They need to make a submarine movie that doesn't do exterior shots. Really dial in the cramped yet isolated horror of the unknown world you can only interact with through imperfect tools
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Is this thread about Das Boot while never mentioning it by name?
aug 25, 2025, 6:25 pm • 1 0 • view
it's "I finally watched Hunt for Red October and am having big loud feelings about submarines and filmmaking" mostly, i should probably also watch that now
aug 25, 2025, 6:28 pm • 5 0 • view
That movie really holds up.
aug 25, 2025, 6:29 pm • 3 0 • view
Good sound design is key here. Creaks and groans and pings and hisses in full surround.
aug 25, 2025, 6:23 pm • 2 0 • view
The 1mc going off telling crew to brace and calling certain people to station but hurried and without specifics on the situation (suggesting that they are still trying to get it under control)
aug 25, 2025, 6:27 pm • 1 0 • view
GOD I COULD WRITE A WHOLE THING ABOUT THE EFFECTIVE SOUND DESIGN IN _HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER_ we were watching it on an immensely shitty little hotel television and it was STILL absolutely spectacular
aug 25, 2025, 6:25 pm • 2 0 • view
yES although all the exterior shots in Hunt for Red October, which I finally watched in [looks at calendar] 2025 a few days ago, were all EXTREMELY good and terrifying and claustrophobic, I think this is a case of practical effects just being overwhelmingly Better
aug 25, 2025, 6:03 pm • 42 1 • view
Oh, I definitely don't think these are bad as shots. There is just something uncaptured about the fact that even the half dozen people who DO see instrumentation, have at best a mental picture of what's outside. And if you need to use that picture to make choices that could get everyone killed
aug 25, 2025, 6:14 pm • 3 0 • view
yeah!! yeah that's fundamentally a huge part of what's compelling to me about the narrative.
aug 25, 2025, 6:17 pm • 3 0 • view
Exactly, and I want to see someone go all in on the moment when "you are wrong" about what's going on outside but it doesn't cut out to show us the audience. Instead we're stuck inside as tensions raise and the stakes mount
aug 25, 2025, 6:20 pm • 2 0 • view
I think that everything from the early 90s looks more real than anything before or after in SFX I know this is probably just "because I grew up with it" but, it's what I stand by
aug 25, 2025, 6:06 pm • 29 2 • view
Look how cool the xenonorph looked in 1979. ♥️
aug 25, 2025, 6:07 pm • 4 1 • view
I’m watching the new Alien Earth tv show and it’s amazing how much juice that show gets just from having that amazing alien design
aug 25, 2025, 7:01 pm • 2 0 • view
HRG was truly goated
aug 25, 2025, 7:02 pm • 2 0 • view
Practical effects are very good, and there’s a reason movies are re-incorporating them.
aug 25, 2025, 6:07 pm • 15 2 • view
youtu.be/0fM5QX8TlYs?...
aug 25, 2025, 6:12 pm • 7 2 • view
no i think this is Objectively Correct in a way that matters, there's a level of realism that you *can achieve via tactical suspension of disbelief with skilled practical effects* that if you try to achieve via CGI you just fall not into the uncanny valley with but off an uncanny cliff into an abyss
aug 25, 2025, 6:08 pm • 27 1 • view
this kinda floats into one my og crank opinions, even back in high school, that a marionette in the hands of a skilled performer can approach verisimilitude far more than a computer approximation, because human feelings and rhythms are really hard to mimic through CAD art.
aug 25, 2025, 6:14 pm • 8 0 • view
but also my non-crank opinion that Jim Henson and Frank Oz were/are gods of an art form that we definitely took for granted as kids, and that stuff like the TMNT movies were truly awe-inspiring works of puppetry
aug 25, 2025, 6:16 pm • 12 2 • view
yeah the old puppets from movies like Neverending Story or the old Star Wars look so much more convincing to me than CGI monsters do, no matter how much effort they put into "look, the fur is realistic now!" I can't be sure it's not just childhood nostalgia, but it sure feels like it
aug 25, 2025, 6:17 pm • 10 1 • view
at least when it comes to the folk entertainment arts (bands, circuses, puppets, theater, etc) I think a lot of our world tends to imagine that the old forms were mediocre or drab compared to modern electric media (film, recorded music etc). I'm p certain old artists had skills that would boggle.
aug 25, 2025, 6:20 pm • 9 1 • view
even something like "shadow puppets" sounds pathetic or uncompelling in our age, but I can assure all of us that a Balinese shadow drama in the 15th century didn't hit much different than a great television drama now.
aug 25, 2025, 6:21 pm • 8 1 • view
i have experienced skilled Balinese shadow theatre *in the 21st century* and i am thrilled to report that it still actually rules ass, yeah
aug 25, 2025, 6:23 pm • 11 1 • view
but i can only imagine how that shit would have hit in its original social and technological context
aug 25, 2025, 6:23 pm • 7 1 • view
They're also not exactly trying to convince you that it's a real, like, THING. you know you're watching a movie but it's real in the context of the experience.
aug 25, 2025, 6:18 pm • 5 1 • view
conveying "a fake thing that is Real" is wildly different from conveying "a real thing"
aug 25, 2025, 6:20 pm • 10 3 • view
and we're getting really, really good at the latter, but also there's a reason that human mocap and *puppet* mocap is such a big deal - we've had either 'centuries' or 'our entire lives as a species' to get good at it, depending, not, like, a few decades
aug 25, 2025, 6:18 pm • 7 1 • view
This is almost always the case, but for some reason even though we've had 20+ years of CGI advancement, Bill Nighy in the Pirates movies still looks *amazing*. Other CG from those movies you can see the seams, but Davy Jones just looks like an octopus guy.
