Speed Racer's Visual FX Uncovered 274
Marco Trezzini writes "View exclusive interactive samples of the digital building blocks behind the Speed Racer movie in VRMag's in-depth interviews with award-winning Matrix visual FX guru John Gaeta, Dennis Martin, Lubo Hristov, and Jake Morrison.
Including Virtual Reality panoramas of the movie locations, turn tables of the mach 5 and 6,
and many making of videos unveiling the secrets of the visual effects.
Link to 'Speed Racer uncovered' and to John Gaeta's interview." The first time I saw the trailer for this movie, my jaw hit the floor. Nobody makes live action "Cartoons" that look like this. I guess that makes me believe there is no way the movie can be good.
Hollywood is dead to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Writers strike be damned, im on a viewers strike!
Re:Hollywood is dead to me (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hollywood is dead to me (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm there, man! In fact, I'm bouncing here and there and everywhere!"
Re:Hollywood is dead to me (Score:4, Insightful)
I swear, it's like for every good movie out of Hollywood, there are five marginal movies, and for every marginal movies, there are ten that are complete crap, like this one: a movie based on a badly dubbed and chopped piece of crap cartoon about a guy who races in every single episode in this, okay, admittedly, tricked out car, and he's smart enough to remember which button is the jump skis (or whatever the fuck those things are) and which button is the buzzsaw in the front bumper, but he's too fucking stupid to check the trunk for the kid and the chimp, and no one picks up that Racer X is his brother.
What's next? Thundercats the movie? Blues Clues the movie?
Here's hoping it tanks like a Uwe Boll film and Hollywood gets the message.
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And really? A Thundercats movie? That's just fucking sad.
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Re:Hollywood is dead to me (Score:5, Funny)
I especially want to see the scene where Steve showers with Slippery Soap, and they have to have a conversation about personal space.
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The first time I saw a rumor they where making this steamy loaf I though no one could be that stupid. I was wrong. I said, well maybe it won't be that bad. Wrong again. Just looking at the previews you can tell how bad it is.
I just think this is part of crappywoods attempt to combat movie piracy. They'll just make movies so bad that nobody wants to watch much less copy.
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You're half right. \
1. Make movies so bad that nobody wants to go to them.
2. Complain to Congress that their profits are down because of the Evil Content Pirates(tm)
3. Get new Uber-DMCA laws passed
4. PROFIT!
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Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think that's exactly fair. There is some way the movie could be good. The original Matrix had neat (maybe not original) effects but it also had a very sound core science fiction theme along with a lot of great drama and situations. The dialog wasn't the best but I thought the story was very very strong. My 50+ year old aunt and uncle watched it when it came out and the one thing they remember from it is the story. Not the special effects or dialog or who was in it but the possibility of this Man Vs Machine universe.
I'll admit when I saw the Speed Racer trailer, my brain didn't comprehend anything that happened. I couldn't tell who was what, what I was looking at or even what kind of conflict the movie centered on. I was utterly stupefied. I'm not afraid of admitting that, it was just confusing and I've never seen or read any Speed Racer material so I have no precursor or knowledge of what the theme is.
If this movie is relying 100% on its stunning visual effects, it's going to be a summer blockbuster and nothing more. It isn't going to age well and might go down as being a standard to watch on the latest plasma screen until next summer when a better movie comes out. There is, however, still a very likely possibility that one or more elements comes through to save the movie. Whether it be the directing, the acting, the story or even the music.
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:5, Insightful)
The science of the Matrix was pretty laughable, I mean the machines are smart enough to build human farms, but too dumb to use satellites to capture solar power. A lot of stuff didn't add up. The films only saving grace, which more than made up for the plot holes, was it's deep philosophical questions, specifically about the nature of experience and what it truly means to be human. These are common threads alongside the other two films mentioned.
I think it is sort of obvious that Speed Racer isn't going to be tackling any sort of grandiose, fundamental question of philosophy. The whole cartoon was pretty campy, which the movie seems to have moved away from. This doesn't give make me hopeful about anything other than the visuals being worthwhile.
Sure, it will probably be an enjoyable film, but I would be very reluctant to mention 2001 or Bladerunner in the same breath.
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:5, Informative)
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It was never supposed to. Nearly all the information fed to Zion by the machines, and subsequently relayed by Morpheus to Neo in the first film, was obvious, obvious falsehood.
