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Bloody Omaha
January 15, 2008 7:05 AM Subscribe

How many men does it take it recreate the massive 1944 allied assault on Omaha Beach? Three. [YouTube]

I don't know much about this clip except that the designers were working for a BBC program called Timewatch. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

posted by LarryC (47 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite

I think I see Coleman Francis.
posted by Cyrano at 7:09 AM on January 15, 2008 [1 favorite]

Crap. I was just coming here to post this!

Great film work!
posted by blaneyphoto at 7:15 AM on January 15, 2008

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Did we MeFi the link?
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:18 AM on January 15, 2008

No, we fried the YouTube. Time to call the Tube Repairman and get the pipes cleaned.
posted by CynicalKnight at 7:22 AM on January 15, 2008

Wow. MeFi broke YouTube.

Must be hosted at DreamHost!
posted by cdmwebs at 7:25 AM on January 15, 2008

The whole of Youtube is down it seems.

In the meantime:

> behind the scenes.

> Production blog.
posted by Happy Dave at 7:30 AM on January 15, 2008

Aaand, it's back.
posted by Happy Dave at 7:42 AM on January 15, 2008

Having just watched it - that's incredible.
posted by Happy Dave at 7:46 AM on January 15, 2008

DU writes "Big media companies are over. We already knew that it only takes a single person to create a gripping story, but now it only takes 3 to make a big screen spectacle. So what's the added value of Warner Bros if a few friends can show them up for 1/1e6th the cost?"

Hmmmm ... Have you ever seen Kurosawa's Ran? By the time the film was made, he could have done the battles mostly with effects and with fewer people, but he chose to do it as real as possible on the set. The set design and art direction were painstakingly done, but you can tell when you watch it. I think there will always be a place for people like Kurosawa to take great care in crafting all the small elements that make up a film in front of the camera's lens, not in the editing room.
posted by krinklyfig at 7:50 AM on January 15, 2008

Sure. But can they do the Pelennor Fields? In candy?
posted by The Bellman at 7:51 AM on January 15, 2008

Big media companies are over .. now it only takes 3 to make a big screen spectacle

The real big screen spectacles with 1000s of extras will be like old castles, monuments too expensive to build that people lust over with cheap imitation. Then again, this scene was shot on location and most of the big spectacles were made in studio lots. The movie Gandhi (1982) was the pinnacle when over 300,000 extras used on location, the largest number of extras ever used in a film.
posted by stbalbach at 7:52 AM on January 15, 2008

Whichever, whatever...that little clip was amazing.
posted by notsnot at 7:56 AM on January 15, 2008

I have not seen Ran, but I agree that there will always be a place for painstaking. That's a little different than claiming there will always be work for thousands of protoplasmic extras, though.

When papyrus was invented, people probably said there'd "always be a place for quality clay tablets" too. Quality, yes. Clay tablets, no.
posted by DU at 7:58 AM on January 15, 2008

There are Bedouin in the Wadi Rum who participated in the filming of Lawrence of Arabia and who to this day believe that they met Lawrence and fought in his battles. Or so the story goes.
posted by YouRebelScum at 7:58 AM on January 15, 2008 [2 favorites]

Wow, this was just incredible. Great post!
posted by OmieWise at 8:17 AM on January 15, 2008

Very cool find, LarryC.

Big media companies are over.

That's why Ratatouille should win the Oscar for Best Picture: not only because it is a nearly perfectly made movie but because its story is perfectly tuned to our times: "Anyone can cook". Anyone can film. Anyone can* make pictures (photography, music, any art) and show them to a worldwide audience.

*It doesn't mean that everyone should, just that most obstacles are being removed for anyone who wants to create anything and show it. Do we live in a Theodore Sturgeon's story or in a Philip Jose Farmer's one?
posted by bru at 8:40 AM on January 15, 2008

DU writes " I have not seen Ran, but I agree that there will always be a place for painstaking. That's a little different than claiming there will always be work for thousands of protoplasmic extras, though.

"When papyrus was invented, people probably said there'd 'always be a place for quality clay tablets' too. Quality, yes. Clay tablets, no."

