Animation Sophistication: The Croods Required 80 Million Compute Hours 196
Lucas123 writes "It may be a movie about a stone age family, but DreamWorks said its latest 3D animated movie The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they've made. The movie required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks' last record holder, The Rise of the Guardians. The production studio said between 300 and 400 animators worked on The Croods over the past three years. The images they created, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity. When the movie industry moved from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously. For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%."
But... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It looks like they've got a new hair model that they wanted to show off, and possibly a new particle simulation model. Woo, freaking woo. Apparently, they have no interest of having the characters mouths say anything apart from "ah-ooooh-oooh-awwww-eeeeeee-ah" when the dialogue actually does something like "why do you always say that?". Fuck the particle model, fuck the ha
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In other words, they can only manage to do one half of what Pixar can do most of the time.
Then again, Brave wasn't that good aside from the CGI. Went through so many rewrites there wasn't much story left.
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, two of the three writers (John Cleese and Chris Sanders) are more than decent. Must have been the 3rd guy who screwed it up.
Prejudice... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess your comment is the variant of "haven't read the article, just the summary".
The script is very well done in terms of human relationships and interactions. It's not a movie about fart jokes, the characters are fairly complex (for an animated movie). It is worth to watch it before forming any opinion.
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Maybe. But they're ugly as a rhinoceros's butt. And that turns me off completely. Plus they act like they're on dope all the time.
Aliens on dope trying (and failing) to mimic human beings, that's what I got from it.
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yep..
it looks like crap, took a long time to compute and it's debatable how many "computer hours" it took to complete because "compute hour" isn't an actual unit in any way.
All I wonder (Score:3)
How many animation studios were forced out of business? That seems to be Hollywood's favorite metric for Fx and computer animation.
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The bigger sacrifice would seem to be that of cellulose film.
...and a media that sacrifices itself automatically is of *what* value? (You are aware that there is a very expensive rush on to save the last century of cellulose film archives that are fading away into oblivion simply becuase they are cellulose...)
Re:All I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Also make the point that, films that were pirated, will never be lost. The entire Tom and Jerry archive was lost in a vault fire. We have none of the originals left. All they had after the fire was the film that had been cut down for TV viewing. That's why all the Tom and Jerry episodes are in 4:3 instead of their original wide screen format.
Re:All I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Negatives for all the Tom and Jerry shorts prior to 1951 were lost in the 1967 MGM fire. Up until 1954, T&J was produced in Academy ratio (1.37:1), which is almost indistinguishable from 4:3 (1.33:1). Later ones were produced in a variety of formats from straight Academy ratio, to widescreen 1.75:1 on Academy ratio negative, to Cinemascope.
The only real difference between initial theatrical and current TV/DVD releases of the pre-1951 cartoons (apart from the obnoxious habit of whitewashing out the culturally-insensitive bits) is loss of the original titles on some, and the odd 'lost' sequence.
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That's why all the Tom and Jerry episodes are in 4:3 instead of their original wide screen format.
I
Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote, produced and directed 114 Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM cartoon studios in Hollywood from 1940 to 1957.
Tom and Jerry [wikipedia.org]
These are the shorts that people remember and all but the very last were produced 4:3, not widescreen.
There have been many attempts to revive Tom & Jerry, none showing any great sympathy or understanding of the characters. Chuck Jones struggled here and it shows.
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Shouldn't it double? (Score:2)
3-d stereo imagery = two viewpoints = $2 \times K$ amount of storage
What's wrong with what I'm thinking?
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Just a guess, but... 1 input (scene), 2 outputs (renders) ? :)
Perhaps 30% is 33.3333333%
Re:Shouldn't it double? (Score:5, Insightful)
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While it's true that most 3D scenes don't need major changes, and the camera data is very small, this isn't always true. In 2D, artists will occasionally use horribly nonphysical hacks to make something look the way the
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that's not where the storage is... (Score:2)
The 2 rendered viewpoints for 3D vision are not the only stored data. It's all the 3D models and textures and animation sequences AND the rendered scenes. So 30% seems pretty reasonable.
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Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.
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Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.
Imagine... All of that just to render a napkin.
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If they were just storing the stereoscopic movie it'd be under 20gig. Clearly they are storing the entire data set including models, textures, etc... In fact, I'm rather surprised that the space increased at all. The rendered version of the movie should be tiny compared to all those assets stored for re-use in McDonalds ads, and sequels.
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My guess would be they have a version of the rendering that is stored at high resoloution with no compression (or maybe minimal intraframe compression) so that they can convert to whatever form the market demands for decades to come. This version may also contain material that was unused in the final film.