The truth:
The machines 'scorched the sky' to protect themselves from Humanity. Humans are dependent on solar power, not machines -- no sane human capable of using such technology would ever willingly do it. On the other hand, making humans dependent on machi
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:4, Insightful)
It does clear up a few things, like how purely mental techniques and "training" could lead one to "bend the rules" -- and why the Machines couldn't effectively implement some basic security measures. It's impossible to fly in, say, WoW unless Blizzard lets you, but it would be downright easy if they, say, offloaded a bit of the physics computation to the clients.
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Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:4, Informative)
To me, it makes more sense that the humans were part of the computing power that gave the machines intelligence. That would also explain a lot of other things in the movie. The nice thing about the matrix is they didn't try to explain everything, allowing you to figure out what you would (the battery thing was a dumbed-down idea that could have been done much better, IMHO).
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My own interpretation is that the machines are actually obedient to the last drop. They are trying to create a perfect world for humans, and the entire contrivance that is the Matrix is really a massive system designed for the machines to understand what will constitute a perfect world for humanity. I think of the Oracle in the Matrix in the sense of the 'oracle Turing machine' described by Alan Turing in the paper "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals", as a special type of state that the machine can go in
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Why should we take that "battery thing" as the real truth?
It makes more sense if you see that the "scorched world with humans as batteries" reality they are "living" in is not the "real reality" either - after all that could explain why Neo could do the stuff he did in that "real world".
And that the whole thing is part of the Oracle's/machines plan to hybrid people and machines and upgrade herself.
She believes there's something that humans have that the m
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I think you completely miss the point of The Matrix. The issue with using human batteries is not as clearcut as it may seem at first. If you recall, the world we live in is actually a simulation, so any assumptions you might have about the laws of nature are no longer valid. In the underlying layer of reality, humans have another type of of biomorphic energy that doesn't exist in the simulated layer or in the sun. This is supported by the fact that Neo is ab
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:4, Informative)
If you have the misfortune of being exposed to a vacuum, for instance, if you are a character in a science fiction story, your body will not explode, but your blood and other fluids may boil, given a long enough exposure. Frost will form in your mouth as your saliva rapidly evaporates. Your ears will pop. Eventually you will die of asphyxiation, if you haven't already had a heart attack from panic.
You have about a minute and a half to get to safety. Before exposure, or immediately after initial exposure, you should exhale and remove all the air from your lungs. Otherwise, the air pressure will rupture the delicate alveoli, the air sacs, in your lungs. That is not an injury that's easy to recover from. There is not much else you can do.
The only accurate depiction of vacuum exposure in fiction can be found in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie the main character is exposed very briefly, and handles the situation well.
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The science of the Matrix was pretty laughable, I mean the machines are smart enough to build human farms, but too dumb to use satellites to capture solar power. A lot of stuff didn't add up.
I always took it as a sign of a pre-existing 'peace treaty' between man and machine that permitted the humans to subsist as batteries with some cerebral stimulation. Otherwise, why would the machines not just use cattle or any other biomass that (a) doesn't occasionally reject 'the program' and lead rebellions against them, and (b) is more energy efficient? I find that it is the mysteries of the Matrix's genealogy that make it interesting science fiction.
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It had a retro feel to it, not just the "tech" but the storyline and such. Not quite a Rocketeer but a decent movie none-the-less.
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:5, Funny)
I mean there's a twist, and I don't want to give away anything... but there's a big secret involving Racer X. And the existential angst of Spritle and Chim-Chim. Like something out of Kafka, you see, one of the twins is actually a chimpanzee.
If this movie doesn't sweep the academy awards, I'll have to believe that it must be because it was too deep for them.
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they came out liking it, everyone would assert "Oh, they're a bunch of tools, the movie is teh l4m3".
I, for one, plan on going to see this flick and reverting to age 8 for an hour and a half, irrespective of whether the movie is so content-free as to qualify as a political speech.
Neener, neener, neener.
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In short, what I'm trying to say is that there is no one definitive way to view and think about a film. A film can be many things to ma
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Brazil? Blade Runner? This is speed racer we are talking about.......SPEED RACER. A cartoon where one of the main characters got into trouble with his pet monkey chim chim. The main antagonist was a Mr. X a guy who was so subtle that he had a giant X on over his mask just to make him more mysterious.
