[KeyserSoze]

a few I've seen on the cinema lately

30 Days of Night - not a bad vampire film, tried to go in a different direction than most recent vamp films, although the story was a bit flawed I think, but still a good watch so 7/10

Lions For Lambs - maybe it was just me but I didn't really get it, it wasn't boring, just maybe disjointed a bit so 5/10

American Gangster - just got back from this one and wasn't diappointed. I did think it would drag a bit in places as it is quite long and looked like a talky film..but it was really good, didn't drag at all and was very interesting and entertaining. Would give it a 9/10

[smashed]

Shooter..
Watched it late last night despite being exhausted from the night before. Thankfully it was good enough to keep me awake.
Not the best film ever tho 7/10

[Silent Bob]

Resident Evil : Extinction.

Standard zombie fare. Actually it wasn't even that. There just wasn't much story at all and it just seemed to be poor standard zombie encounters pieced together by boring bits. 1hr 25mins long of nothing much. :(

3/10 - 1 of those is for the opening scene and 1 is for Ali Larter looking quite hot.

Stardust

I thought this would be a standard fantasy adventure but how wrong could I be. It was was flipping good. Loads of British actors in it - so many that I missed David Walliams even though he was in it all the way through. Beautifully shot, well directed, well acted, great visual effects and a cracking story. Will be buying this when it comes out.

9/10

[Lionel Richtea]

My first visit to the cinema for a while was on sunday, went to see Beowulf in 3D

All in all pretty impressive. The 3d is fantastic, this was my first 3d experience since 'freddys dead the final nightmare' and that was only the last 20 minutes or so in that dodgy red and green 3d with the equally dodgy cardboard glasses. Beowulf 3D gets the propper digital treatment and rather snazzy plastic 'national health' glasses

Its a simple enough story, has some good action scenes and the cgi is stunning to look at. the choice to make the characters look like the voice actors is interesting and the likenesses are a great achievement as the realy do look like the actors ..Angelina Jolie naked only covered by dripping liquid gold in 3d is the stuff of dreams lol

How my 3D experience will compare to the 'regular' 2D version I dont know, its a shame I wont be able to recreate the 3D experience on DVD, I just hope its as good in 2D and the fantastic 3D version

8/10

[wilko]

Originally Posted by Lionel Richtea

the choice to make the characters look like the voice actors is interesting and the likenesses are a great achievement as the realy do look like the actors ..

They actually used the same technique as "polar express" - i.e. the actors acted out the film as normal for the camera, and then the resulting film was ran through a "CGI" process to apply the effects and animated feel.

So the reason that they look like the actors is because they are the actors.......if that makes sense. Its not an animated film in the traditional sense.

[Qexit]

Originally Posted by wilko

They actually used the same technique as "polar express" - i.e. the actors acted out the film as normal for the camera, and then the resulting film was ran through a "CGI" process to apply the effects and animated feel.

Er, not quite. They used motion capture techniques to generate motion data files. These were then applied to the character models built and rigged by a team of skilled 3D model makers and TAs. There is no CGI process that can simply 'apply the effects and animated feel'. It is not as straight forward as the old rotoscoping technique used in more traditional cell frame animation (anyone remember the original animated version of Lord of the Rings ?) It involves a lot of work adjusting the motion data to work on the models. They would have been able to use 3D scanning techniques to create accurate models of some of the main characters (note, only a few of these were done most obvious being Angelina Jolie) but even these would then require a huge amount of work to make them animatable. They used some very special surfacing techniques to produce realistic skin and a whole different technology for hair and cloth. Dragons have to be done by hand as there is nothing they can motion capture to reproduce their movements. Likewise mermaids :grin:

Originally Posted by wilko

So the reason that they look like the actors is because they are the actors.......if that makes sense. Its not an animated film in the traditional sense.

Again, not quite. Motion capture can only do so much. It does not reproduce skin colour, hair, clothing or sweat. These have to be created by the animators. It's all clever stuff, but it takes alot more than pressing a few buttons in a computer program to create. If you watch again, look at how bad the hand movements are. These do not transfer well to motion capture. Even worse, take a close look at any sequences with horses. That was dire :( I'll try and track down a good online feature about how they did it all later.

[Qexit]

Follow this link to find out a lot more about how the film was made:

http://vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=3457&page=1

but watch out for the annoying advert that might po-up before you get to the article.

[Silent Bob]

Over the weekend we watched:-

Jeremy Clarkson Supercar Showdown.

Standard fair for one of these DVDs and bit boring really. 4/10

In The Shadow of The Moon.
For anyone that's watched From the Earth to the Moon, this is a must see. Some of the real astronauts talking about their experiences intermingled with real footage. 10/10.

[SLAYER]

Cool films recently;

Southland Tales 10/10 enjoyable and quirky
American gangster 10/10 great gangster movie from the best
The Nines 9/10 3 seperate stories quit cleverly interwoven together
Stardust 9/10 very magical and enjoyable

Not bad could have been better;

Hitman 7/10 not bad but wanted to be bourne ultimatum but wasn't
Shrooms 6.5/10 ok horror but the end was completly ripped of from another film i saw last year witch was much better

Not so good films recently;

30 days of night 6/10 nothing realy new in this movie unfortunatly!

Can't wait;

Cloverfield
We own the night
I am legend

well thats what i thought any way!!

[moes_girl]

A Muppet Christmas Carol [9/10]
One of my favourite Christmas movies and one which we normally watch every Christmas Eve but have too many other plans on Monday so squeezed it in today.

Zodiac [8/10]
Despite negative reviews I thought this was fantastic, yes it was a tad long but we were so engrossed that we didn't notice. Great performance from Mark Ruffalo, also nice seeing Dr Mark Green in this. The attention to detail was so spot on you would have thought it was made in the 70's.