The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
My dad was in the AF at the time, and was assigned to the movie as a consultant on AF trivia. He convinced them that the stunt could be done safely, and explained how to do it.
And so it was done. My dad got in trouble, because if the B17 had crashed doing the stunt, the AF would have looked bad. But it didn't crash, and the stunt was a big deal to the movie crowds, so he was forgiven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGGynxYbA48
It's still freakin' impressive today.
His other contribution to the movie was the mission briefing wall maps.
Sadly, the movie company burned all three to the ground after the shoot, in order to avoid paying the import duties the British tax people demanded. They didn't have the money, and didn't have the gas money to fly them back the US. They tried to give the bombers to a local museum, but the tax people still wanted the import duties, and the museum couldn't pay it.
What a tragedy.
I'll tax the street (If you try to sit, sit)
I'll tax your seat (If you get too cold, cold)
I'll tax the heat (If you take a walk, walk)
I'll tax your feet (Taxman)
Knowing Hollywood accounting (really just fraud, but "its always been done that way" so I guess its cool now): maybe they just didn't want to? Not that I want to excuse the tax apparatchiks, this is horrible.
"! Fourteen American bison were brought to Catalina in 1924 for the making of the Zane Grey film The Vanishing American. After all that effort, the footage of the Bison didn’t make the final cut, and they do not appear in the movie. When filming was completed, the production company left the animals behind! "
https://www.catalinaconservancy.org/index.php?s=news&p=artic...
So although I do understand it's a sad situation, the movie team should have first made sure it could pay the tax and then do the stunt.
The hallmark of the bureaucrat is favouring process over outcomes. These people are the enemy.
I am not a fan of calling people "enemies" I prefer to look at their incentives and context so that when can learn how to change them so that we will have less "enemies" in the future
In this case the airplanes had also an historical significance so it is hard to justify forcing their destruction.
If your point was about the generic usefulness of import taxes, then I have misunderstood you, no objections there.
> I am not a fan of calling people "enemies" I prefer to look at their incentives and context
I suspect you are in your rationalist phase right now, given the Scott Alexander link in your bio. I used to be one too. This is a good starting point, but it is just that - a starting point.
> can learn how to change them so that we will have less "enemies" in the future
What you probably have in mind is to have a civilized discussion among reasonable people and thus determine the best overall outcome for the best of all of society. Changing the system so that the resulting forces will produce different outcomes.
I'm not really qualified to elaborate on the topic of changing power structures (in essence: of the problem of governance), so I'll just stop here. But its a different problem than you imagine, and you will recoil from the things that are required to succeed.
1. do it at dawn, when the air is the stillest
2. have the pilot make pass after pass, each time a bit lower
3. have a ground observer in constant contact with the pilot giving the clearance from the ground
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan
That's not to belittle the capabilities of the pilots flying in these takes, it's a very well executed maneuver and certainly not entirely risk free (assurances aside, such stunts have also gone horribly wrong). But it's not quite as hard as you might think because the ground helps to 'push back' in case one of your wings gets too low. The bigger risk is probably from cross wind, which would affect the plan asymmetrically.
Unfortunately, one of greatest stunt pilots died doing similar stunt for the original "Flight of the Phoenix"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_the_Phoenix_(196...
Sad when someone dies because of it though..
PS I'm surprised that thing was FAA certified. But this is really a case where a model would have been a lot safer.
This is another video in a slightly different fashion, but it gives a good idea of the feelings of the people present during a low altitude fly-over, especially an unexpected one:
Ps that video doesn't do justice to how LOUD those things are :)
Isn't that reason as good as any other?
Some stuff that stands out to me was star trek tng where you can see the wood grain in things like doorways even though they're painted. No way that would have been visible on TV.
Even today, I doubt that buzzing sequence could be done as convincingly as the real thing. I've seen some aviation war movies done with CGI, and it just isn't quite right.
Buzzing the field is against orders.
