CGI so good you don't see it

Nice FX!

From JoBlo.com:

This video clip just blew me away. I seriously had no idea that there was so much CGI in David Fincher's ZODIAC. I guess Finch really didn't need to go out and find/create backdrops that looked like San Fransisco in the 70s. Check out the following clip to see just how much of the background was real, and how much was just a bunch of sh*t the tech dudes added later.

Crazy, huh? Sure, it's not Shia LaBeouf acting with an enormous imaginary robot head, but this is pretty sick too. The big blue screen has to be a little distracting, doesn't it? Anyway, this is a pretty cool little insight for all of you interested in film-making.

(Checking to see when Transformers comes out on DVD... ahh, yes, October 16, 2007)

The Trailer Before Transformers

Before Transformers started, we saw a cool trailer for a movie that appears to take place in NYC. It look like a home video of a "going away" party, when suddenly the city comes under attack. Buildings are blowing up, the head of the Statue of Liberty gets tossed into the street... all shot from a consumer video camera.

It's some new thing by JJ Abrams (creator of Alias & Lost)-- that was given away by the Bad Robot logo credit. But there's no title, and not much else to go by. There are some cryptic websites, but I wouldn't bother with them just yet. There doesn't seem to be anything worthwhile yet. It's a sort of web-marketing scheme where the websites will magically grow more content as the movie gets nearer (Jan 08-08).

I hope that this project doesn't distract from the "other" project he's working on. That would be the next Star Trek movie. I got the impression that the point he went off to do Lost, Alias started to go down the drain. I'd rather have one great movie than two half-good ones.

CG Movies

Over the past years, CG-based movies have certainly evolved.

Tron was one of earliest. Though many scenes were made with cardboard and not computers, it certain defined the look for CG design and had many cultural icons that still appear today. I recently saw a car commercial that was a reenactment of the lightcycle game.

The Last Starfighter was fun, but lacked realism. The space scenes had all the trademarks of early CG- too clean, too sharp angles, no shadows.

On TV, of course there was Star Trek, which mixed models and CG. An often overlooked series was Space: Above and Beyond. It had what I consider the best, most realistic CG space scenes until Battlestar Galactica came around.

BTW, I'm not talking about the 1970's series-- If you don't know about the new BSG, head over to SciFi.com right now. Better yet, head over to Amazon and get started with the DVDs before Season 4 comes out next year!

Final Fantasy was a really good attempt at realism, but fell short in a few areas. Most notably was lip sync and facial expression. The character ended up seeming like robots instead of people. I think that alone gave the movie a bad perception despite how incredible the rest of the imagery was. I wish they could go back and re-render that one.

I ran across a trailer for one called Dear Anne. But the website is down. Just discovered this one- Now and Nowhere. Not sure what it's about, but it looks cool.

I don't want to count Star Wars, even though the last trilogy was almost completely CG. I think they just tried to hard to be hyper-animation and ended up with the equivalent of someone overdressing in a really bad outfit like some stars do at award ceremonies.

I have yet to see 300, but have high hopes. Sin City and Scanner Darkly were okay, but they were more style than story. Movies like this seem to be getting better. But still way behind the traditional Japanese animated movies like Spirited Away or Ghost in the Shell. In design there's a philosophy that "form follows function"- I think that applies to movies as well.