J.J Abrams "Cloverfield" project.

J.R. Hudson said:
Look at all o the SW fan film, the recent short http://www.theore.net/ ...

All I'm saying is .. I wasn't too impressed with the VSX. They were really solid, but not OMG Jurassic style.

Definatley doable if even on smaller scale.
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Just my opinion but I'm gonna say no chance. I'm guessing you're not giving the movie credit for the percentage of effects work in each shot. TONS of "invisible" stuff. A huge amount of the environments were created almost entirely in post. It all lent to the realism of Manhattan in various stages of destruction (which I felt was flawless) without which the movie ceases to be "scary."

I think they farmed out all of the effects work to at least half a dozen companies.

Sure, you COULD do it on a low budget, but it wouldn't have the scope and it would end up looking like, well BEING, this.
 
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Jared Meyer said:
Just my opinion but I'm gonna say no chance. I'm guessing you're not giving the movie credit for the percentage of effects work in each shot. TONS of "invisible" stuff. A huge amount of the environments were created almost entirely in post. It all lent to the realism of Manhattan in various stages of destruction (which I felt was flawless) without which the movie ceases to be "scary."

I think they farmed out all of the effects work to at least half a dozen companies.

Sure, you COULD do it on a low budget, but it wouldn't have the scope and it would end up looking like, well BEING, this.
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I think he was trying to say that the effects were not anything spectacular. Especially considering how little you actually see of the monster itself.

BTW, I think if you look at some of the stuff we linked you will see what we're talking about. Cloverfield is the type of movie that could have been done on a lower budget with some talented creative people. The link you provided sucks in comparison really.

IMHO.
 
Michael Anthony Horrigan said:
BTW, I think if you look at some of the stuff we linked you will see what we're talking about.
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Saw The Silent City a long time ago. And it's great. Ok, if you had a hundred Ruairi's and they were all willing to work nonstop for 3 years for minimum wage, yes, you might be able to pull off Cloverfield quality effects on a budget less than 30m. :) (Kidding. Kind of.)

Even the most talented effects houses on the planet are still fighting at the bleeding edge of technology to get things to look "real" or at least "right." You throw anything less at it and it shows. To me anyway. I probably have a much lower tolerance for less than perfect cg than the next guy though (from an audience perspective).

With Cloverfield I was never once distracted by sub-par effects. It all felt real. When I saw the special features on the DVD I was actually pretty surprised at how much of it was cg.
 
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Wow, I'm a believer. :)

You DVXuser guys keep amazing me.

I hope that the whole budget for Silent City wasn't so big?

...

The future looks even brighter. :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
 
Jared Meyer said:
Saw The Silent City a long time ago. And it's great. Ok, if you had a hundred Ruairi's and they were all willing to work nonstop for 3 years for minimum wage, yes, you might be able to pull off Cloverfield quality effects on a budget less than 30m. :) (Kidding. Kind of.)

Even the most talented effects houses on the planet are still fighting at the bleeding edge of technology to get things to look "real" or at least "right." You throw anything less at it and it shows. To me anyway. I probably have a much lower tolerance for less than perfect cg than the next guy though (from an audience perspective).

With Cloverfield I was never once distracted by sub-par effects. It all felt real. When I saw the special features on the DVD I was actually pretty surprised at how much of it was cg.
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City and landscapes are pretty easy from everything I've read. It's the creature that would take most of the work. Like what's been said, it's no Jurassic Park when it first came out. I think you're giving Cloverfield a little too much credit.

When I walked out of JP I was blown away by the SFX.
 
His words...
Ruairi Robinson said:
Budget - cost me 7k euro + 3-4 grand from my producer to SHOOT the thing... then eventually got some assistance from the film board to complete it...

Time is a bit of a sore point for me, since it took wayyyyy long to finish than I would have preferred. I spent 6 months on the post with no income, then had to stop to figure out a way to pay my rent... then before I knew it a year had passed and the film was sitting there like an Albatross. At this point I hated every poo pooing frame of the thing and wasn't even going to finish it. I decided finally to get my shi* together and hacked all the stuff I hated out of it, and spent a couple more months on it (actually it was quite quick to finish in the end) and that was the end of last October - done and dusted.

3D was 3dsmax and vray to render.
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No, Cloverfield sure has its flaws, but the fact that I watched it for the fourth time tonight [in 5 days] comes to say something. :)

It's very well made.

...

And you don't have to worry [too much] about lighting and composition in this kind of films. :)

Lol.
 
My wife just bought a DVD of Cloverfield at Costco and we watched it this evening.

She walked out at about 53 minutes, having lost patience with the shakey camera footage. She said it made her dizzy (we were watching on a very large screen at close range).

I kept wondering when the camcorder footage would end and the real footage begin. I expected that to happen maybe 10-15 minutes into the story, and then imagined the rest would be forensic analysis, the government planning on how to deal with the monster, etc. but that never happened. The ending was a disappontment. Storywise, it left me with a sense of lacking of substance.

That said, I was impressed with the match-move work. The animation/CGI work was top-notch. The match-moving was particularly impressive, given the fact that there was no stable camera shot to match with. There was some match moving by hand in the rooftop scene, but it was done extremely well. The challenges to making visuals like this integrate are what separate the wannabe filmmakers from the real filmmakers.

A lot of the footage seemed to be HVX200, but I noticed they had a Thompson Viper cam in some of the shots, which seemed strange, given the look they were going for.

Overall, story, C-, matchmoving A+. Overall, I give it a B.
 
The only HVX footage was from the party scene in the beginning. Which is a misconception people have about it. Very very little was shot with the HVX. The visual effects shots were done on the F23. I think the Viper made an appearance here and there. But they didn't use it as much as cine-altas cam because they were shooting under sodium-vapor lights. And apparently the viper has a more prevalent green cast than the F23
 
Geeze, I thought the whole thing was shot with the HVX. The F23 seems to have a lot of grain. Maybe that was added in post to simulate camcorder noise. There was also vertical smear in the department store triage scene, making me think it was definately a consumer CCD cam. The opening footage, the Coney Island footage, etc., seemed like consumer cam footage, and I thought the rest was HVX.

My wife was looking up consumer reviews on the movie and she said it got an "F" rating. A lot of people didn't like the camera work, some people got sick and vomited in the theater from induced motion sickness. I kept explaining to my wife that "if you had a camcorder and you got to witness the destruction of a city, this is what you would capture." Maybe there was a better way to tell this story, but if this technique were the director's intent, I'd say he accomplished it.
 
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