Exactly what I thought when I saw it. Not cool.
children of men opens tomorrow in USA
- Thread starter Jerry_111
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Exactly what I thought when I saw it. Not cool.
Icarusintel
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Jesus, that's crap. Hopefully the Region 1 Special Edition will have an awesome DVD cover and package.
gick
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According to the DVD and several websites (which I can't be arsed to dig up) they were actually done in one take. The blood you see on the camera in the big battle disappears because they digitally removed it.
Beerdude26
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You have to be bullshitting me.
theotherguy
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wow, just saw it...fantastic but too short and a pretty bad ending.
Jerry_111
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Even if the scene was cut at the point where the blood disappears, that would still have been one of the longest scenes I've ever seen.
Beerdude26
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It's around 7 to 8 minutes. They spent 2 months choreographing it, they only started doing takes the last two weeks.
How? I didn't say I could do anything like the baby in the movie. Not a chance, not in a million years! But I have done a lot of work in Renderman and it's incredibly difficult to write shaders by hand in RSL.
Gick You're right, not all the shots were done in separate takes. Some were though. For example, the birth scene is two shots. We can also see the blood removed the lens which is an alarm going off in my head saying that the scene was divided there. It would be way way way way too difficult, not to mention expensive as hell to remove the blood for the remainder of that scene.
God, the effects were fantastic.
KagePrototype
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I've examined it, and the blood is definately removed over a period of a few seconds about 3/4 into the shot (around the time he's looking up the stairwell inside the building).
I'm confused, is the nine-minute action scene one take or not. I'm hearing it was 5 takes stitched together, but this article says otherwise.
Krynn72
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Jerry_111
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no wai! i thought it was 2D like every other real baby!
KagePrototype
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Nope; the blood was there by accident. The director even called cut when he saw it happen, but no one heard him because of an explosion going off. He just let keep going.
The Monkey
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Is it any good.
Dynasty
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Next time you watch it, it'll seem so obvious it was 3D.
Eh, it's possible, but watch out for sneaky press kit releases. Press kits are basically advertising, but sometimes they'll include a bunch of "funny" or "interesting" stories that aren't true to share with entertainment news/DVD commentary for more attention. Like Sonny breaking that guy's rib in the Godfather? That isn't true. Dustin Hoffman secretly laughing in the corner of the room in the Graduate? It didn't happen. But every movie does it. Just watch the commentary, usually they'll have some story that sounds like bullshit, but you're inclined to believe it because it's so ridiculous. That sounds like some press kit material to me. When a director yells cut, he yells cut and it's repeated over about 5 different radios to everyone on the set. If they don't hear him the first time, he'll say it again, rest assured. It would literally cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get rid of the blood digitally unless they cut the scene and replaced the lens. You can't just digitally remove something with a snap of the finger. Someone has to go in and do it frame by frame, making it perfect every time. At 24 frames per second at 4K resolution, that's just ludicrous..
Ah, I was right! I knew it couldn't be done in one long shot. It's possible I suppose, but this method seems cheaper and more doable, considering the amount of takes you'd need to have to get it right, you'd lose way more money on film.
Most of the transitions in the movie were completed on the environment while the camera was briefly panning away from the main actors. For the coffee shop scene though, Theo seems to remain in frame throughout the shot, but at the transition point, the camera cleverly pans off of him to show his reflection on a window. "You get the feeling that he was in camera throughout the shot, when actually, for a couple of seconds, you only saw his reflection... You just don't notice it."
Even more complex was a shot in which the camera follows Theo in the middle of an urban battlefield and inside a building. At one point, in a remarkable cinematic sleight of hand, the camera actually becomes the character's point of view. The shot was captured in five separate takes over two locations. The exterior section of the shot was split into only two takes and the interior split into three. On top of the already demanding transition effects, Double Negative also had to deal with a huge amount of set and action enhancements. Some buildings were painted out, others were extended with extra stories, new structures were added in; hundreds of bullet hits were also composited in, using practical elements.
During the interior section of the shot, the environment remains visible behind windows. Since the plate had been shot with greenscreens, the team needed to replace them with a digital panorama of the exterior. First, digital stills of the exterior set were stitched together using proprietary software. The resulting panorama was mapped onto a 3D cylinder, which was then imported into a 3D scene containing the matchmove data from the tracked greenscreen plate. From the 3D package, the cylinder and the matchmoved camera were then exported into Shake via another in-house application, and the 'Cyclorama' was composited into the greenscreen windows.
