Box Office Prediction (August 15-17)

Please, reblog! IIt’s called self defense. Apart from having here, in the US, one of the highest cases of homicide and rape in the world and high rate of GBV, think about how this could help your mother or sister

palpatine straight up told anakin he was a sith lord and anakin was like well. this is a lot to process so im going to go fetch my boss and we’ll come back in about half an hour and murder you so don’t go anywhere and palpatine didn’t you have to admire the man

Finally started updating my Doctor Who blog again.

11 months late isn't that bad, right?

adulthood is just a never-ending cycle of So You Think You Can Wait Another Day To Do Your Laundry

My review of Listen, and why it's better than Blink.

Here’s the new 24 hour comic I drew this year!  This one is called THE KING’S FOREST.  cw: blood, violence

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

*electric guitar riff*

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

Assuming “Axis & Allies with roommate” and “Civ III on Deity” counts as military strategy...

which julius caesar are you???? i’m Caesar the Commentator, tag urself

Everyone should know the international sign for Help Me. Let’s make this famous!!

Practical F/X vs. CGI in Willow

I finally caught up with the 1988 George Lucas / Ron Howard fantasy yarn Willow, and it's a blast. Not quite a classic, but spectacular, imaginative, thrilling, and charming in a way few blockbusters are.

The highlight for me - besides Val Kilmer's delightful rogue The Mad Martigan - is a battle sequence in a castle, where Martigan is basically taking on a few dozen villains on his own using a variety of tricks and tactics while Willow is busy trying to get his sorcery to work. There's a lot of other elements at play here - the villainous Princess Sorsha trying to figure out if she loves or hates Martigan, sorceress Raziel is stuck in a goat form, and trolls have encased all the inhabitants of the castle into stone and are still lurking around somewhere. It's a terrific scene as it is, but then Willow, trying to ward off a troll, accidentally turns it into a gigantic two-headed dragon known as the Eborsisk. And it's fantastic.

Later on, there's a scene widely praised at the time where Willow turns Raziel from a goat into an ostrich, a turtle, a tiger, and finally her own form in turn. It was the first CGI Morph in film, and led directly to The Abyss, which led to T2, which led to Jurassic Park, until now, when studios spend $250 million to make over-budgeted cartoons with live actors pasted in here and there.

Which got me thinking on the CGI vs. Practical Effects debate, since this is a nice example of the same effect being done both ways. Thinking about it, I think in both cases it was the right call.

The troll-to-dragon transformation is done with a combination of go-motion (an advanced version of stop-motion developed by Phil Tippett for the Hoth battle in The Empire Strikes Back) and animatronics. The effect is choppy and ugly, and the result is unsettling and creepy. It looks wrong, something that should not be.

It also necessitates cutting back to Willow's reaction shot. That's one of the things that makes the scene so good, really - Warwick Davis's look of "What the hell did I just do?" elevates both the horror and humor of the scene.

By contrast, the CGI morphing is smooth and fluid. It's no more or less realistic, but we're talking about magic here, so realism isn't exactly the goal. But this scene isn't Willow accidentally turning one monster into another, much more horrific monster; it's about Raziel becoming her own form again, and about the beauty and wonder of magic. It also allows the scene to take place in longer takes, but we don't especially need Willow's reaction until Raziel is herself.

Reversing the effects wouldn't have worked as well for the story - the smooth transformation would have looked like just a cool effect with the troll-to-dragon rather than horrifying (CGI can do a great many things well, but creepy just is not one of them), and Raziel's wouldn't have had the same sense of wonder and beauty with the grotesque look of go-motion. (The AT-ATs or ED-209 are exactly the sort of thing Go-Motion is good at)

Unfortunately, go-motion has largely gone extinct in the CGI era, as it's thought to be less "realistic", though I'm somewhat unconvinced given how cartoonish the effects look in mega-budget films like Days of Future Past (a phenomenal movie, by the way) or Amazing Spider-Man 2 (not a phenomenal film). Like makeup effects, bladders, models, matte paintings, and even celluloid film itself, go-motion is the older, harder method, but there are stories told better. Sometimes, like King Arthur in Excalibur, storytellers should charge into battle using the Old Ways.

On the other hand, sometimes you want a T-1000 to wreck up the place, and gotta bring in the computers.

Practical and digital are both tools, both with their function and form in stories. I hope going into the future, film makers remember the old methods and use them, and that cynical, f/x savvy viewers remember what beautiful things can be done with the new methods and don't dismiss them out of hand. (myself included)