In my experience, Chinese people are thrilled when non-Chinese people speak their language (even poorly), probably because it's pretty rare.
But yes, the tones are the hard part. The grammar is straight forward and similar to English, and characters are (almost always) pronounced only one way.
For a job at a small new game studio, first there was a slightly technical but mostly informal chat with a Director of Engineering where he asked me about things from my resume and my website (I keep a blog where I write about side projects). I love when interviewers take the time to look at my website and ask me about it because I can talk about that stuff all day.
Then they gave me an assignment to build a particle system. They provided a rendering framework and then I wrote the code to generate the particles. It was so much fun that I spent a lot of time on it. The follow-up was a panel with four engineers and we just went over my particle system code where they asked me about my reasoning for certain design choices, possible edge cases, etc.
It was all very positive and I got the job.
I much prefer the code review style of interview because I'm not good at writing code or problem solving while someone is watching. I've never been offered a job that had any sort of coding/whiteboarding component. My brain often presents novel solutions to complex problems at 2AM after I've slept on it, or during a walk around the block, and that sort of thinking isn't exemplified well in many technical interview scenarios. Talking about code I've already written is much closer.
A lot of what this article talks about rings true in a presentation I watched recently by the team at Weta Digital which did the VFX for The Batman
They talked about, among other things, how they had to:
- digitally replace the stunt man's face in many of the action shots because his jawline was too dissimilar to Robert Pattinson's.
- digitally modify a hand because a prop gun misfired in a shot
- enhance the fight scenes to look more visceral and violent
- add rain and rain spatter to the car chase (the parts that weren't already fully digital)
I'm no filmmaker but I felt many of those things could have been done without VFX. Hire a stunt man that looks more like RP, reshoot the scene with the broken prop, forget about rain and/or tone down the epic action set piece, etc.
Instead it seemed like it all just came to rest on the shoulders of the VFX artists.
As someone in the VFX industry myself (but as a software dev writing the tools the artists use), I'd argue those examples are generally useful work being done on the movie to make things "more real". Whether it's worth it, is going to be very opinionated.
However, I would say: I re-watched GoldenEye recently, and - maybe it was because I'm in the industry and notice these things more - but the blatantly different stunt men (especially landing the Cessna in Cuba: the man looked totally different compared to the actor who should have been flying!) compared to the actors did make me personally go "hang on a moment, who's that?"
Some of this stuff can now also be automated to a degree (not completely, it still requires artist input, and sometimes a lot), but it's not often Rotoing every frame like it used to be ten years or so ago.
Things I'd personally argue aren't worth artists having to work on, but I know they do, are things like skin wrinkle removal on leading actresses, removing mustaches on actors, etc. And the biggest issue is clients changing their mind at the last minute, often having previously signed off on lookdev or anim at the earlier stages, or just generally having to deal with bad set preparation because the 'talent''s time on set is 1000x times more important than the unseen artists, who then have to do loads of work to compensate for badly lit (very un-evenly lit) greenscreens or lighting on set, because the on-set VFX supe was likely ignore when he complained ("Oh, they can just fix it in post").
What really gets me are two things. The jiggle cam, and "let's film stuff but obscure what is happening in post".
I have watched so many 2005+ movies, where all the action scenes are just replaced with 'jiggle the screen around', and thus, you see nothing.
Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything.
Someone else mentioned that the reason stunt doubles are changed vfx wise, is because maybe they couldn't find one similar enough.
I call hooey on that, the real issue is cost. Generic stunt doubles are far cheaper than "stunt double who looks like top tier star".
And the jiggle cam is cheaper than a real action scene, and fast cuts are too, because who cares how well it is timed/shot if you can't see it.
I think, much like any industry, all this junk is just cost savings. It also shifts blame, and requires less talent from the director and actors.
I doubt any modern director, or actor, could handle the pressure of expensive shots, dangerous shots, with people running through explosions, or car chases, stunt doubles or not.
Nope. Just throw all that at sfx, and all the stress, cost, and reputation risking shots are no longer an actor's or dieector's issue.
It's actually rarely about cost itself, just look at modern movie budget, they didn't exactly get cheaper than 20+ years ago. The main factor is time, predictability and control. When you do it in post with CGI, you always have full control and can change your mind at any time. If you do it practical, you are stuck with whatever you filmed. Going back and doing a reshoot takes a long while, in CGI you just jiggle some parameters and rerender. If your movie-star-lookalike stuntman breaks a leg, you have a problem. If you do it with CGI, it barely matters what you captured in camera, just change it.
