For "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991), Robert Patrick learned how to fire a gun without blinking, to prepare for his role as the T-1000, a killer robot.
🎥 4 shots 🤖 16 rounds 👁 1 blink
The GIF at the top of this post is real-time, as it was seen in the film. If It Were Made Today™: would still have Patrick train to fire the weapon without blinking; the one blink in this sequence could be digitally painted out by a talented paint artist.
While the music was from “Fallout”, the inspiration for Apple’s terrific opening film for the iPhone event was clearly “Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol”.
Seems to me that Twitter should allow users to easily be able to view all "Quote Tweets", just like users can easily list a Tweet's Likes and Retweets.
My quick and dirty mockup of how Twitter could implement Quote Tweet tracking. Clicking on the "Quote Tweets" gives you all the instances, which is just a Twitter search for the URL of the original Tweet. This seems like low-hanging fruit.
Me: Hey Apple, three movies I bought disappeared from my iTunes library.
Apple: Oh yes, those are not available anymore. Thank you for buying them. Here are two movie rentals on us!
Me: Wait... WHAT?? @tim_cook when did this become acceptable? pic.twitter.com/dHJ0wMSQH9
There's been a lot of chatter about what exactly does it mean to "buy" a movie from iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, or any of the other online movie services.
Movies appearing and disappearing in iTunes (or any service) as the studio agreements dictate has been happening for years. Totally customer hostile and studio agreements should prevent it but it’s not new.
The lack of social media memory is good for repeated attention, though! https://t.co/f1wgIP9rkm
Rene Ritchie says that when iTunes severs a licensing agreement for a particular film, the film disappears from the iTunes Store. You can no longer stream the film from Apple servers, even if you "bought" it. (However, if at some point you had downloaded the movie to your Mac/iPhone, you would still be able to watch that movie, even after it leaves the store, apparently.)
If Apple (and Amazon Prime Video, Comcast, etc.) were a little more honest about what it meant to "Buy" a movie on their service, I think the user interface buttons would look a little different.
To add impact to a shocking moment of extreme violence, director Jim Cameron and the editors of "Terminator 2" used a very old-fashioned, low-tech editing trick.
A single frame of solid white was added into the edit precisely at the moment of impact. Nestled within a predominantly dark sequence, the quick 1/24th-of-a-second flash of bright light shocks the audience and makes the moment that much more striking.
"Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" (1982): another example of adding a single bright frame in the middle of the edit to intensify a moment of personal violence.
Unlike the "T2" example, the frame is a single frame of overexposure (rather than a white solid color).
There's also jump cut to a different take a just before the head butt, which is hardly noticeable in real-time, especially with the added subsequent flash frame.
Another example from "The Road Warrior", again with a single frame of overexposure to punctuate the impact.
Update: If you've been here before, you absolutely need to scroll down toGigantic Update, 1/20/2025 for some new information.
The GIFs below were part of a Tweetstorm where I attempted to debunk the whole "the Jaws shooting stars were real and actually happened on camera" mythology. These read better as tweets than as a blog post, so see the thread here, if you want.
All these "Jaws" tweets reminds me to dig up my half-finished project files debunking the whole "those shooting stars were real" myth.I'm just going to post these in their current state, without context. I planned to talk day-for-night, fast lenses, film stock, exposure of stars, depth of field, motion blur, tracking, hand-drawn animation composited into live-action... but nobody's got time for that.
In summary, contrary to what the mythology might be, there is no way those two shooting stars you see in "Jaws" were real-life shooting stars photographed in-camera during filming. Those shots contain animated effects work to simulate shooting stars.
Update, 10/24/2021, from Paul Hirsh's fantastic book "A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits":
As I watched [Jaws], I noticed something odd in one of the later reels. In a low-angle close-up of Roy Scheider showing the early evening sky behind him, I saw what looked like a brief fiery streak in the sky. Later the evening at a party at Steven's hotel to celebrate the opening, I asked him about it. "Hey," he called out, "Paul Hirsch saw it! He saw the UFO!" As I had suspected, that streak was deliberate; it was a little foretaste of Steven's next picture, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
the shot, brightened for clarity
Gigantic Update, 1/20/2025
Here we are again.
I find it astonishing that folks are still repeating the myth that the shooting stars in "Jaws" were captured in-camera. To recap, here's a quick summary of the forensic evidence that the two shooting stars are animated and were not photographed in-camera during first unit production.
The sequence was shot day-for-night and exposure values where they are for this sequence could not possibly expose for a real shooting star.
In both shots, there is zero motion blur on the hottest part of the shooting star, while the head of a real shooting star, if captured, would be smeary.
The shooting star, in both shots, has a single point of intensity and a variably flickering pink tail. This is not what shooting stars look like.
The Roy Scheider shot is photographed with the camera panning and tilting a bit, however the animation is locked in screen space indicating the animator didn't "match move" the camera.
