Special Effects in Movies

This week I don’t have any original content to post. Call it a slow month if you must. Today instead I’m going to talk about special effects in movies from Hollywood, Bollywood and Japanese cinema.

Hollywood: The Money

So it’s quite obvious that when it comes to special effects, Hollywood is where you’ll find the most current, cutting edge visual stuff. This is namely because its the oldest, biggest, and most prominent industry within the the entertainment business. They have access to the most skilled and highly trained VFX people in the world, and most importantly they have the money to to make even the most ludicrously written scenes look believable.

Take i-Robot here. The majority of this movie was completely computer generated, and even though the robots still had this “not-really-there” feel to them, the production value was just high enough that it didn’t distract from the experience.

Still though, even with all the production value in the world, the problem Hollywood seems to face time and time again is their utter lack of imagination: we keep seeing the same rehashed cliche plot lines and visual archetypes like the matrix-bullet-time-makes-things-more-epic technique, and the use-epic-gospel-music-to-make-a-fight-scene-more-intense technique, and so forth. Though visually each movie that comes out of Hollywood looks great, its becoming less and less impressive because the substance isn’t there to “wow” us.

Japanese Cinema: The Imagination

Then there’s Japanese cinema: the people that brought us most of the worlds most bat-shit-insane stuff.  Though their production value is noticeably lower than the stuff Hollywood can put out there, it doesn’t bother you one bit because the content they put out is really just so completely out there you’re willing to look past it.

Below is a clip from the movie Casshern: a feature film loosely based on an old Japanese anime of the same name.

Embedding was disabled, so click the image to watch on Youtube.

Again, here we get another robot apocalypse film but instead of a somewhat plausible plot line like:

• People build and rely on robots hoping they won’t turn on us
• they turn on us unexpectedly
• the hero defeats the robots

We get:

• The hero dies at war immediately
• is resurrected when some human-organ-growing factory is struck by lightning causing several super human Frankenstein people come to life as well
• dawns the Casshern costume and fights off an army of robots the misunderstood Frankenstein people adopt as their minions to avenge their ancestors who were wiped out in this genocide years ago
• and everyone dies… or not really… cause there are like spirits or something…. or… I don’t fucking know.

Yeah I admit that’s not a very good summary, but you try understanding what the hell is going on–I dare you. And even if you don’t, you won’t care because its that awesome.

Bollywood: The…. what the fuck….

Now, I enjoy Bollywood here and there. Hell I grew up on all the songs and dancing. But for as long as its existed, Bollywood has tried to do what Hollwood does, but:

• with a fraction of the budget
• with a fraction of the technical skill
• with an Indian sense of humour

Now normally this results in an unbearable experience, but the one redeeming quality that they bring to the table is simply this: Indian people have no idea where to draw the line.

In Hollywood, it would go like this:

Screenwriter: So, can we have a scene where our robot combines with a hundred other robots like him to form a super giant robot!

Producer: Sure! That sounds awesome!

Screenwriter: BUT, they don’t actually combine. No. no, they stand on each others shoulders, and interlock arms.

Producer: Uh….. wait what?

Screenwriter: and the Robot is a brown dude.

Producer: ……

Screenwriter: We’ll call him Brownatron.

Producer: Get the fuck out of my office.

In Bollywoood….

(As seen on Toblessrobot)

Yeah. Don’t even lie, that that wasn’t the greatest thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

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