District 9

[Mr.Fitnah]

life under the fascist state. government run corporations are the bad guys in this film, boogey man politics, aliens used in experimentation etc. good film, ending a possible set up for part deux.

Hope not.Amazing effects but hardly worth the time, better to sit and watch a fire and smoke a cigar.

 

[wvulax]

I dunno if I just missed it, but did they ever explain why/how the aliens were stranded here? If they do make a sequel, I hope they expand on that.

 

[Jon]

I dunno if I just missed it, but did they ever explain why/how the aliens were stranded here? If they do make a sequel, I hope they expand on that.

They didn't go into detail, but wasn't it obvious? They ran out of fuel.

The whole premise of the movie was to be different from other alien movies. Usually aliens show up to start a war, or just to communicate with other lifeforms. These aliens showed up by mistake, and clearly, they had no intentions of interacting with the humans. Upon arriving, they did not come out looking for help, they chose to stay on the ship and starve. And even though the aliens had superior technology and easily could have won a war, they chose not to fight. I think that was one of the many social commentaries present in the film.

Also, this movie wasn't about what happened when the aliens arrived on earth. All of those events took place two decades prior, and being a landmark event in the life of the earth, it would go to reason that everyone on earth already knew the details behind that. This movie followed Wikus's story (which was highlighted by the fact that they were filming a documentary about him), and it explained what happened when MNU appointed Wikus to lead the relocation of the prawn from District 9 to District 10. The backstory about the aliens was irrelevant to this story. We didn't need to know anything about their past in order to understand that they were being treated poorly. In fact, the humans actually led the viewer to believe that the aliens were nothing but subhuman scum, apparent by the commentary from the interviewees in the early part of the film and by Wikus's early treatment of the aliens. But through telling Wikus's story, we see that these are actually intelligent and nurturing creatures. In spite of knowing nothing about them, and in spite of what we were led to believe early on, we are able to feel sympathy for them. That's pretty good storytelling, if you ask me.

 

[Jon]

Amazing effects

The effects weren't that amazing. This wasn't really meant to be an action flick. The effects were never meant to draw in the audience. If you were looking for a movie with good effects, go watch a no-brainer like Transformers or GI Joe. This movie was about the story, not the pretty pictures on the screen.

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

Amazing effects

The effects weren't that amazing. This wasn't really meant to be an action flick. The effects were never meant to draw in the audience. If you were looking for a movie with good effects, go watch a no-brainer like Transformers or GI Joe. This movie was about the story, not the pretty pictures on the screen.

The prawn effects were off the hook, The story was multidimensional but not particularity original. Something akin to an old outer limits cautionary tale.

 

[Jon]

Very few stories these days are original. It's the most original story I've seen in a movie in a long, long while. It was refreshing, for sure.

 

[KittenKoder]

Amazing effects

The effects weren't that amazing. This wasn't really meant to be an action flick. The effects were never meant to draw in the audience. If you were looking for a movie with good effects, go watch a no-brainer like Transformers or GI Joe. This movie was about the story, not the pretty pictures on the screen.

Actually, if you understood CGI, they were extremely amazing, almost revolutionary. Only one other movie has used such a standard, Cloverfield. Just because there isn't a ton of fancy stuff, doesn't make it less amazing. Watch the camera jitter, the CGI moves with it almost perfectly, that's the amazing effect.

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

Amazing effects

The effects weren't that amazing. This wasn't really meant to be an action flick. The effects were never meant to draw in the audience. If you were looking for a movie with good effects, go watch a no-brainer like Transformers or GI Joe. This movie was about the story, not the pretty pictures on the screen.

Actually, if you understood CGI, they were extremely amazing, almost revolutionary. Only one other movie has used such a standard, Cloverfield. Just because there isn't a ton of fancy stuff, doesn't make it less amazing. Watch the camera jitter, the CGI moves with it almost perfectly, that's the amazing effect.

Very few people understand the first thing about CGI High and low res models and the rendering process.The Prawn were superlative.

