Hacker Cinema
The Jungle Book
2016 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Jon Favreau
After a threat from the tiger Shere Khan, Mowgli, a man-cub fostered by wolves, is forced to flee the jungle, and he embarks on a journey of self-discovery with the help of the panther, Bagheera, and the free-spirited bear, Baloo.
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19 comments on Hacker News
To expand - most kid shows that adults can stand to watch are written to adults in some sly way that flies over the kids' heads. Often that adult targeted humor is something that kids have no context for (subtle sexual innuendo, pop culture references) - I think the 2016 "The Jungle Book" remake is a good example of this, with extended and funny references to Apocalypse Now and other mature films. But Bluey will have some innocuous fun episode and the subtle context is actually something about death, parental legacy, being an adult with a life predating your children, the pain of miscarriage, etc. I don't know how they pull off addressing those topics but they somehow do and it's magical.
Many adults of a certain age will have very happy childhood memories of watching classic disney movies such as jungle book, cinderella, toy story, Lion King. Most creative companies would love to have the kind of love that disneys back catalog has. Alas this love does mean the easy ability to sell plastic toys for every film.
If you watched "The Jungle Book" remake, it was astonishing that there was only 1 actor (the boy who played Mowgli), and everything else was generated. I ripped that movie and while putting in my KODI collection, I couldn't decide whether to put it in Movies or Animated Movies. I think soon everything will go into the Animated Movies folder.
A good live action people with CGI dragons could certainly be done now. The technology is there. The 2014 "Paddington" and the 2016 "The Jungle Book" certainly showed that live action and CGI characters can interact really well.
On the other hand animators seem to have found that sweet spot for animated human characters where they are human enough that as long as you are somewhat interested in the story you can easily forget they are animated, but still different enough to avoid the uncanny valley.
Same with animated sets.
If someone were to do a Dragonriders of Pern movie I think I'd prefer fully animated, because Pern really needs at least a trilogy and I think it would have a better shot of getting second and third movies if the first were fully animated.
That's because a fully animated version could have a short at winning the Best Animated Feature Academy Award (at least if they ever change the rules to make the voting for Best Animated Feature sane [1]). A big award win would boost the sequel chances.
If it was live action with animated dragons it would not be eligible for Best Animated Feature.
[1] For Best Animated there are two voting differences from most of the other specialized categories. (1) Every member of the Academy can vote, as opposed to only members in the branches of the Academy related to the category, and (2) voters are not required to have seen all the nominees.
I've seen interviews asking members why those voted for the movies they did and with Best Animated Feature you see a lot of answers like "I haven't watched cartoons since I was 6, but my grandkids wanted to see <Some_Disney_Movie> so I took them. I waited in the lobby doing work on my phone while they watched. When they came out they seemed happy, so I voted for <Some_Disney_Movie", or "My kids streamed <Some_Disney_Movie> 10 times a day for 6 months so I voted for it".
Here's is recent video that goes over in great detail the problems with the Best Animated Feature award [2].
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S8zsRWst7U
The only big movies I know of with talking, photorealistic animals are the Jungle Book remake, and this Lion King remake. “Caught up” is a bit of a stretch when most anthropomorphic stories are still heavily stylized.
If you think about it this came about through laziness and to lower budgets, same deal with great programmers, programmers shouldn't want to do repetitive lazy work but innovate it away. Tedious work becomes a pain on time and budgets, so you innovate to do it faster/better.
Animators didn't want to draw all the backgrounds slightly moving and this allowed re-use and new innovations to make movies faster. This allowed animators to focus on the character cels and making characters look better, the main focus.
The multiplane camera with movable layers for parallaxing directly led to some of the best early Disney movies (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and The Jungle Book) and helped their budget as well as made them look better. Plus at the time, it was actually an improvement that animators welcomed to speed up their tedious work.
That was the predecessor not the multiplane aspect of it with moving layers, definitely inspired it. Lotte mostly just used it to swap out colored backgrounds on her silhouette cel style to adjust placement and color.
A predecessor to the multiplane camera was used by Lotte Reiniger for her animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Berthold Bartosch, who worked with Reiniger, used a similar setup in his film L'Idee (1932).
Ub Iwerks invented the multiplane camera with movable layers to create parallax and zooming [1] which created immersive depth. It also saved on budgets, tedious background animation and allowed animators to focus more on the character cels, the star of the show.