aug 25, 2025, 6:12 pm • 22 1 • view
there's some early CGI that looks frankly incredibly good but i think people have chased a desire to be brighter and clearer and Show More, Not Less, And At A Higher Framerate in ways that have been really detrimental; earlier CGI you had to -hide- the seams in a way that felt movielike
aug 25, 2025, 6:13 pm • 23 1 • view
now the CGI is so good that you do not have to hide the seams, you can in fact shine a bright spotlight ON where the seams should be and there are no visible seams there, and it's gee-whiz COOL that you can do that and I frankly enjoy it as spectacle, but it's often bad *filmmaking*
aug 25, 2025, 6:14 pm • 8 1 • view
Part of this is just, like, the death of shot composition, I think. There's a similar effect in animation, where older less fluid stuff often feels more dynamic simply because it was storyboarded better and with a greater sense of motion.
aug 26, 2025, 11:35 pm • 4 0 • view
I kind of suspect that's a huge part of it, is that early CGI was likely handled with something along the lines of "film the rendering on physical film and smudge the lens some" or whatever, and so you get things that look more genuine than when the animators have full confidence in it
aug 25, 2025, 6:15 pm • 14 1 • view
That was a really cool era for special effects, when there were so many practical effects crews still involved and collaborating with the new computer guys. When it worked it was amazing, when it missed it was terrible.
aug 25, 2025, 6:26 pm • 16 2 • view
One of the coolest was how they used computers on Star Trek First Contact to change how they shot spaceships. They locked miniatures in place and put the camera on computer controlled robot arms, and swooped the camera past the ships over and over, doing multiple exposures on the same film.
aug 25, 2025, 6:32 pm • 15 2 • view
And they would change the lighting and effects on the ship, so the way the engine glowed and the way light reflected on the miniatures looked nothing like a little model
aug 25, 2025, 6:34 pm • 9 0 • view
I can’t find the behind the scenes video of them filming the ships, but I found this behind the scenes of the borg queen using the same computer controlled camera rig, and it turns out for this shot they used a fake head and a real actor’s body, the exact opposite of what I would have imagined.
aug 25, 2025, 8:00 pm • 5 0 • view
So that's what's called Motion Controlled Photography & it's actually much older than ST:FC. They were doing it as far back as the 60s for movies like 2001, but it really came into it's own with Star Wars.
aug 25, 2025, 10:42 pm • 4 1 • view
I think first contact was using some cutting edge software to design those shots, though. The way they were taking separate shots of each miniature separately, with camera and lighting moves that worked together when they composited it all together to make sense in 3D space
aug 25, 2025, 10:55 pm • 5 0 • view
George Lucas' most valuable contribution to film as a medium is (almost certainly) special effects. ILM is still doing cutting-edge work to this day: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industr...
aug 26, 2025, 12:03 am • 8 1 • view
They did make some improvements with it in First Contact, by among other things, doing CGI touch-up passes after filming the miniatures.
aug 25, 2025, 10:43 pm • 5 0 • view
You still get that stuff, though mostly on lower budget stuff. The high budget movies tend to go "yeah we'll just make the scene in CG", where low budget stuff uses a bare minimum. Upgrade ends up looking far better than Venom
aug 25, 2025, 6:34 pm • 5 1 • view
I really should rewatch Upgrade. I remember it as an absolutely awesome action movie, and We Have Tom Hardy At Home is a really fun actor.
aug 25, 2025, 6:35 pm • 8 1 • view
yeah that makes sense. You do a lot of things that are not intended to be comprehensive, but to hint at what's going on
aug 25, 2025, 6:15 pm • 4 0 • view
with more CGI, it gets more removed from the director's immediate scene work and there's more pressure to just put in everything.
aug 25, 2025, 6:16 pm • 5 0 • view
There is something to just "this looks like how I know movies look" even more than "this looks like real"
aug 25, 2025, 6:07 pm • 8 2 • view
one of the things that gets me about HUNT is that the red route one scene is basically just a stage play in a single room, plus a little bit of music and sound effects and it is THE TENSEST FUCKING THING
aug 25, 2025, 6:19 pm • 13 1 • view
GOD YES i spent the entire time just like. curled up against my partner and Vibrating Nervously it was great haha
aug 25, 2025, 6:21 pm • 8 1 • view
he was like "i have watched this movie 74759845856 times why is it giving me the jibblies /this time/" and i was like "because you are watching it with someone for whom one of their principal joys in life is marking out super hard on scary shit, hi, hello, you wanted this"
aug 25, 2025, 6:22 pm • 9 1 • view
<3
aug 25, 2025, 6:22 pm • 1 0 • view
I'm glad ya'll had a good time
aug 25, 2025, 6:23 pm • 1 0 • view
you don't need a big cgi spectacle to make people start gripping the edge of their seats!
aug 25, 2025, 6:19 pm • 9 1 • view
you can get a lot of tension in stage plays anyway!
aug 25, 2025, 6:20 pm • 3 0 • view
I've routinely noted that Phonebooth would make an excellent stage drama with fairly minimal effects (a few squibs and lighting honestly).
aug 25, 2025, 6:42 pm • 3 0 • view
Odd to me that the two movies I can think of like this are Buried (a coffin) and Lebanon (a tank). Can't think of it being done in a spaceship or a submarine.
aug 25, 2025, 6:06 pm • 5 0 • view
Ill check out Lebanon. That's another scary situation where at most two people inside see anything and are probably looking out of tiny windows
aug 25, 2025, 6:15 pm • 4 0 • view