With modern movies there is so much CGI to begin with, that it hardly even matters what you filmed, it's not unusual to completely redesign scenes in post, as the script wasn't even finished when they started filmed the thing.
In theory, the flexibility is great. In practice it is itself a problem, as those decisions are avoided throughout production and instead accumulate into post. Where they get further kicked down the road - client for first 80% of schedule: "looks alright". client for remaining 80% of schedule: "[now that we've actually thought about this] we want it to be this way". The artists lament what they could have done had they gotten this direction earlier, ultimately just polish the turd with weekly extensions until the client is satisfied-slash-actual-deadline, and look forward to the next show where things might not go as awry.
Like everything in our society, the real problem is that the people in charge of managing don't know how to do the work, and rather than listening to, taking feeding, and trusting the people doing the work, they act as if their job is to blindly push orders downwards and micromanage whatever catches their attention. The article ('s followup) touches on this, ("managed to get themselves into really high positions but don’t know how a green screen works... People in the traditional leadership roles are boomers or Gen X guys, and what we do now didn’t exist when they were coming up"), but is naive in thinking that it's going to get better over time. In actuality, the "creatives" of tomorrow are busy gladhanding today, and the dynamic will persist.
I think this is why the production setup of Mandalorian got many VFX people excited, despite Engine being so counter to the standard workflow. It pushed the bulk of CGI to where it belongs - as a backdrop for actual acting and storytelling, and directly fed into the director's real time decision making. There are always going to be touch ups and last minute changes, but those are only practical in the context of having larger structure locked down. There are definitely constraints of the digital backdrop technique (watch Mandalorian again after that video, and you see it in everything), but I look forward to seeing how it might trickle out into the rest of the industry.
> Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything.
Shakycam is the worst. Casino Royale (2006) was loaded with it. It was so bad I couldn't parse what was going on in an action scene. In a James Bond film, which is supposed to ride on its action scenes.
The shakycam trope can probably be traced back to The Blair Witch Project, but for the action/thriller genre it really comes from the Bourne series. It's an easy way to add verisimilitude to a fight/chase and lets you skimp on the fight choreography because the fighters can't be seen very well. But personally I find it disorienting, and it took me right out of what everybody says was an excellent Bond film (and might've been if they committed to smooth reasonable action shots rather than shakycam).
If yt wasn't so hostile to fair use, running shaky scenes through video stabilization to explore the artistic contributions of camera shake could make for an interesting channel. Is the scene ridiculous without it, like the stabilized Star Trek scenes making the rounds years ago? Or is watchability improved by the contents not bobbing and weaving around?
In my memory it was Batman Begins (2005) that had if bad and started the trend, but you’re right about the first Bourne movie (2002) being somewhere near the start (as far as tent pole movies go).
At any rate it’s a super lazy crutch for bad choreography. Contrasted with something like the Indiana jones airplane fight scene with its wide shots of the action is like night and day.
To me, this seems subjective and grouchy. It might be that when you were growing up, things were a certain way, and now they're a bit different. You have a minor aesthetic disagreement. Some people like the shaky cam.
You may like the shakey cam, and that's fine naturally, but claiming age has something to do with it is weird. It is also unfair to call me grouchy.
All I know is that shakey cam is incredibly unreal to me. I have never, in my entire life, experienced scenarios where my vision was like a shakey cam, and I say this as someone with a history of racing, stunt driving, and a variety of athletic activities which jostles one about.
When in such real life situations, my body senses motion, my brain sorts it out, and there is no shakey cam effect.
I liken it to making a sound track for a movie, but imagine two people talking, while someone randomly cranks the audio up and down, and changes the aurial position of the speaker randomly.
Sure, that's going to create tension and stress in the movie goer too, but it draws one out of immersion, and is just lazy work.
Intensity can be created with real actual intensity, the shakey cam is a crutch.
One point regarding Goldeneye and fx generally. From a lay persons perspective Goldeneye has pretty snappy pacing so from memory some of the sets, such as the starting chemical plant explosion look a little fake, but the movie just chuggs along and and has a fairly good storyline that doesn't stall out.
