Befores & Afters
beforesandafters.com · Group blog · on HN since 2019
Befores & Afters covers visual effects and animation in film, including behind-the-scenes breakdowns of how specific shots and movies were made.
What HN saysHN links it for history of film VFX techniques, such as the CG in Escape From New York and the bullet-time camera rig.
18HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
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Most-shared posts
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
exodust · 2022-06-27
The actors would need to learn the new characters and lines? That takes time they rehearse a lot. Or are you suggesting the same characters are used? But then you'd have yourself a regular series with different adventures each episode.
Film industry does already use props over and over. A great one that comes to mind is the scale model of the city that was bought and sold from studio to studio, movie to movie: https://beforesandafters.com/2019/03/26/a-visual-journey-inside-the-mi…
dazzawazza · 2022-07-11
The CG from Escape From New York was done in a similar way.
https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/12/escape-from-new-york-at-40-how…
dragontamer · 2022-01-13
That's definitely not the optical-flow slowdown trick I'm talking about. That spiderman slow-motion was some combination of 3d effects and maybe real-life cameras ("Matrix" style: https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/15/vfx-artifacts-the-bullet-time-…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfdyroV7kc
This scene from 300 is very clearly just a wide-angle shot (initially), with someone playing with the Optical Flow timewarp effect (sliding it up and down). Its incredibly cheap.
See this demo in Premier Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOc_LkZaIk
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That's the thing. 300's main innovation was using _cheap_ effects. Optical flow time-warp didn't appear on Premier for another few years, but the algorithm was popular and was just a custom filter / program that was getting passed around at that time.