I dunno what resoloution movies are done at nowadays but if we assume 3 bytes per pixel, 24 frames per second and 8 million pixels per frame that is about 2 terabytes per hour.
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These days, even small theaters show in digital 4K. If you're rendering on a computer you have no reason not to go for 4K as well. Times 2 for the second eye.
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I can't be certain that this is the technique Dreamworks used, but it makes sense and would save disk space:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_image_compositing [wikipedia.org]
Instead of rendering images for both eyes, you render a "deep" image that contains depth information. The images for each eye are then written out of post production rather than out of the CG software.
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No idea how much this was used on this particular film, but for the record, deep images don't save disk space. They churn through it like nobody's business! The idea is driven around storing many samples per pixel instead of just one, so you have a *lot* more data than with a normal "shallow" render and compositing pipeline. It is extremely useful
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Generally speaking, nothing clever happens for stereo storage. It's just that the actual rendered frames are only a small part of the total data involved in making a film. I've never worked at Dreamworks so I can't speak in detail about their pipeline, but I wouldn't be surprised i
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Please do HFR next (Score:2)
Okay, so everyone's doing 3D now, fair enough. I have no idea what high-definition means in this context though - have movies moved beyond 4k?
Lets hope their next title will be in high-frame-rate too. This should be a no-brainer particularly for animated titles. Double the processing requirements again!
Unless of course they go for a motion-interpolation to generate every second frame but the end result wouldn't be nearly as good.
storage up; cost down (Score:2)
what's interesting is that even though their storage requirements have been increasing, the cost of the needed storage has probably been dropping drastically along the way. I bet they are spending less on storage now than they did in the 90s, even though they are probably storing a few orders of magnitude more data. so from a costs perspective...which is how DreamWorks looks at it...it's a non-issue
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That's what I was thinking too, if the simplest solution is to just get a bigger disk, then let's just do that. Doing otherwise is like a company rationing office supplies [thedailywtf.com]. Personally I just bought 2x4TB drives that'll give me 5TB more HDD space (I'm retiring two 1.5TB drives) because I'm too lazy to sort through it all. Hell, I can't even keep my downloading in pace with technology, at one point I had ten HDDs operational now I'm down to six and if I wasn't looking for room to expand I could go down to fou
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Yeah, I took a tour of Wavefront Technologies back in the early 90s and they were still measuring storage in gigabytes. They'd just unpacked their first HDTV setup and, if I remember right, the demo system had 10 gigabytes of storage and it was ridiculously expensive because it had to be able to read/write crazy-fast to handle the HD content. I think that was about the time I paid $600 for a 212 meg drive at a computer show and it was a great price. A couple years later, I met a guy who was working on a
from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies... (Score:3)
..."over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously."
but yet the quality and entertainment of such movies at best remains about the same.
Besides I always get a kick out of the HD systems at a cinema, sure brag about your HD flickering mirrors and your THX Super surround, doesnt mean squat when the picture is still fuzzy and the speakers sound like a cheap set of computer speakers with too much bass running though 2 metal 1 watt tweeters and a 8 inch floppy as shit "sub"
But... Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
How does the efficiency of this compare to some of Pixar's movies (like Brave or WALL-E)?
I only say this because sometimes long render times and exuberant technical requirements are not signs of proper craftsmanship. When they are, you often point out why they are- maybe you've developed a new BRDF shader that takes a bit longer to render but offers results closer to an unbiased renderer that nobody else can achieve. Or maybe you've written a new global illumination system that, once again, takes a bit long
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Then you compare it to the first "Toy Story" which had hardly any shadows and a pile of other shortcuts but is still going to keep a lot of people glued to the screen for a couple of hours.
glitz vs Quality (Score:2)
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Easy way to save time (Score:3)
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That's sort of the way "Rango" was done. Which, BTW, is a much better movie that "Croods" (who came up with that name?). The scenes where done by live actors and then the animators took over.
Re:Easy way to save time (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe the "actors" available today were not lifelike enough...
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Maybe the "actors" available today were not lifelike enough...
How can that be? I heard Keanu Reeves was available!
this is meaningless (Score:2)
At any rate, the time it takes to render a movie is about as interesting as the average histogram from all the fram
250TB? (Score:2)
I'm amazed that a full-on Hollywood production can fit in 250TB.
That's really not all that expensive any more. Unless my math is wrong that's well within the budget of a medium-sized post-production facility.
