Ghost in the Shell FUI Design | Hacker News Reader

Ghost in the Shell FUI Design

hudsandguis.com

205 pointscryo54 comments

Open articleView on HN

I couldn't easily find in the post what this FUI abbreviation stands for, so here's a reddit on it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FUI/top

Fantasy User Interfaces, for those that don't want to follow the link and search the page.

And I thought it's "Floating User Interface" :)

I always thought it was "Fake User Interface."

Yes, I always heard "FUI/Fake User Interface" used to describe those deceptive pop-up advertisements meant to look like a Windows system window (usually with some nonsense warning like "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!").

I simply stopped reading presuming it meant Futuristic User Interface.

Subscribed to that so fast.

While it copped a lot of flack, visuals wise there was pretty much nothing wrong with GitS.

I disagree, although they created a beautiful vision of the future it just doesn't resonate with what GITS is to me.

The world of GITS never felt like a neon billboard strewn "Neo Tokyo", felt like it has always had a wider visual language than just that one note. Feels like the city is trying to demand presence as an entity in the remake while in the originals the city was mostly just an anonymous sea of sky scrapers that was then experience though more intimate close moments.

I realise Ash is a huge fan of Akira and I can't help but think how Neo-Tokyo plays almost as a larger than life character in that film has influenced his work in this.

Compare this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB-ik-Bpl0c to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixAHUWgBKsw&t=0m35s

You might be interested in "Ghost In The Shell: Identity in Space" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw

That video is very insightful and resonates with what I love about Mamoru Oshii's movie. The city is definitely a protagonist in that classic movie as well, but it's not garish like in the new movie.

Started out that comment with the intention of linking that, excellent watch.

> Compare this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB-ik-Bpl0c to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixAHUWgBKsw&t=0m35s

Both of those clips also show how important background music can be in reception of the scene.

Yeah, it was an extraordinarily pretty film, although I think they really dragged out the whole "HEY LOOK HOLGRAPHIC BILLBOARDS" thing, I lost count of how many sweeping shots of buildings and their attached holograms I saw...

I may be remembering it incorrectly but I think that was a pretty common motif in the source material.

Google-image Ghost in the Shell cityscape: there is not a single ad hologram in the original (do correct me if I'm wrong though). The holograms shown are not as futuristic, they are green luminescent and pixelated, such as in the helicopter tactical view and the making of cyborg opening scene.

There are more in Innocence, especially during the parade scene, but even then the city itself is much more raw, like SAC and esp. SAC2G nails it. There's way too much of a Blade Runner feel in the live action movie.

In the artbook they mention how they wanted to emphasize how pervasive augmented reality had become in their world.

I guess giving the solograms - what they call them - a lot of airtime is one way to do that if you don’t want to explain why they’re there in the actual story.

Unfortunately to both myself (intimately familiar with the source material) and my father (zero knowledge at all), the shots increasingly came off as "look at all this work we put in to these, please appreciate them... please?" as the movie progressed.

Not that I'd mark it down for it at all, there's no shame in wanting to show off your work (especially when it's that good looking), and they never dragged on too long, they were just... oddly more frequent than expected.

It was an absolutely stunning film. Love the sheer amount of design effort that went into it, it really paid off. So much polish at every level.

I have to give my two cents. I've have been a die hard fan of the franchise. I've seen multiple times: all 4 movies (original, Innocence Solid State Society and "The new Movie), the 2 animated series (SAC) and the OVA (ARISE). The live action ironically failed for me because it tried to please the fans too much. Literally more the half of the movie scenes were taken from one of the source materials I mentioned above. This would be OK, but for someone that noticed where they came from it felt like they were all forced. I loved the series because every new iteration added to the one before. However, for this one it seemed that they were just lazy. Plot wise it was on par for GitS, because most of time it's not very interesting. Whats interesting of the series is the possibilities and consequences of the tech they introduce (plugging your brain to the net, hacking eyes, cloning pigs with human organs, uploading your ghost to the net, trafficking prosthetic, etc) <rant> One last thing, they didn't add the chopper/airplane fly by at the beginning of the film. All series/movies since the 1995 original start with a chopper/airplane fly by. That really messed with me for some reason. It's like something you expect. </rant>

> It was an absolutely stunning film.

