Kong kicks ass... link to trailer

[trekgeezer]

If you didn't catch it yet here is the trailer for Peter Jackson's King Kong. It looks fantastic and Kong looks like a grizzled veteran of many a fight.

King King Kong trailer

[Alan Smithee]

I don't know. It does nothing for me. Even the fx are pretty run-of-the-mill, big budget cgi.

I sense this movie could have relatively big opening, but will prove to be a disappointment at the box office, more or less (it won't bomb, but I can't see it making as much as ROTK).

Then again, I thought Spider-man wasn't going to be a hit.

[Mr_Vindictive]

For me, this looks like a film where the CGI will "work".  I don't mind CGI if it's used well and I have more faith in Jackson than anyone else to use it to the highest possible level.  I can't wait, looks like a great winter movie.

[Jamtoy]

I think what has lost me with CGI is the fact that now it looks like very little effort goes into these "blockbuster" movies.  Anyone remember the efforts that went into the stop motion photograpgy on the original King Kong?  The hours spent for just a few seconds of film.  Now with CGI, you may spend hours building your model, but to animate it in the film, you just sit back and lett the computer do the work.  I have just recently begun to use Photoshop.   I downloaded the renders of the Monsters from the "Godzilla: Save the Earth" video game, took a picture of a local hotel, and after a few miniutes, I had a picture of Mothra flying over the building that looked better than any of the movies.  

Most of those "Making of" featurettes where they used to show the guys standing over scale models for hours have become seeing one guy sit in front of a computer.  That's how most of us live anyway.  Nothing special there.

I still think King Kong will be good, but it will never hold up to the original.

[Susan]

I caught the trailer on tv, the effects were too much cgi that it looked cartoonish on my tv.  No one doubts it takes alot of effort to make cgi in a movie - it's just the effort doesn't always pay off for me. The 1979 king kong looked scarier and he was a machine :)

[dean]

Jackson has a major crush on King Kong: I'm reading a biography on him at the moment [which isn't too bad either] and it's hard to go more than a chapter without the writer mentioning the fact that Jackson really likes King Kong in some way or another.

Hopefully that means that it will be good, but I'll wait and see...  I liked the look of the trailer though: I don't care if a movie is CGI or puppets, just as long as it translates well on the big screen...

[trekgeezer]

Seeing King Kong as a child is what made Jackson want to be film maker. He was working on it before LOTR came up.

Jamtoy, you don't know what the hell you're talking about, it takes hours and hours creating realistic looking stuff with CG. Why do think it takes Pixar over two years to release one of their films after they have the voices recorded?

I can guarantee you that almost every film you see now has some CG in it and you never notice it, because you don't know it's there.

CG is just a labor intensive if not more than stop-motion ever was. s**tty CG is easy, because it's s**tty. Companies like ILM, WETA, and Pixar don't do s**tty CG.

I'm afraid that stop motion would probably look hokey to most moviegoers nowadays.

Don't get me wrong I like all the old Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien stuff, but that's called nostalgia.


If you still think it looks bad, look at these hi-res images that were posted over at AICN. Check out the life in Kong's eyes, the quality of the fur, the scars, and hey the  tooth is really a nice touch.

Kong

T-Rex



Post Edited (06-29-05 09:19)

[ulthar]

Jamtoy wrote:

>  Now with CGI, you may spend hours
> building your model, but to animate it in the film, you just
> sit back and lett the computer do the work.  

Why did Finding Nemo take FIVE YEARS to produce?  CGI is *not* easy (the good stuff, anyway).

Getting a character to fly by a hotel using prerendered images is not the same things as animating character interactions, having multiple characters interplay in one scene and certainly not emotion.  I'm not meaning to downplay what you did, because I do think it sounds cool, but proper CGI in a feature film takes man-decades to produce seconds of film.

One example that I've mentioned before is the milk pouring scene in Shrek (Thelonius pours milk into a glass just before Lord Farquaad makes his first appearance).  I've heard/read that they used real Computational Fluid Dynamics to model the flowing liquid - that's Ph.D. thesis level work, huge calculations on parallel HPC architectures and by no means cookie cutter technology.  All of that for about 2 seconds of film, but it looks great.

