The reviews were negative because people had very high expectation for this movie (as it marked 100 years of Disney) and they got "just another animated musical". I watched with my wife and we enjoyed it, but we had zero expectations coming in.
Thanks! From reading those older comments, the actual process is much more chaotic and iterative, closer to how Hayao Miyazaki creates his movies. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275329
> Stereo 3D accounts for a left eye and right eye to create depth.
There is a tiny-but-visible difference in composition between "left" and "right" scenes. And now I wonder: what is used for the 2d version?
Is there a "center" version that gets used for 2d? And the 3d version is based on that but offset to the left and right? Or is the 2d version either a "left" or a "right" version? Or something else?
For most studios, the film is visualized and composed normally, then the "flat" version is used as the left eye of the stereo version. An additional set of render passes is made for the right eye using an offset camera (sometimes, if you're creative with compositing you may not need to do an actual render). This process also allows a stereo version to be created relatively cheaply if the client decides they want to do one halfway through production...
Source: Worked on several stereo animated and live action features and designed stereo compositing versioning process.
It smoothly scrolls from one stop to another, ignoring how much you scroll by and instead completing full transitions for you? Because for me it scrolls to "wherever I happen to stop stops scrolling", meaning the experience is complete jank because it will happily stop halfway through a transition and nothing you get presented is an even remotely pleasant experience.
Eww. No, it behaves as you described. Which is exactly what I want. I utterly despise any website that hijacks my scroll wheel to “complete full transitions”. YMMV.
This reminds me of a limited time exhibition at the Mirakan museum in Tokyo back in 2017 (I believe it toured). It was focusing on Disney animations and how they wereade, in particular Moana as that was the most recent release at that point. The focus on every single part of the process was so impressive, plus seeing items used in the creation of the films was fantastic. It sticks in my mind to this day.
There's a bit of an industry adage here: Every improvement and enhancement in compute performance enables an equal and opposite advancement in software capabilities and complexity, resulting in render times staying the same. While a fairly broad and generalized statement, it is reasonably true for a lot of aspects of our industry.
For fun I asked Kagi "why haven't render times gotten better over the years?". The results were pretty spot on:
"""
Increased Complexity: As software evolves, the complexity of scenes and effects increases. Features like advanced lighting, volumetrics, and motion blur require more computational power, often offsetting any improvements in hardware.
Higher Quality Expectations: The demand for higher resolution and quality (e.g., 4K and beyond) leads to longer render times. Users expect more detailed visuals, which inherently take longer to produce.
Hardware Limitations: While hardware has improved, the efficiency gains may not be enough to keep up with the growing demands of modern rendering techniques. For example, ray tracing can dramatically increase render times, and not all hardware can handle it efficiently.
Software Optimization: Not all software updates prioritize optimization. Some updates may introduce new features that, while enhancing capabilities, also increase render times.
Rendering Techniques: Different rendering engines and techniques (e.g., CPU vs. GPU rendering) have varying performance characteristics. Depending on the setup, some may not see substantial improvements.
Overall, while there are advancements in technology, the balance between quality, complexity, and hardware capabilities often results in stagnant or even increased render times.
Because value creation is bottlenecked by human? The value of technology contained within a product is at most zero, so better tech only ties investment rate of return ever tighter to human factors, contrary to naive assumption that adding more tech should progressively dehumanize processes for exponentially more rewarding returns.
The technical process and its costs are amazing. These films are crowd-pleasers, and nothing in them should be polemic or connected to the real world, in order to recoup the millions. But that means that anybody who wants to bring anything polemic to art will never have the same level of resources. Just as well. But I would like to see something like this website but for a low budget short.
I should think the bar has been lowered for film-making of all kinds due to technology. YouTube has hosted an increasing number of "fan films". I guess I'm just a little surprised to have not come across more "garage films" that are less derivative.
This is a great overview and something I could have benefited from when starting as a sysadmin in the sector!
Edit: Looks like the reviews for Wish are terrible. Maybe this intro to the industry was the best thing to come out of the film!