filmmaking

Epic Games shows how LED walls can provide both virtual backgrounds and real lighting, letting scenes be captured in camera in a single pass with Unreal Engine.

The first of seven parts of RedLetterMedia's long review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It argues that the film's central flaw is its characters and the lack of audience connection.

Every Frame a Painting analyzes how Jackie Chan stages action comedy, with nine principles such as starting from a disadvantage, using the environment, clear shots, and keeping action and reaction in the same frame.

VFX supervisor Jonas Ussing examines what studios mean by "no CGI", showing how much invisible CGI hides behind practical-effects marketing. It is the first part of a multi-part series that includes analysis of doctored behind-the-scenes footage.

A video essay from Every Frame a Painting about Vancouver, a major film production city that almost never appears onscreen as itself. It shows clips of films and TV shot there that pass the city off as somewhere else.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Michael Bay's style, 'Bayhem', covering his camera movement, composition, color and editing. It argues that even if you dislike his films, they teach something about visual perception.

Who Killed Captain Alex is Uganda's first action movie, made for under $200 by Nabwana IGG in Wakaliga. This version has English subtitles and a video joker (VJ Emmie) providing running commentary.

Insider explains how The Mandalorian replaced green screens with LED walls that project real-time 3D environments behind actors, with over half the show filmed on such virtual sets.

Animator Joel Haver explains how he makes his short films using rotoscoping and the EbSynth tool, along with the software he uses. The method is a labor-intensive, frame-by-frame process.

A very short clip from Taken 3 of Liam Neeson's character jumping a fence, edited with extremely rapid cuts.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.

Ian Hubert shows how to use Blender's motion tracking to turn ordinary footage of a room into a stylized digital environment for an indie film. It is a quick, practical walkthrough in his loose, lazy-tutorial style.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay analysing how Edgar Wright creates visual comedy through framing, camera movement, editing, sound effects and music.

Documentary filmmaker Cassie Jaye explains how making The Red Pill led her, a feminist, to reevaluate her assumptions about the Men's Rights movement. She argues for listening to people you think of as the enemy.

Stargate Studios' 2009 virtual backlot reel shows before-and-after shots in which green screen and compositing replace locations in ordinary TV dramas and comedies. It shows how much of a seemingly real show is computer generated.

A 1983 behind-the-scenes film about making the HBO 'Feature Presentation' starship logo sequence. It shows the handcrafted miniature city, motion-control cameras and practical effects.

RocketJump Film School argues that we only notice bad CG while great CG is invisible, so CG seems to be everywhere ruining movies when it often is not.

A video essay from Every Frame a Painting on animator Satoshi Kon and his editing style, which distorts and warps space and time. It draws on his four features and one TV series.

The first episode of Ian Hubert's Dynamo Dream series, a one-person sci-fi short made in Blender with a gritty futuristic city setting. It was made with help from friends and Patreon supporters over about three years.

A one-minute clip from James Burke's 1978 BBC series Connections in which he walks past a Saturn V rocket and a timed take-off happens behind him in a single shot, with no green screen.

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

Raw 500 fps footage from Camera E-8 on the launch tower for the Apollo 11 Saturn V liftoff, transferred in HD from the 16mm original. More than eight minutes of film covers about 30 seconds of real time.

ILM shows how The Mandalorian season one used a large curved LED wall to display interactive 3D environments in camera. The video covers the virtual production setup replacing location shoots.

Red Bull and the Dutch Drone Gods follow Max Verstappen's RB20 F1 car around Silverstone in a single FPV shot using a custom drone that accelerates to 300 km/h in about four seconds. The video also covers the year of development behind the drone.

A video essay on how the editors of Star Wars: A New Hope recut and rearranged the footage to rescue the film. It walks through specific changes that improved pacing and drama.

A five-minute CG sci-fi short film by Danil Krivoruchko, based on Peter Watts's novel Blindsight. It follows a revived crew member recalling a first contact mission, and took four years to make with artists worldwide.

Keiichi Matsuda's short concept film depicting a future where physical and virtual realities have merged and the city is saturated with media and advertising. It shows an augmented-reality-filled daily life as a provocative vision.

Wildlife videographer Dani Connor Wild talks with Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini about how her red squirrel recording became the desert mouse sound in Dune.

Honda's 2003 'Cog' commercial for the Accord, a two-minute Rube Goldberg chain reaction of car parts. It was filmed practically rather than with CGI.

MORE is Mark Osborne's Oscar-nominated stop-motion short about a joyless inventor in a drab, conformist society who yearns for his younger days. It won Best Short Film at Sundance in 1999.

Jeff Bell's Blender Conference 2018 talk on how Netflix's animated film Next Gen was produced using Blender. It covers the studio's pipeline and tooling.

Episode 2 of Corridor Digital's Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors, a short film made with AI-assisted animation techniques such as Stable Diffusion and DreamBooth. The story follows King Philip facing his twin brother and a barbarian king.

A short GoPro film of Uli Emanuele's wingsuit BASE jump through a roughly 2 meter wide cave opening, after three years of preparation. It follows his climb to the exit point and the flight itself, shot on a HERO2 camera.

carykh demonstrates a script that speeds up the silent parts of a video while leaving speech at normal speed, to condense lectures and similar footage. It later became the Jumpcutter tool.

The famous ladder fight scene from Jackie Chan's First Strike (Police Story 4), an action sequence that won the Hong Kong Film Award for best action choreography.

World Builder is a short film by Bruce Branit in which a man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.

The 4K, 60fps version of Big Buck Bunny, the Creative Commons-licensed animated short film from the Blender Foundation.

A Spike Jonze-directed Ikea commercial in which a discarded lamp is treated sympathetically, until a twist undercuts the sentiment. It is a short, well-known piece of advertising.

Shrek Retold is a crowdsourced, scene-for-scene remake of Shrek made by over 200 creators, each redoing a short section in their own style.