Hansel & Gretel: Wife Beaters
The-Editing-Room.com has a humorous script of Hansel & Gretel which I watched recently as well. After being slightly enthusiastic about the trailer’s vfx and steam punk-y flair I gotta say that Hansel & Gretel is an even bigger piece of crap than I had feared.
I can recommend it for people who enjoy watching women being hit into the guts and faces with blunt objects.
“Believe me, honey, this hurts me more than it hurts you.”
“Hello, I’d like to apply for the position of screenwriter. I have recently divorced my wife and am willing to weave my sick revenge fantasies into the plot…”
I applaud the movie for using make-up effects for witches and trolls, some aerial shots looked like well-done miniatures and a lot of splatter stuff felt like practical SFX as well. I don’t need this to be VFX all the time. Had they been consistent with it, the movie might have been a little gem in an era of CGI.
But towards the end – or rather mere seconds before the credits start rolling – we are treated with some top-notch bullet-time Krakatoa particles full-CG expensive eyecandy which feels awkwardly out of place. After all, the first 99% of the movie’s effects were not much better than what TV shows like Buffy or Grimm are doing. For example, not a single witch-flying-away-on-broom effect looked good.
I don’t really accuse it of weirdly budgeted effects or even plot inconsistencies. Come on, it’s a popcorn fantasy movie. I accuse it of being boring boring boring. That feeling creeps in after just a couple of minutes of watching dialog scenes that consist mostly of awkward silence. It’s like the actors are thinking “I’ve delivered my line, why doesn’t anybody yell “CUT” already?!” and it shows on their faces.
That, and the misogyny.
rating: 3/10 (the “way below expectations” level where it’s in the company of Uwe Boll productions like “BloodRayne” or “Alone in the Dark”)
Trailer Shot
The fruits of my labor (and Jan’s plus of a bunch of other hard-working colleagues in lighting, animation and fx simulation of course).
Pacific Rim
Wow, this looks like a well-made life action version of Neon Genesis Evangelion!
httpvh://youtu.be/zA92Rw6kNWw
And maybe it’s actually enjoyable because apparently it doesn’t go the Transformers route of US military porn with a douchebag teenager and a tits and ass girlfriend. But after having suffered through Transformers with people around me drooling everytime they saw Megan Fox on screen… I’m kinda worried that today’s audiences actually expect a giant robot movie to have these things 🙂
Light Swoosh
Here’s a quick test for a particle effect done in Fusion.
Music: “Dance of the Gypsy” by Jeris (feat. A.M. mews by MommaLuv SKyTower)
licensed under a Creative Commons license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
You can download the comp here. It demonstrates a few other things like linear gamma, lens flares and glows. You need the Time3D fuse from vfxpedia and the Krokodove plugins.
Roger Ebert has died
I’ve just read this on MovieBob’s blog.
Sad story. I’ve read Ebert’s Journal a lot, mainly because he had a really great style of writing when he ripped apart bad movies.
update:
I’ve read Ebert’s wikipedia page. Reading about his recurring cancer treatments is tough stuff and it’s touching to see how he kept doing what he loved (reviewing movies) even though he had to use a speech synthesizer for the past few years. It’s also uplifting to read some of his past blog posts (especially the latest one which is dated one day before his death) that radiate so much appreciation for other peoples work, art and nature.
Wikipedia has this quote from him:
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.
This is something I’ve also heard people like Richard Dawkins say. It’s a nicely worded atheistic viewpoint. But I think it’s probably also one that requires a great deal of courage the closer you get.
Lesser-Known Fusion Features
Made another video tutorial:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ_yXEZ2OeQ
This one is a quick tour of a couple of lesser-known features in eyeon Fusion: changing the frame step size, proxy footage for loaders, hotkeys for roto, view and subview settings, local render queue, hardware status.
You might already know some of those “secrets”, but they pop up every now and then on forums so I thought I’d collect them into a small video.
Als ich einmal einen Film schauen wollte…
Auch wenn ich in der Filmbranche arbeite habe ich selten Zeit oder Lust auf Kino. Da wollte ich doch mal sehen, ob ich “Hänsel & Gretel” bequem vom Laptop aus anschauen kann – besonders weil ich damit rechnen muss, dass der Film ja doch nichts taugt. Also, iTunes Store aufgemacht und dann das…
Gibt’s eigentlich eine Möglichkeit, das ganze NOCH unübersichtlicher zu machen? Ein Layout mit Zeilen und Spalten, Thumbnails in verschiedenen Größen, jede Zeile kann ich auch nochmal horizontal scrollen.
Es scheint einen Unterschied zwischen “Leihfilmen” und “Filmen in HD” zu geben – und wenn ich auf “Leihfilme” klicke wird das ganze noch schlimmer. Eine Thumbnail-Wüste ohne Einteilung in Genres oder Qualität wird einfach über mir ausgekippt. Das ganze ist schlimmer als damals in einer Videothek, bei der man auch ewig durch die Regale gegangen ist und Meterweise Straight-to-VHS-Schund durchforsten musste. Und es ist ja nicht so als wäre das Angebot hier besser. Die Mainstream-Soße von Twilight und Till Schweiger wird oben groß gefeatured. Wer weiß ob es gute Filme in der Thumbnail-Wüste irgendwo gibt. Lust, danach zu suchen habe ich nicht. Dabei hab ich noch nichtmal über das Preismodell gesprochen.