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I'd say you've answered your own question to the GP... Your comments on the trailer pretty much accurately reflects the original series as well, so it sounds like you understood it juuuuust fine.
Seriously... Of all the series they could have done a modern live action remake of, why choose Speed Racer? It had no plot (unless the "secret" of Racer-X as Speed's long-lost brother counts), no charact
Re:Why the Instant Dismissal? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, great, now the movie is ruined for everybody.
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I agree with your post in general, but I think the Matrix certainly had original effects. The first bullet time scene had my jaw on the floor - I had never seen anything like it and I couldn't even figure out how it was done (at first, anyway). It was original enough that it's been copied a million times since.
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It's not "Speed Racer!" (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's not "Speed Racer!" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course it will make hollywood and all involved a lot of money, as someone else said it will be THE movie to test your $20k home cinemas on, but from the look, little at all toward the "anime as an artform" they seem to think.
I say this not as a film critic, or even someone who is good with computer graphics, I say this on
Re:It's not "Speed Racer!" (Score:4, Informative)
Speed Racer definitely fell into the category of unrealistic/stylized on purpose, so it seems an appropriate fit.
But then at the end of a day, it's just supposed to be a fun movie, and we miss the fun by overanalyzing it to death.
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Not to mention the fact that Anime tend towards trying to make animation as real as possible [...]
Say what ? O.o
Over done. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its based on a cartoon! What they have created is a caricature of a caricature of reality. Granted that makes the previews a caricature of a caricature of caricature. Still, it gives me the overwhelming impression of trying too hard, probably to cover up for the script.
Then again, I thought the Matrix series was kind of dumb.
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Ding! That too annoys the crap out of me. It's one thing to suspend belief when watching the cartoon and have springs come out from underneath the Mach 5, but the one thing that the cartoon seemed to get somewhat correct was the way the cars (and drivers) reacted when driving. This looks, as you said, like the producers are trying too hard.
As a rule, I don't watch commercials bu
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Truthfully, I'm not really looking forward to it, anyway. I didn't watch Speed Racer as a kid, despite being in the right age group. Plus, the Wachowskis ticked me off with the last 2 Matrix movies. A
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Anime shows shown us that you don't really need realistic settings to achieve either. What you need is gripping story and good characters.
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I saw the previews and I had the same issue with it that I had with the horrible Hulk film. The CGI was too obviously CGI.
I makes the willing suspension of disbelief [wikipedia.org] very difficult.
Go in with no expectations at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget the Matrix, forget the old cartoons, don't bring any assumptions or fond childhood dreams to the party.
Just order a large popcorn, maybe get a little intoxicated, and go watch the eye-candy.
And if there's a plot that actually makes sense, it's all gravy.
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The race courses in the cartoon actually looked MORE REALISTIC than the ones in the movie trailers. They should have either done an all CGI cartoon OR used live action with realistic looking CGI enhancements.
This is all just my opinion of course, but I was really, really dissapointed. Judging from a lot of the comments in this discuss
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But they did have SOME idea of what the audience "would or would not like" -- Dillinger's helicopter at the beginning was CGI, but you weren't supposed to know that. The CGI that you were supposed to notice was very intentionally meant to look like compute
Re:Go in with no expectations at all (Score:5, Interesting)
A little? Every time I see the trailer, I think to myself, I've got to go see that movie when I'm tripping balls. I just hope my eyeballs don't pop out of my head!
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Every time I see a commercial for that glitterfest blip by on the TiVo I wonder how many kids will be carried out of theaters convulsing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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What is it with movies that everyone wants to an excuse to dumb down and shovel shit into their cortexes?
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Speed Racer = Wimp. Racer X = Truly Bad Ass (Score:5, Funny)
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For the non-US'ians... trailer response...? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen the trailer pass by before various movies four times now (10,000 BC, Definitely Maybe, Reservation Road, The Spiderwick Chronicles - a pretty spread out mix of audiences), and all four times the audience's response ranged from "wtf is speed racer?" to "what's with the awful effects?".
Somehow I can't see any of the audience here (NL) to be immediately drawn into the movie thanks to the lack of growing up with Speed Racer, and the trailer showing a minimum of story and mostly oddly-composited (I guess it's a "visual style") live action/CG doesn't exactly help to lure people in based on the visuals.
So what has audience response been in other countries?