 

[KittenKoder]

The effects weren't that amazing. This wasn't really meant to be an action flick. The effects were never meant to draw in the audience. If you were looking for a movie with good effects, go watch a no-brainer like Transformers or GI Joe. This movie was about the story, not the pretty pictures on the screen.

Actually, if you understood CGI, they were extremely amazing, almost revolutionary. Only one other movie has used such a standard, Cloverfield. Just because there isn't a ton of fancy stuff, doesn't make it less amazing. Watch the camera jitter, the CGI moves with it almost perfectly, that's the amazing effect.

Very few people understand the first thing about CGI High and low res models and the rendering process.The Prawn were superlative.

The parts that amazed me was the machinery, especially the ship. The details they included while including them in the scenes you expect them to cut corners. It felt so real it was almost impossible to tell when they were using models instead of CGI. Not to mention the prawn's costume details when they had them. Working with full CGI is hard enough, but to include it in the way they did for D9 ... just wow. I want to see the DVD so I can find out (hopefully) what they did to track the camera jitters, if they used a formula or just manually rendered the images. Movies like (the new) Transformers they just overlay them really, that's why almost all the camera movements are smooth. D9 has really set a new standard, one that Cloverfield created. When that module dropped from the mother ship ... the whole scene felt almost too real.

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

As far as camera movement it would not be to hard to program a computer controlled camera with the same parameters of a Mel script of a CGI sequence .

 

[GHook93]

I know people hate critics reviews around here, but the critic seem to love this movie!. Rotten Tomatoes at 88% positive rating. Yahoo critics give it an average of -A!

District 9 Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes
District 9 (2009) - Critics Reviews - Yahoo! Movies

 

[GHook93]

Like Passion of the Christ, D9 had a $30 mil budget and made $600 mil. I think D9 will have some great success also!

 

[KittenKoder]

As far as camera movement it would not be to hard to program a computer controlled camera with the same parameters of a Mel script of a CGI sequence .

Depends on the software they used as well. Tracking the jitter is the hard part if it's held by hand instead of planned on a tripod, and a lot of the shots were.

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

Maya is the industry standard , nothing is more flexible or deeper.
The special effect crew were largely grads
Autodesk - Television - Vancouver Film School ups its Maya and MotionBuilder Instruction from VFS
The hand held could be a computer controlled dolly cam.
Pure speculation on my part of course I wasnt there.

 

[KittenKoder]

Maya is the industry standard , nothing is more flexible or deeper.
The special effect crew were largely grads
Autodesk - Television - Vancouver Film School ups its Maya and MotionBuilder Instruction from VFS
The hand held could be a computer controlled dolly cam.
Pure speculation on my part of course I wasnt there.

Actually, Blender is in direct competition with Maya really, just Blender is free so a lot of people don't use it. The Prawns however looked a lot like Blender's built in renderer results. Blender is also more appealing to game designers because of it's Python scripts that allow exports to almost all other formats.

I haven't played with Maya ... not spending a few hundred dollars on something that's a new hobby, so I don't know how it would be done in there, also I don't know if Maya has a Linux version even. In Blender I would use a sync script, but no matter how you do it, you would need some manual adjustments for any software, there is just too much variation in hand held camera shots to do it all automated.

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

I think you would go the other way, not a true hand held but a computer controlled camera mimicking one that is synced to the animation.

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

If you dont object to torrents Maya is a blast to play with .
try it out.

 

[KittenKoder]

I think you would go the other way, not a true hand held but a computer controlled camera mimicking one that is synced to the animation.

If you dont object to torrents Maya is a blast to play with .
try it out.

Yeah ... but if they did go that way it was very convincing.

As for Maya ... meh, I love Blender honestly, and all my current models are in that format.

Here's my work: YouTube - KittenKoder's Channel

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

Very nice You have a great deal of patience .
And a funny vision.
CGTalk - Blender to Maya model transfer

 

[KittenKoder]

Very nice You have a great deal of patience .
And a funny vision.
CGTalk - Blender to Maya model transfer

Thanks. For now I'll stick to Blender though, as I said, I am a newby to modeling, just never thought I had an interest in it until I played with it for a new avatar ...