The first multiplane camera, using movable layers of flat artwork before a horizontal camera, was invented by former Walt Disney Studios animator/director Ub Iwerks in 1933, using parts from an old Chevrolet automobile. His multiplane camera was used in a number of the Iwerks Studio's Willie Whopper and Comicolor cartoons of the mid-1930s.
Fleischer Studios (Popeye/Betty Boop) also made one or copied in 1934 [1]
The technicians at Fleischer Studios created a distantly related device, called the Stereoptical Camera or Setback, in 1934. Their apparatus used three-dimensional miniature sets built to the scale of the animation artwork. The animation cels were placed within the setup so that various objects could pass in front of and behind them, and the entire scene was shot using a horizontal camera. The Tabletop process was used to create distinctive results in Fleischer's Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Color Classics cartoons.
William Garrity took Ub Iwerks invention further and that iteration was used in many large successful movies they made [1]
The most famous multiplane camera was invented by William Garity for the Walt Disney Studios to be used in the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The camera was completed in early 1937 and tested in a Silly Symphony called The Old Mill, which won the 1937 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. Disney's multiplane camera, which used up to seven layers of artwork (painted in oils on glass) shot under a vertical and moveable camera, allowed for more sophisticated uses than the Iwerks or Fleischer versions, and was used prominently in Disney films such as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and The Jungle Book
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera
Modern color treatment in film totally drives me crazy, independent of what it does to CGI.
It seems like every film coming out of Hollywood these days is processed exactly the same way:
* Crank down the low end so half the frame is solid inky black.
* Pick one or two key colors, and jack up their saturation.
* Desaturate everything else.
In other words, make the entire movie look like an over-dramatic poster for it. Throw any sense of naturalism or unique look out the door. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Here's the top live action movies of 2016:
Rogue One
Cyan and olive: http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rogue-One-A-Star-Wars-Story15.jpg
Captain America: Civil War
Yellow and red: http://cdn3-www.superherohype.com/assets/uploads/gallery/civil-war-trailer-2-screenshots/cwttss03.jpg
Why they felt the need to make Cap's lip rosy red is beyond me. Even better is this shot:
http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Captain-America-Civil-War-cast-photo-Renner-Johansson-Evans-Sebastian-Stan.jpg
This is a daylight shot. Look at how the characters are all squinting. Look at the big white fluffly clouds that should be diffusing the light and softening shadows. And yet, magically, all of the shadows are jet black and almost all of the color is gone.
The Jungle Book
Green and red (to draw attention to Mowgli):
https://www.moviedeskback.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The_Jungle_Book_HD_Screencaps-23.png
Deadpool
Another daylight shot with nonsensical shading:
http://turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Deadpool-Movie-Screenshot-Brianna-Hildebrand-Negasonic-Teenage-Warhead-Texting.jpg
The light is clearly diffuse, if you look at the shadows on the ground, and yet there is this deep black everywhere. Deadpool took the look further by only picking one color (red, Deadpool's outfit color) for the entire film.
Lest you think this is just an issue with superhero movies, let's ignore those and look at the other top non-superhero movies of 2016:
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
More of the same:
http://harrypotterfanzone.com/wp-content/2016/09/fantastic-beasts-trailer-screenshot75.png
It also suffers strongly from the "It's a period movie so we're going to sepia tone everything so hard it looks like you're watching the movie through an aquarium full of pee" effect.
Hidden Figures
https://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/hiddenfigures.jpg
More of the period movie sepia along with an improbably jacked up complementary cyan.
Star Trek Beyond
If the past is warm, the future must be cool:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Trek-Beyond2.jpg
Blacks, grays and neon cyan, just like Rogue One. Look how unnatural his skin tone is! They wanted to jack up yellow to complement their primary blue so much that the poor dude has jaundice:
http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/star-trek-beyond-trailer-cover.jpg
La La Land
I'll give this one some credit for varying it up a bit. Also, dramatic spotlit stage lighting is a logical part of the movie's look. But it's still prey to the same cliched look in places:
http://henrymollman.com/content/images/2017/01/Screenshot-from-2017-01-18-22-36-49-1.png
Ghostbusters
Ectoplasm green and spooky violet were the key colors for the whole film. Secondary colors tend to come across as magical or eerie to viewers since they're different from the safe and familiary primary colors. Of course, jacking up magenta doesn't do flattering things to skin:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ghostbusters2.jpg
Also, what color is Melissa McCarthy's coat? Is it actually black? Who fucking knows.