That's really not the same thing, though. The medium isn't what's at question. The technique is. Calligraphy is still practiced and paid for, even though you can print neatly, more consistently and cheaper with a laser printer and illustration program. It's still not the same.
posted by krinklyfig at 8:41 AM on January 15, 2008

My friends and I recreated Omaha Beach using plastic green army guys. That was before YouTube.
posted by goatdog at 8:42 AM on January 15, 2008 [2 favorites]

Very nice. I also feel that big media companies are doomed.
posted by Mr_Zero at 8:47 AM on January 15, 2008

Good stuff. Thanks, LarryC.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:01 AM on January 15, 2008

"Big media companies are over"

I suppose they said the same some 15 years ago, when Lucas shot over 60 hours of feature quality stuff, on location all over the world, for a relatively low budget:

"Similarly, Western provided a full regiment of soldiers out of a mere handful shot on location by digitally arranging and compositing multiple camera passes to effectively 'clone' the same small group and position them side by side. For the pilot episode, there was a very dramatic scene where Young Indy is thrown off his horse and surrounded by forty horsemen from Pancho Villa’s gang. In reality what was shot was twelve horsemen surrounding actor Sean Patrick Flanery. Because of the high cost of renting horses and hiring extras, what Lucasfilm did was duplicate the Mexican bandits so that it looked like there were forty men surrounding Indy instead of the twelve actors that were actually there."
posted by effbot at 9:11 AM on January 15, 2008

Very cool. Thanks.
posted by rtha at 9:15 AM on January 15, 2008

Itis interesting, this age of less and less people required to do/make things. Was listening on the radio the other day and they mentioned Skype, Youtube, Myspace, Craigslist and other internet related companies that are providing services (telephone, video media distribution, etc) that the big companies do. And how much fewer people these internet companies employ. I think each of those companies (in some cases, before they where bought out) employ less then 100 people, whereas the traditional companies ran into the thousands and tens of thousands. We are hurtling towards a predominate 1st world service economy.
posted by edgeways at 9:26 AM on January 15, 2008

Very cool post.
posted by justkevin at 9:27 AM on January 15, 2008

That's why Ratatouille should win the Oscar for Best Picture: not only because it is a nearly perfectly made movie but because its story is perfectly tuned to our times: "Anyone can cook". Anyone can film. Anyone can* make pictures (photography, music, any art) and show them to a worldwide audience.

Yes, they can. It's interesting that you'd use Ratatouille to underscore the point, though, because Ratatouille is an example of the kind of great filmmaking that really does require an army of very talented artists and craftspeople to execute. (That said army is behind the scenes instead of in front of the camera is the main difference.)

I agree that Ratatouille is the best film of the year, but it cost $150,000,000. That kind of quality comes with a price. No matter how talented Brad Bird is (and he is prodigiously talented), he wouldn't get the same results if he only had, say, a third of those resources at his disposal.

Even the second-best movie of the year, There Will Be Blood, cost a not-inconsiderable $25 million to get on film. The financial barriers to working at that level of sheer craft remain enormous.

Once, the Irish musical-romance that really was made on a shoestring ($150,000, according to IMDb, although I'm betting it cost quite a bit more than that by the time Fox Searchlight finished prepping it for release), is a very good movie, too — but it looks a little bit like ass. You can argue that's appropriate for the semi-documentary approach, but I really wish the filmmakers had been able to spend an extra few hundred thousand dollars or so on somewhat higher production values. (Then again, it probably looks much better on DVD, where most people will discover it, than it did in theaters.)
posted by Joey Bagels at 9:27 AM on January 15, 2008

edgeways writes "Was listening on the radio the other day and they mentioned Skype, Youtube, Myspace, Craigslist and other internet related companies that are providing services (telephone, video media distribution, etc) that the big companies do. And how much fewer people these internet companies employ."

Google owns YouTube. Fox owns Myspace. eBay owns Skype. Craigslist ... well, there is something different there. Craig never sold.

Most of these companies started out small. They don't need that many people to run day-to-day operations, but they aren't truly small anymore.
posted by krinklyfig at 9:36 AM on January 15, 2008

There are Bedouin in the Wadi Rum who participated in the filming of Lawrence of Arabia and who to this day believe that they met Lawrence and fought in his battles. Or so the story goes.

It's a cute story, but I have my doubts. I saw no sign of this when I visited Wadi Rum several years ago. They were well aware that it was a movie. The local guides could take you to both movie locations and historical locations, but they didn't seem to conflate the two. The older men would tell you that their fathers or grandfathers had known Lawrence, but that was about the extent of it.

