Breaking Down "Bayhem"

Is there currently a more widely lambasted director on this planet than Michael Bay? Though critics softened slightly for his last film, the dark true-crime comedy Pain and Gain, the knives are out once again -- perhaps even sharper than before -- with the release of Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth entry in the blockbuster franchise that has continued to stuff Bay's pockets with ridiculous amounts of moolah. So is there anything more to Bay than what we already know, i.e. fast cuts, sexy chicks and explosions? In this video essay, Tony Zhou incisively analyses what makes Bay, essentially Bay, and love or hate him, there's no question that the man's a step above the the blander, hack-ier likes of McG or Brett Ratner, at least on an aesthetic level:
Meanwhile, the critical mauling of Age of Extinction has been so bad that talk show host Jimmy Kimmel decided to get a few critics together to say something nice about Bay:

Only God Forgives: VFX Showreel

To say that Nicolas Winding Refn's Thailand-set crime-noir Only God Forgives arrived last year to hugely polarising reactions would be an understatement -- it definitely didn't garner the same kind of consistent acclaim as his previous film, Drive. In fact most Fatso customers hated it, if this sampling of reviews are anything to go by:

But if you're a fan of the film and/or the director, you'll want to check out this clip that breaks down all the special effects shots. Love or hate him, you can't deny that Refn knows exactly what he wants to see on-screen... down to blinking eyes....

I'll be the first person to say that CGI is overused these days, BUT when it's used as smart and subtly as this, it can be a brilliant tool to help you achieve a very specific artistic vision that doesn't involve cities getting decimated. Good stuff.

Action Movie Kid is All Kinds of Awesome

What do you do when you're a special effects wiz at Dreamworks Animation with a kid? If you're Daniel Hashimoto, you turn your three-year-old's imagination into action-packed reality. Check out this super-cute compilation of short videos he's created with James, who gets to wield a light saber, fire rocket launchers, amongst other things...

Ray Harryhausen: "If you make fantasy too real, it loses the quality of a dream."

AMEN! I was watching Life of Pi last night thinking, "Okay, that's a pretty impressive and realistic-looking computer-generated tiger and all... but...". This weird kind of feeling - attributed to a phenomenon called "uncanny valley" - has yet, for me anyway, to be overcome by CGI, no matter how good it looks. There's so such problem with Harryhausen's pioneering stop-motion animation creations. The hand-crafted charm, the jittery quality, the fact that an actual three-dimensional object was photographed, the onus being on the viewer to do some work filling in the gaps - these elements make, say the skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts, feel a whole lot more real than some of the slick, overblown CGI effects we've seen and been accustomed to in recent years.

Anywho Ray Harryhausen's passing is a great loss to the film world. Without this guy there would be no Star Wars, no Jurassic Park, no The Thing, no Nightmare Before Christmas etc!  A lot of Hollywood's greatest and most memorable creatures, aliens and monsters simply would not exist.

Here's a pretty good comp of Harryhausen's work:
If you 'd like to catch up on some of the films he's worked on, this is a list of what we've got in our library:

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
It Came from Beneath the Sea
Earth vs the Flying Saucers
20 Million Miles to Earth
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Mysterious Island
Jason and the Argonauts
First Men in the Moon
One Millions Years B.C.
The Valley of Gwangi
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
Clash of the Titans

Canvas of Sound

Foley artists really don't get nearly enough credit for the work they do to bring films alive with sound. They're the real magicians behind the scenes. Watch this great short profile of veteran foley artist Gary Hecker, who shows us some of the painstaking methods he uses to create the sounds we hear on-screen. It's truly a gasp-worthy art form:

SoundWorks Collection: Gary Hecker - Veteran Foley Artist from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Don't Trust What You See on TV

Wow, I had no idea of the extent of green screen usage on TV. It's obvious for special effects-heavy shows like Heroes, but for ordinary scenes of people walking across the street or just standing outside a building?? Quite impressive when they can make it all look so seamless.