catching up with SIFF

[ironymaiden]

been consumed with chorus stuff the past few days. transcribing while i can...

Battle of Wits
i have cheezits and a coke. i'm wondering if it's safe to open the coke afer carrying it over here from the office. the checkin guy now knows both my name and my viewing habits. he's good. sometimes i want to cultivate such skills, the rest of the time i'm kind of glad to not have them.

the forecast said 60s today. they were dead wrong.

* * *
it was much warmer, probably high 70s.

the film is set in warring-states era China. it's about a great strategist who helps a small city in a siege. Ge Li (Andy Lau, the *spoiler redacted* in House of Flying Daggers) is a follower of Mohism and his command of the little city's forces is aimed at reducing suffering for all, which goes about as well as can be expected in a monarchy. rather than featuring showy wirework and swordfighting, the battle sequences are mostly infantry actions featuring shields and polearms. (i only detected one Massive-type scene; there really did seem to be a cast of hundreds if not thousands, and the credits thank the Chinese military.)
the dialogue is a bit stilted, but i can't tell if that's translation, being a manga adaptation, or genuine lameness.
i really enjoyed this one once it got rolling, especially because (with one late exception) the battles felt plausible and the underdogs held their own by being clever. i'm looking forward to taking C to this one during the festival and talking about the fighting afterward.

4 out of 5, not for people who are bored by battle sequences.

i can't believe eljay spellchecker doesn't know manga.

Comments

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

It's possible to do giant crowd scenes without heavy-duty digital tricks. One way they might have done the Marching Army of 100000 scene might have been to have infantry formations marching across a plain, with their pace guided by a laser pointer (visible to the formation leader but not the camera). By shooting the same scene several times, with different soldiers in the files closest to the camera, it would look like a different formation in each group. Then with compositing all the shots could be combined into the same shot. To save film, some formations could be repeated, and composited far enough apart on the screen that they aren't obvious duplicates.

I see that Massive isn't insanely expensive by film production standards. But besides the licensing price it requires a lot of expertise, and that costs too. By contrast, I know enough about video compositing that I could do that sort of copy-and-paste stuff, as long as it works the same way in film-editing software that can handle high-resolution digital intermediates as it does in Adobe Premiere Elements (which tops out at 1080i HD) – and I'm a total newbie at that sort of thing.