Back in Aquaba, I also met the man who had acted as Omar Sharif's stunt double. He ran a small antique shop, and had a framed picture on the wall of himself and Omar, looking like twins, mounted on their horses in the desert.

/derail
posted by zueod at 9:40 AM on January 15, 2008 [2 favorites]

This sort of thing can be made because big media corporations poured huge amounts of money into films for decades and spurred this technology to come about that much faster. Smaller folks with less money and a lot of talent/hard work can now do it because of the big guys. And I wouldn't say you're necessarily wrong to suggest big media is doomed. But wouldn't that mean a serious slowdown in these sort of technological advances is coming?

Anyway, nice post. Thanks.
posted by ghiacursed at 9:52 AM on January 15, 2008

But wouldn't that mean a serious slowdown in these sort of technological advances is coming?

Maybe, although the industry that pays for a technology isn't always the one that benefits most from it. For instance, amateur filmmaking has been mostly spurred by computing advances and digital video cameras. The first is entirely undriven by Hollywood while the latter has only been so recently.
posted by DU at 9:57 AM on January 15, 2008

I was an extra in The Mighty Ducks and to this day am convinced that I helped cheer them on to victory over Hawks.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:04 AM on January 15, 2008 [7 favorites]

I saw this last week and it only reaffirms something I'm really coming to believe: Big media companies are over. We already knew that it only takes a single person to create a gripping story, but now it only takes 3 to make a big screen spectacle. So what's the added value of Warner Bros if a few friends can show them up for 1/1e6th the cost?

That's cute. Where do you imagine these gents worked to develop their chops enough to be able to do this in the first place?

The other thing is that you have to remember that people don't want their movies to always be something that they could make in their backyard if they only knew how. They want to see something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make because that figure impresses them. So long as there are people who will be impressed enough by a huge budget to see a crappy film then there will always be companies willing to spend an astronomical amount of money to make a crappy film that will double their investment in a week.
posted by shmegegge at 10:13 AM on January 15, 2008

They want to see something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make because that figure impresses them. So long as there are people who will be impressed enough by a huge budget to see a crappy film then there will always be companies willing to spend an astronomical amount of money to make a crappy film that will double their investment in a week.

I know people choose to see movies because they're impressed by the spectacle that money buys, but I'm not sure I believe in these alleged people who decide to see a movie just because they heard it cost a lot.

"Should we see Transformers or Spiderman 3 this weekend?"
"Dude! They spend $80 million more on Transformers! We're totally seeing that one!"
posted by straight at 10:47 AM on January 15, 2008

William Gibson on the demise of big studios, circa 1999:

The Garage Kubrick.

The Garage Kubrick hates everything that Sundance, let alone Hollywood, puts people through, and he won't have Slamdance or Slumdance either, or any of the rest of it.

The Garage Kubrick is a stone auteur, an adolescent near-future Orson Welles, plugged into some unthinkable (but affordable) node of consumer tech in his parents' garage. The Garage Kubrick is single-handedly making a feature in there, some sort of apparently live-action epic that may or may not involve motion capture. That may or may not involve human actors, but which will seem to.

The Garage Kubrick is a control freak to an extent impossible any further back along the technological timeline. He is making, literally, a one-man movie; he is his film's author to the degree that I had always assumed any auteur would want to be.

And he will not, consequently, come out of the garage.

posted by mecran01 at 11:20 AM on January 15, 2008 [1 favorite]

While this is very cool, I don't think I'd be calling it a sign of the apocalypse for traditional media companies. If this technique had been used in Saving Private Ryan, I think the film would have lost a lot of impact, because despite being very impressive for what it is (a very low budget take on something that would otherwise be very expensive), the low budget aspect still shows in the final work. The green screen work (especially the explosions) simply don't look quite "right".

Don't get me wrong; this is certainly impressive, and completely appropriate for the work that it was created for. However, it has a ways to go before it can really match big budget productions.
posted by tocts at 11:26 AM on January 15, 2008

I know people choose to see movies because they're impressed by the spectacle that money buys, but I'm not sure I believe in these alleged people who decide to see a movie just because they heard it cost a lot.