I'm a 29yo USer, and I never saw Speed Racer (Score:2)
I'm asking because I'm thinking that Speed Racer is primarily a U.S. childhood memory keepsake.
As a 29-year-old United Stater who watched a metric ton of TV when I was little, I barely know anything about Speed Racer. I have no idea where this nostalgia is coming from. The first time I'd ever heard of it was around '92 or '93 when MTV started showing it for a little while. I watched it once, and I thought it was lame (and I admit, most of my childhood favorites were also lame without nostalgia to help them).
My impression is that it had its heyday in the US well before I was of TV-watching age,
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After watching several trailers on Rotten Tomatoes, Speed Racer left me unimpressed and slightly annoyed. Too colourful and no story to speak of.
Take "Cars" for example. My 3-year old loves them. It has excitement, fun, it's colourful and joyful
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Since I'm outside of Hollywood's normal demographic, I don't think this movie is meant to capitalize on nostalgia for Speed Racer. This movie is meant to appeal to the billions and billions of Nascar fans in the US. Racing is hot right now in America, and everyone loves to watch the crashes, so a race movie with lots of CGI crashing mi
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That also explains the letters on their clothes. The "G" on Speed's shirt is for "Go", which is his name. Trixie is "Michiko", explaining the "M".
Yes, I was one of those kids in the US who grew up watching Speed Racer. I looked up the rest of the stuff when _my_ kids started asking "Why does Trixie have an 'M' on her shirt?".
Yes, it's horridly campy, but younge
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People don't talk much in theater in France so I don't know what the other thought but I predict that this movie will be a vast failure in France: the CG is nothing special, it's too dumb for adults and doesn't appear to be funny enough for children..
Not another NFS Underground clone (Score:2, Insightful)
There aren't any Neon lights in the 1967 cartoon!
Where's the really fast talking and loud gasping!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Damn you Hollywood!
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The remainder I leave up to your filthy mind.
speedracer vs ninjas? (Score:5, Insightful)
But what made me laugh was the trailer clearly showed he did _NOTHING_ his whole life but think about racing, or practice racing.
So htf did he build the muscles and learn the skills to take out the ninjas they show later? lol
He's not even a pirate ;)
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Re:speedracer vs ninjas? (Score:4, Funny)
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Of all remakes, why Speed Racer? (Score:2)
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Is anyone actually interested in seeing this? (Score:2)
Speed Racer? Was this even necessary? And the color schemes. My God, it's enough to make the production design on Batman and Robin look heterosexual.
Why I hate blockbusters and CGI-fests (Score:5, Informative)
$40 million for the leading man and leading woman
$100,000 for the script
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Re:Why I hate blockbusters and CGI-fests (Score:5, Funny)
You can hang that up then. The only thing that will save that script is if it shows up at the theater and offers to suck my dick.
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Re:Why I hate blockbusters and CGI-fests (Score:5, Interesting)
Next time you see an ad for Crazy Animal Doing People Things starring Al Pacino as Every Character Al Panico Has Ever Played and Cameron Diaz as Generic Bimbo, just walk away.
why slashdot commentary bugs me so (Score:2, Interesting)
This film is certainly about visual appeal. But i can say that with just a teensy bit of knowledge in that domain, it is readily apparent to me that this is a spectacular triumph.
The film captures the recently popular technique called HDR or High Dynamic Range photography, but they
Actually, it's not a bad movie (Score:2)
With that said, there is still certainly enough action, story and overall fun to keep all ages involved. Having grown up watching Speed Racer during it's first run (yes, I'm that old), I can say that they did a very good job of bringing the cartoon to life. The special effects were outstanding and all of the characters were dead on.
Overall, I would go and see it a
Their next film (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm with the Taco (Score:2)
WTF ? (Score:2)
did i see the same trailers? (Score:2)
as someone who grew up watching this.. (Score:2)
I find it insulting that they had live actors on green screen and they then painted that trainwreck behind them.
Meat Wad makes the money, see... (Score:2)
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LaFontaine: The ultimate, 100% guarantee of crap (Score:2)
If they added that movie announcer Don LaFontaine
Oh my Lord, somebody shoot that guy already.
Any trailer narrated by that throat is proof that neither director, producer, or anyone else involved in the film in question has exercised a molecule of imagination.
On the bright side, nice to have such a reliable indicator.