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.

http://vimeo.com/36579366

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 🙂

Waidmann’s Heil

Hut ab vor der Leistung der involvierten Werbeagentur. Das Plakat klingt ja so, als hätten sie ein Picknick im Atomkraftwerk an den Mann bringen sollen.

Aber das Rehkitz ist nachträglich reinkopiert, oder?

(gesehen in München)

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“.

Fusion Script and Macro Collection

I’ve noticed quite a few Google hits for Fusion on my blog, so I thought I’d write a short summary of various scripts and macros I have created over the years.

Note: Since Fusion was aquired by Blackmagic Design, vfxpedia has been turned off and thus many links no longer work. Besides that, Fusion 7 introduced a new LUA interpreter that requires changes to some scripts. If a script no longer works in Fusion 7.x or you need a Fuse or Macro that was hosted on vfxpedia, drop me a line or visit the forum at steakunderwater.com/wesuckless where I might have already posted an updated version.

Scripts

• A huge improvement to the Add Tool script.
• Exporting keyframe data to After Effects
• Importing keyframe data from Nuke
• Saver Checker Script that creates missing output directories and lists enabled savers (useful if there are a lot of them).
• Loader From Saver creates or updates a loader from a selected saver.
• 3-Point-ImagePlane, a script that automatically aligns 3D planes to vertices in a point cloud.
• Freeze Cam, a helper script for projections that duplicates a camera and removes its animation.
• Tool Color Labels to easily tag your flow.
• Invert Animation Curve, a script that swaps time and value of an animation spline.
• An improved version of Fusion’s “Change Paths” to do search&replace operations on your loaders and savers.
• An improved version of “Destabilize Transform” to connect trackers to almost anything that has a center, size and angle slider.
• An improved Python implementation of the Bake Animation script, that processes multiple properties at the same time.
• Un-Modify, a tool script to remove modifiers from a stack without killing the whole animation.
• A converter to use Syntheyes lens distortion values with Fusion’s LensDistort tool.
• A suite of scripts to exchange shots between Fusion and Syntheyes.

More scripts and script-related snippets can be found on Vfxpedia, by the way.

Macros

• A 3D Colorspace Keyer implementation.
• ExponentialGlow, a glow with a nice photorealistic falloff.
• Image Mixer to help with applying scanned grain from gray cards.
• Macros to apply Lustre(R) merry grades, Josh Pine’s log2lin math and Nuke-inspired TMI color balance.
• An implementation of Nuke’s Ramp tool for gradients.
• A Color Picker that can be placed on top of an image to serve as a persistent color readout which has since been improved by Gregory Chalenko.
• SoftClip, a macro to gently compress overbright values below 1.0.
• SigmoidalContrast creates an S-shaped contrast curve.
• SpillMerge, an advanced keying solution for smoke or reflections.
• “Toe”,  a macro to gently raise an image’s black level (inspired by Nuke’s tool of the same name)
• “Turn” for rotating an image (including its canvas) in steps of 90 degrees.

Fuses

• Open-Source Plugins to create Lightning Bolts, Lens Flares or Lines
• GPU-accelerated Rolling Shutter correction based on motion vectors from eyeon’s Dimension plugin.
• A Smoothcam-inspired Fuse to automatically stabilize or smooth a shaky camera move.
• CubeToLatLong turns a cube map into (part of) an equirectangular panorama.
• SparseColor draws gradients or fills an image using multiple spots of color.
• A Nuke-like color correction Fuse whose contrast slider works well on linear images.
• A GPU-accelerated CornerPin, an improvement over Fusion’s native tool.
• A Switch Fuse as found in Shake or Nuke.
• A Fuse to manage auxiliary channels (like depth or vectors).
• A clone of Nuke’s Reformat tool to fit an image into another image format.
• A modifier for averaging two or four point positions (e.g. trackers)
• PositionHelper, a modifier to easily smooth a tracker path or change its reference frame.
• XfChroma, a transform tool that leaves a colorful trail.

All scripts and Fuses are open-source (mostly BSD-style) and commented extensively to serve as scripting tutorials 🙂 Feedback is always welcome.