BTW, B17 crews would sometimes buzz fields in WW2 to celebrate having completed their tour of duty and they could go home.
They did indeed have problems with people getting killed. That's why the stunt was to be done with models until it was shown it could be done safely.
We're all adults and can make our own choices. Few things in life are free of risk (you drive a car I imagine). If I want to do a damn stunt I'll do it. Should we also ban most sports? Those are dangerous too. How about we stop building tall buildings? Lots of construction accidents there.
Also, the kind of accident that happened recently on set is vanishingly rare. There are a ton of safguards in place to ensure things like that don't happen and, in this case, at least one person was severely negligent.
Beyond that, there can be many reasons; for example, in a similar situation with Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afS5ks54tms
1) It's fun
2) Interesting to work on for the director and the crew. If this was shot with a digital screen and a fan, that'd super be boring to produce.
3) Brings good marketing
4) Can justify paying expensive advisors / raising more production money (these stunts are difficult to financially evaluate so they can funnel out budget easily)
5) It looks more realistic (though it's not necessary a quality, as the story-telling is sometimes more important than realism).
It's the exact opposite situation from what you describe, which is why it has been newsworthy. But I don't understand how your takeaway became the opposite of the described reality.
I would be interested in seeing the numbers on prop guns fired in filming vs injuries. I expect it is enormous. The risks are simple, understood, easy to prevent.
Many of the risks in drug development are largely unknowable before human testing and we still use human subjects.
I had a boss try to bring this up at lunch last week. "I was watching an old western and they have prop guns everywhere, how come no one died back then?" Pulling up a Wikipedia[0] listing on movie accidents brought up quite a lot of old western and war movie accidents.
Although it seems vastly more animals got hurt on set than people. A lot of early war/western movies seemed to be extremely detrimental to horses used on set.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_and_television_ac...
What is the difference between bringing something up and trying to bring something up?
NPr states the last prop gun death was Brandon Lee in 1993, so ~30 years ago. I still wonder how many movie blanks are fired a year. 1 million? 10 million?
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048295916/props-gun-death-in...
The primary means western propaganda uses is to persuade. It has to be persuasive because the targets can choose whether they believe it or not. Nobody has to comply, and dissenting voices and alternative narratives are available. Also it competes in a market for ideas and so there's a degree of selective pressure to improve so you're quite right it has become quite sophisticated whereas authoritarian propaganda can rely on excluding dissenting voices.
Soviet and Chinese propaganda, at least the types you're taking about, persuade by projecting power. It's about psychological domination, with heroic poses and strong simple messages emphasising the inevitability and necessity of party control. It's blunt design is part of the point. Thousands of gymnasts and marchers in perfect lockstep. Zero individuality. It doesn't matter if you are persuaded, as long as you get the message that you have no choice but to comply, and look, everyone else is complying!
Take the poisoning of Navalny. They don't need to persuade anybody in Russia that the state didn't do it. Everybody knows the state did it, even those that are pro-state. The point is to send the message, this is what will happen to you if you push us too far.
I don't think Fred Hampton was persuaded as you describe.
Or just don't worry about it. I have many unpopular opinions and posts :-)
They are in front of a mirror. They wanted to actually use Arnie in the reflection to show his face; they wanted a dummy for the head closest to the camera, to show the surgery inside the head. So they used a window in the wall instead of a mirror! Linda Hamilton and her twin sister are mimicking each other's movements to make it seem it's a mirror image.
(The other use of Linda's twin sister, the scene where the T-1000 fakes being Sarah, is better known)
I am very enamored with the iconic "impossible mirror" shot in Robert Zemeckis' "Contact" instead, which used subtle CGI to brilliant effect to innovate over the practical bag of tricks. It's my single favorite effects shot in movies: https://youtu.be/avRdYf78kLk (from 1:10 for the impatient)
Almost certainly not; that's the point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULxw4UDY5g8 (up until 0:35)
2. The original Birds did not have that music. I cannot believe how classic media remasters completely ruin the tone of the originals. From Star Wars, to Rust in Peace, to Birds now.