Progress (Score:3)
I've heard that the average time to render a frame has stayed around 3 hours, from "Andre and Wally B" to now. May or not be true, but it's probably close. It's amazing to look at the differences between "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 3", which makes a particularly good test case because they have the same characters but they're 15 years apart. I remember being amazed at how things looked in Toy Story, from Rex's bumpy texture to the messed-up paint at the bottom of Andy's door, but if you watch the first right after watching the third, you'll be amazed at the differences. I'd say it's most noticeable in the human characters but if you look closely you'll see it everywhere.
I'll bet ... (Score:2)
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What's 3D, high rez good for (Score:2)
...if they still only have 2D, low development characters?
Seriously, could they maybe start spending a few of those millions they pump into special effects and more shiny into scripts that actually, you know, make me WANT to watch the movie? Or at least make me want to stay longer than the 10 minutes it takes to know how it is going to progress and end?
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If you want dumb kids, stick with the status quo. Have you watched a Looney Toons cartoon in adulthood? There's loads more depth behind those cartoons than anything coming from Dreamworks today. You can enjoy it while you're young and when you're old. Sure beats all the sex jokes in Shrek - which really didn't need to be there. There's plenty of ways to be intelligent, funny, and still appeal widely to kids.
After the movie... (Score:2)
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subject (Score:2)
"The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they've made."
Does this mean they've finally managed to change the expression on character faces from their usual open-mouthed stupidity?
So many computations, so much emptiness. (Score:3)
I saw the preview trailer...excellent graphics, top-notch animation, very good voice acting...but it failed to grab my attention. There was a void.
On the other hand, the movie 'Up' was a lot cruder, in terms of technical aspects, but so much more moving than 'the croods'.
Gotta love the lack of imagination here at /. (Score:2)
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When you get to the point of calling an animated film "a kid's movie" you're part of the problem. Dreamworks has a big tendency to put out pretty-looking drivel. Sometimes as a kid or even as an adult you want to turn your brain off and watch something mindless. I enjoy Hannah Montana now and then. But when you get to the point of taking all the art away from a movie just because it's a kid's movie, you're breeding a generation of dumb people.
Just compare something like Kung Fu Panda with Finding Nemo o
30% is tremendously? (Score:2)
Maybe it's just me, but the fact it's not a doubling is actually a little surprising. I can picture it - the models are 3D all the way though to the final rendering, where you need to pick between 2D and 3D (2D is probably a single eye view of 3D). But at some point those shared models need to become pixels, and a 3D rendering seems a 2x increase in storage. Or are the models so complex now that the end rendering filesizes don't dominate storage needs?
That said, the trailers don't make me want to watch this
If only they had used ElectricImage... (Score:2)
It would have been completed in half that time. LONG LIVE EIAS!
Re:Define "compute-hour" (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who works in scientific high-performance computing:
1) N -- the most interesting thing from an engineering perspective is the number of MPI threads or whatever ("How many ways am I going to parallelize this thing"), and while you can sometimes get benefits from understanding that two threads running on different cores of the same CPU can communicate faster than two threads on different machines, it (at least in lattice gauge theory, what I do) is not that big of a deal.
2) Not usually, although there are some allocation-granting groups that have conversion factors ("We give you X million core-hours on this machine, here's a conversion table for our other machines.")
Re:Define "compute-hour" (Score:5, Insightful)
I can really only see it going 1 of 2 ways. Either the biggest number that's technically possible, carefully tracking all all cores, threads, and processors as separate, also counting double if the person has 2 windows open with Crood-related tasks in both ... or the wildest-ass-guess the could muster. "We have 3000 computers, working for 3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day ... soooo 78.9M ... eh, just round up.
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"We have 3000 computers, working for 3 years. There are 365.25 days in a year, 24 hours in a day ... soooo 78.9M ... eh, just round up.
Thats exactly what they did. From the article, they have 3000 Blades, and it took 3 years.
...which works out to 3169 pixels rendered per "compute hour." Horribly inefficient.
The article also mentions 250 billion pixels in the movie....
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That reminds me of my younger days playing in 3D Studio Max. Sometimes a 15-second animation would take all night to render on an old Pentium. By the time you get a few lights into the scenes, all the reflection and shadows are insanely complex. With today's movies, they go way beyond that level of complexity.
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Given the public relationsy nature of the number, assume they are going with whatever sounds biggest to the marketing guys, which would probably mean core-hours rather than machine-hours. That is to say, a two socket machine with 4 cores per socket can do 8 core-hours of calculations per hour of wall-clock time.
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The OS doesn't have a large impact on the application performance. Macs Windows and Linux machines generally all run on the same hardware. If they were Macs though, they would not be using the latest hardware, but several year old Xeon's because that's all you can get in a Mac Pro.
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You seem to have picked up an extra R along the way.
