Dazzle and Sparkle: Everything You Need For A Magical Film

Cinderella 

I am a huge Disney fans, as far as I can remember I have always idolized Disney princess for their beautiful dresses and amazing elegance and grace. As I grew older I became more aware of the issues people have against Disney princesses and why they can in some ways ruin a child's perception of body image and identity. However, despite those issues I have found the princesses to be inspirational. I recently went to see the new Cinderella movie and I was absolutely astonished and amazed by the beauty and perfectionism in the editing and graphics in the film. But most of all I was obsessed with the costume designs and the art direction in the film, I mean I was literally jaw-dropped at how beautifully crafted Cinderella's ball gown was. I watched a couple interviews with the  Academy Award winning costume designer Sandy Powel to see her inspirational and how she went about designing the costume choices for Cinderella. 

 When I am first approached to design the costumes or be the art director for a film shoot, the very first thing I do is request a script from the writer to (1) find the time and setting of the piece, (2) extract the emotional appeals intended for the audience, (3) meet with writers and directors, and (4) find colors and clothing choices to fit the piece. I was pleased that Sandy Powel takes on a very similar approach when designing for a film, her sketches were extremely detailed and beautifully crafted... the amount of hard work, dedication, and precision placed in the designed sketches between Powel and Swarovski definitely show in the film. Cinderella's dress is nothing short of fabulous and truly timeless. 

 

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.

Resident Evil Zombies

You know, I know that the zombies in Resident Evil are CGI. Well, rather the BIG zombies. The "normal people zombies" are  clearly just people in makeup. But I've always wondered about the CGI zombies.

There isn't a lot of information online about the making of these things, but I can do my best to try and describe it as best as I can.

Being a fan of all of the Resident Evil movies, I have been able to see the evolution of the CGI from the first film to the last, and when I tell you how much it's actually changed, it is honestly crazy. In the span of 10 years, the technology has obviously become more and more advanced; so being able to create more intricate and more "gruesome"zombies was becoming more and more possible.

Watching the first movie, the CGI for 2002 was honestly not too bad. But watching the last (2012), oh man was it so much better. The way they were able to improve it to make it look so much more... well.. as real as they can without getting cheesy.

But relating this post to my previous posts, with great detail comes great render time. I was unable to find how much time it took for the render times, however, you can probably guess that it wasn't a short time. But all in all... they made a great movie.

It's all in the Details

So my usual posts have been about how "we can do this or that", or at least that the animations that we see professionally done are a ton of work, but we can do. I want to take a step back from that for a second to talk about this video I found, because it approaches it's style of animation very well and does a lot of cool stuff. So I'm not going to say that I could make something like this, because it is really, really incredible work, but I want to pull out some cool things it does and talk about them. This is a video for League of Legends, about it's "Championship Series", and follows several top players at the game as they "transform" into the champions they play in the game. So you end up with the animations of a bunch of people who are half video game characters, acting as those characters. The creators made a conscious decision to still have a majority of the character model as the person, so we can still identify who they are. On top of this, in the first part they have the people in front of banners representing their team name, thus further having the audience play the game of "who is that?". The one thing I really liked about this video is all the extra little details they add in to make the animations seem more real. The "golem hand" has a little smoke come out of it for example, and when the hand hits a rock that rock breaks apart just a little bit. The green ooze that comes off one of them just has a little bit of particles going on to make it look better, and sparks and smoke effects are common on all of the animations used. I love these little touches because it is really these things that add production value to this type of piece. The art style is obviously really striking, but to make an animation believable you need to really be detailed oriented, not just thinking about the super big picture. Because obviously the animation and story as a whole are strong here but in my opinions the details count dramaticly more then we give them credit for

Extreme Detail Used in Movies

So a few of my friends were sending around this article that Cracked.com just put out. It's called "7 Movies That Put Insane Work Into Details You Didn't Notice"and it shows some rather nice work.

The first one they list is a movie that we talked about in class and actually had a chance to view the process of the title sequence: Se7en. We got to see a little more than what Cracked talks about, but the article does talk about how the creators wrote the journal entries, found and attached pictures, and actually bound the pages together.

Continuing on, Cracked.com talks about a beautiful animation that I have never even heard of. The Thief and the Cobbler, which inspired Disney's Aladdin, was written and directed by Richard Williams. It was about 30 years into the making, but was never finished. Animation World Network Magazine even had an article on it in 1997 talking about the work and background of the story.

Now even if you don't read the article, you should definitely watch this animation because the detail is really quite amazing.

Cracked.com continues on the examine Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Stanley Kubrick's Filmography, The Matrix, Ghostbusters, and finally Akira Kurosawa's Entire Filmography. 

The article is a bit short and not as detailed as I would like it to be, but it definitely opened up my eyes a bit more to the detail that goes into these movies. I've watched Ghostbusters since I was a kid and while I knew that the terms they were using were real, reading the article really emphasized how each director, writer, designer, creator, and producer should really look into even the simplest details in order to make a production that much better. When creating something, no matter what your job is, the project will always come out better with a little more research. Not only will it make it more realistic, but sometimes it will even inspire you to create something else. Detail may seem futile or unnecessary, even out of the budget, but creating something with such depth can really pay off in the reception of the final product.