Welcome to the Desert of the Real

January 8, 2010 8:54 PM

The Third & The Seventh (a gorgeous, entirely 3D short film)

(previously)

posted by empath (32 comments total)

(woops, i meant to say 'CGI', not '3D')
posted by empath at 8:55 PM on January 8, 2010

Hold on let me get my 3D glasses.

. . .

Ok I'm ready.


(woops, i meant to say 'CGI', not '3D')

Oh for fuck sake.
posted by nola at 9:07 PM on January 8, 2010

I tried to watch this but my pc is stupid and it hates vimeo so I don't get to see cool stuff.
posted by nola at 9:09 PM on January 8, 2010

OMG. srsly, OMG
posted by bam at 9:19 PM on January 8, 2010

Yeah, I just saw this on Digg.
I was actually not that impressed. While the creator is obviously very, very good at modeling and texturing, the film seemed overly set on using a short depth of field with a wobbly focus, which gets old after a while. As well, I've seen way too much 'surreal' stuff done with 3DS MAX by now and it's gotten rather trite.
posted by dunkadunc at 9:36 PM on January 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

I just saw this, and it suddenly dawned on me that one day, almost all movies will be completely CG. This is truly amazing. Frankly I thought this video was all BS until I saw the compositing video. Wow.
posted by reformedjerk at 9:36 PM on January 8, 2010

I didn't pay attn to the text of the FPP, I just dove in to the link, and was all, "Wow, those are some really nice rack focus shots of some cool vintage cameras, in some neato spaces," and because I'm in a noisy place and can't hear the music, I zoned out thinking about some camera-rigging ideas that floated into my head, and stopped halfway through, figuring I'll watch it through when I get home.

Then I came here to the comments, and I think, "What? It's..what?" and I went back to Vimeo and watched the composite reel, and my mind hurts a little now.

Or what reformedjerk said.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 9:41 PM on January 8, 2010

Thought, not think. Dammit, I combed that for tense agreement and still missed it.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 9:43 PM on January 8, 2010

I just saw this, and it suddenly dawned on me that one day, almost all movies will be completely CG. This is truly amazing. Frankly I thought this video was all BS until I saw the compositing video. Wow.

I find it somewhat Ironic that you would say "This film is B.S" to mean

"Yeah right, I don't believe this is CG this guy went out and found all these locations, built all these sets, rigged all these cameras and shots for real! And now he's trying to pass it off as CG!"
posted by delmoi at 9:46 PM on January 8, 2010

(check out the mirror image marble at 5:37, not something you'd ever see in real life. :P)

I've always loved sort of mid-century brutalist architecture. Lots of people seem to hate it, but whatever.
posted by delmoi at 9:50 PM on January 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Interesting point delmoi. In the future, I suspect people will be showing videos like this and claiming it's "ALL DONE WITH CAMERAS!!!", and people like me will at first think it's BS and done in CG before seeing the behind the scenes video.
posted by reformedjerk at 9:57 PM on January 8, 2010

> it's "ALL DONE WITH CAMERAS!!!"

I can tell from the pixels and having seen a lot of cameras in my time.

(Sorry.)
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 10:15 PM on January 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is beautiful imagery!
I would love to see more feature films with an artistic sensibility similar to these shots... like tracking shots, and cutaways, and more.. just look at those tree's and leaves. (8 :30ish-9:30ish)

also, brutalist architecture, I fave that, and didn't know, previously, the title.

one day perhaps we will get feature movies which feature an "installation" of 'such and such', digital artist... amongst a good story. and occasionally masking a worse story. enhanced realty is not a false reality... often digital manipulation brings forth what the artist originally saw, or was moved to see by their inner workings... either way, these are surely tendancies to be promoted, and encouraged.
posted by infinite intimation at 10:15 PM on January 8, 2010

(Oh crap, that should have been 'film grain'...)
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 10:16 PM on January 8, 2010

Oh wow Louis Kahn's Phillips Exeter Academy Library is a real place
posted by delmoi at 10:23 PM on January 8, 2010

This is gorgeous, but it is not a "short film" to me. It is a demo reel piece, or a video brochure for this guy's services, because it shows a lot of beautiful imagery that has been thrown together because it all looks cool, but has no story whatsoever. I think that's a central and defining feature of a film, is that by the end you've been taught something, changed, moved upon, rather than just shown some images and sounds.

I don't mean to come off as totally putting this down; it's brilliant, and I certainly couldn't do it myself at this point. But to call this piece of work a "film"... well... it dims my view of the work, honestly. I found myself holding my breath through the better part of it, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did (at least until the very, very end), I was rather disappointed.
posted by po at 10:48 PM on January 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

i'm torn. man with a movie camera for our time or why would you spend so much time compositing this?
posted by russellterziak at 1:51 AM on January 9, 2010

EDIT: tomorrow, i will regret using "compositing"
posted by russellterziak at 1:53 AM on January 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm not really sure if I would have noticed had I not been told it was CG beforehand, but the shaky camera was a little much. This is odd because while the usual explanation is is that CG artists probably drastically underestimate the fine motor control capabilities of good manual camera work (see, for example, some of the making-of videos from Butterfly Effect where they used humans instead of motion control for some greenscreening effects to save money), this film actually features in many scenes camera rigging which, if it were running the POV camera, would get us very smooth motion indeed.
posted by odinsdream at 4:26 AM on January 9, 2010

yeah, great craftsmanship but boring and pretentious nonetheless. even with the carefully placed dirt specs in the appropriate places this is all too orderly and neat for my rotten taste. why the urge to put something like 'arquitecture as an art' in there? ah yes, because it's not. well , there are exceptions and I'm not big on generalizing normally but this film is symptomatic for the wrongs of all those wanna be artists working in architecture. it's only neat without the people that are supposed to live in those spaces.
posted by namagomi at 5:12 AM on January 9, 2010

Hmm... I'm not so sure about the Completely CGI. At least one of the buildings shown in this film is the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI USA.