Anything in the background of the Roy Scheider shot would be out of focus. Just look at Richard Dreyfuss, who is soft. The shooting star is crisp and sharp, indicating a non-defocused animated effect.
They looks animated as HELL. Just like the animated effects to brighten the barrels' lights in the water in the exact same scene.
One reason it's bubbling up again on blogs and social media is due to "The Shark is Broken" which debuted on Broadway in August 2023. Co-written by Robert Shaw's son Ian Shaw, the play dramatizes the often-difficult production of "Jaws", and the shooting star makes a cameo in the play, with the authors of the play implying that it actually happened during filming - a beautiful example of serendipity and happy accidents amidst a troubled film production.
From Deadline: "Fans of the film – who isn’t? – will be delighted with the attention to detail on this Broadway stage, right down to that famous shooting star accidentally captured by the late, great cinematographer Bill Butler."
Here's the problem - those shooting stars featured in "Jaws" were NOT captured in-camera. They are optical effects added in post-production by an animator. Film fans need to stop repeating the false claim that they were happy accidents captured in-camera during the filming of the movie.
If the forensic analysis of the footage indicating that the two shooting stars were added in post-production then maybe the fact that director Steven Spielberg's well-documented love of "When You Wish Upon a Star" from Pinocchio might convince you. Or Spielberg's vivid childhood memory of a meteor shower that captured his imagination (see Joseph McBride’s ‘Steven Spielberg: A Biography’). Or that he later adding animated shooting stars into "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". Or the Paul Hirsch quote printed above.
Maybe this will help slam the door on this myth. I reached out to film historian Jamie Benning about this issue. He said, "let me ask Joe Alves."
Alves was the "Jaws" production designer and also worked with Spielberg on "The Sugarland Express" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and has spoken extensively about his experience on "Jaws". Paraphrasing, this is the response he got from Alves in August 2023: yes, the shooting stars in the movie were animated. Yes, they were added in post-production.
Let's put this myth to bed, once and for all.
As an aside, let's discuss why this myth gets perpetuated. Firstly, with the well-documented production troubles that "Jaws" had to overcome, the shooting stars being real, in-camera events invites a pleasant bit of magical serendipity, which captures one's imagination. Even when all hell was breaking loose, months behind schedule and millions over budget, this movie was destined to be a masterpiece, and nothing exemplifies that then the wonderful serendipity of two shooting stars that happened to get captured on film for the movie! It's a terrific bedtime story, but one that is pure mythology.
But another piece of the puzzle is that there might have been an actual meteor shower that occurred during the filming of the movie. Someone sent me this bizarre quote from cinematographer Bill Butler apparently given to American Cinematographer 1975 birthed the myth:
"During the scene where Brody and Hooper are waiting for the shark and comparing scars, we had a meteor shower in the sky behind them. We didn't plan it, but when we saw it happening, we quickly set up and filmed it. This kind of natural phenomenon does a lot for a film. It wasn't an optical effect."
(Complicating the issue - I can't find this quote in the AC archives. I went into a deep dive in the American Cinematographer archives (here's the "Jaws" issue from March 1975), and reviewed every single 1975 issue, and couldn't not locate this quote. As an aside, the AC Archives are absolutely amazing.)
A version of this story is often repeated, sometimes attributed as being mentioned in a “making of Jaws” documentary, but I’ve scoured the several documentaries about the making of the film and I have not come across this story.
Here's what I think happened: Yes, there was a meteor shower during filming. Yes, Butler and crew did what they could to photograph the event, devoid of the boat or actors, just to attempt to capture something on film. And he erroneously says in the "it wasn't an optical effect", meaning that what they filmed was what they filmed. However, and this is a gigantic "however", the footage of the real meteor shower they filmed is not in the final movie. It's not. The "meteor shower being filmed by the crew" story was told by Robert Shaw to his son Ian, which became part of his father's "Jaws" lore, but mistakenly morphed into "the shooting stars in the movie were REAL".
The shooting stars in "Jaws" are animated optical effects executed in post-production.
• • • •
Oh... there's just one more thing.
Another source has access to Steven Spielberg. So this person asked Steven Spielberg in September 2023:
Paraphrasing from Spielberg: Yep, it's animated shooting star, animated by Albert Whitlock.
This was a bombshell for me. No, not that Spielberg confirmed that it was animated, but that it was supervised by none other than Al Whitlock who passed away in 1999, the veteran visual effects artist who contributed to some of the most amazing visual effects of all time. Not to mention that really terrific illusion in "The Blues Brothers" (1980) that I documented on Twitter.
Just about every single TV sold in the U.S. has ‘motion smoothing’ switched on by default.
The TV attempts to create additional temporal frames, to make the motion feel “smoother” and less jerky. This makes movies (shot and projected at 24fps) appear smeary and wrong.
Films seen on a TV with motion smoothing on are not being presented properly. The “new” look changes the emotional impact of every single scene. This is not how the film was intended to be seen; this is similar to the appalling process of colorizing black & white films.
