Hacker Cinema
Cloverfield
2008 · Film · 85 min
Directed by Matt Reeves
Five young New Yorkers throw their friend a going-away party the night that a monster the size of a skyscraper descends upon the city. Told from the point of view of their video camera, the film is a document of their attempt to survive the most surreal, horrifying event of their lives.
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18 comments on Hacker News
That is interesting that it was actually composed recently, of course he was going for period-accurate and that seems to be his thing. But it's just fascinating to me, the sort of social norms around, and the mood or feelings that are evoked by, that kind of music, compared to a modern "serious" monster movie like Cloverfield or something (of course silent vs. talkie is a bit apples-to-oranges but it just feels culturally worlds apart even though they're kind of going for the same thing).
That gets really murky really fast.
Is 10 Cloverfield Lane a sequel to Cloverfield? They decided to throw the Cloverfield name onto it shortly before release for marketing reasons, the actual movie has nothing to do with the events and story of the original Cloverfield.
Is the video game Nier a sequel to Drakengard? Technically yes, but the connection is vague and distant. And there's also Drakengard 2 which is the sequel to a different ending for the original game.
How would you count Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off series of The Walking Dead, itself and adaptation of a comic book series. Do the shows continue to get copyright protection so long as the comics are still being published? Or vice versa?
I don't think you're wrong, and I got the same feeling while watching the 'found footage' style of horror movie ; Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, etc.
It feels like weak writing to fall back into a narrative first-person account for the entirety, but I can't place my finger on why.
Maybe it just seems like it's the easiest 'fiction' to write because it is so predicated on the fantasy being narrated by a perspective that is entrenched in a normal reality?
What I don't understand about the movie business is the cost of making them. The most important ingredient to the success of a movie is the plot. We've all seen low budget movies that made lots of money - because of the plot. Casablanca, Psycho, Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Primer, ...
Star Trek TOS was a very low budget affair, and produced excellent results, because they hired the best scifi writers. When they threw money at the Star Trek movies, they were all terrible.
It's the plot that matters. Nothing else.
To date, Cloverfield remains the only movie I've walked out of
Along those lines, it's low-key fascinating for me to see unintentional 9/11 imagery in pre-9/11 movies. Look at something like True Lies, which treats a terrorist attack and a plane destroying a building as lighthearted action movie fare.
You never see that kind of imagery treated so flippantly after 9/11. 2000s movies with 9/11 analogues (War of the Worlds, Munich, Cloverfield, etc.) deal with it mostly indirectly and always as deep-set trauma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_entertainment_affected_by_the_September_11_attacks
You might also enjoy similar documentaries Cloverfield, The Blair Witch Project, and This is Spinal Tap ;-)
I do vr projects for work occasionally and previously was in film when they were pushing stereo. Content makes a huge difference. On a flat screen the most dramatic space contrast is left-to-right, in stereo it's near to far. If you're exaggerating something you'd use those. It's way more fatiguing on your eyes to focus near to far, than left to right--it also takes like 10x as long for people to focus and recognize something that changes near-to-far.
FPS games are awful for VR when you move around with a joystick. Also, a lot of the "dramatic" things that get used to try and sell games make you dizzy. There's also some acclimation. They say devs are the worst subjects for testing of some vr demo will cause sickness.
I also think people underplay the motion sickness film and FPS video games can have on people who are unacclimated (FPS games didn't have big money pushing it in the early 90's and were on tiny, low res screens). I know I've felt motion sickness playing flight simulators and certain FPS games, especially at first. Movies like Blair Witch and Cloverfield were criticised for making people feel sick.
To address the focus problem, I've been wondering why there's not much talk about light fields for VR (maybe because of patents?).
So, first it stretches the definition of sci-fi beyond reason (how on earth is The Witch science fiction??), and then to add insult to injury it leaves one of the purest sci-fi movies of the year (The Arrival) off the list (though, I suppose to be fair it's trying to list movies folks may not have heard of... of course then they went and stuck Cloverfield and Midnight Special on the list).
I'm baffled.
