Mad God: What happens when the best practical VFX artist, ever, writes a film? | Hacker News Reader

Mad God: What happens when the best practical VFX artist, ever, writes a film?

arstechnica.com

112 pointsTomte33 comments

Those who enjoyed this might also enjoy Takahide Hori's JUNK HEAD [0], which was released in Japan earlier this year. In a similar vein, it's a ton of practical effects and stop-motion animation set in a post-apocalyptic underground world full of weird entities. Oddly enough, I discovered it via YouTube Kids[1], and while I like the art, I can't say that it's kid appropriate, which speaks to how weird YouTube Kids (still) is[2] if you leave it auto-playing unattended.

[0] https://youtu.be/O2ygfn-WqF8

[1] https://youtu.be/T2tFGeLvPW4

[2] https://www.theverge.com/culture/2017/11/21/16685874/kids-yo...

Nice to know there's still the weird and punk out there.

I kinda miss mainstream culture being exploratory enough to permit things like The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, MTV's Liquid Television, or Pipkins [0] (seriously, what was it with 70s and 80s British puppetry?!).

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QuaLAGgeTx8

Woah, do you know if it’s going to come out full length with English sub? I’ve been trying to find news on Junk Head but there doesn’t seem to be much that’s in English.

From the brief trailer, it looks a lot like the surreal and discomforting stop motion animation that the band Tool used for many of their videos.

eg. Sober https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nspxAG12Cpc

Ænema https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CehYA3omb5o

Which were heavily influenced by the Brothers Quay.

Of which, the Street of Crocodiles and the Epic of Gilgamesh haunt me to this day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNOfsJz4TjA

And, they were of course inspired by Svankmajer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-gGpWpra-g

The creepy / grimey vibe reminds me of the Operator series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xavcTEwk3VQ / https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1152912515/operator

Just a heads up though - it's very avant-garde.

Due to it's prominent display at Edinburgh airport the phrase "Mad God" will always make me think of this poem:

But Edinburgh is a mad god's dream

Fitful and dark,

Unseizable in Leith

And wildered by the Forth,

But irresistibly at last

Cleaving to sombre heights

Of passionate imagining

Till stonily,

From soaring battlements,

Earth eyes Eternity.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978): "Edinburgh"

I can't really think of Scottish poetry these days without remembering William McGonagall. Here's his incomparable "The Tay Bridge Disaster": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tay_Bridge_Disaster

Pure classic.

My guess: you get a series of really astounding effects work, with a tissue-thin plot to function as an excuse for parading them before you that’s slightly more coherent than “this is my effects reel”.

Which seems pretty much what this article confirms this film is.

I noticed that and once the effects lose their novelty factor the movie ages quite poorly. I also noticed older movies which aged pretty well and guess what.. the cast is quite varied with input from different artists. A good director knows how to leverage that and ‘marinate’ it into a good film.

How would you rate the stop-frame Alice movie from the 80s? Did it age well?

That isn't necessarily a negative

Oh definitely, I mean I enjoyed "The Wizard Of Speed And Time" a lot when I finally saw it even though its plot was basically "an excuse for Mike Jittlov to do a bunch of effects shots".

The images remind me a bit of Neil Gaiman's MirrorMask[0], which was actually fairly advanced, when it was made.

Odd movie. I liked it a lot. YMMV.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366780/

Dave McKean directed that, didn’t he?

I believe so.

This reminds me of the epic trailer for the (apparently mediocre) game Warpath, which should totally have been a movie:

https://youtu.be/eqeSGjCKV68

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad?

Or Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running) As a kid I loved that film, as an adult, not so much.

omg Ars Technica is still around! that takes me back..

Flip the question around and you either see how ridiculous the question is, or how disdainful it is of the art of writing (or both): “What happens when the best writer, ever, does VFX for a film?”.

Also by what measure is this person “the best practical VFX artist, ever”? Is there some global competition with leaderboards going back decades where this person is ranked objectively as number one?

This kind of nonsense making it to the front page makes it really hard to enjoy HN.

> “What happens when the best writer, ever, does VFX for a film?”

My guess would be that somebody who was very good at writing, and also took an interest in visual (or in this case practical) effects, would probably be at least fairly good at it.

Lots of film people are good at more than one thing. I'm not sure what you're getting at with this question.

“What happens when the best writer, ever, does VFX for a film?”

You get Pixar?

>By now, anyone who would agree to the label of "film fan" knows the legendary Phil Tippett. Perhaps the greatest visual effects artist of the last 50 years (if not ever), Tippett brought to life the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the creatures of Star Wars while also enriching many, many stellar visual feasts like RoboCop, Willow, and Starship Troopers.

As a European into classic and arthouse cinema, from the resume he rather sounds like someone we'd call a "film fan" would not know, if not actively avoid the movies he was involved.

No, you watch those movies specifically for the miniature work. Similarly, terrible shonen anime with sakuga cuts by relevant animators.

I don't really think this kind of pretentious gatekeeping is helpful or welcoming. The works of both Spielberg and Tarkovsky are worth watching.

I'd go so far as to state that a true film "fan" appreciates both high-brow and popular cinema. There's no such thing as a "guilty" pleasure if you truly enjoy something.

>I don't really think this kind of pretentious gatekeeping is helpful or welcoming.

No, but it's culture-building. "Everything goes" seldom builds any great appreciation, it just makes everything a big interchangeable blob.

>The works of both Spielberg and Tarkovsky are worth watching.

Well, that's not some natural law. It's just an expression of a specific cultural norm.

RoboCop and Starship Troopers are both far headier movies than what a lot of arthouse snobs would consider high art. And they actually made money!

You can deliver a quality film with a substantive plot while still making an action movie for the masses.

I'm just as into film as you are, if not possibly more so, but please just fuck off with your snobbish anti-Hollywood nonsense. Most of Europe's actors, directors, & what-have-you all work in Hollywood from time to time to eat.

Shit, while we're on the topic of Paul Verhoeven, the guy made the most successful (most seen) film in the history of Dutch cinema (1973's Turkish Delight) and put Rutger Hauer on the map with it. And did it again later with The Fourth Man (loosely remade later as Basic Instinct) which was a global hit and the most financially successful film made in the Netherlands.

Don't forget the also excellent "Black Book".

And I'd argue anyone who doesn't know most of those movies are not much of a film fan.

It just says a lot about your “taste”. You may not like the lack of character building in Jurassic Park but you can’t deny the amount of work that went into practical effects in order to make that movie (same with Every single Harry Potter movie by the way).

Same thing with Starship Troopers which by itself is also quite a funny piece of political satire apart from creative use of gore and trashy characters.

What is arthouse for you? A man and a woman speaking french and driving into the sunset?

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