Page 3
quote:
Crafting a Nine-Minute Long Shot
The most complex shot of all probably was a nine-minute long scene in which the characters have an extensive dialog while driving a car, and are then ambushed by a group of anarchists, resulting in one of the character being shot dead on its seat. The shot was filmed in six sections and at four different locations over one week and required five seamless digital transitions. Moreover, the camera records the action with a continuous movement that would actually be impossible to create in reality. In many instances, the camera ends up shooting the actors from a seat where we had just seen another actor the second before...
The plates were shot from a "doggy cam" shooting through the cut-off roof. The director, the cinematographer and the camera operator were actually seated on top of the car, thanks to a special rig, while the vfx crew and other technicians were hiding out of camera range around the traveling car. Altogether, 13 actors and crew members were on board for plate photography!
Given the length of the scene, the team opted to use as much of the original plates as possible, re-timing, warping and painting to reposition actors and parts of the vehicle where they didn't quite line up from section to section. Photographic textures of the entire interior of the car were taken to create a 3D model that could be used to align the 3D tracking data for each section of the shot. The roof was replaced throughout the entire shot, while the dashboard, windscreen and parts of the front doors had to be created in CG in several instances to allow for a smoother transition between plates. Defocusing the Maya elements was achieved using depth passes from software packages, including a proprietary plug-in that uses real world camera and lens measurements to calculate correct focus levels. Focus distances were then animated by hand to match in-shot focus pulls. "During filming, each location was photographed using an 8mm lens over a range of 12 stops to produce an HDRI environment -- inside and outside the car -- that would allow us to light the CG elements," Churchill says. "Using proprietary tool Stig, we created tiled panoramas of each environment that we then used to join the surroundings from one location to the next."
The live-action ambush was greatly enhanced by CG Molotov cocktail, a shattering digital windshield, a bullet hit and blood spurt and even a CG biker and motorcycle to augment a stunt performed during plate photography.
From VFXWorld.com
Most of the transitions in the movie were completed on the environment while the camera was briefly panning away from the main actors. For the coffee shop scene though, Theo seems to remain in frame throughout the shot, but at the transition point, the camera cleverly pans off of him to show his reflection on a window. "You get the feeling that he was in camera throughout the shot, when actually, for a couple of seconds, you only saw his reflection... You just don't notice it."
Even more complex was a shot in which the camera follows Theo in the middle of an urban battlefield and inside a building. At one point, in a remarkable cinematic sleight of hand, the camera actually becomes the character's point of view. The shot was captured in five separate takes over two locations. The exterior section of the shot was split into only two takes and the interior split into three. On top of the already demanding transition effects, Double Negative also had to deal with a huge amount of set and action enhancements. Some buildings were painted out, others were extended with extra stories, new structures were added in; hundreds of bullet hits were also composited in, using practical elements.
During the interior section of the shot, the environment remains visible behind windows. Since the plate had been shot with greenscreens, the team needed to replace them with a digital panorama of the exterior. First, digital stills of the exterior set were stitched together using proprietary software. The resulting panorama was mapped onto a 3D cylinder, which was then imported into a 3D scene containing the matchmove data from the tracked greenscreen plate. From the 3D package, the cylinder and the matchmoved camera were then exported into Shake via another in-house application, and the 'Cyclorama' was composited into the greenscreen windows.
Page 3
quote:
Crafting a Nine-Minute Long Shot
The most complex shot of all probably was a nine-minute long scene in which the characters have an extensive dialog while driving a car, and are then ambushed by a group of anarchists, resulting in one of the character being shot dead on its seat. The shot was filmed in six sections and at four different locations over one week and required five seamless digital transitions. Moreover, the camera records the action with a continuous movement that would actually be impossible to create in reality. In many instances, the camera ends up shooting the actors from a seat where we had just seen another actor the second before...
The plates were shot from a "doggy cam" shooting through the cut-off roof. The director, the cinematographer and the camera operator were actually seated on top of the car, thanks to a special rig, while the vfx crew and other technicians were hiding out of camera range around the traveling car. Altogether, 13 actors and crew members were on board for plate photography!