I find I notice effects a lot more in movies when the story has flat spots. And as I learn more and more about visual story telling. All I think about when watching movies that go heavy on stunts and action "how does this progress the storyline".
Once I knew what process shots were, I just can't unsee them in older movies. In particular, where the actors are driving in a car, when the background is clearly a rear projection on a screen.
It's also obvious that the windshield has been removed for the filming.
Not not mention that they tug the steering wheel back and forth as if they were playing real life frogger just to signal that they are "busy doing something". This doesn't make sense either.
It always seemed to me like there was a simple solution. Record the steering wheel movements of the stunt car. Use a motor in the fake car to replay the steering wheel movements.
I find that even real, natural driving shots often look fake, but I'm not sure why. I've accused a film maker friend twice of using "janky and obvious looking greenscreen" for driving shots and both times I was completely wrong. Once was a car on a trailer which might have accounted for some of the unnatutalness, but the second time was a real quad bike driving on a real road with a chase car in front of it and a backwards facing camera-person.
Some films (and a lot of TV shows in the 80s/90s) often got the angle of the projection wrong as well, so there's an obvious miss-match between the perspective of the interior of the car and the outside... i.e. the angle of the camera in the car is roughly horizontal, but the projection is looking upwards towards the sky at around 10/15 degrees.
Another obvious (when you know what you're looking for) tell-tale if the projection is better, is the light direction / shadows within the car compared to what the car's doing: car turns left 90 degrees, but oh no, the sun's still coming from the same direction as before...
What's funny to me is you can have all this "immersion" and then for most bigger markets you get some rando voicing for Brad Pitt. I can't believe e.g. Germans are ok with this. I can't watch Spanish movies with English voiceover, I'd rather have subtitles
Subtitles vs dubs/voiceovers are largely a cultural thing. I envy countries where movies/tv shows are pretty much exclusively subtitled, for example Sweden. Coincidentally, Swedes seem to be really fluent in English on average.
It's a win-win: you absorb languages for free as a child, and you later get to enjoy art in its original unmutilated form.
We also translate a lot of books, even though the profit margins aren't that big.
The main source of government-critical information during the Communist era were the radio transmitters (RFE, Czech broadcast of the BBC, Voice of America) which were hardest to stop. Those stations broadcast in Czech and Slovak. Anything that had to cross a physical customs point (movies, books) was heavily censored.
If you grow up with movies being fully dubbed in your native language you don’t question it much. Usually the same voice actor voices the same actor(s), so Brad Pitt has the same voice actor voice in all movies.
Dubbing movies becomes a problem when you are exposed to the actors’ original voice or the original audio track of movies because dubbing is a poor substitute. And hearing the same voice for different actors breaks immersion.
You're on point. I think the issue is the fourth wall is becoming thinner. When you watch an old movie, you don't get the immersion you got watching it when it was out
I did a rewatch marathon of sorts with the kids, Alien, Aliens, Terminator 1-3, stuff like that. Those new action flicks, especially the super hero movies, cannot compare against those. An opinuon my son shares, and he grew up with Marvel. He was glued to the screen when we watched Alien for the first time together, because it did build up astory ajd tension (his words, not mine). Compared to Marvel were the CGI orgy starts 2 minutes into the movie.
Heck, I'll take the Terminator 1 stop motion effects over any scene in the forst half of the last Dr. Strange "movie" (I couldn't bring myself to watch more than that, even Meg is more fun to watch...) any day of the week. Because T1 is still scary and conveys emotion (despair mostly for being chased by an unstoppable killet machine), while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.
As compared to, e.g., the Expense, a ton of sci-fi short films (Dust in a great channel for that on Youtube) or the Mandalorian. I think the over use of CGI is just an easy excuse for bad story telling, and people swallow it.
> while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.
I think this is the crux of it, moreso than the CGI Orgy (great term btw). You can have movies with visibly apparent CGI, or even straight up animated movies, but the action is great and still drives the plot and pulls on your heart strings. I know every beat of The Matrix by heart, but there's still a ton of suspense in every action shot, because each encounter adds some new angle to the power scaling. At the start, squad of mooks > 1 freedom fighter > several mooks, but even 1 agent is better than several FFs. Then that balance shifts.
Contrast that with the Smiths fight in the later films, and it's totally Conservation of Ninjutsu at play. Adding more baddies just divides the power of a single baddie, because we already know the outcome, so we know 1 Neo = N Smiths.
