If you’ve seen a superhero film in the past 10-15 years, chances are that when you see a character wearing a suit, what you’re seeing is almost 100% computer generated. Sometimes the character on the screen is motion-captured but sometimes it’s completely animated. It’s amazing how much these movies are made like animated movies — they can make so many different kinds of changes (clothes, movements, body positioning) way after filming is completed. (via @tvaziri)
Starting in 1991 and continuing through 1996, Marvel released their quarterly and annual financial reports to shareholders in the form of comic books. Columbia University librarian Karen Green writes:
Working with editor Glenn Herdling, and using the Marvel Method of story to art to dialogue, Fishman developed the plot, Herdling found some of Marvel’s best artists to pencil, ink, and color, then Fishman wrote the copy (conveying everything the lawyers and SEC demanded), and Herdling put everything together. And so, thirty years ago today, a slim four-page comic debuted, with a cover by legendary artist John Romita Sr. Inside, Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk (sporting, appropriately, an accountant’s green eye shade) discussed net income, publishing revenues, and earnings per share.
The report caused an immediate sensation. No one had seen anything like it. Even more impressive was the subsequent annual report. A 36-page stapled book on glossy paper, it combined information in comics form, introduced by Uatu the Watcher, with updates on licensing, advertising, and more, along with traditional financial tables and text.
Marvel’s newest TV series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, contained a scene in the third episode that featured a tantalizingly short glimpse of erstwhile villain Zemo dancing awkwardly in a nightclub. Fans clambered for more, and so Marvel released an hour-long video of Zemo dancing, cheekily called “The Zemo Cut”. Tag yourself — I’m the clapping. (For some reason, this reminds me of Mad Men’s Ken Cosgrove dancing to Daft Punk.)
Insider takes a look at how big Hollywood blockbusters (Marvel movies, in this case) are increasingly made, with an extensive digital previsualization stage that happens before any of the shooting starts. Think of it as supercharged storyboarding — the digital version of what Bong Joon-ho created for Parasite for instance. This is how digitally animated movies have been made for decades now — studios like Pixar always create roughly animated cuts of their movies before moving along to the expensive and time-consuming visual effects step. Big blockbusters like the Avengers movies are essentially animated films now, with live actors seamlessly inserted into the mix, like Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The “techvis” layer of the process is super interesting. Based on the previsualization, the system can output camera angles, movements, and settings that directors & camera operators can use on set to get the shots they want, speeding up production. This is the reverse of a technique that Pixar uses, in which real-world motion is captured and then programmed into virtual cameras:
To get the motion just right for the baby carriage scene in the antique store for TS4, they took an actual baby carriage, strapped a camera to it, plopped a Woody doll in it, and took it for a spin around campus. They took the video from that, motion-captured the bounce and sway of the carriage, and made it available as a setting in the software that they could apply to the virtual camera.
The flip-flop they’re doing in filmmaking right now is fascinating to watch.
Actor Chadwick Boseman died on Friday after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Boseman played both Jackie Robinson and James Brown in films, but he was best known for his role as T’Challa / Black Panther in four Marvel movies. In this short video featuring behind-the-scenes footage from those films and interviews from his colleagues, Marvel pays tribute to the best possible person they could have gotten to play that role.
I watched Black Panther for the third or fourth time over the weekend and while Michael B. Jordan always blows me away, it’s Boseman’s quiet intensity and magnetism that grounds Jordan’s performance and makes the whole “the bad guy has a point” plot work. Yeah ok, it’s just a superhero movie, but I think Black Panther is going to be one of those films that’s going to be relevant and reverberate for a long time.
The late 1930s were a time of explosive creativity in the comics industry, with the creation of Superman, Batman, and Marvel Comics’ own unlikely fan favorite, Namor, the Sub-Mariner. I enjoyed reading this short précis on Namor in honor of his 80th anniversary.
Namor is less an early superhero than the last of the pulp icons, an antihero who threatened humanity with death and destruction. Unlike Superman, he’s not a secret alien raised by the best of humanity to save us all; he’s a hybrid mutant raised by a nonhuman race here on Earth that regards humanity as overgrown, ill-tempered children. And unlike Zack Snyder antiheroes who have to be twisted from their origin stories to bring them up to date, Watchmen-style, nothing about Namor needs to be changed to make him genuinely menacing, alien, and scary, while retaining his sexy charm. Namor’s just got it going on.
Namor’s film rights have been circuitously tied up for years, so we’ve never seen him on the silver screen. The first hit that always comes up when you search for him is Keanu Reeves, and Keanu at any age wouldn’t make a bad Namor. There’s talk of introducing him into the MCU via the Black Panther franchise, and that’s a great idea as well, since the main thing Black Panther and the Sub-Mariner share is that they’re not really super-heroes; they’re kings.
(Superman is precisely interesting to the extent that he is neither a king nor a god, but a man; these two things are not mutually exclusive. Hollywood’s inability to grasp this is part of why superhero movies have so much trouble, despite being the most dumb-simple megagenre of all time.)
I’m certainly aware that one of the themes (perhaps the theme) of Black Panther is the gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be. I’m also aware that one of the main characters, when he finally sees the unimaginable beauty of Wakanda, finds it too bittersweet to bear. It’s a movie about hard choices and impossible expectations. Which makes it a movie about making movies, like all the other movies.
The closest analogy I can think of for Black Panther is The Lord of the Rings. (These are the two movies, in my lifetime, I have waited the longest to see, and held the highest expectations for.) Black Panther may be the closest Marvel has come, even counting the Thor movies, to merging high fantasy and superhero fiction. This pops up in deep and superficial ways: the characters fight with swords and spears more often than guns and blasters, and the plot is laden with intrigue of kings and clans, bloodlines, blood debts, and blood enemies, and magical (sometimes techno-magical) weapons that are too dangerous to be used lightly. I’ve heard other people call these parts of the movie Shakespearean, and I could see some parallels, but it feels more like fantasy.
Like the Lord of the Rings movies, Black Panther is a beautiful, improbably piece of filmmaking. Like them, the overlapping action plots sometimes get muddled, with one thread having to be sacrificed for another. And like them, when the movie has time to breathe, it is a quieter, emotional film, about characters who are able to convey or suggest deep connections with limited screen time.
It’s that movie, that other Black Panther, I want to stay in. The moments between friends, lovers, rivals, parents and their children quickly get bowled over by a very capable action fantasy superhero movie. And to make a version of Lord of the Rings that is antiracist and antiimperialist from start to finish, while preserving all the dramatic possibilities and ambiguities of what it means to be a king to a people, is no small thing.
But the genius of Creed — and as of today, after only one screening of Black Panther versus dozens of Creed, I’m going to provisionally maintain that Creed is the better Ryan Coogler film — was its ability to balance its obligations to the Rocky franchise with its subtle but penetrating portrayal of human relationships. Creed comes the closest I have seen, the closest I recognize, to what it means to love someone: a partner, a mother, a child, a father figure, a lost legacy. Black Panther only occasionally allows room for the same emotional range, and they’re the best moments of the film.
Creed’s Philadelphia shows the world as it is; Black Panther’s Wakanda staggers against the task of showing the world as it ought to be.
This brings me to the last way in which Black Panther is like The Lord of the Rings: its first cut, by several accounts was over four hours long. I am perfectly happy with the movie I saw. But I suspect that somewhere in those four hours, is the movie that I most especially wanted to see.
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