Except for the storyline, which is way less interesting than the original.

I thought it was stunning film too. It's rewarding to see someone else who felt that way. Both at the nerd end and the not-nerd end of things GITS find little reception, which makes me disappoint for the full-condition of humanity, in way I'm not to articulate well.

I can't speak for the general public, but as for the nerds (ok, specifically for me): probably because the new movie was not on par, either in style or philosophy, with the 1995 movie?

Exactly.

The total running time of the remake was more than the original movie, yet somehow said a lot less. Aside from the visuals, the movie was embarassingly mediocre.

Sound was good too. Can't recall what they named the antagonist, but failed experiment dude's voice was 10/10. Such a perfect addition to sell the "this is one fucked up Android" message.

The antagonist was a huge disappointment for me.

Spoiler: In the original the antagonist is basically the singularity, a new form of life born from code. In the remake? Oh, her ex boyfriend.

Oh absolutely the old antagonist was way cooler. I specifically liked the live action one's acting and sound design, though.

And that is where they went wrong (the nerds that is). This is a new work, you should evaluate it on it's own merits and not how it compared to a artifact in what is essentially a different medium.

It's almost as if many critics forgot about all the different versions of GitS. Starting with the manga.

When the first movie came out people were complaining that it is not the manga. I'm pretty sure if they'd made a 1:1 copy of the 1995 movie, the same people would complain about that.

There is no way to please everybody. People will find reasons if they feel they need them.

It's true you can't please everybody, but at least in my case this doesn't apply: I own both the manga by Shirow and the movie by Oshii, and absolutely prefer the movie -- in fact, I don't like the manga very much. Back in the day I didn't complain the movie by Oshii wasn't like the manga, I celebrated it because it was so much better! Likewise, the new movie fails not because it's not exactly like the classic '95 movie, but because it's not as good as that movie... and makes me wonder why it was needed at all.

Well, this "as good as" is more of a personal opinion though. I love the '95 movie. It was the first anime I watched and it showed me that there is not only tentacle porn and little girls there. But I've also seen everything else that was branded GitS and I have the manga here. Therefore I liked the movie because it was just another interpretation of the general idea that is GitS.

Because of that, I find that harsh and kind of orthodox criticism quite over the top.

I didn't like it not because of previous work, which I haven't seen in ten years, but because it was hamfisted. Scarlett's acting and the "moral of the story," shoved down our throats with no subtlety. Luckily other characters absolutely slayed it.

Stunning visual design is great, but it needs to be coupled to a good plot, a good movie, to get recognition.

Thing is the original succeeds in all this and feels as fresh today as it did on release. The 2017 version feels entirely unnecessary.

(Yes I understand all the reasons commercially why it was remade, no those don't change my opinions on the matter.)

The storyline was awful.

So many stories to be fit to such a richly imagined future. It's like a choose your own adventure!

Loved every minute of it until the last 5 minutes, where they went so far away from the original story line, it would be like remaking Star Wars and having Luke turning to the darkside.

Only the last 5 minutes? Did we watch the same movie? The plot, to me, looked like it was written by someone who watched the original while drunk.

I remember thinking that whoever made this movie must have hated the original movie.

I guess it is a gamble the director has to take: to be remembered as a great director, you can't simply remake movies verbatim. You have to put your spin on it and hope people think you made something greater than the original.

The movie did not capture the feeling of the original movie nor did it seem convincing as a future reality the way the original does.

Btw, hologram ads featured in a COD Advanced Warfare Tokyo map a few years ago. Given the color scheme of the movie and that of the map, I would not be surprised if the map was a bit of inspiration for the movie's designers.

