» Transformers http://www.brandsareopinions.com Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:41:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Some Friday Video Awesome, Bollywood Style http://www.brandsareopinions.com/some-friday-video-awesome-bollywood-style/ http://www.brandsareopinions.com/some-friday-video-awesome-bollywood-style/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:51:15 +0000 Dennis Ryan http://www.brandsareopinions.com/?p=7243 Continue reading →]]> One of the lessons video production inevitably teaches is that while action grabs the audience’s attention, reaction gets them involved.  In other words, the most amazing stunt in the world will always feel hollow unless it’s followed by a shot of someone reacting to it.  Seeing someone laugh or recoil or drop their jaw in amazement sets the context for the action and spurs our emotional engagement.  It’s one of the reasons the Transformers movies feel so achingly repetitive after twenty minutes of their incredibly sophisticated action scenes—there’s no one helping us care that the car is now a mighty flying robot.  Unless you want to count Megan Fox, but as an actress, she’s basically a posable action figure.

All that said, today’s awesome video clip could not care less about that kind of theory.  This delightfully cheesy clip excerpts a 2010 Bollywood film called Enthiran-The Robot, a madcap adrenaline rush about a scientist’s unsuccessful struggles to control his android robot after it falls in love with his own fiance.  Ouch.

It is the most expensive film in India’s prolific film history and has enjoyed worldwide financial and critical success, eventually becoming the highest grossing Indian film of all time.  Who knew?

The best part is that the visual effects imagination is as spectacular as the execution is awful.  Which reverses  the typical Hollywood formula that camouflages a lack of imagination under flawless CG perfection.

Anyway, enjoy this admittedly-overlong clip for the high-flying exuberance of its patently ludicrous story.  It makes little to no sense. Still, it’s kinda wonderful.  Happy Friday!

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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]]> http://www.brandsareopinions.com/some-friday-video-awesome-bollywood-style/feed/ 0 This Weekend, I Saw The Future of Film Rendered In Breathtaking CGI http://www.brandsareopinions.com/this-weekend-i-saw-the-future-of-film-rendered-in-breathtaking-cgi/ http://www.brandsareopinions.com/this-weekend-i-saw-the-future-of-film-rendered-in-breathtaking-cgi/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 06:15:26 +0000 Dennis Ryan http://www.brandsareopinions.com/?p=4274 Continue reading →]]> No, I didn’t see Avatar–though I will.  As a student of culture, I must.  In one month, Avatar’s already become the second highest worldwide release ever, behind Cameron’s own Titanic.  And this despite having a title set, as Element 79 art director Lindsay Stevens first noted, in the horrid Papyrus font.  But I digress…

Instead I saw this twelve and a half minute piece called “The Third and the Seventh” by Alex Roman on Vimeo.  Do yourself a favor and cleave off the time to watch this on your computer in full screen and HD.  If you can’t afford the time but can find a minute and a half, watch this.  And then remind yourself that despite the natural lighting, despite the seemingly hand-made erraticism of some camera moves and depth of focus changes, regardless of the incredible details of wear and tear on vintage film cameras and the botanic splendor of deciduous trees and waving shafts of wheat and grass…heck, notwithstanding even the appearance of a photographer in some of the scenes…none of it is real.

You really have to force yourself to fully absorb that.  None.  Of.  It.  Is.  Real.

Should you doubt that, watch this.  And if you want to see exactly how the filmmaker uses 3dsmax, Vray, After Effects and Premiere, he shows you here.

In these times of Harry Potter and Transformers, the most remarkable cinematic effect of all is to see something utterly believable rendered staggeringly perfect through entirely artificial means.  The very invisibility of the effects in this piece will blow your mind.  What it means for the future of Hollywood and commercial set building remains to be seen, but this will be used.  And we’ll have more actors scampering across blue screens, only later to be turned into fantastic images and landscapes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Alex Roman (real name Jorge Seva) is a classically trained painter who spends his days working in the world of arch viz: architectural visualizations created through computer graphics.  Some amazing masterpieces of architecture appear in his film, including MAM, Milwaukee’s fabulous art museum designed by Santiago Calatrava.  For more information on this filmmaker, here’s the only substantive interview I could find, conducted early in the process as he was creating various pieces before they all coalesced into his final film.

“The Third and the Seventh” refers to pillars of Art: Architecture (third) and Cinema (seventh).  I’m not familiar with the entire list of pillars or their ranking, but I can speculate on the foundation of Art…

Awe.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79
]]> http://www.brandsareopinions.com/this-weekend-i-saw-the-future-of-film-rendered-in-breathtaking-cgi/feed/ 2 WWHD? The Comic Virulence of the Hitler YouTube Meme http://www.brandsareopinions.com/wwhd-the-comic-virulence-of-the-hitler-youtube-meme/ http://www.brandsareopinions.com/wwhd-the-comic-virulence-of-the-hitler-youtube-meme/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:44:56 +0000 Dennis Ryan http://www.brandsareopinions.com/?p=3727 Continue reading →]]> Knock-knock jokes…  Top Ten lists…  ”That’s what she said”…  Over time, cultures build stockpiles of shared comic references.  Back when we all watched Saturday Night Live, everyone copped Dana Carvey’s “Isn’t that special?” complete with the Church Lady’s off-balance lip pursing.  More recently, Kanye West’s obnoxiousness led to a spate of  ”Imma let you finish–” bits.  Sharing laughs around common reference points builds bonds between people, and simply makes the day pass more pleasantly…Picture 1

So it’s no surprise that this video popped up at the end of last week.  Mark Wegener, the man behind the consistently intelligent humor of ‘Local Paper’, passed along this latest version of Downfall, this time with Bruno Ganz’ Hitler screaming about the news media’s breathless over-coverage of the Balloon Boy hoax.

These days, you really are nowhere in the cultural landscape if you haven’t been referenced and had the piss taken out of you by ridiculous subtitles laid over this 2004 Oscar nominated film.  Type “Hitler Downfall” into YouTube’s search box and you’ll get 2,280 hits.  People have re-edited this clip to make Hitler rail on everything from Twitter’s server fail to Michael Bay’sTransformers to Tony Romo dumping Jessica Simpson.  It’s become such a common reference point it’s even gone meta, with Hitler losing it over his discovery of all the Hitler parodies.

It will take a far smarter person than me to explain our collective subconscious enjoyment of seeing history’s most notorious villain alternatively simper and explode over the banal topics of everyday life.  But the simpler truth is that the internet, originally designed to link brainiacs involved in military research and development, now serves a far more noble purpose: enabling distant people–often complete strangers–to satisfy our deeply human need for connection.  And laughter.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79
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