This is currently on hard rotation in my house.

I let out the biggest FUCK YES when I found out the first trailer for Furiosa just dropped. And immediately out came all the haters to say “it looks too CGI – I loved the practical effects of Fury Road”.

Ah yes, Fury Road, the film that didn’t have any CGI at all.

One thing I noticed while looking over the old trailers for FR was this shot from the Comic-Con trailer (released July 2014)

Compare this with the same shot from the final trailer (released December 2014)

Yep, no CGI at all.

Wait, shit, speaking about Tim Schafer, I should also throw some love at Double Fine’s PsychOdyssey which was released earlier this year! It’s an epic warts-and-all, 6 year long behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Psychonauts 2. The BTS stuff we usually get for most games is part of the promotion of the game, and the PR people would never allow anything bad to be shown. PsychOdyssey, on the other hand, shows a company at its best and at its worst and it’s absolutely insane to me that a company would allow itself to be so candid. By the end, I was sobbing. Sobbing.

Honestly, even if you’re not into gamedev, this is worth your time, just because I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again.

Or, if you don’t like Vox’s video essays, you can check out the article that inspired it.

tl;dw: companies cheap out on products because the cost of everything (labour, materials) has risen and as consumers we probably wouldn’t pay a fair market price.

Solo Solo Travel is one of my favourite YouTube channels to watch before bedtime. It’s a type of ASMR, I guess, like a soothing digestif to help me wind down for sleep – mostly-wordless videos of someone traveling around Japan on various forms of transport. The thing I love most about the videos are the captions the filmmaker has added to describe what they’re doing/seeing. This person is an underrated comedy genius. Perfect timing, perfect phrasing. My wife and I watched this one the other night, where the person is traveling around one of Japan’s islands on one of the most exclusive trains in the world (pretty niche content!) and belly-laughing our way through the entire thing.

This is a wonderful essay about Everything Everywhere All At Once’s portrayal of masculinity. I hadn’t consciously picked up on Waymond’s lack of a character arc, but it makes so much sense.

Also EEAAO (as no-one is calling it) was unexpectedly one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year. If you’ve been putting off watching it, please do check it out.

I was watching Thief the other night and couldn’t get over how James Caan (RIP to a real one) was only 41 in that film but looked so much older. This is a great explanation of why that is.

2,400 CG artists were all given the same basic animation and this is the 100 best renders. They’re all great, but some of them are jaw-dropping.

I have no doubt this will eventually get sherlocked because it’s such a great idea: use your video’s virtual background for actually useful stuff, like presenting slides, so that the audience don’t have to choose if they want to see the presenter or the slides.

While we wait for David Ehrlich’s video of his best films of 2019 (which are still the high water mark for this kind of thing - 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012), Sleepy Skunk has put together a pretty great mashup of some of the trailers from the year.

I’ve probably seen maybe a quarter of the films in this video, and of the one’s I’ve seen, not all of them were particularly great (I wasn’t, for example, a fan of Midsommar. In fact, I think Ari Aster might be a complete charlatan), but in the context of this mashup, they all looked amazing. Which made me think maybe Errol Morris was right when he said

I believe that there are no good movies, no good books, no good music compositions just great scenes, great passages, great moments.

(Except for Mad Max: Fury Road. That is a perfect movie.)