Wachowski Brothers and the Speed Racer Movie

Steven Weintraub writes "Susan Sarandon talks about the Wachowski Brothers Speed Racer movie and confirms the revolutionary way the brothers are making the film — the entire frame will be in focus like a cartoon."

The "Revolutionary New Camera"

The camera in question is oakley's spinoff camera brand, Red Digital Camera. [red.com]

Re:Go Speed Racer Go!

Why would Keanu be so bad? He has just about enough emotional range for the Robot.

Focus is a tool

Focussing on an object draws the people attention to it. It's used as an artistic tool. If everything is in focus, then the public will most likely not even notice (unless they specifically check for this).

I hope they don't spend a lot of money/effort on this "feature", the way they did on the game-quality 3D graphics of the Burly Brawl (ref: Matrix 2).

Re:Focus is a tool

Maybe, just maybe they're a bit more imaginative than you.

Re:Focus is a tool

At the same time any average schmuck like me could give them 10 better ways they could've handled the Matrix sequels & V-for-Vendetta than they did.

But perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps what you perceive as a choice between 10 better ways on their part is a choice, but at the same time the choice they made is the only choice they could have made. You choose to think otherwise, but do you really have a choice in thinking you have a choice, did you choose to have a choice, or did you decide anyway?

The Wachowski brothers made the choices they made because they were the only choices they could have made. (Continued ad-nausium until the exciting car chase in the middle of the film. To be continued after car chase.)

Re:Focus is a tool

When one is presented a vague idea or goal to accomplish, it always seems easy to those who didn't have to do it.

I can ask dozen different questions, each with a simple answer, but that most people will fumble at. Not because it is difficult to execute the conclusion, but that the conclusion is non-obvious from the offset. Only once it is presented to all the answers, including those to which you would find 'better' become 'obvious'.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Making a graphic novel into a movie sounds easy. The average shmuck(by your own logic, I suppose that would include you), might say "Pffft...The story was already written down and framed, how could they screw THAT up?"

But only once you realize that you have 2 hours of film, a certain budget, actors with certain demands and a market with certain thirsts does the enormity of the task become apparent. How would you convety something that takes 2 hours to -read- into 2 hours of action? And how do you pull it off without boring the snot out of people or resorting to the cheap trick of keeping the silly camera moving too goddamn fast to make out the shortcomings of the choreography(I'm looking at you Transformers and Borne Supremacy).

I happened to like V for Vendetta.

I loved the first Matrix movie, the second one was meh and the third one was crap in my opinion. They shouldn't have been done. But given the massive plot hole-ridden concept the original was based on, I guess they sorta painted themselves in a corner.

But besides all that, I will ask a simple question: how do you make a boiled egg stand straight up on a table without using any materials except the egg and the solid table(no tablecloths, salt, etc...

The solution is simple. But can you think of it?

The answer(in reverse, right to left):

.dnats ot hcihw htiw esab rediw a ti gniwolla kcarc lliw gge eht fo mottob ehT .elbat eht no ti malS

To prove my point, after reading the answer(if you could), the solution becomes far more obvious then it was from the offset.

The big problem is sometimes the average shmuck thinks of himself too highly to probe deeper then a superficial holier then thou, self gratifying way a la Simpsons ComicBookGuy.

Re:Focus is a tool

The answer(in reverse, right to left): .dnats ot hcihw htiw esab rediw a ti gniwolla kcarc lliw gge eht fo mottob ehT .elbat eht no ti malS

I'm dyslexic, you insensitive dolc!

Re:Focus is a tool

Then i guess they're going to have to use some other trick to draw the attention of the audience to what they want you to see. I guess there are a number of ways, have the characters more heavily coloured than the background (done very nicely by Spielberg in Schindlers' list with a red child on b&w background), have the characters much larger in frame than usual, maybe layer the background like a cartoon so that perspective is screwed up and the background seems 2D rather than 3D.

There are other ways than depth of field to emphasize an object, but its not easy even in stills photography. In movies i'd guess its going to be very hard to get the right "look" consistently. Good luck to them.

Re:Focus is a tool

Read TFA:

They're doing something where they're layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon [...] so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background.

So first off, it's not what the Slashdot summary says. It's going to have multiple planes of focus, but the entire frame will not be in focus. Think of an old cartoon where you had a foreground plane, an action plane and a background plane. It may look something like that, but of course, the real world has more in it than those three planes, so some things won't be in focus. No camera has an infinite depth of field, but it can be simulated by using multiple images, digitally composited. This is something like a focus bracket, which you can see a good example of in Wikipedia's picture of the day from April 18, 2007 [wikipedia.org] (I just happen to have remembered this because it's where I learned about the technique).

Re:Focus is a tool

No camera has an infinite depth of field

A pinhole camera has infinite depth of field. Of course it has some other problems, diffraction, sensitivity, etc.

If you have enough light, fast film, and shoot with a tight aperture, you can get very wide depth of field. Just two or three "layers" would be enough for effectively infinite depth of field even at film resolution. However compositing the layers would be a bit of a chore. For a feature length film, the compositing process would need to be automatic, perhaps assisted with something like a scanning laser rangefinder.

