Hacker Cinema
The Mitchells vs. the Machines
2021 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Mike Rianda
A quirky, dysfunctional family's road trip is upended when they find themselves in the middle of the robot apocalypse and suddenly become humanity's unlikeliest last hope.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
I suspect it's the dog/pig problem [1]. Many of these systems have no object permanence. If a vehicle was detected at 170 feet, it may not have remained detected as the car got closer, same with the pedestrian. We all should know by now that fixed objects are filtered out by the Tesla system, whether that's stopped vehicles or signs and reflectors; it's actually pretty common for driver assistance features to filter out fixed objects, outside of parking assistance speeds... but most other brands don't have drivers that overtrust the assistance features.
[1] As popularized in the movie The Mitchells vs. the Machines: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LaK_8-3pWKk
I'm genuinely curious, what about The Mitchells vs. The Machines graphics felt slightly outdated? It felt like they pushed the boundaries of the medium to me, including doing a lot of custom rendering work to make their final frames match their concept art as closely as possible, right down the the stroke textures and light-responsive character outlines. Or were you just referring to them not making any significant advances in physically-based rendering, because in that case I see what you're saying.
Side note, that movie was spectacular. I have poster for it on my apartment wall!
COVID should have helped them a lot: plenty of big, well made films suddenly needed a way to get in front of people that wasn't a movie theatre and they went with Netflix. (The Mitchells vs The Machines, for instance). Unfortunately, I think they've made two mistakes: what should be landmark content is just kind of muddled in there with pointless documentaries, shows that were immediately cancelled, and old second rate sitcoms; and they're way too aggressive with the Netflix branding, which has a poor reputation. It's over-saturated to the point that I can't imagine someone having a favourable impression when they see that extra Netflix logo on a piece of content. Ambivalent, at best. Just think if they used that kind of space for human curation, or to emphasize the excellent creators that are represented on their platform instead.
I already said this above but
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie. They also did Cloudy with Meatballs.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.