The last post about differences in animations really got me thinking about what other differences motion and graphics had on the movie/tv industry. I posed the question to myself, do older more dated movies suffer due to their lack of special effects? At first I thought about action or fight scenes. To the old days of Batman and Robin where when someone was punched a big “POW” would come up on the screen with a cheesy sound effect to the newest Transformer movies where half the time you don’t know who is good or who is bad; you’re just speechless from the effects of the scene. I decided that the answer was no, people are watching older movies because their classics, and more times then not these said classics make you speechless in ways Transformers could only wish.
I turned my attention to more modern shows and movies. And was wondering does a show’s success at all correlated to its special effects budget? My first thought was that it shouldn’t. However I was sitting on the couch last week with my girlfriend as she watched MTV’s new show Teen Wolf, it was the season finale and in the scene the “big bad wolf” no pun intended is killed. The wolf is CGI, and as I watched it I almost laughed. The show had actually grabbed my attention for a couple of minutes, however the second I saw the wolf I got up and walked away.
Now I had also been dragged by my girlfriend to see the twilight movies, and plot aside at least the CGI was better. Comparing apples to apples, the Werewolves in twilight made the werewolves in Teen Wolf look like they were drawn on a sketch pad.
Here are two links to see the small glimpses of the Werewolf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m87uh7YH7CQ&feature=related
So after watching these I have to make the decision that sometimes even the greatest plots need a more “beefed” up budget to allow for CGI work that looks professional
Spencer (and everyone), it is a good post. I took the liberty of editing it so that instead of the link you can actually see the clip in question, but I left the other one so you can go back and edit it yourself.
ReplyDeleteFirst a tip: please do not use WORD (which you did) to write your post. Either write it directly in the post window, OR use a simple text editor. To see why just go into your post (in edit mode clicking the little pencil at the bottom of your post or login end edit) and switch to the HTML view. You will see a ton of garbage! that is WORD. After all that garbage your real post begins. So using WORD just make it hard to edit and can cause display problems as well, so KILL, KILL, KILL WORD
To "embed" the actual video click the SHARE button (below any YouTube or VImeo video and then choose "embed". Copy that code that is highlighted and simply paste it, not in the COMPOSE tab, but in the EDIT HTML tab in the line where you want the clip to appear.
It sound horribly difficult but it is not, just try it.
If you had used simple text (for example use TextEdit in the Mac) there would not be any garbage in HTML except a few tags and it would be very easy to insert anything. Do the following so you see what I mean:
Copy the text that you wrote (even from your WORD doc or even from the already posted text) and PASTE it in TextEdit first. Then copy it from TextEdit and PASTE IT in the COMPOSE window of a new post (no need to publish it, you can preview it if you want) then switch to the EDIT HTML tab and see the difference, clean text! just a few tags indicating paragraphs etc. very easy. So now, inserting the embed code for the video clip is a snap, right? right!
Happy posting. One more thing, tags (labels) . The more appropriate tags for your post would be things like: Teen Wolf, MTV, werewolves,Batman, Transformers, special effects, CGI etc. you get the idea. No one is going to enter a search in Google called "comparing CGI budgets" (OK may 1 or 2 people)
Hope this long comment helps everyone.