Martin

Re:Focus is a tool

they're going to have to use some other trick to draw the attention of the audience to what they want you to see

I prefer to have the subject circled with a big red arrow pointing at it.

Re:Focus is a tool

I, for one, look forward to the new real-time eye-tracking monitor solutions that tracks my focus on the screen and blur everything else than that. Or, er...

..which actually exists, and is pretty cool. The idea is have a constantly shifting jumble of letters, but show the real text at the point the reader is looking. So the reader sees a screenful of clear text, but anybody trying to look over the shoulder, or film the screen or anything will jsut get meaningless junk.

Re:Focus is a tool

personally, I think she misunderstood the technology they're shooting for; I think what they're probably doing is HDR cinema - where they're not doing infinite depth of field, (which is actually fairly easy to obtain with a wide aperture), but rather, a high dynamic range, which is a fairly new technology in digital photography, and some automatic cameras with this feature are just starting to appear. It wouldn't surprise me if there weren't people experimenting with it in cinema. The color effect would very likely be very Anime-like, from some of the HDR photography I've seen.

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

When I first saw that scene, my first thought was, "They're doing it in Yoda's bed!"

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

"Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall... argh! WTF doing in my bed you are?!!! Out you get!!"

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!), but they even managed to mess up the sequels

But that was the problem - the first one was completely fresh and different (for mainstream audiences not into anime and extreme martial arts) - the sequels were obliged to follow broadly the same style, but by the time they came out, bullet time, wire-work Kung-Fu and "extreme" fight scenes had become cliched. Have you noticed how tame the bank lobby shootout scene looks today, compared with the first time you saw it? The long delay (probably not helped by the death of two cast members and the post-9/11 hiatus for any film in which things got blowed up) didn't help.

Its not as if the plot of the sequels was any sillier than the first movie (the whole humans as power sources thing - holy thermodynamics Batman!) just that the first film was such compellingly brilliant eye candy that your brain's services were not required, and we never worried about why someone punching you in VR should give you a fat lip in reality. By "Reloaded" we'd seen it all before (with freeze frame, commentary and white rabbits too, thanks to the original's role in popularizing DVD) and were starting to worry about plot holes.

...plus the first film had the "advantage" that it came out fairly close to Star Wars Episode one, and benefitted from rather favorable comparisons... (NB: I still think that Universal should have gambled and released "Serenity" head-to-head against "Revenge of the Sith" - then they'd have been a story, and people love to root for the little guy).

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

I disagree. The problem with the sequels is that they didn't even use the same techniques that made the first movies cool - instead of bullet-time morphed cameras, they switched to CG puppetry. The fact is that 3d puppets can't hold up to real people in a fight scene. The car chase scene would've been good had the surrounding movie not ruined it. Look in Hellboy: good fight scene = subway brawl (real actors in costumes) bad fight scenes = everything afterwards (3D puppets). Plus, they completely ditched the bullet-time gunfights in the sequels, which were one of the neatest parts.

Reloaded was bad because it was utterly bereft of a plot. It was like a bad japanese RPG - they kept going to the Oracle to get quests.

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

Not only the human one. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition#Supersti tion_and_psychology [wikipedia.org] for example:

"In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he describes his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behavior in humans."

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

Does anybody still pay attention to these guys? I mean, okay, people seemed to like The Matrix (although I never understood why) but everything since then has been uniformly awful.

"Everything since"? According to IMDB they've done the Matrix trilogy, a few Matrix related anime and video games, and then V for Vendetta which was a fucking awesome movie. What are you smoking?

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

Assuming for a moment I don't like V for Vendetta (a fair assumption, I found it to be awful) they've made three movies since The Matrix. I'm sort of shocked I had to spell that out for you, since you had the list right in your post, but I'm happy to provide such services to the cognitively challenged.

Also, I am smoking Camel Turkish Silver. Don't see the relevance, but I'm happy to answer you.

Stop the hating

The Matrix sequels which people bash on religiously, still broke box-office records, and sold quite well on DVD. V For Vendetta did well at the box office, and sold well on DVD.

So yes, studios still very much listen to these guys, and they should.

The major flaw with the Matrix sequels was the script, which had too much exposition. V For Vendetta proved they could take a lengthy graphic novel that is heavy on exposition, and not overload their movie with it. And from AICN's script review of Speed Racer, it will be a movie that focuses primarily on intense action sequences.

In case anyone forgot, Matrix Reloaded, horrid exposition and all, still happens to feature perhaps the most insane freeway sequence in the history of film. The State of California wouldn't let them film it on any of their highways because they said the script for that sequence was unfilmable, and it was guaranteed to kill people in the process.

I'd wager that any real student or lover of film is still very much interested in how these guys will continue to innovate in later movies, even if their previous films have flaws. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a perfect film. Even my absolute favorites still have glaring flaws.

So the cameras are on loan from unseen-U library?

I'm sorry a chimpanzee - he doesn't like to be called a monkey.

The thing I wonder is: who is the other guard they were talking about?

Great...

Now when the theater projector is slightly out of focus you won't be able to see ANYTHING.