Also, there *IS* a lot of 'hand animation' in modern CGI that, in the words of Big Idea founder Phil Visher, bears more resemblance to stop motion work of old than to what you think of when you hear 'computer animation.'  Couple of examples, both from Pixar:  

(1) The cheerios pouring scene in Monsters, Inc. (when Sully is trying to get Boo to go to sleep), the cheerios are hand animated as they pour out of the box.

(2) In the short 'Birds,' at the end, when the little birds loose their feathers, those feathers falling/floating are all hand animated.


All of this said, I have my own mixed feelings about the new King Kong.  I'll keep an open mind about it, of course, but the original holds a special place in my heart and always will.  It has a gritty edge and really defined what could be done with stop motion.

[Jamtoy]

I didn't mean to downplay the work of CGI animation.  I do know it takes hours to complete a model.  

For example, I have been working on a computer model of a humanoid figure for about 3 years now.  I have been trying to get the effects of motion and fluid movement right.  I have been building 3D computer models for almost 7 years now.  My example from Photoshop is how simple it is for the average person on the side of the street to make effects on a computer that look acceptable.

So Trek-geezer, I do know that it take years to animate a figure.  BUT what I was trying to say was that the computer has made these effects easier to achieve WITHOUT the painstaking work of standing over a model of the figure and moving it a little at a time for hours.   I sit at a desk for hours drawing in 3D CAD programs and there is little satisfaction of seeing your model ON THE DESK when you get back to work.

Look at Clash of the Titans, Calibos was stop motion animated.  The Lord of the Rings had the Golum character as a CGI model over a human actor.  The computer followed traking markers on the actors body and animated the computer model to follow it.  I know that technology and the programing took years to do and make it look good.  But in the next few years, this type of capability will be in programs on the desk at home.  People will not be impressed with the effects that they can do at home.

That's the reason why as a kid I like Godzila movies.  If the effect works, it progresses the story.  If the effect didn't work, you could at least go in your back yard and try it out becasue it was such a simple effect.  Today, with the computer I have and the computer modeling techniques I use, ANYBODY can make CGI characters.  It only depends on the time a person wants to take on the project that determines how good it will look.

CGI should NOT be the story, it should, as with the effects of early movies, aid in telling and progressing the story.

[Jamtoy]

>One example that I've mentioned before is the milk pouring scene in Shrek
>(Thelonius pours milk into a glass just before Lord Farquaad makes his first
>appearance). I've heard/read that they used real Computational Fluid Dynamics >to model the flowing liquid - that's Ph.D. thesis level work, huge calculations on >parallel HPC architectures and by no means cookie cutter technology. All of that >for about 2 seconds of film, but it looks great.

(This may be a little off topic but I think it will further clarify my position on the use of CGI.)

That is one thing I DON'T like about the use of CGI:  The use of technology JUST TO ENTERTAIN US.  The work I have done in 3D modeling has been for industrial application.  Now mostly the problem is the lack of insight of the leadership in manufacturing, but when you create a program that the uses fluid mechanics and solidification functions to "pour a casting in a computer model, the leadership will say, WOW that's cool!  How much does this cost?"  When they learn the program costs over $10,000.00, they say "We don't need it."  So the guy that wrote the "thesis level program" can't sell it to manufacturing.  He has to sell it to the entertainment industry.  I lost my job 3 times working for people like this.  Now what do they want? 3D models of stores and resturants so they can have a walk thru of the layout and see people in the picture too.  

One recent invention that I saw great potential in medical application was a small actuator that had quiet motion.   Where did it get applied first, THE NEXT GENERATION FURBY!!!!

I read somewherethat there are ancient Greek manuscripts that indicate that someone back then had invented a crude steam engine.  The military leaders of the time saw NO APPLICATION for it.  It ended up on a temple door so the door would open "by itself" and look like the gods opened the temple.  Think of how history would be different if the application for this steam engine went on an ancient Greek "paddle wheel" ship.  The fleet would have been unstoppable.