How come the camera is not in the way at that point? Did it move backwards to the closed door? The answer is quite interesting. Let me know if you'd like me to spoiler it for you.
I always assumed that the "big room" was to avoid the culling algorithms / potentially-visible-set tripping over the mirror.
In general, lots of things in games require re-rendering the scene multiple times per frame, so game engines are really, really good at this. Shadows, projections, transparency / translucency, motion/depth blur, indirect lighting, deferred lighting, even things like hit testing (though for dependency + latency reasons that's a prime candidate for offloading to the CPU). Anything that requires less visual fidelity will have its performance tuned accordingly: fewer pixels, simpler shaders, lower LOD geometry, lower framerates. Nobody will notice if the fuzzy bounce lights are calculated once every five frames and blended.
Ray tracing is conceptually simpler but (so far) slower at any given level of cleverness -- you'll often hear that it has asymptotic benefits, but those same benefits can be pulled out of rasterizers with effort comparable to what is required to make the raytracing practical.
Here is a writeup of the passes you might expect to see in a modern engine: https://zhangdoa.com/posts/rendering-analysis-cyberpunk-2077
Here's an overview of a modern geometry pipeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw
Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, everywhere.
That said, it often makes sense to drop some of the decorative flourishes used on the primary instance of the model due to distance, or use a different level of detail. There’s really no great way to get around needing to tell the GPU to render the triangles twice (short of rendering the view to an intermediate buffer and using that, which is still twice…)
Without using this technique you'd have the camera in shot.
The other identical twin thing I remember was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander was split into two, one of him all his strengths and the other all his weaknesses. Nicholas Brendon's twin brother was used in the scenes where there were two Xanders in one shot.
To the impatient: The meaning of this shot depends on the first 1:09 minutes.
This is what I remember from T2 director's cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiBHj8Xs4sg (at 0:21).
When I saw the theatrical cut it always confused me how John could tell who was the T1000. And it also annoyed me that Arnie shot the frozen T1000, seemingly only speeding up his thawing.
In the director's cut you see that T1000 is actually damaged, but not damaged like a non-liquid robot would be. It's not losing mobility (control) of an arm, but instead losing control of its morphing functions.
It's complete genius that was (almost[1]) entirely cut from the theatrical cut. It's ridiculous that the edit it out.
[1] There's exactly one "flicker" of T1000 metalliness in the theatrical cut. A small remnant of a genius idea.
I can't find the "making of" video where they tell how they did this, but here is the cut scene: https://youtu.be/tZNE637BeEI
In scenes where you see Arnie's face in the mirror at the same time as his head being operated on, it's not a mirror, and one of the two Sarah's is not Linda Hamilton (whoever's face is shown less clearly).
Edit: lots of hits on Google saying this is how they did it, but I cannot find a single authoritative reference, like a making of video or someone involved in the production saying so.
Got it, yeah that was a good use of her.
I also really like the scene where John tries to teach him to smile, but at least there they have the excuse that it's a minute or two in length.
Certain other scenes, like Kyle's visit and the extra nuclear nightmare scene, I think the movie is better without.
The actor playing John Connor looks ridiculous. Linda Hamilton in aged makeup looks silly. The whole scene looks corny.
And it defeats the "no future" vibe that worked so well in the first Terminator movie.
"There's a storm coming."
The same technique of using an extended set to fake a mirror was frequently used on Quantum Leap.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/terminator-2-helicopter-stunt/
With regards to Vietnam, a legend that I was told (but cannot confirm) was that Hueys had such bad tail rotor authority that they would take off straight up with the whole airframe spinning. Once high enough, the pilot would start the helicopter moving forward, which would allow the tail rotor to bite more, and the helicopter would stabilize.
