OK, NOW the Wild West is truly closed and the Western truly dead.
"Hello, CGI" (to the tune of Hello, Vietnam):
https://youtu.be/LNHOFyIaGD8
"Kiss me goodbye and let the Old West die,
Goodbye prop gun, hello CGI"
CGI Horses to follow. Saloon girls are right out.
Nice song. Hah!
I noticed the CGI blood spurting in the head-shot killings in the original John Wick(I suppose its the same in the sequels) and in The Irishman(where DeNiro's assasination shots are always to the face.)
I accept it. Especially involving shots to the head, safer all the way around.
The irony(given Alec Baldwin) with all the "blood hits" in The Wild Bunch is that nobody actually SHOT AT anybody. The blood packs were wired up to the "victims" and exploded without anyone firing at them. Indeed, Peckinpah made sure to put blood packs on both the FRONT and the BACK of the victims to simulate a bullet going clean through.
Both blank guns and exploding(wired) blood packs have gone a little wrong in movie history. Faye Dunaway got an eye injury from a blank in Bonnie and Clyde; Sean Connery went to the hospital over blood packs exploding on his chest in The Untouchables.
Back to Baldwin given the gunplay in The Wild Bunch. All that shooting in The Wild Bunch, all those blanks being fired, all those blood hits being wired and...nobody got hurt.
If you are careful and hire the right experts, that's the way it should be.
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Yeah, not worth getting hurt over. If today's movie people can't handle the job right then I guess better not to use any king of ordinance anymore. I don't like CGI blood though.. looks fake. As far as I know no one has ever died from movie blood being squirted on them.
shareI don't like CGI blood though.. looks fake.
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I agree, but then CGI has made so much of ALL movies "fake." Its not really a visual advance -- though I suppose it looks better than the old process work where you could see a blue line around people talking in front of a screen.
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As far as I know no one has ever died from movie blood being squirted on them.
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Ha. No. Again, when the "movie shot" is OF somebody getting shot, nobody even has to aim a gun at them. Just rig up the electric charge to "explode the charge" and the blood spurts out. As star James Caan said of Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite(1975) "Man, the blood bags were burstin' all over the place."
I suppose this is interesting: at some point in the 60's, audiences DEMANDED to see blood spurt out of gunbattle victims. The days where no blood hit was shown and the victim just grabbed his chest and fell over dead were ...almost not ALLOWED. There is a little blood on guys in movies as early as "The Magnificent Seven"(1960) but Bonnie and Clyde (1967)was the first "blood bag movie" and then The Wild Bunch(1969) took it up to 11.
So we brought it on ourselves.
I do remember seeing "They Shoot Horses Don't They" in 1969 and flinching at a slow motion shot of a key actress taking a gunshot to the temple. That it was a woman made it harder to watch,and they had skin and hair rigged to "explode out" from her head as well as blood. A shot RIGHT TO THE HEAD. Never really forgot that scene.
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SPOILER FOR THE UNTOUCHABLES
I mentioned how Sean Connery needed a Chicago hospital visit after a bunch of electric blood charges hurt his chest on The Untouchables. Unfortunately the news articles gave away that Connery's character was bring machine gunned to death in the scene. So when I went to THAT movie, I knew going in that Connery was going to die.
Years later I went to LA Confidential and thank god I read no articles about the story or filming. A character died in that one and it was a great, exciting surprise. I remember thinking "I wish I saw The Untouchables without knowing about Connery's death."
But the other point: rigging people with explosives on their bodies CAN be dangerous. No one's ever been killed, but Connery and others have been lightly injured.
You are a font of knowledge, thanks. So, they can be a bit dangerous. If they had replaced Kevin Kostner with Alec Baldwin then maybe Connery would have gotten his Oscar posthumously? Baldwin: "Mr. De Palma, I think Sean should get a head shot in this scene. Whaddya think?"
I was just thinking about the use of drones in movies. They've basically replaced helicopter shots, and thus are much safer. Many other accidents back then could have been avoided though, if drones had been available. The only time you really need a helicopter is if there actually is one appearing in the scene (assuming you don't just CGI it, of course). That wouldn't have helped Vic Morrow and the two child actors on the set of The Twilight Zone as the scene called for an actual helicopter in the scene. Anyway, the good thing about drones is that you can get actual footage if you chose to that wasn't possible - or very difficult, expensive and dangerous - before. I actually think drones haven't been all that imaginatively used in most movies considering their potential.
. If they had replaced Kevin Kostner with Alec Baldwin then maybe Connery would have gotten his Oscar posthumously? Baldwin: "Mr. De Palma, I think Sean should get a head shot in this scene. Whaddya think?"
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LOL.
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I was just thinking about the use of drones in movies. They've basically replaced helicopter shots, and thus are much safer. They only time you really need a helicopter is if there actually is one appearing in the scene (assuming you don't just CGI it, of course). That wouldn't have helped Vic Morrow and the two child actors on the set of The Twilight Zone as the scene called for an actual helicopter. Many other accidents back then could have been avoided though, if drones had been available.
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Yes, the history of helicopter shots is somewhat interesting.
In 1960, Hitchcock WANTED to open his movie Psycho with a helicopter shot over Phoenix Arizona heading down to the hotel room where the movie begins. The shots were actually taken but he rejected them -- the camera strapped to the helicopter was way too shaky in the finished shots. He used a camera anchored on a roof "panning and diving" instead to get the shot.
Also in 1960, Billy Wilder's The Apartment opens with something LIKE a helicopter shot over New York City, but it really looks like it was shot from a fixed wing plane and it is quite shaky.
So Hollywood technicians worked for years and years to develop what was called "The Tyler Mount" so that a camera could be mounted on a helicopter without shaking. Hithcock used the Tyler Mount for an opening helicopter shot over London in Frenzy (1972.)
But as you say, helicopter shooting and some shooting in airplanes proved dangerous -- fatally in Hollywood over the years. A camera operator fell out of a plane on Mike Nichols Catch 22, a pilot fatally crashed a small plane for a shot in Flight of the Phoenix...very dangerous work. And I'll assume that some helicopters went down.
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But now we have the drone, which makes everything safe on the one hand -- but removes the "pioneer spirit" of "making it real and dangerous on the other."
And isn't it interesting how we -- as the audience -- have now "learned to spot the drone shot" in movies? When we are way high up looking straight down over people driving, riding, walking, we just KNOW we are in a remote controlled drone. Its part of our "movie watching vocabulatry" now.
I would like to see drone footage used in a less obvious "droney" way, say ground-level tracking shots, and weaving in and out in close quarters, for instance. Everything doesn't have to be an overhead establishing shot as most directors seem to do. I have an imagined films I have in my head about baseball. In a bases loaded top of the ninth situation, I would have the camera start at the pitcher's mound, go from the batter's box, down the line to first base, then over to second, third, to the pitcher and back to the batter stepping into the box, pausing at each station for some interactions between the players. No need for camera tracks or any expensive equipment.
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