Though I love CGI work and do some computer modeling and animation myself, I am more impressed when the technology is used for the advancement of mankind.  But when you build the most powerful computer the we know of on the planet, like the one that was used for the Lord of the Rings, so that we can be entertained, I think priorities are not in place.  

(OK Sorry a little off topic here. )

[ulthar]

Jamtoy wrote:

>
> That is one thing I DON'T like about the use of CGI:  The use
> of technology JUST TO ENTERTAIN US.  The work I have done in 3D
> modeling has been for industrial application.  Now mostly the
> problem is the lack of insight of the leadership in
> manufacturing, but when you create a program that the uses
> fluid mechanics and solidification functions to "pour a casting
> in a computer model, the leadership will say, WOW that's cool!
> How much does this cost?"  When they learn the program costs
> over $10,000.00, they say "We don't need it."  So the guy that
> wrote the "thesis level program" can't sell it to
> manufacturing.  He has to sell it to the entertainment
> industry.  I lost my job 3 times working for people like this.
> Now what do they want? 3D models of stores and resturants so
> they can have a walk thru of the layout and see people in the
> picture too.  
>

Well, the technology is not used just for entertainment, but what is wrong with entertainment driving innovation?  Some of the most sophisticated innovations in programming in the past decade have come from the game industry; if those innovations have (recognizable) applications in other areas, who cares where it originated?

Some managers may deny a 'useful' app for whatever reason, but others will recognize the utility.  Fluid dynamics simulations like the milk in Shrek and the casting simulation you describe ARE used in industry every day.  I myself (not in manufacturing) use, and write, code for modeling reactive flow systems; the initial development cost can be high (enter Open Source Software), but once working, simulations are MUCH cheaper than actual experiments and in our case (detonation modeling), much safer, too.

Dale Earnhart, Jr's race team (and others probably, too) used fluid dynamics to prepare for restrictor plate races; again, enter the entertainment issue.  But, those advances, like those at NASA, eventually permeate daily life (if they are successful).

Finally, in my experience, $10,000.00 is peanuts for hard core engineering software (but *I* won't spend that on software I can write myself).  I've seen some that go $25,000 for a ONE YEAR license and others that go $47,000.  This is one reason why my company is creating our own software to accomplish the tasks we want, and we are creating it open source (the chamber project on Sourceforge if you have any interest).  A lot of these programs seem to be so expensive because the developers act like they are the only ones on the planet that can produce them.  I know quite a few out-of-work or under-worked PhD scientists that could produce anything your company wants in-house; if they are hired and allowed to create.  Okay, so my OT rant is off, now, too.  :)

Just my $0.02.

[Jamtoy]

I totally agree, ulthar

[Flangepart]

This...looks GOOD!
I have hopes for it, now.
Period piece, and Black fir Denham well.
Heres lookin at you, big ape!

[Dunners]

Looks pretty good to me, very nice CGI. I like how the traile ropens up with jack black doing the crazy director(note he looks very much like a younger smaller Orson Welles) and overall the film looks to be a lot of fun.

[dean]

>>>CGI should NOT be the story, it should, as with the effects of early movies, aid in telling and progressing the story

Sorry to nitpick, Jamtoy, you did bring up a good point about the uses of technology, but, from what I remember, King Kong [the original] didn't exactly have that grabbing a story, it was a framework so that the effects could wow the audience.  Which are you going to remember more, lines of dialogue from the movie, or King Kong on top of a building swatting at planes?

Effects of any kind are mostly done to entertain, shock and strike awe in our minds, after all, there are so many options in order to convey a storyline, so one has to wonder why the chose an extreme special effects shot over a line of dialogue which conveys essentially the same thing.

I remember listening to the audio commentary on Matrix Reloaded from these two film critics who basically kept saying that the car chase on the highway scene is pretty much pointless in terms of narrative and is just there to make us go 'wow.'

That being said, effects done well and entertaining work wonders: I don't care if I can do it at home in my own time, if it is done well and looks good then that is great, if it adds to a storyline, then that is even better!