Crazy if true. And after seeing a stunt like that by a bona fide insane and top-tier veteran pilot, I believe the legend.
Interview here:
I did not start with fixed wing, though I have flown fixed wing a couple of times, not logged. I wanted to do fixed wing when I was younger, but helicopter seems a better bet now.
The reason is because the fixed wing industry is mostly airlines. And when I say "mostly", I mean 90% or more. That means that the fixed wing industry is subject to the volatility of demand for airline travel. Even before COVID, I knew it was volatile; 9/11 made that clear as well. With COVID being endemic and people not relaxing restrictions, I doubt the fixed wing industry will really recover to what it was. It might, though; my neighbor trains pilots for an airline, and his schedule is full right now because they can barely keep ahead of the demand for new pilots. And there are still other jobs, so the fixed wing demand might remain pretty high.
But rotorcraft was really only affected in one area: tours. The rotorcraft industry is much less volatile, and the demand is just as high. That's why I chose it. Also, it's easier to learn to fly helicopters and then to switch to fixed wing later if necessary.
The downside is that getting your Commercial certificate for rotorcraft is far more expensive, just because even the lightest helicopters cost far more to run per hour.
I can't say which is right for you, but that should at least give you more info.
Good luck with your progress, and hope the medical knot untangles itself.
"Moving forward" means tilting the rotor disk. Even when spinning, this will induce a little thrust, which will help clear the "dirty" (turbulent) air from the tail rotor, and as you said, induce a wind vane effect, which would stabilize the spinning a little, which would then allow more forward airspeed, and it would compound. I could see the helicopter flying a widening spiral as it gained forward airspeed until it fully stabilizes in straight-and-level flight.
Loss of Tail Rotor Effectiveness is a big deal in most helicopters where the tail rotor is not big relative to the size of the helicopter. In Robinson helicopters, the typical trainers, the tail rotors are massive for the size of the helicopter, and you will almost never run into Loss of Tail Rotor Effectiveness.
[1]: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
[2]: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
That being said, I've talked to a few Vietnam helicopter pilots and all of their stories were ... well, exaggeration is a common theme.
if the pilot tipped the helicopter to the right after leaving the ground, and then continuously held the control stick in the direction of the movement of the helicopter, the body of the helicopter would begin to face the direction of travel unless the pilot actively countered that turn via the tail rotor.
Yes, which is why it would work to just push the stick forward, even if the helicopter was spinning.
It's basically a 1990s version of barnstorming.
"I was curious about how the overpass would affect the ground effect of the helicopter. Tragically, I have no brain for physics. But I do know a helicopter pilot, so I asked him. Apparently, at 60 kts, there wouldn’t be significant ground effect because the down flowing air off of the rotor disk would mostly be tailing off of the helicopter. Had Tamburro taken the stunt slower, the down flowing air would be more directly underneath the helicopter, creating an (obviously undesirable) effect."
I was thinking more of the low pressure zone above the helicopter being disrupted by the overpass. Apparently it wasn't too bad since the pilot managed the stunt twice without injury, but it's a possibility that would have had me crapping diamonds if I were asked to pull it off.
So first of all, GE in a rotorcraft is different from GE on a fixed-wing aircraft. The fundamentals are the same, of course, but in a rotorcraft the relative velocity of the blade/wing isn't connected to the velocity of the airframe the way it is in a fixed-wing aircraft. In a fixed-wing aircraft the velocity of the wing and the velocity of the airframe are the same, of course. But in a rotorcraft things get very complicated. The upshot of all this complication is that the GE effect is reduced as the rotorcraft's airframe starts to move. The faster it goes, the less GE you have. So you might notice some differences while hovering under an overpass, but shooting through at 60 MPH the GE is effectively a no-op.
If you really want to know the gory details you'll have to read up on helicopter theory. It's way too complicated for an HN comment.
Minute 0:57 to be more precise.
Also, you can enjoy Rio de Janeiro from above in the 60s.
