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troupo12/09/20244 repliesview on HN

You should watch how movies are made sometime. How a script is developed. How changes to it are made. How storyboards are created. How actors are screened for roles. How locations are scouted, booked, and changed. How the gazillion of different departments end up affecting how a movie looks, is produced, made, and in which direction it goes (the wardrobe alone, and its availability and deadlines will have a huge impact on the movie).

What does "EXT. NIGHT" mean in a script? Is it cloudy? Rainy? Well lit? What are camera locations? Is the scene important for the context of the movie? What are characters wearing? What are they looking at?

What do actors actually do? How do they actually behave?

Here are a few examples of script vs. screen.

Here's a well described script of Whiplash. Tell me the one hundred million things happening on screen that are not in the script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kunUvYIJtHM

Or here's Joker interrogation from The Dark Night Rises. Same million different things, including actors (or the director) ignoring instructions in the script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqQdEh0hUsc

Here's A Few Good Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hv7U7XhDdI&list=PLxtbRuSKCC...

and so on

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Edit. Here's Annie Atkins on visual design in movies, including Grand Budapest Hotel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzGvEYSzHf4. And here's a small article summarizing some of it: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/annie-atkins-grand-buda...

Good luck finding any of these details in any of the scripts. See minute 14:16 where she goes through the script

Edit 2: do watch The Kerning chapter at 22:35 to see what it actually takes to create something :)


Replies

shermantanktop12/09/2024

I can't upvote this enough. This topic in the media space has generated a huge amount of naive speculation that amounts to "how hard could it be to do <thing i know nothing about>?"

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bunabhucan12/10/2024

I agree with you.

At the same time I am curious in the "that person has too many fingers" sense at what a system trained on tens of thousands of movies plus scripts plus subtitles plus metadata etc. would generate.

I thought about it for a bit and I would want to watch a computer generated Sharknado 7 or Hallmark Christmas movie.

robotresearcher12/09/2024

Of course normally other people contribute to a movie after the writer. My comment mentioned three of the important roles. This whole thread is about tech that automates away those roles. That's the whole point.

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player123412/10/2024

Cool since you know, at what point in the process do you swap out all the white ppl? Thanks in advance!