Central Intelligence
The traditional comedy look is brightly-lit and saturated, so Central Intelligence didn't fare quite as poorly as the above. Whenever they had a chance to dim the lights, though, they revert to the same cliched look as well:
https://i2.wp.com/doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/centralintelligence2944.jpg
The Legend of Tarzan
http://images3.static-bluray.com/reviews/14209_5.jpg
Jesus, we get it, colorist. They're in the wet jungle. We don't need to be physically assaulted with the colors blue and green to figure that out.
...You get the idea.
Go back and watch a movie from before 2000 and you'll quickly realize how much more pleasant to look at most of them where, and how much more variety there was in look. Compare Alien to The Graduate. But it seems like ever since the rise of digital coloring and superhero movies, Hollywood has decided every single fucking movie needs to look like a comic book page, whether it needs it or not.
One recent movie I really liked that bucked this trend was Her. It was heavily colorized, but in a way that stood out. In shots like these, even though there's a strong color cast and a lot of dark, there's still always some color and detail in the shadows:
https://i1.wp.com/turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Her-Movie-2013-Screenshot-Theodore-Apartment.jpg
https://3kpnuxym9k04c8ilz2quku1czd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/her-screenshot-14.jpg
Thanks for qualifying more. I'm surprised you didn't mention having humans in the video as a point - since that's pretty much what we're best at detecting fakes.
I believe the technology already is at a point for us to do this. The technology isn't the barrier to meet your criteria as much as the attention to detail. For a rendered video scene to look good, the main issue is the animation.
Still image renders are already at the point of fooling humans if enough time went into it. Then the remaining issue is the animation. Animation requires incredible attention to detail - some of which can be improved by a more nuanced understanding of the physics involved (eg water simulation or bird flight).
> no one, anywhere, has achieved fully realistic CG video
According to your specific criteria for realistic CG video.
But I still would argue the technology is already there. They just haven't made your video yet because realistic CG is done in movies. And movies aren't prioritizing meeting that specific criteria. But the talent and technology is there.
What about scenes like this from the Jungle Book?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6yKWQ24rF8
Of course it breaks your rubric for having the boy be real. But get rid of the boy, and less stylized setting (high saturation and fog and smooth tracking camera), people would absolutely be fooled in at least some of the scenes in that clip.
> In a scientific setting, a nature video will wipe the floor with our best CG video ten out of ten times.
Okay
Perhaps. Too bad we hit a GHZ wall, so the only thing we can do now is add more cores.
FYI: For 6K and 8K, both nVidia and AMD tech reps have said that "multi-GPU" (not CORE) solutions will be required to reach those. But they also said once they hit 16K, they'll have "real eye quality" in terms of DPI which comes with lots of extra "realism" for free. Like, watch the new Jungle Book in 4K and certain scenes of mountains will blow your mind and feel "real" (without any 3d glasses) and your brain is like "holy shit, I'm not watching a movie (for this split second), this is something real." But most scenes still don't. We're so close to photorealistic, I can taste it! (Like that GTA 5 photorealism mod on HN yesterday.)
That's why they're all moving to Vulkan. OpenGL is single-threaded and a PITA to easily exploit multiple GPU solutions. (Global state, one draw thread.)
> So the only alternative to paying for something you don't own is to steal it and pretend that you're somehow justified because you don't agree with the way the law is written?
Well laws are meant to be interpreted rather than followed verbatim. But that genuinely wasn't the point of my post and I'm certainly not advocating piracy. That doesn't mean I have to agree with how the movie industry is run either.
My point was that Disney should be upping their game to make their content more accessible rather than making it harder and using their monopoly via intellectual property laws to force their market position. That just seems really disingenuous with the point of intellectual property - like how Apple and Samsung went to war.
Copyright law wasn't intended to last the period of time it does. In fact copyright law was first conceived to allow publishers to make money from publishing but then the information was always intended to go into the public domain. Granted we are talking about 300ish years of history (IIRC) and times change but given the profits Disney are raking in you can hardly argue that they haven't recouped their production costs. However I'm not trying to argue against capitalism here either. My real issue with Disney is that they have been one of the biggest campaigners of extending copyright law, and also one of the biggest abusers of the public domain with a multitude of stories adapted and then trademarked (Jungle Book, Little Mermaid, Cinderella, etc). They make billions from "stealing" public domain stories and yet people like yourself complain if someone suggests pirating Disney's work as an alternative (I'm not by the way, but you assumed I had) and that seems somewhat unfair in the general sense when Disney have intentionally priced themselves out of reach for many parents. As an aside: I think the fact that Disney often targets younger audiences really helps them here as well because it makes it harder for parents to boycott their services.
