What’s your favorite movie that uses lots of practical effects?

The Thing has to be up there if the criteria is just an overall great movie heavy on practical effects.

Do you have a favorite practical effect of all time?

The “digital” wireframe view of the city from Snake’s glider in ‘Escape From New York’.

It was accomplished with miniature buildings which is rad.

Repeat from the other thread:

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

Something that is popular (or sells well) despite having no apparent appeal to anyone the commenter can think of.

I don’t enjoy Bloodborne. I think I can figure out why there is a lot of hype for it.

It seems like all of the answers are “I personally didn’t enjoy this game therefore I can not conceive of anyone else enjoying it.”

I find that interesting.

COD4 was the first Modern Warfare game.

World At War wasn’t numbered.

I’m not saying Clancy stuff is always completely grounded, especially the longer it goes on, but I’m trying to use the Clancy comparison to capture the essence of an idea. COD4 while fictional, and with moments that aren’t wholly realistic if you really hold them up to the most intense scrutiny has the overall texture of realism. MW2&3 and Black Ops games all exist as throwing bigger and more insane setpieces out with no regard to any realism.

It’s a the last COD with a real gutpunch moment that says anything about anything. The nuke going off it a moment of realizing you aren’t a special main character and you die like everyone else, and that maybe war isn’t just a big fun adventure. All the shock moments have been trying to top it are so dramatic that they don’t have the same effect that the nuke did.

While (classic, I’m not counting stuff ghostwritten under his brand) Clancy characters have hyper competence, it’s to be expected given that they are turbo ultra elite soldiers or spies. Their motivations and ability to act doesn’t reach the point of self parody.

For a COD4 example: Nikolai, the Russian that the player rescues early on in the game. He is a mole inside the Russian antagonist faction feeding information to the SAS. He got found out. He’s being kept at a house with a handful of regular soldiers watching him. When you rescue you him he is calm or at least puts up a calm front and thanks you. That’s a pretty believable guy who could have been a real person who is doing something realistic and dangerous.

In MW2 that character can materialize with apparently infinite types of military aviation hardware, and he is also a pilot able and willing to do insane maneuvers. And he is personal friends with Captain price rather than just being an SAS asset. And he is in touch with a friendly militia group in the middle of Europe.

There is a distinct jump from COD4 to MW2, where it goes from Tom Clancy to Michael Bay.

MW2 is still fun, but it exists in an entirely separate tonal reality than COD4.

I’m replaying COD4 and taking notes at the moment for a review I’ve wanted to do for years, coincidentally.

Looking at just COD4 without being influenced by knowledge of the sequels, it’s got a decent story and if you look at the edges you can find contemplations of cycles of violence, and while not to the point of being anti-war it does emphasize the waste of it.

The characters are Tom Clancy levels of larger than life, which is significantly more restrained than what came later. Individually the story beats and scenarios have at least a texture of realism, often loosely based in something real and then strung together in a story that isn’t convoluted.

I could see it being a good movie with the right handling. It probably wouldn’t be.

The closest that ever happened to me was an interview that ended up turning into a two hour plus long tour of the facility with my interviewer pointing out a lot of little details in more of a first day orientation than interview kind of vibe.

The job seemed like a lock until I got a generic rejection email. I didn’t reach out, but the same day that I got the email I also got a text from my interviewer apologizing to me because he had recommended me for the job and thought I was a good fit, but management above him had an internal person that they’d already planned to give the job to.

Normally I’d be skeptical of a story like that, but given that he’d really gone above and beyond the scheduled amount of time for the interview and that he sent the text unprompted, I really do believe there were shenanigans afoot above him.

Do those detectors even work against LIDAR? A lot of police use that now anyway.

I travel a lot throughout the US, and sometimes the changes are obvious while other times I can be driving and not entirely sure which state I’m in just from looking around on the highway. As others have said while driving on a major highway a clue can be a huge store full of items like fireworks just across the border from a state they aren’t legal in.

The geography and environment can certainly be a big clue. Driving through West Virginia there are tunnels through large mountains, Pennsylvania around the Pittsburgh area has steel bridges, Louisiana has highways raised up from the muck, there are mountains that the highways wind around in North Carolina that give way to pretty flat highways as you go south. Kentucky has long depressing stretches of straight boring road. I’ve noticed even traffic patterns can say things as Georgia highways always have a higher number of semitrucks than anywhere else for example. Nevada is flat and open but as you go into Utah it gets windy and rocky, and cell signal usually goes out for a bit.

Staying in different states I notice alcohol sales rules are different. In some states you basically don’t see any alcohol outside of designated stores for it including no beer at gas stations, in other states you see beer for sale widely but hard liquor only at designated stores, and in other states hard liquor at WalMart is perfectly normal.

I’ve found on the whole that people are actually nicer than average in Utah. While coffee shops exist I have noticed in offices there is often a lack of a central coffee machine.

Louisiana everyone I deal with from there has a tendency to be much more relaxed than average about showing up exactly on time for things. Louisiana itself also has a cultural divide between the northern part which is more generic US south, and the southern part which has the more creole and tourist heavy atmosphere.

I honestly don’t mind Ohio. I know it’s an internet meme to hate it, but aside from their obsession with dumping chili on unrelated foods it’s decent. Has a strong blue collar streak kind of like Pennsylvania culture.

Texas has a big cowboy influence and they don’t let you not know it. The roads tend to big big and wide which is great, except the freeways especially in Dallas can become confusing multilevel nightmares.