Given the length of the scene, the team opted to use as much of the original plates as possible, re-timing, warping and painting to reposition actors and parts of the vehicle where they didn't quite line up from section to section. Photographic textures of the entire interior of the car were taken to create a 3D model that could be used to align the 3D tracking data for each section of the shot. The roof was replaced throughout the entire shot, while the dashboard, windscreen and parts of the front doors had to be created in CG in several instances to allow for a smoother transition between plates. Defocusing the Maya elements was achieved using depth passes from software packages, including a proprietary plug-in that uses real world camera and lens measurements to calculate correct focus levels. Focus distances were then animated by hand to match in-shot focus pulls. "During filming, each location was photographed using an 8mm lens over a range of 12 stops to produce an HDRI environment -- inside and outside the car -- that would allow us to light the CG elements," Churchill says. "Using proprietary tool Stig, we created tiled panoramas of each environment that we then used to join the surroundings from one location to the next."
The live-action ambush was greatly enhanced by CG Molotov cocktail, a shattering digital windshield, a bullet hit and blood spurt and even a CG biker and motorcycle to augment a stunt performed during plate photography.
From VFXWorld.com
Javert
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Screw Superman or Pirates, give "Children" Oscar for Best Special Effects.
Add also: Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor-Michael Caine.
I just got back from seeing this movie. It was downright visceral! Next to "The Departed", it's the most visionary film to come out this year.
Add also: Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor-Michael Caine.
I just got back from seeing this movie. It was downright visceral! Next to "The Departed", it's the most visionary film to come out this year.
Sulkdodds
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Well...6Three said:
Firstly an 'apocalypse' very often implies a new beginning as well as an ending - and Children of Men, with its end-of-the-world scenario, its terrorism, its grimy, dystopian streets, its rampant extremism, and the final outbreak of complete chaos in the Bexhill ghetto, is pretty apocalyptic. There's a sense of society working itself up into an appalling frenzy, a death thrash, before it destroys itself and begins again. The planes that fly over and bomb the shoreline add an explosive flourish. By the end of the film, the world as we know it could be said to be over.
Essentially, Children of Men is both terribly bleak and very hopeful because it presents two opposing convictions - one, that there is no hope for humanity and the world is a terrible, violent, chaotic and absurd place - as symbolised by the appearance of Picasso's Guernica, I suppose, and two, that we must continue to strive and to hope for a better tomorrow. These contradicting beliefs are ones that I think many - certainly me included - share, or can at least understand, especially living today when we are confronted with multiple doom scenarios at any one time - from immigration destroying our culture to global warming destroying our species.
At the start of the film, Theo is resigned to his fate and to that of humanity. He has given up the idealism of his younger years to work in the arse-end of the government and fritter away the time left. But in the course of the film his activist tendencies are revived, both by events and the help of the old soldier, Michael Caine's character. By the end, he has wholly committed himself to the essential pursuit of a better tomorrow (or even a future at all) - despite what are possibly the direst circumstances imaginable.
In the closing moments of the film, we get an incredible powerful image of that contradiction: human hope is reduced to this poor woman, clutching a baby, perched in a boat, lost on a tossing sea. The arrival of the boat - tomorrow, duh - and the haunting laughter of children - promise only a chance. It is a hope - however small and battered, whatever the world can do to tear itself apart, and even after an apocalypse, it is there, and perhaps that's all we can ask for.
Well, that's what I thought, anyway.
Neutrino
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Personally, I would have much preferred it to just end with her floating through the fog, leaving it up to the audience to decide whether hope or despair prevails.
63
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I'd rather be told what happened.
Agreeing with Sulk. Too many movies are spoon-fed nowadays. I LIKE that we don't know anything about the human project. We know just enough to get a little idea and it sounds plausible. I also like how we don't know why the world is infertile. That makes it more interesting. Throughout the movie, we basically see it through Theo's eyes. He never finds out either of these things, but he can guess and interpret, like the audience.
gick
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Nominated for:
Best Editing
Best Cinematography (it really really deserves to win this)
Best Adapted Screenplay
I wanted it to be nominated for best director, best film and best supporting actor - michael caine, but i didnt expect it to happen.
On the plus side, Pan's Labyrinth is up for 8, and the Prestige is up for a few of the technical oscars.
Best Editing
Best Cinematography (it really really deserves to win this)
Best Adapted Screenplay
I wanted it to be nominated for best director, best film and best supporting actor - michael caine, but i didnt expect it to happen.
On the plus side, Pan's Labyrinth is up for 8, and the Prestige is up for a few of the technical oscars.
Direwolf
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I like the fact that the mysterious ending forces some introspection for the audience so they can make sense of everything, and its great from a symbolic point of view. But from a character point of view I can understand the frustration with it. By the end you're attached to those characters and not having any closure on their fate is jarring. Its on of those situations where I can't argue with the choice, but I can understand where critics are coming from.
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