This is why I say I'd rather see them working with existing providers instead of running their services in their own silo forcing people to pay for yet another subscription service just to access Disney content. You're right they have no legal nor economic obligation to do so; but I think respecting your customers wishes should count for something given that in any other industry customers could vote with their feet and easily switch services.
People forget that Disney owns a lot of must-see content:
For example, here is the list of top grossing movies of 2016 http://www.imdb.com/list/ls074920894/
Disney had the following films
1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Rogue One
3. Finding Dory
4. Zootopia
5. The Jungle Book
11. Doctor Strange
12. Moana
19. Alice Through the Looking Glass
For 2017 so far (http://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/domestic/all-movies/cumulative/released-in-2017)
Disney has
1. Beauty and the Beast
3. Guardians of the Galaxy V2
11. Pirates of the Caribbean
13. Cars 3
They own the Marvel franchise, the Star Wars, as well as some of the most loved children's movies in history. They also have a ton of children's TV programs.
If Disney really had a subscription service with all their movies and TV shows, I would choose them over Netflix.
OK? How is any of that stopping YOU from innovating?
And there are many different forms of innovation. For one, the technological innovation needed to bring the new Beauty and the Beast to the screen. You could also say the same thing about The Jungle Book from a year or two ago, yet the technological innovation to present the story in the way they did recently is miles away from what they had when they made the original animated film.
My point was that they would not have been impossible without CGI. All four of those movies could have been made prior to the mid-80s, with different technology. I chose Rogue One and Jungle Book because one comes from a family of movies that excelled in practical effects, optical compositing, and modeling and the other has a version which was made in the 1940s.
Decades ago, Finding Dory would have been hand animated (though, even that had moved begun moving to computers in the late 80s). I haven't seen Captain America, but I would guess similar types of movies existed before hand (the 80s and early 90s are full of over the top action movies and practical effects; some of which still hold up today).
Visual story telling doesn't require CGI. It might be the most pragmatic way to do things now (due to time, cost, complexity, etc.), but it's not the _only_ way.
A pretty small percentage, obviously. The top grossing movies of 2016 were Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Finding Dory, Captain America: Civil War, The Secret Life of Pets, and The Jungle Book. All of these movies would be impossible to do without CGI.
Viewers want movies to be spectacles. If we're watching something in a theater, we have high expectations of the production value. Otherwise, why even waste the time and money going to a theater? We can watch the "good", low production value movies at home.
Consider 8 had a $306,000,000 budget, 9 had a $200,000,000 budget. I have no problem saying it was profitable, but so was The Land Before Time 9. When a movie pulls in ~1/2 has much as the previous film it's a sign.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/2016/top-grossing-movies
Just looking domestically we have Finding Dory (squeal), Rogue One (franchise), Captain America: Civil War (squeal), The Secret Life of Pets (kids movie), The Jungle Book (kids movie), Deadpool (franchise), Zootopia (kids movie), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (franchise), Suicide Squad (franchise), Doctor Strange (franchise), Moana (kids movie) etc. Down at #14 The Revenant was at least nominally an original movie, though very similar to several other films.
I don't think any of these where bad for what they where, but there was nothing new for the 14-40 group. 2015 had #6 American Sniper, #9 The Martian, but was again mostly rehashed movies until #17.
Which is essentially the role he played in the recent live action Jungle Book movie.
Even their trailers look crappy.
The Marvel Universe is wearing out, too. Avoid "Captain America - Civil War". The writers are running out of ideas. It's a heel-face turn, always a bad sign.
Now what? Movies from video games? "Warcraft" and "Angry Birds" are in theaters now. Disney did Kipling's Jungle Book, which is a CG demo reel for animal animation. We're almost to the other side of the uncanny valley. But it takes thousands of animators to drive the tools.
I thought I was the only one.. yes. Up - it said more emotionally in those first 10 moments with no dialog than most movies do in 2 hours.
The recent Jungle Book was similar, my eyes were misty the whole movie. The Martian had similar effects.
I hardly ever cry otherwise.