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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like “hollywood” is finally fully corporate, devoid of any soul it once had. I just finished the ILM docu-series and wow what an amazing and incredible story. It’s sad that, for the industry, it’s all culminated in abusive studios, disconnected directors and fuck it someone else will fix my mess mentality. And the disrespect for VFX workers, my god, they should come join an ops team they’d get more respect. I guess it’s kinda to be expected when you’re just perpetually milking cash cow IP to death (hardly the innovation it once was). And since when do lasers arc in space?? I don’t watch super hero movies on principle at this point. It’s the least I can do.

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> it’s all culminated in abusive studios, disconnected directors and fuck it someone else will fix my mess mentality.

> And the disrespect for VFX workers, my god, they should come join an ops team they’d get more respect.

> I guess it’s kinda to be expected when you’re just perpetually milking cash cow IP to death (hardly the innovation it once was)

I can’t help but smile reading this.

Replace “studios” with “organization at big tech company”.

Replace “vfx workers” with “software development engineers”

Replace “cash cow IP” with “legacy systems that still bring in $$$”, although yeah there’s IP there too from a while ago.

Sorry, I don’t mean to take this completely on a tangent, but I can’t help but think there are similarities here.

I'll never understand this vibe. You're a programmer, in most places that's among the best paying jobs available. How are you being there exploited the same way as VFX artists are?

Having worked on both sides, being a former VFX programmer and artist makes tech companies afraid of your expense plus they incorrectly think your used to pampered treatment. In tech companies, they see VFX films and do not realize they are seeing the collaborative work of thousands of digital workers - so they expect the programming output of thousands of people. It is a no win situation, because to get them to understand you have to convince them they believe in fantasy.

If you are in an agency which basically sells labour (body shop) and if the agency is doing fixed bid projects ("you build us XYZ mobile app which does ABC by MNP for XXX") you will be in a comparable situation. There is a difference however:

* Devs are harder to find and currently they are likely to flat-out refuse to work on location * In dev, "time+materials" (bill by the hour) is much more prevalent.

One of the reasons VFX work is so miserable is that the producers will try to place a project in the cheapest locality and with a fixed bid, implying an unlimited amount of change requests as long as the deadline is not passed. One of the best medicines against the indecision and non-commitment from clients is making them pay for time spent (both waiting while they meddle and working when the umpteenth change requests comes about). This works very well - it does imply you have to fire clients who do not want to work like this.

VFX studios are in a bind because if you want to work "big ticket stuff" (Marvel etc.) they will negotiate hard on contracts, they will want insane deadlines, and they will want fixed bid. And they will want you to be in a locality which provides tax breaks.

I've been trying to avoid sequels, reboots, and other Millennial nostalgia-based movies going to a mainstream theater, and I found it nearly impossible. Accidentally watched Uncharted not realizing it was based on... a video game of all things. It wasn't good. Nothing else was good either the past 2 years.

I'm not partial to old movies, but there are some gems, and they show how much you can do without modern VFX. I don't know what modern live-action movies were even improved by fancy effects besides The Matrix, which was awesome. Even when the scene is about action, it's cooler when it's realistic, like the Blues Brothers chase where they're actually driving 118 MPH and 104 real cars are getting wrecked.

If you want to avoid reboots in theaters, you would have had to stop watching films in the 1930s.

Are you serious?? Lots of awesome new films come out every year.

I'm not sure what you mean. My example was a non-reboot 1999 movie.

What’s funny is that considering the waste and negligence described in the article, I bet it’s cheaper to wreck 104 real cars than to pay a VFX team to do it.

The Revenant is one of the last movies in recent memory that seemed to do something novel.

If we’re going to primarily be inundated with highly computer-influenced content, I prefer it to not try to look perfectly real which is why I’ve really enjoyed some of the animated series that have popped up recently. I’ll also admit that I’ve seen Into the Spider-Verse because my friends wouldn’t let me avoid it. I’ll give Marvel a pass on that one—the animation is amazing.