Wow.

So if I take a photo at, say, f/10 instead of my usual f/1.8, resulting in greater depth-of-field, this is revolutionary?

How can I patent this?

Re:Wow.

So if I take a photo at, say, f/10 instead of my usual f/1.8, resulting in greater depth-of-field, this is revolutionary?
How can I patent this?

What's revolutionary is they shoot every scene with several cameras at the same time (or several times with the same camera), using different focus planes each time to cover the entire depth range.

Then they assemble them post-production and boost the saturation, for that very special cartoony-colors, always-in-focus look... otherwise known as how the photos of throw-away consumer cameras look like.

Yea, all the wasted effort... keep in mind the movie took at least twice longer to shoot because they had to use blue screens even for a scene with nothing special in it (only to assist the post-production assembling of the planes).

Newfangled Oldfangled?

Goodness. That revolutionary way of composing a shot called deep focus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_focus [wikipedia.org] and used as far back as 1922? Pull me up a chair and pour me one of those newfangled qahwat al-bnn all those crazy kids are drinking these days!

Re:Newfangled Oldfangled?

There's two ways of getting a larger focused area with a single camera and a single lens. Both involve getting less ligth, so both will give higher noise, or force you to film at brigther light.

First, like you say, go farther away and use a tele-lens to pull the foreground to the wanted size. This has the side-effect that, as you say, the background becomes bigger and appears closer to the foreground. (because what matters is the *relative* distance, having the actors 5 meters away and the explosion 50 meters away means the actors are 10 times closer. Having the actors 50 meters away and the explosion 100 meters away means the explosion is only twice as far away, so if you compensate by zooming until the actors are same size on screen, the end-result is a explosion that is visually 5 times larger than in the first case)

Second, use a smaller aperture. With an infinitely small aperture, you get everything in focus, with a small aperture you get a very large focused area.

hmm...

If everything is going to appear two-dimensional I wonder if the actor/background details will be minimised at all. Not really cell-shaded, but something less detailed.

Surely they will follow much of the original Speed Racer construction formula and have lots of close-up shots, re-used footage and the same 4 panels of background speeding by as Speed and Racer X do their thing.

If the story villains don't have polygonal moustaches than I'm not going.

Hmm

I'll reserve a judgment until I at least see a trailer of the movie.

Deep Focus?

OK, what's the difference between this and "deep focus"? When I first read this, I thought, didn't Citizen Kane (circa 1941) do this?

So it would appear that they're making some differences with color, etc., but yeah - I'd like to see a still or two at least.

Re:Deep Focus?

the difference is they add the words 'like a cartoon' at the end, instantly making it both revolutionary and really cool.

Re:Deep Focus?

From what I can understand of what they're going to be doing in this movie - they're using CGI to compliment deep focus effects.
Deep focus will still give you a depth of field, you just play around with everything in the frame to ensure it's within the hyperfocal distance of the lens.
With this new one, they're taking it one step further - if two things need to appear in the frame, but it's not possible to have them both in focus, they'll be filmed separately and stitched together so absolutely everything is sharp and crisp...

Great.

Now we can have Persephone in focus ALL the time.

Re:Story this time?

How substantive do you think a movie with a girl who flys a helicopter whilst wearing a mini skirt and go-go boots can be? Don't even get me started on the kid and his pet monkey.

Re:Brothers?

Who cares. What's really cool is that:

1.) Kym Barret (The Matrix,Reloaded,Revolutions) will be doing the costume design.
2.) John Gaeta (The Matrix, inventor of Bullet Time..) is the visual effects supervisor.
3.) Owen Patterson (The Matrix, etc) is the production designer.
4.) Peter Fernandez (The original American voice of Speed Racer) will have an appearance in the film.

Re:Brothers?

He's saying they're both the same thing because they both involve multiple still cameras. This, of course, means that the field of special effects has had no innovations whatsoever since the end of the 19th century, when motion pictures were invented. Anyone who thought Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, et al, were in any way different to anything produced before them clearly was just imagining it because some of the technology they used had something in common with technology that had previously been invented.

3d too I hope.

I wish that makers of 3D films (primarily IMAX) would do this. Too often I would get a headache from trying to focus on the 'out-of-focus' background stuff. I always found it difficult to keep my eyes only on what the filmmaker wanted.

This is a first for Hollywood!

A film where the script, the acting and now the image are all flat and two-dimensional !

Woo-hoo! Next they'll invent super-xylem vision, so they can all be wooden as well!

Pretty light on details

I'm getting a huge kick out of these heated debates over such a tiny bit of crappy information. Sarandon says she doesn't understand it, then proceeds to give a really crappy description which amounts to "everything is in focus" ... and suddenly the /. readership are experts on the subject (and why it has been done before, and how they'd do it better, and why one of the Wachowski brothers chopping his nuts off makes him a sister, etc etc etc).

Personally I couldn't glean almost anything useful from the article.

Ironic

It's ironic that they would choose this movie to highlight such an effect. As a cartoon watcher in the 1970s, I noticed that Speed Racer was one of the few that would on occasion actually use out-of-focus backgrounds in some scenes.