All thanks to stupid US aviation policies - recertification is so expensive nobody does it and everyone flies dangerous shitboxes despite >50 years of innovations.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/trivia
> Ed Harris reportedly punched James Cameron in the face after he kept filming while he was nearly drowning.
There's a great documentary on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k43KHV1fDU
I would not have wanted my suffering and fear to have been wasted.
History is full of “I think this is a bad idea, but I’ll do it” accounts in the after-disaster reports. People can and regularly do dangerous things against their better judgement because they were ordered to do it or otherwise pressured into it. Saying that they volunteered is to drastically over simplify the situation.
No, did someone claim that? Stuntmen regularly decline to perform stunts they perceive to be too dangerous. It's part of their job to do risk evaluation and say yes or no.
> Only people who are willing to do things in unnecessarily dangerous ways should be stunt people?
Eh, yes, that's literally the definition of being a stuntman, you do things that are dangerous in place of someone else because you know how to manage the dangerous situation compared to the other non-educated (in dangerousness) person you're replacing for that scene.
> A perfectly reasonable solution is for the director to take their staff's safety into account and not risk people's lives for a movie.
Yes, agree! That's why there is a whole stunt team on set, not just the director and the stuntmen themselves. As a team they evaluate the stunts and stop them if they are too unsafe.
Unfortunately, every single stunt in the industry carries the risk of death, so if we want to be really safe, we simply cannot have action movies anymore at all.
Again, people regularly do things against their best judgement because of social and economic pressure. Stunt people are not magically excluded from this process.
I don’t think they „chose“ to be in a risky business..
More info here: https://www.nfi.edu/stunt-coordinator/
A woman was shot and killed by live ammo on a movie set about a month ago.
It's not really anyone's place to dictate someone else's risk appetite. Stuntmen and Stuntwomen know what they are signing up for. They are the ones choosing to risk their own lives, not anyone else.
Some people really love doing crazy shit and making wild art. I still quote Terminator 2 decades later; it is epic art regardless of whether you personally like it or not.
In the vast majority of stories you hear, the actor/stunt-person dies because the director/coordinator/other staff was negligent.
It's obviously not reasonable to expect for a stunt-person's job to be as safe as office work, but "they are the ones choosing to risk their own lives" is bs.
> Stuntmen and Stuntwomen know what they are signing up for.
_Everyone_ knows what they're signing up for, so the only interpretation I can make here is that you believe there should be no protections for employees.
This is making it sound like they're forced to choose their profession and take risks. If I were to guess, the truth is probably completely the opposite - the only reason they got into it was because of the thrill of stuntman work.
> we could’ve run a CG helicopter under the freeway overpass, but it was so much more fun to do the real thing.
I'm guessing the same applies from pulling a helicopter on a trailer. It's simply not fun.
The whole shot that "went through the computer" has a completely different feel to it than scenes that don't.
Compare 3:38 and 3:44 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhL8WlDHKaY.
It looks like it was shot with a completely different camera, or going into a mini-dream state.
I mean it's extremely well done. It holds up so well even... jesus christ 30 years later?!
But it's extremely obvious which scenes got the CGI treatement.
Oh, and if this is one of those "once you can see it, you can't unsee it" things: Sorry about that.
First it's a one single still frame up until the full closure of wounds, may be it's the reason for a dream effect that you feel. It was shot on the same camera as other shots from the John's point of view in this scene, but processed differently, as it went trough film scanner and laser film recorder.
Same with other CGI scenes.
Amazing for 30 years ago, but very not possible to confuse with practical effects.
I see the bullet holes absolutely don't match up. At 3:38 they are not as deep and wide as in 3:44. But also the actors position is different especially the mouth (closed in the first, open in the other). Continuity errors.
The morph effect is somewhat cringy but to be fair, they always were. At least in DS9 and Terminator 2 there were in-universe explanations why they existed.
There's also something weird going on with the eyes to the T-1000 after the morph effect has finished. Not sure if that was intentional.