Also reminds me of an article about the Cloverfield movie (can't find it right now). They made the head of the Liberty Statue on the actual size it would be when cut by the monster and falling among people in the streets. But the feedback from a closed beta exhibition showed that audience would find find that "small" head comically ridiculous and inaccurate. So for the film release they made it much bigger so people would find it realistic.
When Cloverfield first trailer came out, there was a shot where the Statue of Liberty's head was flung into a street. The first version of it appeared to be a rough cut CGI [1], then the second version came out of the trailer and the head was thoroughly improved[2].
I know that there is a need for buzz to be created, but where does the line between changes and false advertising occur. If for some reason I was super psyched about the dinosaur jumping out of the water and eating the shark and the scene is cut from the movie, then how is this different from car sales saying they have a car with a/c on the lot and then finding it never existed.
1. Trailer 1 screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/bqkryTL.jpg
2. Trailer 2 screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/A9uVtnx.jpg
Yes, mapping geometry/mesh to real world structures/skylines/halls/rooms of real locations, geolocation, orientation of device and local structural data. That is when augmented reality really takes over. We may even see a time when looking at something without some sort of augmented view is strange. Tango seems to be going right at that.
Personally I cannot wait to be chased by Cloverfield like monsters/creatures along the skyline and weaving in between buildings downtown. Movie ads are going to be amazing.
Plus, anecdotally, it makes viewers feel 'dizzy'. See criticisms of found footage movies like Cloverfield.
This was a pleasant surprise, but the second half was pretty lame and uninspired. It should have ended as a pitch-perfect exercise in horror movie lampshading, with a shadowy, unresolved conspiracy. With the first hour, then walk away.
Then again, I really liked Cloverfield for not getting too hung up on explanations.
There were complaints about nausea from Cloverfield's filming technique, despite this technique being used many times before without nearly as much camera control (Blare Witch project had some awful shaky scenes far worse than Cloverfield).
I don't buy any of these articles. Yes some people won't respond well to 3D, but the vast majority does and has in every implementation. This is as absurd as saying when the Model T was released, that because of a minority of the population having motion sickness that the automobile is destined to fail.
I don't know a single person who has a problem with 3D. Well technically that's a lie, I know someone who's blind in one eye, so with the glasses they're just watching an over expensive 2D movie and without they're just watching a very fuzzy movie.
I love my FlipCam. I've been keeping a video diary of my startup on it, and I also used several to record my vacation to Australia and New Zealand in October.
I don't think you need super-high quality, even though the FlipCams are HD. Content counts more than style or featureset. What I like about the FlipCam is ease of use, portability, and connectivity to various video-sharing services.
The vacation was a bit of a testbed. Everybody in the family had a FlipCam, and we posted to the net a lot. After a few days, however, we realized that some sort of post-production really helped make the video much better. So I started using Camtasia Studio for basic titling, popups, splices, and transitions. It also allowed me to tweak the codec settings when I rendered the file, which was nice.
Another interesting lesson: the more you film, the better you get. At first everybody was stiff as a board the second you turned the cam on. Must be some kind of hangover from the still camera days. But after a dozen or so shots with us all watching the results, we realized that relaxing was the only way to go. The videos got a lot better at the end.
Here's a sample of the more relaxed video we got at the end of the trip instead of the start: http://www.vimeo.com/7121046
EDIT: I'm a bit of a movie buff, so this is a pet topic for me. I know that you're receiving conflicting advice, and I really can't emphasize enough how content trumps style. We found the the emotional context of a piece -- setting, reactions, flow, body language, vocal inflections, narrative -- win out so solidly over technical attributes that you can shoot a great video on the crappiest equipment imaginable and it will still be great video.
I could point to major motion pictures going the handy-cam way, like Cloverfield, or I could point to the popularity of amateur internet video, or even America's Funniest Home Videos.
But I won't.
The problem with CGI is that it (almost) always looks fake. Cloverfield was a good movie until that goofy CGI monster came into frame. If Cameron figured out how to make CGI look real and I mean really real, Avatar will truly be a breakthrough.
Just saw a movie. Awesome intravert sport, movie watching. Except for the whole leaving the house thing...
Seeing Cloverfield makes me glad I just moved from NYC.