CGI IN BOND FILMS

hegottheboot wrote:

You see TSWLM for years and go wow Bond got away just in time.

You then devour production history.

Then every time you wince in sympathy with Roger and imagine the panicked crew jumping out in camera with extinguishers...

I don't understand...excuse my ignorance.

That scene where Stromberg attempts to kill Bond with the uber-long under-table gun (Mr Stromberg, could you possibly be compensating for something?) but Bond leaps off the chair just in time ... it actually wasn't QUITE 'just in time' and Rog sustained arse injuries as a result.

Yes his bum got scorched quite badly because the timing wasn't quite right and if I recall he had to take a number of days off for sure.

'Where most people have one hole, I now have three!' as he liked to say about it .

Usually wasn't the leading man leaving the Bond set with a sore arse.

CJB wrote:

Usually wasn't the leading man leaving the Bond set with a sore arse.

You're thinking of Mr wint and Mr kidd

Alimentary, dear Felix...

Bill Koenig from The Spy Command made a good point about how CR smartly made use of CGI by erasing the safety harnesses from the actors/stuntmen. This would allow them to do things practically but done in a safe manner.

That's pretty much standard practice in everything and actually has been done for longer than most realize. I think the type of wire removal really took off in the 90's and got progressively better.

It's all about how you utilize the tools at hand. But what the problem becomes is that people over-rely on them or do not know how to be creative without or outside the digital toolbox.

BI wrote:

I imagine the QOS freefall was done digitally because its production issues probably didn't allow the time to do it with stuntmen 80 times, lol.

Ha, maybe. An unfinished script and the tightest turnaround for a Bond film since the 60s and they gloat about globetrotting to the most locations of any 007 film.

I recall Forster claiming that he was proud of the realistic technology because he didn't have to risk the stuntmen's life.
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It was a different allocation of resources, but it was seriously costly, because they had to come up with ways to deal with this huge amoutn of data captured during the stuff with Craig and the actress in the actual free float chamber. There were 35mm cameras recording them, plus other reference cameras (five to seven altogether I think) and then they basically rebuilt the characters from data capture points and projected the live-action textures onto the CG bodies in proper perspective. I'm doing this from memory, but Dave Stump, a really good VFX guy, took care of the tech end for the sequence, which involved synchronizing the cameras through some kind of universal world clock based on distance from GMT zone down to a millisecond.

Considering the result, I see the QoS freefall scene as only being thought of as a successful operation where the patient not only still died, but then exploded all over the surgeons and nurses. If they'd used this for a different kind of scene, sort of like how Fincher wanted to do RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA's many microgravity scenes, motion-capturing actor faces and mapping them onto CG bodies, it might have been somewhat more successful.

Jeez. No wonder the film cost over 220 million or whatever, which seems insane for both Bond and 2008.

Every movie that has got around 10 VFX vendors working round the clock for a couple months is going to have a giant spike on their budget, and QUANTUM was definitely an example of that. Over 900 VFX shots, but I doubt anybody who didn't work on the show themselves could point out more than half of them. I actually set out to count the effects shots once, but, as I actually LIKE parts of the movie, kept getting distracted and engrossed in the movie. For once I wish I had the CINEFEX issue on QUANTUM, they actually were doing breakdowns of scenes by vendor at the ends of their articles for a time, it might actually indicate how many shots were done by each outfit and where the shots took place.

I wrote about another movie with an exploding VFX situation, RED PLANET. That was originally just a two vendor show, Cinesite doing the AMEE robot, and Digital Domain doing everything else, which was supposed to be 220-270 shots. Instead DD only delivered about 20-30 shots after building a spaceship model that was too big to be photographed on the available stage, and another 8 or 9 vendors came in and wound up doing almost a 1000 shots, because the film had to reevaluated massively after the director finished his cut, which was immediately discarded as he was know-nothing from beer commercials, and then a genius fix-it editor named Uriosite really rebuilt the finished movie practically from scratch. (that's the movie where they had lots of unexpected split-screen shots because Kilmer took out a restraining order on Tom Sizemore so they couldn't do any shots with them in-frame together after that took effect. Tons of laborious work to get separately-shot elements of the two actors to live together like a single shot, because they didn't have motion-control and couldn't shoot matching moves. THAT's how your budgets go nuts, having to deal with stuff like that.

All it takes is someone who really cares and not only plans to but actually does shoot a film down and dirty the way they used to. Spielberg did this on Raiders when his career was on the line post 1941 and it was magic.
Ironically it's almost always cheaper to do it live instead of having dozens of effects companies churning out inferior work.

And yet still during shooting everybody says, 'it takes too long to reset, just fake it and do the squib (or whatever) in post.' Probably not Eastwood, because he'll print the first take/rehearsal and live with however the gag worked, but he's exceptional in various ways as a filmmaker.

I say that ... and then realize I haven't seen anything he made yet this century! Guess that remark needs an asterisk.

Part of problem is that audiences don't violently reject bad effects sequences ... they're too much the norm now. Used to be that a bad effect in a climactic scene could ruin a movie's rewatchability (looking at you, AIR FORCE ONE.)

If they'd just cut FX shots by about 70%, there'd be a happy medium reached, I'm sure of that, where quality would really go up signficantly (assuming the time to do the work remained adequate.) And the storytelling would be better, because you don't have to be showing things outside the window every two seconds. All you have to do is look at good pictures up through the mid-90s to know that, before nearly everything in vfx went digital.

I think there are 130 VFX shots in TREK VI, and they made up less than 10% of the movie's budget, but the Abrams Trek pics have like 12x as much VFX (and probably 20x less content and 50x less brains) and the cost is probably a third or more of the budget.

I remember being flabbergasted that ILM alone got 20 million of the 60 mil spent on THE MUMMY 20-odd years back (or maybe it was the sequel), and they weren't even the sole vendor on the show.