A Journey to the Center of Procrastination : YouTube and Historical Rap Battles

      Much like  I had mentioned on my previous post, I am a busy college student. Very busy. By that, I mean that I peruse YouTube and completely ignore most if not all of my responsibilities as a student and as a functioning human being in today's fast-moving society. Anyway, what I'm getting at is Epic Rap Battles of History. Due to the fact that I'm genuinely a child, I get an incredible amount of entertainment out of these videos. Often laced with more offensive material than an internet troll could muster, ERB is usually rather educational and incredibly pleasing to the eye. Or not. There's really no in between. One of my favourites was a finale episode where they pit five monumental directors against each other in the form of, you guessed it, a rap battle. Honestly, why not. Warning: it's very NSFW with its profane lyrics. Sorry. Not really. It is a good watch, though.

    

       One of my favorite parts of these videos are the loads and loads of behind the scenes that they upload alongside the main photos. These videos usually showcase anything from the recording process, the post production, the costumes, and even just a full dance cover version. I enjoy seeing how much effort goes into the backgrounds because they tend to build them from scratch and usually use the same small things over and over but in different ways so the normal viewer wouldn't notice. Overall, I find it a very unique idea and really inspiring and I love learning their little shortcuts and reasonings when creating all of the aspects of their project.  I wouldn't wanna work on it myself (I actually really would), but it is very nice to see all of the steps that go into creating the special effects and backgrounds for these videos. 

Did Michael Bay actually do something right?

The Transformers trilogy is absolutely awful. Like most of Michael Bay's 'films' they are one-dimensional action flicks trying to disguise themselves as something more meaningful. Sorry Bay, but you're not fooling anyone. There's not a single Bay film that I have found cinematically pleasing, nor have I ever found a reason to commend the director, except for one exception.

While I do not necessarily agree with Bay's style of filming or directing, there is at least one thing he's done right all these years (besides managing to perfectly resemble Michael Bolton): hiring an excellent team of visual effects specialists. More specifically, I'm talking about the Transformers movies. While I find them to be terribly painful to watch, there is certainly something to admire about the films. The visual effects behind the absurdly complicated alien robots is simply breathtaking.

To start off, Destroyer, an enormously impressive creation found in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, took 72 hours to render...per frame! Pretty crazy, huh? Let's be honest, though. Anyone can make something that takes weeks to render. That's not the impressive part. The impressive part is that the single Transformer was put together by 6-8 individually created, incredibly detailed vehicles. Imagine how long that would take you to create. Now, imagine how long that would take you to create a second time once your director told you it wasn't good enough. I can only assume you'd be pretty upset with that news. Essentially, the animators were instructed to go back and make the machines twice as detailed as it already was, and THEN to reconstruct the final robot with all 6-8 individual pieces.

Another kudos for Bay goes to his ability to bring in practical visual effects. On the set of Transformers 2, Bay was able to bring in a sizable number of military vehicles (tanks, bombers, F16s, you name it) to fly over set, drop flares, and just add some level of believability to his otherwise ludicrous film. Bay is also a fan of on-set explosions. They're dangerous, yes, but they make for one hell of an effect. It also saves quite a bit of postproduction time and effort. Speaking for anyone who's ever worked postproduction on a film, we all greatly appreciate it.

Bringing it back to postproduction visual effects, the aircraft carrier scene of Transformers 2 is also quite an impressive feat. I never really gave it much thought, but much more than most people would ever expect went into this scene. The team shot actual burning miniatures and debris with blue screens that were later composited into the completed animations. The people on the carriers were a mix of animations and people who were shot tumbling and falling. The aircraft were created by the animators as well. Basically, thousands of pieces were created for this scene simply to be destroyed over the course of a minute. It's like being a kid again after taking hours to build a LEGO model just to have your younger brother completely and utterly demolish it.

Animation is a crazy field to go into. It's often the defining point between a film's success and it's downfall. In Michael Bay's case, it's really the only thing he was able to do correctly.

I Can't Think Of Anything Clever

So I was going to think of a clever title, but I got nothing, so here it goes:

I'm going to write about the new Transformers Age Of Extinction trailer that was unveiled during the Super Bowl. To start off I started tearing when I saw it because I love these movies and it looked incredible. So let us begin.

Watching this trailer really made me open my eyes. Now, I know that I wasn't exactly able to pin point specific effects that will be used in class, however, I was able to catch a lot of cool effects in general. The way that the trailer was made utilized a ton of different effects. The use of explosions and particles were made great. Granted the Transformers are always done with such high quality that the amount of detail that is put into them is probably out of this world.

If I relate this post to my last two, I can most definitely imagine that the Transformers movies take much more computing power and many more computers in render farms to create this movie. They are both long movies and EXTREMELY high resolution. Especially with the detail, like I stated above. If you want to watch the trailer, it is right here. If you are as impressed as I am with how this trailer makes the movie look, I am pretty sure no one will be anything less than impressed.

CGI

Here is a comical take on the powers of CGI posted by "The Onion."