Like they smeared something over the lens.
Also check out the "goes through the bars" shot. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Look at things like color grading, and things that look like "upscaling" (but aren't).
Because it's like an upscaling effect that also could be an overuse of HD makeup.
I've seen that in contemporary movies or series (or badly configured HD TVs) and it doesn't have a dissociative effect on me seeing it in this movie because I just don't remember how movies from that era shouldn't be looking like that.
easy money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE
^ you want skynet, because this is how we get skynet. :-)
YSK that you can click on the Channels tab of both of these YouTube channels and see interlinks that they added.
I love how prosaic and simple some of their practical effects are; but the real accomplishment to me is how hard it is to pay attention to those details, to notice them; when everything flows so smoothly into captivating scenes.
In a similar vein, just after having watched X-Men 2 in a cinema a (different) friend who did CGI animation for a living pointed out that during the scene where Magneto moved the bridge, you can see that the shadows on the water don't move with the bridge. His theory was that the special effects team were likely completely aware, but looked at the amount of effort required and hoped no one would notice. I never noticed the problem myself until it was pointed out.
I guess back then when special effects were monumentally difficult and computers weren't as capable as they are now, directors often relied on the audience's attention being elsewhere at that moment and thus being less likely to notice.
Screencap: https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Aliens_goofs?file=A2blactorholep...
(fixed in the bluray)
The "caseless" ammo assult rifle is obviously ejecting spent casing in some scenes.
The rotating light on top of the mecha suit loader is smashed when the queen drags it down into the airlock but is whole again once down in the pit.
Your comment reminds me of this Raiders Of The Lost Ark scene:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/8u3aey/in_the...
I have to admit not noticing this for decades.
I remember seeing a video where Jackson was raving about how they can relight shots, showing a pretty uniformly lit shot in Hobbiton. They went on to try to add directional light, shadows etc. using masks, and the image just got worse and worse until it was an inconsistent mess. But apparently they liked that.
And don’t get me started on how they smoothed the dwarves’ skin out so they look like glamour models. I really can not fathom what they were thinking.
You'd be surprised how much the average human can enjoy fake lighting and fake elements in photography/videography.
For anyone with the slightest lighting knowledge though it looks horrendous.
Today there are no technical problems or impracticalities with high frame rates, and modern cinematography is hitting the limits of what you can do with 24 fps (and sometimes crossing them). 24 fps has become a local maximum because that's what we've done for decades, but it is also a blurry mess.
Furthermore, much of home entertainment is streamed these days. I imagine introducing 60 fps on top of 4k would increase bandwidth requirements beyond what many consumers have access to. It may also be more than Netflix et al want to pay for, so one imagines they'll want to tack on a surcharge as they did for UHD.
Yes, more frames means more data, but it creates fewer problems than the 4k/UHD upgrade everyone willingly goes through, while doing more to increase fidelity.
I looked for 1080p screens when I last bought a TV and couldn't find any. 65", and wanting fairly quality, but no 4k sources so why do I need 4x the pixels? (Sadly, the week after I bought what I bought, I happened across some 65" new in box Plasma TVs at auction... Oh well)
There's nothing new that has to be changed to support this, most of the content people are watching is already HFR.
It's only the narrative based shows that try to be "cinematic" which are at those low fps rates.
But the technology is there, it works just fine.
24fps is far too low.
However if you pause the action, you can clearly see where the rendering shortcuts have been made (The Transformers movies are a good example of this).
It's just as choppy as 24Hz at 1/1600 shutter, but in traditional film, it's choppy and blurry due to the slow shutter, so I can barely see anything.
For quite se time I'd run upscalers to pre process all movies I was watching to 60Hz or 75Hz just because it was noticeably easier to watch.
The argument is that the general populous are used to the 'film look' of 24fps, that anything else diminishes the impact of watching a film. Films that have tried high fps (The Hobbit for example) received negative reviews for picture quality; people just didn't like it.