> it would be like remaking Star Wars and having Luke turning to the darkside.

That sounds like a better movie tbh

Well it is the plot of the prequels...

...which were pretty bad. So we can rule out this idea! :)

That's not why they were bad. They built up decades of expectations and not only dropped the ball, but threw it to the ground and decided to write what sells toys instead.

Agreed, my comment was tongue in cheek. But at least we agree the prequels were terrible!

The entire plot was absolute crap, but to be fair this isn't the first time we've seen Major defect and become an enemy of her country.

Isn't that what Luke does? Later, like in the movies coming out now. I thought in the EU, he ends the Jedi Order and merges the teaching of Light and Dark into one discipline. but I'm no SWexpert.

I'm going to take an unpopular stance here but I must disagree, at least to the extent that whilst details were done relatively well (although no better than, say, Total Recall's recent remake) the photography was not.

Here's a simple example: the chase scene to the water [1] vs [2]. In the first, you have a whopping 3 layers of background, the white water, the dark slum, the city in the back (and perhaps an extra layer of city) giving the scene immensity and depth. Even the proportion in which these layers cut the screen (each increasing in height and implied size with distance) help give further depth. The main character is clearly contrasted (including earlier [3]) and thus easily followed, with the eye naturally falling upon the action.

The drawing is neat and the spirit carries over to the sound: the fight is punctuated by long periods of silence both of the ear and of movement ("Music is the space between the notes." - Debussy - to say nothing of the enormous importance of empty space in both Chinese and Japanese art e.g. [5]).

I'll let you take a look at the movie version and see if you can find an understanding of these elements.

Here's an unrelated example of what I mean by the spirit being done well: [4]. Listen to both the steamroller-like momentum, and the way in which the lower voice emerge from the texture about halfway. It is actually incredibly difficult to play like this reliably despite the relative technical ease of the work, Gilels almost makes it sound like he took one, maybe two breaths only (a subtle change of texture splits the work).

[1] http://www.mangauk.com/gallery/albums/album-19/lg/gits_124.p...

[2] http://sm.ign.com/t/ign_nordic/video/g/ghost-in-t/ghost-in-t...

[3] http://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/10635_4.jpg - literally framed!

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu06WnXlPCY

[5] http://www.theartwolf.com/landscapes/hasegawa-tohaku-pine-tr...

More examples: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yHfLyMAHrQE/maxresdefault.jpg

http://thecabot.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/the-godfather...

https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/sm/upload/bn/hi/lo/wd/yojimbo-1...

http://moviemezzanine.com/wp-content/uploads/spirited-2.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/DQuW037.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K0c2HJ4AO6o/maxresdefault.jpg

Another example stolen from reddit (this is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, opening montage to the original was one of the most beautiful things I saw on a movie theater screen this year):

http://puu.sh/rk1e0/8bde48eb5a.jpg - Live Action Movie

http://66.media.tumblr.com/eff396f3b1c3f9fcf9ce6e0923484f96/... -Animated

And this is the fan movie: http://www.gits2501.com/wp-content/uploads/GITS_SITE_1920_AT...

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53y0ri/ghost_in_the...

When this scene was shot in 2003, also with Scarlett Johansson, Sofia Coppola managed fine: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/79/f8/5f/79f8...

And this blog is dedicated to Sci-Fi UIs http://sciencefictioninterfaces.tumblr.com/

I recall seeing a navigation app a few years back that copied almost perfectly the navigation views from Standalone Complex. Never did get the name of it.

personally, I disliked all the holograms. They're in every movie these days and they are sooooo boring, not to mentioned impossible. The original Ghost in the Shell had none and the city was much more gritty and interesting without these silly "solograms." Really ruined the feel of the film in my opinion.

Thank you for sharing this. I have always loved FUI.

Very nice. Thanks for the link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com