Death to Lens Flares

I used to like lens flares. But after watching the 2012 remake of “Total Recall” (the boring CGI extravaganza starring some dude and Kate Whats-her-name) I just can’t stand them anymore. This movie is really shoving the OpticalFlares plugin into your face. It’s like an obnoxious mosquito in your room. STOP IT and get on with the plot already!

Oh. Right. Plot. That movie really has nothing else to offer but CG set extensions and optical flares.

Wait… what puts me into a position to criticize a movie that clearly has an audience? Me, who hasn’t even gone through script-writing classes? Well, as somebody who eats food I have a right to criticize a dish I didn’t like based on the fact that I’ve enjoyed a similar one in the past. I don’t have to be a cook myself 🙂 And since the internet is already full of movie criticism that nobody wants to read, I’m trying to blend some thoughts on look and VFX into my ramblings. So here we go.

If you freeze a single frame you can really see the hard work put in there by the VFX crew. I didn’t work on it but if it’s anything like the Hollywood shows I’ve worked on, it usually goes on and on like this for weeks:

Put some more sparks here, add a tiny glint over there.
Fix edge of hair on screen left.
Add more teeny-tiny holograms in the background that nobody’s gonna notice unless they print out single frames from the Blue-Ray and stare at them for a minute…

Awesome level of detail in Total Recall’s CGI set extensions (crop from HD trailer)

I can only image how many revisions the compositing artist made to the brightness of the roof to the left of Colin Farrell’s head until VFX supervisor and director were happy. 3? 5? But what good does this level of detail and photorealism do if somebody should have put more effort into script and characters instead?

I know, it’s a science-fiction movie. And the whole movie might be a dream anyways. But things like the elevator through the earth’s core or the floating buildings in the sky kept bothering me.

Questioning this kind of stuff isn’t really about questioning the thoughts that were put into a movie universe and its back story. Maybe it’s hinting at the fact that many look and set design decisions are an iterative process done in VFX postproduction (“hey, let’s put even more buildings into the background and make it look like they’re floating in the sky!”). There is one scene in Total Recall that shows how well it can work out when design decisions are rooted in the script instead: Quaid saves his life by disabling a robot soldier at lightning speed. He is able to loose two screws and rip out a circuit board in two seconds because he performed the reverse action for years while working at the robot assembly line.

But that’s not the point. Questioning sci-fi technology is more of a sign that what happens on screen just didn’t keep you engaged so your mind starts wandering. There are a lot of movie universes that I enjoy although their technology makes no sense if I start thinking about it for even a minute. The original “Total Recall” by director Paul Verhoeven is equally far out, but I can’t help but feel that Arnie’s Quaid/Hauser character was actually torn between what is true and what is just mindgames.

In 2012, Hauser/Quaid is just an underwear model being chased by a lingerie model through set pieces copied from other movies like “I, Robot” or “Minority Report”. Toned down for a PG-13 rating and the largest possible audience.

Just fire up an image search for “total recall” and compare the screenshots. Verhoeven’s version has left us with so many iconic images that still ring a bell 22 years later! Which of the top row of images will you recall in 2034?

In 1990 they weren’t afraid of saturated colors yet. 2012 is – of course – orange & teal.

To sum it up, “Total Recall (2012)” is boring stuff for guys like Mr Egan from the UK who shares this nugget in an IMDB review:

PS. How can a movie not have a 10/10 when it includes a woman with not Two but THREE whole breasts?

On my scale: 5/10 (the “mediocre waste of time but not horrible” level)

Moving Heaven And Earth

This August, I’ve been working at Sehsucht Hamburg on a commercial for Dodge Ram. It’s online now so watch it in all its glory:

Amongst other things, I was responsible for compositing the shot of the car bursting through the dust cloud, wire removal work on the eagle shots and the night-time “pack shot” at the end.

Software used: Nuke, Mocha
Full credit list available here.

Here’s a small breakdown video:

[flowplayer src=’videos/ram_breakdown.mp4′ width=640 height=360 splash=’ram_breakdown.jpg’]

Rolling Shutter Update

I’ve just updated my rolling shutter removal Fuse for Fusion. It implements the technique used by Syntheyes, where the center scanline is assumed to have been taken at the current frame (instead of the topmost scanline).

Here’s a white paper that explains the technique, but most of it isn’t applicable to my Fuse. In fact, the author of Syntheyes advises against messing with your footage in order to remove the effects of rolling shutter. My Fuse isn’t intended to be used on raw footage (pre match moving). Instead, it’s a finishing tool to reduce/remove distorting in case your shot exhibits unwanted wobbling due to the rolling shutter issue.

Looper: Closing a year of over-hyped sci-fi flicks.

Ok. Time-travel movies are impossible to get right. But come on… people have tried harder in the past.

Looper – the “next Matrix” or whatever it gets called in the hype machine that is cinema in 2012 – starts witty and fast, but its initial idea gets tangled up by time paradoxes and it gets slower and slower. The production design is nice, but the random outbursts of sadistic violence sickened me. Yes, Bruce Willis is bad-ass as always. But it feels like he was cast simply because Looper feels like a bad adaptation of Twelve Monkeys.

Instead of trying to evade time paradoxes, Looper’s script writers even go over the top in that they are introducing us to people with telekinetic abilities early on in the film. Then they completely forget about them and their implications on society for the rest of the movie (and about 30 years into the future).

Why not introduce fire-breathing dragons as well? If you can just get rid of time paradoxes at will and you already have X-Men in the movie… why not go ALL the way?

Still… 7 out of 10 for stylistically fusing the 1950s and 2040’s 🙂

What If?

The author of the infamous xkcd web comic also has a site about “answering hypothetical questions with physics”. Of course there’s the well-known “What if everybody jumped at the same time” question.

But how much energy could you get out of Yoda, if he used The Force to generate electricity?

Bastion

It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a real computer game. Usually I just spend some pennies on cheap iPhone games. But the reviews on this one convinced me: Bastion is a great hack & slash game.

I absolutely dig its style, which reminds you of Anime titles like “Castle in the Sky” or Nausicaä, where the world is heavily influenced by the presence of giant animals or monsters as well as fantasy technology that mixes swords and gunpowder.

The game’s story is pretty straight forward, and although it gives you the illusion of choice by deciding which weapon or skill to upgrade, it basically doesn’t matter to the plot and the order in which you have to fight through all the different levels. This, however, is no demerit! The game offers you about a dozen weapons to discover which can be upgraded in different ways. You can equip two at a time and are free to choose your combination. Each weapon has two modes of attack (usually a melee and a ranged one) and you have a shield that can also be used to attack.

The best thing about Bastion, however, is its voice acting. The game feels like an audio book. You learn about the plot and its back story piece by piece through narration which comments on your actions, sometimes foreshadows, but never gets repetitive. Check out this gameplay video to get an idea of how that works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05WZ57uhmNc

The voice actor they hired is seriously cool and he reminds me of something I’ve heard a couple of years ago on the album “Rough and Rare” by Yonderboi:

VFX/Nuke Blog

I’ve just discovered that Jan Burda, a very talented compositing artist I’ve worked with in the past, has opened up his own blog. He has written some Nuke tutorials, so head over to his place and have a look!