Watched Aquaman recently, same thing. Completely unprincipled power scaling. No reference frame, and it just scales up and up until it's CGI Army 1 vs CGI Army 2. That spectacle might work if I had more reference for the power levels, plus emotional investment, but I don't.
Have had the same experience with my son. The T1 eyeball scene, even while quite primitive by modern standards, was much more impactful to him than anything in Stranger Things.
Actually older movies (80s-90s) didn't have much special effect, I find the more realistic, rougher nature of the scenes much better than the cartoonish, hyper-polished SFX today. When you see a fire, it's a real fire, not something digitally added, etc.
As much as I love advances in tech & art & visuals, I'm also getting pretty tired of live-action films that are basically computer generated. It has a certain look to it, too clean & precise & shiny, even as they industry overall gets better at matting things down.
I wanna see a larger counter-reaction to all the gloss, and have movies get a lil rougher around the edges, while having the stories & characters be way more refined. Draw attention to the medium's limits, rather than try to make it real, and then it becomes hyperreal/ uncanny.
But I'm guessing the industry will wanna go full immersion (like VR) rather than take a few steps back. Maybe there's room for both, if studios were willing to be more experimental (doubt it!).
to be fair, Henry Cavill looked even weirder with his CGI-removed "shaved" face as well.
they should have made a movie about the behind the scenes debate on this matter. execs, the star, the VFX team, and the final reception. coulda been really hilarious, entertaining, and use the situation to their advantage.
Since you say you have experience in the vfx industry. Do you think someone can release a killer app that can reduce the use of many visual artists and just make vfx with the use of software instead? And how feasible is this?
It's probably also everything that is accidentally overlooked during the shoot. Previously you would hat a different take, perhaps, or live with the goof. Now you can just offload that to post-production.
But probably also a question if how expensive filming days are with the whole crew vs. how expensive VFX artists are. The latter work is also highly parallelizable.
It’s probably a good ol perfectly rational slippery slope. Fixing a minor mistake or two in post is absolutely the best choice for everyone. Each additional fix is not worth a reshoot either. But slip too far and the product suffers.
> forget about rain and/or tone down the epic action set piece, etc.
But this is the stuff which make the movie cinematic and draws the audience. Hiring a stunt man which looks more like the lead might not be possible - historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc. But this makes the scenes less engaging.
A set with full crew and actors present is extremely expensive. For any mistake which can be fixed with VFX rather then a reshoot, it is probably the prudent financial decision to use VFX.
> historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc.
Those were often done, but other options that increased engagement were having actors do their own stunts (not always appropriate) or casting stunt workers into bigger parts.
You can't have lead actors perform actual dangerous stunts (despite what marketing might tell you). The financial risks are far to high and insurance would never accept that. Just imagine the financial loss if the actor is not able to complete the movie due to an accident. It only really happens in B-movies and movies produced outside of Hollywood.
When you say that a prop gun misfired, do you mean that a real gun, used as a prop, went off accidentally? Between this anecdote and the rust shooting, actors seem to have really poor trigger discipline. Is this something that happens a lot?
Huge plus one for OS: Three Easy Pieces. It sticks in my memory forever and I just confirmed, I had a random question about "why" from part of that book in 2014 and emailed Remzi and within a few days had a very detailed response back. It was much appreciated because I can get hung up on little details that I can't explain and it can really create a wall for me, so thanks Remzi for being responsive to a learner!
Worth mentioning (I think it was elsewhere in the overall thread) CODE is getting a 2nd edition later this year. I've always meant to read the book but never did, so I'm planning on using the second edition as my excuse to finally do so.
I'm in the middle of this book at the moment and I have mixed feelings on it.
It's definitely well-written and you can feel the love and care that went into producing it. But I think it would have been stronger had Nystrom skipped the Java version and spent those pages on theory instead before jumping into the C implementation. While going through the Java stuff (implementing in C# instead because I have an emetic reaction to Java) I found myself just wanting to hurry up and get to the good stuff in C. And I found the visitor pattern and code generation stuff to be a distraction.
