial for Fusion is online. It’s about removing objects (a shadow in this case) from a shot using a 3D matchmove, some scene geometry and automated white-balance matching. You can download the complete project and footage as well. Yeah, it’s a home video of mine but the technique has proven valuable on various shows already.

It can also be easily transferred to Nuke.

Related to this: freezing cameras for projection setups just got a whole lot easier with this script.

Also slightly related to this: on some other blog I’ve found a link to these vintage VFX educational videos. The whole thing has an 80s air to it but the names of the presenters should ring a bell 🙂 Well-known gurus like Ron Brinkmann and Stu Maschwitz are among them.

The Dark Knight Thumbs Down

Christopher Nolan’s supposed masterpiece finale is a dud. A movie so stupid it’s insulting.

I used to scoff at those guys who seemed to remember every plot hole in movies they’ve watched. Reading their reviews or the fake scripts at the-editing-room.com is funny but I think “wow, that never struck me during the movie, the mood was right and the action covered it up, these guys really have no life”.

Not with The Dark Knight Rises. It’s just full of god-awful plot holes and one deus ex machina after another. It just ruined the movie for me.

Bruce Wayne goes from geriatric to Ninja using a handy knee gadget he had lying around in his lab. Then he gets almost beaten to death but then gets his spine fixed by a slap on the back from a cave doctor somewhere in a generic Arabian country and – boom – after some bench pressing he can jump again like a world class athlete.

All of Gotham City’s 3000 cops are trapped in the sewers for three months. After they finally get out, they are clean-shaven and are wearing untarnished uniforms.

The film’s big surprise plot twist at the end is surprising only because it’s the most random thing the scriptwriters could think of. And thinking they didn’t do much. Every girl in the film (that’s 2) gets to be a love interest. To make up for the lack of estrogen, there’s the most amount of man-tears a mainstream action movie has had so far. Bruce Wayne, his butler, even the bad guy… they all get to bawl when they are confronted with their childhood memories.

Seriously, how can that movie get an IMDB score of 9.0? Don’t tell me that action movies have always had these plot holes. What else does that film have left? Fist fights? The most non-aerodynamic flying machine ever seen on screen since the Jetsons? A nuclear mushroom cloud that looks comped in like from an AfterEffects tutorial?

Meh.

Movie Bob’s Reviews

If you don’t know the movie reviews by Bob “Movie Bob” Chipman you should head over to his “weekly column”. I like his approach of using super cheap videos edited from movie trailers and clipart graphics while he’s giving 5-minute rants and monologues about movies.

He’s surprisingly critical of most recent blockbuster movies but he backs up his stance with knowledge about each movie’s predecessors as well as screenplay theories. Basically, he’s giving short lectures about movies and their connections rather than just coming across as a bitter fanboy who sneers at mainstream cinema. Here’s a sample for a mediocre movie that I’ve happened to worked on 🙂 More can be found on his website.

Object Removal Teaser

This is an old post. Head over to the final version of this tutorial.

I’m in the process of recording another video tutorial about camera projections. This time, I’ll demonstrate a real-life example of how to remove objects (a shadow on the ground in this case) from a shot. Ok, it’s a home video of mine, not a real shot from one of my projects. But I have employed this technique on actual shows and this shaky video of mine is much more challenging than a perfect film scan.

Here’s a preview:

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle

Now that’s some eye-opening ideas on how programming could be like if we broke free from the decades-old paradigm of writing code in a text editor, compiling, looking at the result, modifying code, ad infinitum.

Instead, Bret Victor proposes an IDE that not only executes your code while you type, but also clearly shows you what’s going on in your algorithm without you having to insert debugging statements everywhere.

He takes it further into designing electronic circuits, where software is replacing pen & paper while keeping the heritage of a pen & paper world of yesteryear. The circuit designer still has to simulate and anticipate the effects of his design in his head.

Invest 40 minutes of your time. It’s worth it 🙂

Resident Evil WTF?!

Hier ist der Trailer zur neuesten Inkarnation der anscheinend niemals endenden Resident Evil-Reihe. Nicht dass ich überhaupt wüsste, bei welchem Teil wir inzwischen angelangt sind. Die Macher wollen auch gar nicht, dass man mitzählt. Stattdessen konkurrieren sie mit “Underworld” um Beiworte: Retribution. Revolution. Re… was auch immer.

Ich will auch gar nicht darüber spekulieren, was für ein Crap der Film vielleicht wird – der Trailer spricht für sich und die YouTube-Kommentare zeigen, dass es dennoch genug Zuschauer gibt, die das ganze aufsaugen, um weitere Teile zu rechtfertigen. That’s business, und wo soll die gute Milla denn sonst mitspielen, wenn nicht in Filmen, die ihr Ehegatte für sie schreibt und produziert.

Aber wo ich mich vor Lachen weggeschmissen habe, waren die unglaublich schlechten VFX in einer Szene. Ich kann nur hoffen, dass das Zeug noch work in progress ist (nicht unüblich für frühe Trailer), und dass ich keinen Arbeitskollegen unwissentlich auf die Füße trete 🙂 Denn diese Shots sehen sowas von billig aus, das kriegen Leute auf YouTube mit AfterEffects besser hin.

Man beachte die stumpfe halbtransparente Explosion im 2. Bild, überhaupt die ganze seltsame inkonsistente Lichtstimmung aus Studiolicht-Greenscreen-Menschen und einem Wolkenfoto im Hintergrund, das sämtliche Perspektive vermissen lässt.

Das dritte Bild: keinerlei Tiefeneindruck, die hintersten Flugzeuge so crisp wie die vorderen… Dazu die heutzutage obligatorischen horizontalen Star-Trek-Lensflares auf jeder Scheißlampe, die aber im Gegensatz zu anderen Trash-Filmen wie BattleShip ein Schritt zurück in die 90er-Jahre sind. Im letzten Bild kommt der überbelichtete Himmel dagegen sehr gut, auch wenn die Explosionen einen kitschigen Glow drauf haben. Ich verweise nur auf einen früheren Blogeintrag zum Thema “realistische Explosion“.