Also, when increasing the framerate, you should try to stick to a multiple of 24 (i.e. 48, 72, 96) to prevent judder when the shot is panning a scene.
Maybe something's wrong with my mind? But 24/25Hz, even with the correct shutter speed, is noticeably causing strain to process, while e.g. old school TV productions at 50Hz don't have that issue.
And stereoscopic 24fps look twice as bad.
I think you can notice high frame rates. Difference between 60 and 120 fps is striking. Even between 90 and 120. And everyone I was showing my phone that does 60, 90 or 120Hz could see it.
Conversely I don't see much difference between 120 and 240 fps.
To get a "natural-looking" amount of motion blur the exposure angle is generally around 180°, which is ~1/48 s exposure time for each frame. If you use a small shutter angle (short exposure time) you get less motion blur and things start to look -very- choppy (another hint for the "eye can't see more than 24 fps" fraction). Generally this translates to moving things being almost always blurry. This is also why pans are usually so slow in cinema films, because if you'd pan faster everything would just be a blurry mess. Another factor here is that film is not very sensitive - so short exposure times are kinda out of the question anyway. Look at e.g. The DaVinci Code, most of the darker scenes were shot on 500 ISO film and it's already very grainy and soft.
Apparent motion blur is also worse on sample & hold displays (LCDs, OLEDs etc.) compared to strobed displays (especially CRTs). Viewing 24 fps content on most displays at their native refresh rate (~60 fps) requires on-the-fly frame rate conversion, which is necessarily of poor quality. If you ever watched popular Youtubers and wondered why the heck their videos are so incredibly janky, it's not just because the YT web player drops frames like crazy, but also because you're viewing 24 fps content on a 60 fps display (they all shoot in 24 fps for the "professional look").
The reason why cinema is stuck on 24 fps even in the digital age is mostly because people have been culturally programmed to associate janky motion with quality film, and fluid motion with cheap TV production. That's all. It's an objectively far inferior format that was chosen at a time when film was quite expensive per meter, and so you'd wanted to use as little film as you could get away with. The only advantage a low frame rate has (today) is that you get a stop more light because the exposure is twice as long at preferred shutter angles. Digital cinema cameras already have base sensitivities of 500, 800 or 2500 ISO though - much faster than high quality film ever was
I kinda assumed it was because it was too expensive and difficult to produce higher frame rate video that was of comparable quality. I have yet to see a high frame rate movie that didn't leave me forced to pay more attention to the bad film props and questionable acting than to the story line.
We’re making art here. The format that people find the most compelling isn’t inferior.
Is it? If we could build such robots, they would be plastic. Any holes shot into them wouldn’t be rigid, and would deform when they moved.
Or are you saying “moved like rubber” obviously looks different from whatever way the stuff this robot is supposed to be made of would move?
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/spotlights/unreal-engine-...
I've also tried to avoid selection bias: I've seen bad (& not funny B-movie bad) films from the 90s
Death Proof is a masterpiece discarding CGI
This isn't to say there aren't good films anymore, there definitely are, CGI isn't what makes them good tho
Take a look at epics like Ben Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. They use HUGE scales with no need for CGI.
star wars ANH: $50 million
star wars ESB: $100 million
star wars RoTJ: $90 million
lawrence of arabia: $137 million
ben hur: $144 million
so yeah, the movies you mentioned had significantly larger budgets, but not massively so (at least compared to ESB and RoTJ). I'd argue the bigger difference is the subject matter. you can do a large 1930's battle without CGI just by throwing money at the problem. there isn't an amount of money you could spend in 1970 to do any of the prequel trilogy coruscant scenes. they probably could have done most of the naboo scenes, though.
I'm also not arguing that huge CGI renders are always a good thing. most stories are really just about the interactions between a few people. I do think it's a significant value add for the scifi genre especially, where the world itself is often a character.