The code can also be a bit hard to follow at times because he jumps around from file to file and function to function. He'll present a function that calls a function that doesn't exist yet, and then define the new function, etc. He does it that way because he wanted to ensure that every single line of code was present in the book (he wrote a tool to ensure that was the case), and it certainly helps if you're trying to copy his code verbatim, but not so much for high-level understanding. Maybe that's a failing on my part.
Finally I wish he had gone into more detail on how one might implement a register-based VM because they are faster and more interesting (to me) than a stack-based one.
The Java part is probably very lucky to have if he ever writes a second edition though. The reason is, for many dynamic languages the best way to make an interpreter fast is now to use the Truffle framework, not write a bytecode interpreter in C. Truffle changes the whole space around language interpreters so radically that it feels like it should definitely be worth a mention in any future take on the topic.
With Truffle you start with a Java based tree walking interpreter (could use Kotlin too for less boilerplate), so the very easiest stuff. Then you annotate it in some places, add a dependency on Truffle and ... that's it. Now you have a JIT compiler for your interpreted language. The next step is to start refining the use of the annotations and to write specializations in order to accelerate your JIT by incorporating standard techniques like polymorphic inline caches.
Finally you can compile your new interpreter+JIT engine down to a Graal native image (single standalone native binary), thus ensuring it can start as fast as an interpreter written in C and can warm up as fast as V8. The binary can also be used as a shared library.
Given that this tech exists now, people who choose to write their interpreter in Java will have a massive edge in performance over people walking the traditional path. It's still relatively new technology but it's hard to see how it doesn't change interpreter design forever.
I sympathize with your criticisms about java because the language is... not my favorite. It would be helpful here to look at its choice as a result of Nystrom solving the intersection of multiple optimization problems:
- Manual Memory Management Is Hard. Interpreters are complex pieces of software, you don't need another rabbit hole to dive into while you're learning your first parser. You don't need to agonize over where to put the contents of the file buffer you're parsing before writing your first lexing switch. People spend years with C and C++ and still get MMM wrong. The book is supposed to be fun.
- Data Structures Are Hard. This doesn't apply to C++ or really any modern language, but since you wanted it done in C the first time, that would entail the obligatory "Implement your own universe from scratch" exercise C is infamous for. I don't mind, I always like implementing my own universes (although I despise C even more than Java, it can't be over-emphasized how badly engineered that language is). But again, Pedagogy says that you should introduce the minimum possible surface area while approaching a new topic, ideally a single topic at a time.
- Interpreters Should Be Fast, so overly dynamic languages like python and javascript are out.
- A teaching language should be popular and familiar. The obvious benefit is accessibility to as many learners as possible, but a less obvious one is the availability of tools and cross platform support.
Out of the vast array of available programming languages and their toolchains, the combination of GC, powerful standard library and reasonable performance excludes a whole lot. The popularity requirement basically only leaves Java, C# and Golang standing.
That's a really good summary. I didn't pick C# in part because it feels more tied to Microsoft and Windows than I wanted the book's language to be. Java (to me at least) feels fairly platform and corporation independent.
If you would have prefered I pick Go, you'll definitely like Thorsten Ball's two books.
Choosing a language for books is really hard these days. There are so many choose from and most are quite large and complex, so it's hard to find a single language that is familiar to a large enough segment of the audience.
Eh, you don't have to use Java for the first part. I didn't, and I've seen many other people in discussions of the book say they didn't either. It's readable enough, and the explanations are clear enough, that you can follow along in any other memory-managed language that you're comfortable with.
You may want to take a look at the various Sherlock Holmes games on steam right now. There is a new one that just came out, and from looking thru them it seems like they try to make such gameplay work. Worth a shot!
I adore the first few hours of the original Metroid Prime where you wander an alien planet discovering new things for the first time: new plants, new animals, strange Chozo artifacts. Some of them want to kill you; most are just going about their business. It's magical.
Then the Space Pirates show up and the entire tone changes and the magic is gone.
Ok I see. I thought it was standard. I did not create this. These are shortened links from amazon. I will replace them anyway and use the long link. I want the ad blockers to work on these.
Also I will make extra clear the links go to amazon.
I still very much consider myself junior but someone I know with less experience than me just recently got a job with "senior" in the title. I have seen senior job postings that say something like "3+ years of experience."
I absolutely do not consider myself senior and I don't think I will for at least seven more years.
But yes, the tones are the hard part. The grammar is straight forward and similar to English, and characters are (almost always) pronounced only one way.