> I bet it’s cheaper to wreck 104 real cars than to pay a VFX team to do it.

This reminds me: you know that scene in Tenet where a Boeing goes into building? It was neither VFX nor a model. It was a full size, real Boeing. Nolan said it was cheaper.

> I’ll also admit that I’ve seen Into the Spider-Verse because my friends wouldn’t let me avoid it. I’ll give Marvel a pass on that one—the animation is amazing.

Credit where credit is due: Spider-verse is the result of the phenomenal teams at Sony Pictures Imageworks. They absolutely nailed this movie, I could rewatch it countless times and still be amazed.

SPI has also produced some amazing technology for the industry, such as being the originator of the Arnold render engine, OpenColorIO (OCIO), and Open Shading Language (OSL).

You should also try Arcane if you haven’t yet. The animation is equally amazing and very expressive.

Netflix could not accept my payment because of some clerical error on their side and they were unwilling to fix it when I called trying to give them money. They literally could not take my money so I’ve been without Netflix for the last year, sadly. I’m a little salty because what company would deliver a canned “we can’t do that due to system error maybe try later idk lol” message to a customer when money is on the line? It’s absurd. /rant

Inception, Interstellar, District 9, Minority Report, Lord of the Rings, etc.

The Matrix was great because the VFX supported the practical FX.

In Matrix reloaded they replaced them.

The result was inferior.

>it was based on... a video game of all things

And the Uncharted games are great. They have good characterization, good writing and funny comedy bits. None of these were present in the movie.

> It wasn't good

Was there ever a movie made based on a video game which was good? I can't think of one.

Resident Evil

Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, Postal, Detective Pikachu, Sonic 1&2. Not necessary the greatest of cinema, but all of them did a good job of turning the source material into a movie. Probably helps that the source material of all of them is relative simple and leaves plenty of room for interpretation.

Also Steins;Gate, though that's a visual novel turned anime, not a regular game. But probably the best example of staying very close to the source material and succeeding.

I've only seen Mortal Kombat out of these and I guess I have to agree with this one. It was just as cheesy as the game and it worked well.

Silent Hill was pretty decent IMO

Elf Bowling loljk Maybe you can count the original animated Pokémon movies as based on a video game.

> I've been trying to avoid sequels, reboots, and other Millennial nostalgia-based movies going to a mainstream theater, and I found it nearly impossible. Accidentally watched Uncharted not realizing it was based on... a video game of all things. It wasn't good. Nothing else was good either the past 2 years.

Same, but for a different reason: I saw too much of how the "sausage gets made", and watching an artistically shitty Marvel blockbuster just doesn't provide enough entertainment to "zone out" of the human suffering that goes into producing that stuff.

> Sounds like “hollywood” is finally fully corporate, devoid of any soul it once had.

Perhaps, but then again people have been saying that about Hollywood since at least the 1930's. Hollywood has always been an industry aimed at making money thorough entertaining people. Sometimes this has resulted in great art being created, and Hollywood is not averse to art as long as it makes money.

I also watched that doc a week ago, and loved that pioneering spirit from Dykstra and the other heroes of my youth. In the next 5-10 years, I think that the growth of AI in VFX will bring some of that back. In fact, that's happening right now, across the world, as every VFX house seems to have some sort of AI skunkworks in place; techniques that are not ready for prime-time, as many applications of CGI weren't throughout the eighties, but who time is yet to come.

> And since when do lasers arc in space??

Webb would like a word...

Can you explain? I’m genuinely curious what phenomenon you’re referring to.

I think they're alluding to phenomena this[1], a description of gravitational lensing from the Webb Space Telescope team.

[1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2019/20/4377...

Okay yes, we can see distant light from slightly behind stars because it follows curved spacetime. The energy projectiles in question in Star Wars VIII arc in a parabolic trajectory through flat spacetime over much shorter distances.

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