This is a logistics issue not a technology issue of the major players who make action movies these days. Your average Avengers film has the action sequences already pencilled out and being created and finished before the rest of the plot is even really figured out and the connective tissue of these scenes is filmed later which is why the action scenes all feel like just random set pieces that are sometimes tonally different and also often don't really have any plot development or repercussions to the rest of the movie because they're just set pieces the director is slipping their story between.
"They say" GRRM is rewriting it because we disliked HBO's GoT story. I say he had no idea what to write and now he knows what not to write.
It's part sad and disgusting.
Tarantino on JRE described how the car crash scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imS39s9DKtQ) was done by pulling the two cars together with a wire & dummies for the gore
I think CGI is coming up on "effectively perfect", especially with the way it has gone from a post-production thing to becoming part of the world around the actors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
So once people get used to perfection, I expect there will be a revival of "practical effect" productions, where people go for intentionally imperfect but more "human" approaches to making scenes. It'll be niche, of course, like low-fi games or fancy barista pourovers. But that's what feels like "better" to some people.
I'd certainly love that in the right context. In the same way Stranger Things was a success as an 1980s revival, I could imagine modern takes on sci-fi films of the 50s-70s that are intentionally done without CGI.
Then why does it still look ... like CGI? I've seen several of the biggest budget productions from recent years, and it seems to me like CGI is not getting any better. Take buildings with debris destroyed in recent Marvel movies for example, or almost any scene in the last film in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, or even Dune, which I just saw in theaters. The CGI sandworms look like CGI.
> especially with the way it has gone from a post-production thing to becoming part of the world around the actors
I can agree with you on this point. The good / unnoticeable uses of CGI are to add background details around the actors, not replace action / stunts, and use as few digital models as possible (the models are still the weak point). Mad Max: Fury Road was the one film where I'd say the CGI approximates "perfection".
If you look at Dune reviews, there was high praise for the look of the film. Ditto for audience reaction. So I think "coming up on effectively perfect" is a reasonable way to phrase it. Things can always be better, but as long as the effects are good enough to not be distracting to 95% of the audience, I think we'll still see the sort of plateau that will eventually lead to some directors and audiences getting bored enough with CGI that we'll see a revival of practical effects as an aesthetic.
I think a really good example of this is this comparison between the old and new Dune movies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHPkdMGI6D4
The new Dune is masterfully crafted, and I was never once bothered by the CG, even though there was clearly a ton of it. The old Dune, on the other hand...I don't think it's aged particularly gracefully. Then again, I've never been a huge Lynch fan.
Such a pivotal moment in my life.
???
5. profit
The film came out in 1991… they obviously didn’t have anything like the tracking to do effects like that as CGI back then.
It could also have been achieved without camera tracking by painstakingly rotoscoping the effect into each frame by hand, which I guess would also count as "CGI".
As someone who grew up watching Willow (1988), I beg to differ... Note the box office was about 1/4 that of Terminator 2, so you could say it reached the public pretty well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_animati...
https://youtu.be/6z9qws7M8q8?t=275
But yes, obviously they could not have done the bullet stuff with CGI.
This one was probably much more effort: https://youtu.be/6z9qws7M8q8?t=275
You're not contradicting the parent comment though. It's not obvious that they had tracking back then. I wouldn't be surprised if they did it all manually, frame by frame.
I'd say not a chance in hell they'd be able to do a good job in 1992 doing effects on a running Robert Patrick while the camera is on a vehicle.
It was cutting edge back then, but not that cutting edge.
Watch the incredible rescan from a few years ago. You can clearly see them.
Still one of the best movies ever. I watched dune recently and while very well done, it felt more like theatre than a movie. Cameron and Verhoeven are my directors. They know how to do action
It's a beautiful finish on film and survives the packing and unpacking and some rough motion. That's nothing to sneeze at. I'm sure someone with more experience could go into more detail, and would appreciate more education on it myself.