Spartacus: Blood and Sand
Posted by: halukcy on: March 17, 2010
Here we have another Roman era epic based on the legend of Spartacus. Many reviews say that Spartacus: Blood and Sand is a mixture of Zack Snyder’s 300 and HBO and BBC’s Rome. I didn’t like 300 when I first saw it but I am still a huge fan of Rome. The relation of Spartacus to 300 is in terms of cinematography and vfx. Its only relation to Rome is “hard” subject matter. Although, I must say that Subject of Rome was much harder than Spartacus. Spartacus’ hardness is based on frequent explicit shots that sometimes you cannot bear to look.
Anyway, besides from the subject, Spartacus has a huge downside to its companions. It has tons of CGI, and they are not good. It’s true that you can never expect top class CGI from a TV series, having a limited budget and all. Since not many TV series depend on this much CGI, it’s generally not a problem and we easily ignore the occasional “bad” effects. In the case of Spartacus, we see that almost every scene is shot in the studio. Add that the gladiator fights, which often has 18+ violence and you have a lot of work to do.
Why is it so bad? The 300-like fights and gore is not the bad part. The bad part is mainly lighting, green-screen shots and accompanying backgrounds.
The Gore (above) – Bad Light (below)
The lights in all of the green-screen shots are really bad. Mattes are also very amateurish. And of course, the cheering crowd in the arena. The animation is so bad that I want to cry every time I see it. Then it reminds me something, the last time I saw such bad cheering crowd animation. Yeah, it was from FIFA and NBA games of EA Sports in the late 90′s. The crowd animation in Spartacus slightly better rendered version of those good’ol games’. Yeah, I just compared a 21th century several million-dollar budget TV Series to a game that was released more than 10 years ago. Check those awful matte and crowd:
So, you probably got the idea that the CGI of Spartacus sucks. Don’t be surprised when I confess I’m watching it 
I just love the gladiator era Rome. This is not a masterpiece like early mentioned Rome, but it has its moments. There are a lot of, I mean a LOT of parts that can be fast forwarded though. You just can’t please me
My final word is: If you are not able to do it properly, don’t do it. Today’s audience got used to state of the art CGI. You will not be able to fool them with such cheap tricks soon. TV or not, people’s eyes are getting more and more accustomed to detail. Just a friendly warning.
Avatar: After the Oscars
Posted by: halukcy on: March 8, 2010
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I saw Avatar one more time last saturday, the day before the big ceremony, this time in an IMAX theater fortunately. The reason I wanted to see it for a second time is because I saw the short documentary called “Creating the World of Pandora”. Eventhough it was only about 25 minutes long and very brief, it made me excited about the movie.
Avatar got 3 Oscars, the ones they deserved. Nobody thought and wanted that Best Picture award would go to Avatar, and it didn’t. The revolution Avatar made is not the storyline or acting, I mentioned this in the previous post. The revolution is the process of film making. The short documentary talks about these revolutions briefly and it gives you the idea.
This semester, I am taking a Virtual Reality course, I wanted to take a vfx relevant course before I graduated. There wasn’t any undergrad courses so I took a grad course. Anyway, before going into deeper stuff, we examine VR instruments, some techniques, visualization and interaction problems, etc. During these, I noticed that all the things I saw in the documentary existed years before the film’s production. For example, the virtual camera. There were similar applications a few years ago. So, I asked myself: Why Avatar is considered as a revolution in film making?
I answered my own question a few moments later. First, many of those VR methods used in production of Avatar were never used in film making before; even if they were used, the scale was not considerably big. Second, Avatar showed the industry that you can make money from VR. During the lectures my instructor often says: “They stopped R&D for this and focused on that because Avatar used that.” We see that many VR techniques were very old and did not improved through the years because there were no commercial interest. Avatar is the one that pushed the sleeping VR world’s buttons.
In the documentary, James Cameron says “We pushed the envelope”. I now know that the pushing is that trying the methods nobody has ever tried (or tried but failed). They did not invent so many new things. They just put together the known things and made them useful. Revolution is not always creating something from scratch. Best revolutions are the ones that collect previously known information, put them together and make them work.