It says compute-hours, not computer-hours
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You seem to have picked up an extra R along the way.
It says compute-hours, not computer-hours
I said computer hours because the content of a compute varies depending upon the computer.
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It'd probably be better just to use flop (floating point operation), and use the exponent
Like petaflops, exaflops, zetta flops, yotta flops..
Like if you have a machine that can execute 1 petaflops/s, then an hour at 1 petaflops, would probably about 3 zettaflops in one hour of computing.
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Floating point operations per second per second ? On an ATM machine ?
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Well..
Floating point operations, and floating point operations per second would have similar looking spellings
FLOPs
and flops
Like if you wanted to say 2 gigaflops, 2 billion floating point operations
And 2 gigaflops for 2 billion floating operations per second
Perhaps you could differentiate them by just dropping normal pluralization conventions?
Like 2 gigaflop for 2 billion floating point operations, and 2 gigaflops for 2 billion floating point operations per second/
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and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there
I prefer Usenet, but yes, it will. And they will still make a profit regardless.
The flatlining of the Hollywood movie scene (Score:5, Insightful)
They could have ... hired some decent writers instead of spending 70 million on fancy CGI and celebrity voices, and then making the same cliched shitpile we see every two or three months
I can't agree with you more !!!
The development of the CGI technology has opened up a lot of possibilities and leveling the playing fields for many MANY people
But on the other hand, the relative ease of applying CGI animation and effects into movies also gave rise to a whole lot of JUNKS
Hollywood is indeed in decline - back in the days when Ben-Hur was made, it wasn't only the epic sets (it was the largest ever made) that made waves, but the story line, the scripting, the twist and turn, and the suspense, that grabbed the attention of the audience
Nowadays we have movies that are essentially "flat" --- the storyline is flat, the acting is flat, even the overdone CGI animation/effects come out looking "flat"
They have taken the FUN out of movie making, and also, movie watching
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I heard an analysis that this is because they need to make the movies internationally appealing, which means stripping out anything that would make it more interesting to any specific culture. You can't get any more vanilla then they are aiming for with a blockbuster, in other words.
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I think you guys are missing the fact that there is always shit being made. It's just that only the good stuff stands the test of time. So it always seems like older things are better. There are definitely a lot of average new movies, songs, books, games, etc, out there, but there is also good stuff if you actually look around. Recently I really enjoyed Seven Psychopaths, as well as Robot and Frank for being "different".
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I'm definitely not missing that... I have Netflix!
(Actually, the free on-demand section on Comcast is far, far worse. It's all the stuff I didn't want to see 30 years ago...)
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I have liked foreign movies, but my wife doesn't like to read the subtitles - and I think she's in the majority. In fairness, she did like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", so maybe it's just a matter of genre.
But anyway, I realize that I miss most of the jokes and cultural references in Japanese films. I saw the series "Oruchuban Ebichu", and fortunately the importers of that show explain many of the cultural references before the program begins. I expect references to American things would be lost on fore
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I'd like to say this, but seriously. The Christian religion has as many good seeds for fantasy as ancient greek, norse, or egyptian religions do. If there weren't so many people taking it so seriously, we could get some awesome movies out of the bible.
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You threw me by using the British title of the The Pirates. Was called "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" here, marketing name of just "The Pirates!"
It was done well except for the 3D. It was over-exaggerated and not used to any cinematic purpose. I understand it was their first 3D film, but it's like they were beginner filmmakers in that regard. For truly good 3D, watch Hugo. Still - Aardman knows what they're doing otherwise.
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Hollywood is indeed in decline - back in the days when Ben-Hur was made, it wasn't only the epic sets (it was the largest ever made) that made waves, but the story line, the scripting, the twist and turn, and the suspense, that grabbed the attention of the audience
I'm sure there used to be a lot of dreck made in the past too, though perhaps not as much because of the higher costs back then, but you have to bear in mind that the reason you saw Ben Hur (or remember it; I'm not going to guess your age) is that it's good.
I expect there were a fair few terrible films made back then too, but no-one is still showing them.
tl;dr Selection bias.
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I wouldn't say no one is still showing them:
Cinematic Titanic [cinematictitanic.com]
Rifftrax [rifftrax.com]
Mystery Science Theater 3000 [mst3k.com] (okay, no ones still showing this).
http://www.rockyhorror.com/participation/showtimes.php [rockyhorror.com]
Nostalgia hides failures. (Score:2)
Once every few years we get a really good movie. And we get a bunch that are either Crap or mediocre, Sometimes the really good ones don't make it big in the box office, however become popular later.