Check out the Twitter hashtag #tvninja - a TV ninja is someone who stealthily turns off motion smoothing on a TV owned by friends, relatives, or Airbnb.
Directors who have publicly fought motion smoothing include Reed Morano and Rian Johnson, who, as far as I know, came up with the hashtag #tvninja.
Motion smoothing goes by many different names (Auto Motion Plus, TruMotion, etc.). Turn it off. Here's a great blog post by Stu Maschwitz from 2011 properly titled, "Your New TV Ruins Movies".
I used an HD source of "The Empire Strikes Back" and did a frame-by-frame restoration of Doomblake's edit. Later, I realized I messed up one of the edits (a second cut to Piett), but I liked my cutaway to Veers more, so I kept it. Making arbitrary changes to source material is a Star Wars Special Edition trademark, so why not continue that tradition. I also added titles, and an actual introduction and conclusion. The audio of the new sequences is mine, but the audio from Doomblake's amazing editing is pure Doomblake.
This is one of director J.J. Abrams' favorite visual effects shots from his film, "Mission: Impossible III". Rather than have actor Eddie Marsan forcibly shove the prop into Tom Cruise's nose, J.J. came up with a different idea on how to accomplish the shot.
Hal Hickel, promoting "Rogue One" on home video, with Alan Tudyk (voice of K-2SO)
If you want to hear a fun interview with ILM animation supervisor Hal Hickel, check out his appearance on the podcast Talking Bay 94, episode 15. Hal talks about his career, how we made Tarkin and Leia for "Rogue One", and about those amazing Yoda “Empire” tests that I’ve seen with my own eyes.
In an attempt to answer the question "What is great cinematography?", a solid answer is "if you can jump to any random frame of the movie and it looks *good*, THAT'S great cinematography."
So I tried that with "Jaws" (1975):
"Jaws" cinematographer Bill Butler was nominated for an Oscar for his work on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that same year (1975). He shared the Oscar nomination with Haskell Wexler.
Whenever there’s a chance to do an apples-to-apples comparison of something related to the art and science of filmmaking, I’ll jump on it.
“Halloween” (1978) has seen approximately 70,000 different home video releases, including multiple iterations on DVD and Blu-ray. I personally own two versions of the movie on Blu-ray: a 2007 release, and a 2013 release, which touts a new HD transfer supervised and approved by the film’s original cinematographer, Dean Cundey.
Rarely do studios use the name of a crewmember to help sell a new pressing of a library film. Intrigued, I wondered exactly how different could the color grading would look, with an apples-to-apples comparison to the 2007 Blu-ray release of the film. I randomly chose frames from the film to compare; I didn’t specifically seek out dramatically different color grades.
Usually when a film-to-digital transfer is completed without the involvement of the original filmmakers, educated guesses (based on the cinematic memory of whoever is behind the controls, the best film prints available, old transfers, etc.) must dictate the exposure and color choices that are required to be made. Color grading (and film-to-digital transfers) are completely subjective; in the end, “what should the film look like?” dictates how saturated, bright or contrasty the movie appears. These are creative decisions.
Even though the discrepancies between the transfers are, at times, inconsistent, the general look and feel of of the 2007 release is much brighter, warmer and saturated. If this 2013 release is truly Cundey’s original vision for the film, he always intended the print to be much darker, cooler and more muted than the 2007 release.
There is no single “correct” way to process and grade a film. Just as a filmmaker chooses the colors and textures of the film’s costumes, the filmmaker chooses the look and feel of the color grade. There are an infinite number of possibilities, and, in a perfect world, new film-to-digital transfers should be supervised by the original filmmakers. As you can see in this comparison, the 2007 “unsupervised” transfer is bright and colorful, which was not the intent of the cinematographer. For some context, take a look at this blog post from Stu Maschwitz, which shows some feature film comparisons of "before creative color grading" and "after creative color grading".
I tried to do more research and hear directly from Cundey himself, but I couldn’t find any interviews with Cundey about his involvement with the 2013 Blu-ray release. At one point, HalloweenMovies.com apparently hosted this photo of Cundey working on the transfer (the link is now dead, and I was unable to find an Internet Archive version).
Back in July of 1986, Starlog Magazine printed an article by Bruce Gordon about "Back to the Future", in which Gordon ponders the idea of the alternate universe created in the Robert Zemeckis time-travel film. Gordon talks about the opening of the film, as we see Marty and Doc get ambushed by terrorists. Gordon speaks of a mysterious figure in the background of this opening scene, which takes place at Twin Pines Mall.
At the very instant that Doc tosses his pistol to the ground (and all eyes in the audience are following its path across the pavement), a silhouetted figure steps into that light. Less than a second later, the figure is gone, Doc has been shot and the chase is on.
I thought it would be fun to look at the artifact that Gordon supposes is "Marty II" in HD.
Clearly, it's "Marty II" back there. Or Bigfoot. Gordon wrote follow-up articles after "Back to the Future Part II" and "III" were released. They're available online via the Internet Archive.