Avatar: It’s all about the atmosphere
Posted by: halukcy on: February 3, 2010
If you see a drama piece, directed by, say Scorsese, you’ll look at the acting first. If you see an action packed crime fiction, you’ll look at the quality of the action scenes: the chases, fights, etc. But, if you see a story which doesn’t take place in here and now, you’ll look at the atmosphere. Futuristic sci-fi, post-apocalyptic drama, or western, a film needs atmosphere to lean on. And the atmosphere in Avatar, the best I’ve ever seen.
How do I decide if the atmosphere is good? If I don’t wanna leave the theater, if I don’t want the movie to end and even if it ends and I leave the place, on the way home, I still feel I am in that atmosphere, it is a good atmosphere.
I guess Pandora is 100% CG, but you don’t care. All inhabitants of Pandora make you feel like you’re one of them. You think that you’re a member of the clan, a member of the forest.
There is one minor detail I didn’t like. The shiny textures of the night creatures, dog-like ones especially. But who cares, right? It’s just a personal thing and even I don’t care.
I saw it in XpanD 3D, since they didn’t have IMAX version but I will see the IMAX one as soon as possible. And I will try to write one more objective review later. This was just to share my fascination
The Wolfman
Posted by: halukcy on: February 2, 2010
I didn’t know this movie existed just until I saw Double Negative’s tweet about it. There are two trailers and they look good. The cast also looks good. Let’s hope that we won’t be disappointed. Check the trailer:
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
Posted by: halukcy on: February 1, 2010
I watched RotF last week and I must say, Transformers movies are exactly like everyone is talking about: State of the art effects, American propaganda and Megan Fox. Luckily, my concern is the best part of the picture, the effects.
If I recall correctly, vfx of the first one were not as “good” as this one’s. There was still bulk load of CGI, but you couldn’t tell what’s happening on screen. Especially fight scenes were very messy, so that the only things you saw were some mechanic parts moving on the screen. It seems they noticed this and chose a better path this time.
Let’s start with the opening fight, the big decepticon chased by choppers.
Like every fx in the movie, this scene was perfectly blended. I’m a sucker for fog, smoke, sand, any particle effects, and I like good examples of them. Combined with good lighting, here you have a nice robo-chase.
Let’s take Autobots. I read in Cinefex that Michael Bay wanted them lit brightly even if it looks unrealistic. Actually, I really liked the autobot lighting, especially Optimus Prime. Check it out:
Aside from lighting, they also did a good job on the facial expressions. Seriousness of Optimus and sadness of Bumblebee were very well reflected. I am also extra pleased when CG glass is extremely photo realistic. That’s why I hate extreme CG on TV series. If you can’t do it, don’t do it. Fortunately, good glass is the part of the 200M spent.
Decepticons were of course very different from Autobots, darker lit, more sharp parts, more metallic.
The Fallen and Megatron were the most elaborate Decepticons, as you can guess. Decepticon world was completely CG and you can tell, but you don’t care since dark lights and beautiful matte metal texture of the fallen draws all your attention.
Oh, yes, and the veteran Decepticon, another state of the art CG character. Very sophisticated character animation including facials and movement. (I know shadow on a flat field is not very hard but I still wanted to put that screenshot anyway, very well blended into real world.)
And finally, the desert fights. the Voltron-ish Decepticon was the biggest character in the movie, and good job on such large characters really pleases my eyes. I mentioned I love sand, and what is better than a huge dusty fight in the desert, ha?
The final battle on the pyramid was the last big scene. I saw bad examples of exploding blocks, and this was not one of them. In Spiderman 3, I had to pause the movie to check if I really saw a huge block passing right through Spidey (I saw it right unfortunately). Bricks of the pyramid were really realistic in the explosions. Only thing I have to say about the final scene is damn bricks? I guess so:)
Anyway, if you read this far, you realized I really liked the visuals although as a whole movie was not that strong. But I guess most of that $200M went to vfx, so it’s money well spent. They also did around $800 M in the box office and I think that pleased them.
Welcome
Posted by: halukcy on: February 1, 2010
I’ve been planning to write for a long time, but I wasn’t sure what to write about. Last night I was watching Attack of the Clones on TV, and the idea popped into my head. Visual effects is the very topic I am most interested in, so why not write about it? In fact, why not write about every CGI topic I find interesting, why limit it to only Vfx?
Hence, I opened this blog. As I mentioned in the About page, I am not an expert, just an enthusiast.