I mean, I know it LOOKS like it's CG. But, that's a real building. So, it makes me wonder how many of the rest of those buildings are CG. And which are real.
posted by Severian at 6:21 AM on January 9, 2010

As far as I can see, all of the buildings shown are real buildings. Kahn, Gehry, Calatrava, and I think maybe Ando are all represented. The house in the woods is familiar as well, but I'm drawing a blank on the architect - Aalto? naaa... help me out, hive mind.
posted by bashos_frog at 7:29 AM on January 9, 2010

(I wonder if famous buildings were easier to model since the plans are available in so many places.)
posted by bashos_frog at 7:30 AM on January 9, 2010

the hanging polaroids near the beginning reminded me of being but men (or a tcm promo in general ;)

thanks!
posted by kliuless at 7:56 AM on January 9, 2010

I mean, I know it LOOKS like it's CG. But, that's a real building. So, it makes me wonder how many of the rest of those buildings are CG. And which are real.

If you watch the compositing reel, you'll see the MAM shot in wireframe and then basic renders, so either way he modeled it. Occam's razor suggests that he wouldn't bother shooting it for real if he wasn't going to model it properly anyway.
posted by fatbird at 8:59 AM on January 9, 2010

Another "that's CG?!" reaction here--it looks completely realistic.

Severian: Hmm... I'm not so sure about the Completely CGI.

Here's the compositing reel. Obviously it was a ton of work--it's amazing that one person could create this.

An interview with the filmmaker, Alex Roman. He does architectural visualization work for a living (presumably creating visualizations of buildings before they're actually built).

I was born in 1979, in Alacant (Alicante), a city in Spain. I would first like to say that my real name is Jorge Seva, but I use “Alex Roman” as an artistic alias for publishing independent work.

After being trained in traditional painting at a few academies, I discovered this other world called CG. After school, I made the move to Madrid and began working at a visual effects company. That stint did not last too long due to the lack of demand for visual effects in the Spanish market at the time.

It was then that I switched into the VIZ (architectural visualization) business. I have been working for several companies since. After that, I took a sabbatical year for to work on an “already-built work” visualization series, which will be stitched together into a short animated piece.

... after working in VIZ for years, I realized that there was a huge aesthetic difference between most clients’ commercial demands and photography of already-built structures. The lack of respect for the architecture itself in some “pure” commercial illustration was very frustrating to me. (Well, this is just my opinion, of course.)

Then, I decided to start a personal journey: to experiment with a more cinematographic and/or photographic oriented point of view of some of my favorites architects’ masterpieces.

Hence, the “TheThird&TheSeventh” project…

The level of realism in the TheThird&TheSeventh is stunning. Your render times must be incredible. What software and hardware do you use? How long is an average render?

I use 3DS Max and Vray for rendering, Photoshop for texture work, AfterEffects for compositing and color grading and Adobe Premiere for edit it all.

My desktop PC (i7 920) it’s now the only hardware i have. Every frame rendertime may vary from 20 sec to 1:30 hr (720p) It all depends on how complex the scene is.

However, I invested a lot of time in scene optimization for rendering. I think it’s the key for a flexible workflow.

I was in LA recently and did a self-guided walking tour of the historic downtown area. A lot of buildings there are used to shoot films, because they're architecturally interesting (e.g. the Bradbury Building, used in Blade Runner). I wonder how long it will take before it'll be easier for filmmakers to create this kind of CG background instead. It would certainly give them a lot of freedom to create stunning architecture.
posted by russilwvong at 9:30 AM on January 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wow. Absolute killer.

My only gripe, trivial as it is, is the "old fashioned film" artifacting of both the audio and the video during the opening and closing credits.
posted by imjustsaying at 12:22 PM on January 9, 2010

The technical skill is really amazing and the aesthetic beauty matches it.
posted by aesacus at 10:14 PM on January 9, 2010

That was gorgeous. Thanks. I wish I could create something like this.

Having said that, I did find some of the scenes slightly tacky, such as the inclusion of the white birds (doves?) flapping around over a pond. And I agree with po's comment above; it would have been better not to call it a short film.
posted by nihraguk at 4:38 AM on January 10, 2010

Occam's razor suggests that he wouldn't bother shooting it for real if he wasn't going to model it properly anyway.

Well, it's an interesting question: there will inevitably come a time where we won't need any part from a real source. We'll have modeling for buildings to get rid of reels of film, we'll have sophisticated marble growth pattern sequencers for realistic skins that get rid of photography, and we'll have beautiful fluid algorithms for motion that won't require any real "actor" involvement. We'll probably even come up with natural-language interfaces to able to instruct our digital actors to "sweep leg" and will be presented with an emotional dialogue that we can adjust from Pussy to 'Nam Vet.

You know when you read about the Bronze Age which later moves into the Iron Age? And how important those changes were to the development of human civilization? That's what these next few hundred years are. The opening paragraphs of a new chapter of human development. Computers really are going to sweep everything under the rug and force us to adjust our priorities better. Which I think is probably a good thing.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:41 AM on January 10, 2010

I don't get why you're not allowed to call it a short film just because it doesn't have a story. Was Koyaanisqatsi a film?
posted by empath at 12:55 PM on January 10, 2010

You're allowed to call it whatever you want; I'm just commenting that I was personally confused by the 'short film' label, because like po I spent most of the time waiting for something to happen and/or looking for a plot or storyline of some kind.
posted by nihraguk at 7:53 PM on January 10, 2010