[Cinementary] “Is this a real video?” Michael Bay's new weapon

   There is a saying 'trust and see ○○'.

Before the corona virus, there will be a director who believes in and sees the movie even for individual Koreans who watched the movie 4.37 times per person per year.

In my case, it would be Bong Joon-ho, Wong Kar-wai, Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson.

Who is your 'belief'?

 Michael Bay is also a director trusted by many audiences around the world.

Audiences at least have faith that Michael Bay won't bore them.

Not many people would say that Michael Bay's films, which directed the "The Rock", "Armageddon" and "Transformers" series, are boring, if not good ones.

As a director, he is the fifth-largest grossing director of all time, and second in Hollywood alone.

Considering that first place is the fearsome Steven Spielberg and third and fourth place are the Russo brothers, who directed the Avengers series, you can see how great Michael Bay's box office was. 

Michael Bay is also known as the 'Action Movie Master' or 'The King of Destruction'.

To that extent, large-scale explosion scenes appear as signature scenes in his films, and Michael Bay says that most of these are done with actual filming.

There are even rumors that the actors run for survival because they don't tell the actors exactly when and where the bomb is going to go off.

Director Michael Bay and director Christopher Nolan are representative Hollywood directors who prefer to shoot in real life instead of CG.

Director Christopher Nolan flew three real Spitfire fighters into the sky in “Dunkirk,” and filmed them while flying with the big IMAX camera on the real fighter, maximizing the sense of presence and sense of presence.

Director Michael Bay also prefers live-action shooting, except for Transformers robots, which can only be implemented in CG.

It feels different.

For similar reasons, some directors shoot with film cameras rather than digital cameras.

(I mentioned in my last column that Paul Thomas Anderson's "Licorice Pizza" was filmed)

  Michael Bay is back with a new movie, "Ambulance," five years after "Transformers: The Last Knight" (2017).

(I filmed the Netflix-only movie “6 Underground” in 2019. This movie is also worth seeing for Florence lovers. A director who can shoot such a huge-dangerous action among Florence’s World Heritage Sites is Michael Bay)

Brothers Jake Gyllenhaal and Ahiya Abdul-Martin II got caught robbing a bank, and somehow Asa Gonzalens hijacked the ambulance that was on board as a paramedic and ran away from downtown Los Angeles to a waste. This is the content of the movie.

(You know? The 'theorem' is that the content is not so important in Michael Bay's films) 

But in this movie, I can't usually see images in other movies that catch my eye.

To be precise, these are scenes that raise the curiosity of “how did you film that?”

Obviously it's a live-action movie, and it doesn't feel like CG on the screen, but the camera scans the skyscraper vertically, then makes a sharp turn on the roof and then plunges vertically.

It's like the angle and camera walking that the cinematographer would have taken while riding a roller coaster.

Not only that.

It passes through posts at incredible speed, then turns into a sharp turn and swerves into an oncoming vehicle.

There is no other dolly in the world that can move like this with camera gear.

The camera even passes under the underside of a police car that gets caught on a dirt chin while chasing a fugitive car and jumps slightly.

Unless you toss a small camera under a vehicle, no cameraman would be able to shoot such a dangerous scene.

  Michael Bay's hansoo (手), who provided such visual pleasure in "Ambulance", is the 'FPV drone'.

'FPV' stands for 'First Person View' and refers to a first-person view drone.

Existing drones fly clockwise with the naked eye or control while looking at a monitor.

And although the camera lens could be moved up and down slightly, the aircraft itself could not be rotated 90 degrees to fall vertically or ascend vertically.

FPV drones are steered by a pilot wearing goggles while watching the video being captured by a camera attached to the drone.

Imagine playing a VR game.

FPV drones do not have a hover function.

Therefore, you can manually move the drone freely and freely. 

The maximum speed of FPV drones exceeds 150 km/h and can go up to 4 km in height, said Im Jong-deok, one of the first-generation competent FPV drones in Korea.

(However, there are height restrictions according to related laws) Mr. Lim, with 9 years of experience in FPV drones, does not buy finished products from DJI, the world's best drone manufacturer, but separately purchases parts to make and fly a homemade FPV drone.

I went to see Mr. Lim and reproduced it similar to the video in the movie “Ambulance”.

The drone used for flight is a 5-inch drone weighing about 650g, with the exterior of the GoPro 10 removed to reduce the weight and only the body is loaded.  

(Video editing Hyeon-gi Jang, FPV drone control/screen provided by Jong-deok Lim) As

you can see from the video, Mr. Lim's FPV drone flew freely in the air at an astonishingly high speed, and easily passed between narrow obstacles.

The 555m Lotte World Tower dive video that Mr. Lim had filmed before (the FPV drone technology that ascends and descends vertically) made me feel dizzy just looking at it.

As long as the relatively inexpensive FPV drone can be used in the right place in the movie, there seems to be no shortage of other cinematic experiences.

About 30 drones dropped into the pond and 20 GoPro cameras that were broken, Mr. Lim said the reason why he switched to FPV drone control. 

 “I was filming a video with a normal drone and FPV came out, so I tried it once, and the charm is completely different.

If the drone video I took in the past just felt like he went up to the sky, it would feel like he was riding a really dynamic Blue Dragon train.

It was very difficult at first because I couldn't control it, but as I did it, it was thrilling and my heart felt like it was going to explode.

The feeling of flying like a bird or being able to bungee jump anywhere?

I do it because of that feeling.”

Film art has overcome the limitations of human visual experience.

No, it might be more appropriate to say that we have broadened the scope of human visual experience by leading new imaging technologies.

The silent black-and-white film at the beginning of the movie evolved into a sound color film, the subtitles were displayed on the video with superimpose, and the editing including various screen transition effects such as wipe out surpassed the time limit, and in the middle of the 20th century, We developed the CinemaScope aspect ratio to provide an image with an angle of view close to the human field of view, and introduced equipment such as Dali, a crane, and a Steadicam to experience the movement of a dynamic and fluid viewpoint.

In addition, in the 21st century, 3D movies such as “Avatar” were introduced and all scenes of human imagination were realized in real images with various VFX, while camera walking as if seeing from the perspective of a flying bird was possible. 

However, recently, with the development of CG, large-scale mob scenes, explosions, and cool backgrounds have come to a point where it is rather rare to shoot live-action scenes.

FPV drones enable CG-like camera work even in actual shooting.

According to Mr. Lim Jong-deok, who was in charge of shooting drones in entertainment shows such as “Sisyphus” and “Law of the Jungle,” FPV drones are just beginning to be used in earnest not only in Korea but also in Hollywood movies.

Recently, as high-definition DSLR cameras can be mounted on FPV drones, it is possible to realize even 8K, Mr. Im said.

  There are too many movies that sometimes rely on such 'visual experiences' while seeing computer graphics realizing hard-to-shoot spaces such as heaven and hell, the future world, and outer space. There were times when I wondered if I was going to lose.

Sometimes constraints and limitations create imagination, and sometimes they develop by overcoming those limitations in other ways, but I wonder if they are trying to solve everything with CG.

FPV drones are expected to enable new visual experiences provided by actual shooting rather than CG at a relatively low cost.

However, I hope that there will be more films that pay attention to the essence of the film while using it only in the right place.

It should be noted that some of the drone scenes I wrote in "Ambulance" felt more like a show than a necessity.

Science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is like magic," but too much magic can wear out on its own and make you turn away from reality or seem trivial.

Come to think of it, there doesn't seem to be any director on my list of 'trustworthy directors' who made CG a key component of their films.