So we come up with an example of 5 or 6 movies that you consider gems of the decade, with nostalgia filters on you say it was a great decade because of movies 3 or 4 out of 6. Not realizing how much crap was released then too, because we have forgotten the movie, because it was just that boring or never seemed
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I'm just waiting for the next Studio Ghibli film to grace our shores, or maybe a Wallace and Grommit. I'll skip Planes, and I won't take my under-10 kids to see it. The Croods can wait till video (AKA TorrentLeech).
I'm a screenwriter. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, seriously, I am.
Let me tell you about the Hollywood screenwriting process as applied to the vast majority of screenwriters.
First the new script is tossed on a pile with a hundred others waiting to be read by one of the teenage intern scriptreaders enslaved at every studio and production company.
When they finally get to your script, these readers skim through page one, looking for that Big Grabber. Hollywood's Writing-by-Numbers bible stipulates that every screenplay have a Big Grabber on page one. That usually means EXPLOSION. (Hollywood's standard screenplay format requires that caps be used for sounds, significant action, and events.)
So the teen skims page one for words such as (but not limited to) EXPLOSION, GUNFIRE, STEAMY SEX, or DECAPITATES. If they do not see those words, they usually toss the script on the huge Of No Interest pile.
Sometimes they'll keep reading in the hope that the next Hollywood stipulation is met: Something Big by page ten. If they don't see Something Big by page ten, they toss the script.
Very occasionally, the teen will keep reading, desperate to see the next stipulation fulfilled: Something Shocking on page 17. Note I said "on" page 17; It has to be page 17. Not page 16, not page 18. It has to be page 17. Why? Because it's in Hollywood's Writing-by-Numbers bible, and who can argue with that?
Well, if that Page 17 Something Shocking requirement is ignored by the worthless writer, who has also not done his or her duty by meeting the page one Big Grabber and page ten Something Big demands, the script will be tossed, as you can imagine.
However, a reader may keep reading once in a blue moon, clinging to the belief that the writer will redeem him or herself on page 30. Page 30 is the last chance. It's where Things Change. There is a chance that the otherwise-ignorant writer has not forgotten the holy Hollywood Writing-by-Numbers bible and has saved something great for page 30. Something Different. Something that Changes Everything.
If it's not there, the script is tossed. End of story in 99.9% of instances.
Some other points: Dialogue is Bad. Dialogue is Boring. Anything longer than Die, muthafucka! is unacceptable. Dialogue puts the teenage intern scriptreader to sleep, and if it puts a teenage intern scriptreader to sleep, it will put everyone to sleep. It just stands to reason. So dialogue is out.
Story is also bad. It just gets in the way of the movie. Remember, it's EXPLOSION, CAR CHASE, BARE BREASTS and other important visual imagery that make or break a true Hollywood classic in the 21st Century.
As long as you have, say, a psychotic serial killer, a hot chick in danger, a popular lead from a hit TV show, exploding helicopters, super heroes, almost-but-not-quite-gay hot guy Vampires (who have some very close male friends), at least 25 zombies, and an ending from which no one walks away alive except maybe the lead and the hot chick (-zombie clause-), you have a Hollywood movie.
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BARE BREASTS and other important visual imagery that make or break a true Hollywood classic in the 21st Century.
Now I *know* you're not a Holywood screenwriter, because that's in the bible for French cinema.
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Remember, it's EXPLOSION, CAR CHASE, BARE BREASTS and other important visual imagery that make or break a true Hollywood classic in the 21st Century.
Okay, so I wasn't going to go see the Croods movie because the trailer looked awful.
But based on your comments as an industry profressional, you say I can expect to see at least one car chase, some explosions and bare breasts.
If you can assure me that it's not a bunch of man boobs, then I promise to reconsider my decision.
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Watch 'Winters Bone'
How can a movie with that title not have BARE BREASTS
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and it's still going to get downloaded on thepiratebay like every other film out there
The difference is that the paying customer has a say in what future productions and budgets will be green-lighted.
The unexpected success of "How To Train Your Dragon" spawned a sequel, a Christmas special, and 40 episodes of the best production values and scripting of any animated series you could name.
Now and again the geek will ride the coattails of WALL-E to the heights or be tossed a bone like "Serenity." Mostly what he gets is a half-century or so of "Dr Who," "Star Trek," and "Star Wars." To ta
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At a rate of tens of hours per frame, even with thousands of machines, only a few dozens frames per second are being written to the storage arrays.
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Uncanny Valley hell. That's what that is. There's a reason you stop at a certain point of realism and keep it a "cartoon." That's why they stick with impressive things like hair animation and pretty lighting effects.