California has lots of Spanish signs, lots of first generation Mexicans who bring culture with them. Lots of for example Mexican super markets. Californians have a culture of going FAST on freeways if there isn’t gridlock traffic, in some cases going 100mph just barely keeps you up with traffic.

The red dots used on almost all of the Delta Force guns.

That style of red dot didn’t exist until a few years later. At the time it should have been the equally distinct looking “long tube” Aimpoints.

Again, I know it is super nitpicky, but they are so prominent and visible especially with those red lenses throughout the movie. They are only a few years wrong, but it’s like if a WW1 movie was full of Thompson submachineguns.

The BDH movie otherwise does a lot of great prop and costume details. Not flawless, but the other inaccuracies are much less noticeable.

I mildly enjoyed that the message of Jurassic World was “This park (movie) is a soulless project that shouldn’t exist and only props itself up on increasingly mindless spectacle.”

My thoughts exactly before I gave up on it. It felt like all the good writers on the team had shuffled over to write the dynasty stuff, and the difference in quality when the show bounced between the dynasty and foundation stories was something of a whiplash.

This is going to sound super nitpicky but even the first time I saw it, the modern body, ahistorical Aimpoints seen throughout the entire movie bothered me. It’s only because they are so unavoidably prominent and because the rest of the movie’s props are so well done that they stick out.

No, though it seems like both sides have lost the appetite and ability to execute meaningful large scale maneuvers. I have wondered if it might end up with some kind of cease-fire agreement that leads to a simmering militarized border while the war is still technically ongoing, similar to North and South Korea.

I would prime usually with a black undercoat and then do my base colors, then I’d do detail work and finish with washes, dry brushing, and mixed color highlights.

This is the traditional way for sure. I also usually prime with black as well even. What you think of as normal though is surprisingly lost on a large number of newer hobbiests who only started recently. They know some bits and pieces but a lot of the painting flow has changed, especially for people more interested in finishing huge armies fast rather than actually having interest in the painting for its own sake.

didn’t want to get crap for fielding unpainted sets

So nowadays part of it in official tournaments people have to have minis painted to a minimum standard to enter. Which means a lot of people painting minis to just reach that minimum and no further.

I didn’t realize there was another way to go lol.

It’s been a major shift in the last I’d say ten years. Airbrushes for painters became really common, helped along by YouTubers making tutorials. Then the contrast paints came out from GW with a heavy marketing push; all of the new GW official painting tutorials on YouTube make heavy use of contrast paints. They were successful and soon after the other paint brands all started selling their own versions.

you’re MUCH faster than I was

Thanks, and yes it depends how fast I want to go, there is certainly a quality/speed sliding scale but I try to work efficiently with batch painting and assembly line painting for the basics to get things done as fast as I can.

I think I have some (really) old 40k minis I saved somewhere, if I run into them in my garage I’ll snap some pictures and reply in another post.

Yes and I run the !warhammer40k@lemmy.world cimmunity which always needs new posts.

If you want to get back into the scene with limited minis, skirmish games are popular these days. GW offers Kill Team, and other rules like OnePageRules have put out their own free skirmish rules meant to use 40k minis.

And uh, ignore the Aliens minis and GCPD. Those were self admittedly a rush job.

Here’s some better examples of what techniques I try to apply look like.

Contrast paints are a new formulation that’s gotten popular in the market. They are like a glaze with wash properties. The idea is that you can simply paint them over a white priming and you’re done, all the shading is done for you.

I find the average results I see in real life to be underwhelming. The colors can often be patchy especially if applied to large flat surfaces like for example Space Marine armor. What is more is that contrast paints only contain one shade of pigment and the darker or lighter portions on the model just relate to pigment concentration. I prefer to shade and highlight by adding different colors to the base paint. I find that it offers more control and greater range over the colors. The control relates also to how highlights are placed. Many people either skip them entirely by relying on contrast paint, or they copy the modern GW Box Art style which highlights pretty much every single hard edge rather than trying to give the impression of a light source. I like to give the impression of a light source.

For traditional touches, blacklining is a practice of tracing a thinned black or near black paint on the borders of different objects of the mini to help give them definition. This can be especially important when painting in bright and saturated color schemes to keep them from assaulting the eyes with too much brightness.

I underpaint, which is related to mixing for shading but means to paint certain areas a particular color in preparation for another color to support it. For example Caucasian skin is usually a red-brown or purple before the first actual flesh tones go on.

Sometimes it’s just things I consider absolutely basic like basing a mini at all in any way. All I my minis are based with texture in some way (any you see in my history that don’t have basing texture were specifically requested such by other people) and have at least basic drybrushing or flock. A lot of people just paint the bases now, or simply just leave them bare.

I also like putting segmented colors, camo patterns, or other simple freehanding on minis. This draws a lot of attention in real life as many people are so used to just contrast painting that they never learn fine control and as such never even attempt freehand.

I do have a few paper copies of older painting books I reference along with various PDF scans. All the the exact paint recommendations are out of date, but the general concepts are still valid.

I partially blame army bloat and the FOMO treadmill in Warhammer 40k for creating unmanageably large armies that cause people to treat the painting as a chore to be finished with rather than something to enjoy and get better at.

Take it from somebody who flies a lot:

Theorycrafting about the best way to load/unload a plane is pointless.

Bring a bottle of water on your plane. Bring some headphones and make sure they are charged. Make sure if halfway through the flight you even feel a little like you need to pee, do it in flight.

When the plane lands keep your headphones popped in, and chill out until you’re off the plane.