Titanic.
posted by shmegegge at 12:08 PM on January 15, 2008

When papyrus was invented, people probably said there'd "always be a place for quality clay tablets" too.

I know some people working for the NSA on long term data storage using, you guessed it, clay tablets. It's the only medium known to be readable after 10,000 years.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:10 PM on January 15, 2008

That looked like a lot of fun to make.
posted by Corduroy at 1:12 PM on January 15, 2008

Scientists prove that expensive wine tastes better.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:49 PM on January 15, 2008

I think I see Coleman Francis.

That's Kevin Bacon
posted by mmrtnt at 2:17 PM on January 15, 2008

The other thing is that you have to remember that people don't want their movies to always be something that they could make in their backyard if they only knew how. They want to see something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make because that figure impresses them.

I think you're right, but it's more about the backyard than the bucks. The rise of television was why Hollywood movies went widescreen (and then the rise of VCRs was why widescreen was used like it was a narrow screen). For a long time you could see 70mm prints of major films in certain theaters. There is a tidy little business in showing regular movies on IMAX screens. (Ironically, sound technology continued to evolve while high-quality visual 70mm prints were struck for a number of years for major films, they eventually declined -- because 35mm caught up with the sound quality. I guess high-def video filming is now understood to be taking over this segment.)

Also, one of the hallmarks of the 007 films has always been their stunts. When they went heavily CGI in Tomorrow Never Dies and Die Another Day, fans protested. With Casino Royale, Daniel Craig did much of his own stunt work, and one of the better sequences -- the construction site -- involved free running done by none other than the inventor of the sport. (See also Jackie Chan.) Oh, and the Aston-Martin that rolled over was a very real stunt that set a world record of nine 360-degree rolls. I don't think CGI will ever entirely replace more visceral recreation.
posted by dhartung at 3:54 PM on January 15, 2008

The green screen work (especially the explosions) simply don't look quite "right".

Right on. This is my biggest complaint about CGI, it's simply not realistic yet. They still digitally composite scenes where the background and foreground are both in focus, and are both as luminous. You can also see in the YouTube video another effect; the post-production work is much more "washed out" and lacks the detail of the original footage.

The great problem is that THIS DOESN'T MATTER for the vast majority of movie and TV viewers; people still pay for, and are entertained by, a technically inferior product. It's the same aesthetic that allows for the popularity of the MP3 music format.

Because it doesn't matter, and it's cheaper, Hollywood will never go back to human labor based special effects. While I'm sure CGI will get better, there is really no economic incentive to do so, and I expect "special effects" will by and large suck for the rest of my life, at least.

Though I never saw the latest "Die Hard" installment, I could tell it sucked purulent donkey balls just based on the TV previews. The "chase" scenes were absolutely asinine, and were of course were totally CGI. Compare that to the chase scene in the 1985 masterpiece To Live and Die in LA. While that had at least one continuity error ( chase car hits box of white powder then miraculously cleans itself) and excessive dolly yaw, it remains one of the greatest chase scenes in film history. All without the taint of CGI...
posted by Tube at 4:23 PM on January 15, 2008

I don't think CGI will ever entirely replace more visceral recreation.

Never say never. Again.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:02 PM on January 15, 2008

"Though I never saw the latest "Die Hard" installment, I could tell it sucked purulent donkey balls just based on the TV previews. The "chase" scenes were absolutely asinine, and were of course were totally CGI."

Hmm. I thought one of the nice things with Die Hard 4 was that they used the Bourne/Casino Royale approach, and did tons of stuff *without* CGI (including throwing cars and stuntmen around and blowing up helicopters), using computers mainly for compositing, cleanup, and additional props.

(there's an enormous amount of CGI work in it, of course, but not necessarily where you think it is).
posted by effbot at 12:26 AM on January 16, 2008

Damn stupid YouTube.

(the thing that made Die Hard 1 superior to its other permutations was its story

content over form)
posted by hadjiboy at 1:11 AM on January 16, 2008

Amazing!
posted by hadjiboy at 1:59 AM on January 16, 2008

zueod - it is a cute story. My old boss worked there for eight years and swears its the case. But yeah, hearsay, hence "so the story goes".
posted by YouRebelScum at 4:45 AM on January 16, 2008

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Bloody Omaha January 15, 2008 7:05 AM Subscribe

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January 15, 2008 7:05 AM Subscribe