MCU Fan-Lady @themcutrashlady - Tumblr Blog

HAPPY 39TH BIRTHDAY, TOM HIDDLESTON! “I remember as a young actor being treated contemptuously by people I hoped would be great. And I thought, you’ve got this amazing life, you’ve probably got everything you want, why are you behaving like a cock? I knew that if I ever found myself in that position, I’d remember to treat people with equanimity and kindness.”

theavengers

“Big Game” Spot | Marvel Studios | Disney+

overthinkinglotr

The reason Lord of the Rings’ special effects have held up so well and still look so gorgeous- especially in the backgrounds and environments– is because they weren’t **trying** to be realistic.

LOTR’s special effects are stylized in a very careful, deliberate, and beautiful way.

In a behind-the-scenes video, the films’ visual effects supervisor explained:

We wanted the look of the film to have this storybook look to it. This is one of the things that Peter Jackson would impress upon the post-grader. He would literally sit there with watercolor (paintings) and say: THIS is what I want it to look like.”

Compare Alan Lee’s watercolor painting (its texture, its limited and unreal color palette, and the careful use of bright highlights in specific places that “frame” the characters/create an interesting composition)–

To the very similar look of the final film:

Because the goal wasn’t to create a perfectly realistic version of Moria. It was to create a version of Moria that looked like a watercolor painting.

And this “watercolor painting” effect isn’t just epic fantasy moments either. Even many of the non-fantastical backgrounds in Lord of the Rings don’t look “fully realistic.” They look very high-contrast and painterly, with dramatic unreal shafts of light bursting through the clouds:

And again, this is by design:

“We wanted to nudge it sideways from reality. New Zealand is a lovely country but it’s still New Zealand, still a real country….and I wanted to nudge it slightly to Middle Earth, which is an ancient world….a world of myth, and legend.”

And the watercolor storybook-inspired colors and lighting isn’t just in the environments either. It was also used in very basic dialogue scenes, to make you really feel like the entire movie was taking place in a fantasy world:

Because the stylization in Lord of the Rings is so consistent– but not to so exaggerated that it gets distracting— it creates this beautifully unreal and dreamlike tone that is completely unlike any other movies I’ve ever seen.They really do end up feeling like “watercolor fairy tales” come to life.

christen-kimbell

This is solid.

I’d also add that yes, they pushed the look of the whole film into “unreal” territory, but they also were very selective and deliberate about where they used CG versus practical effects. Or practical everything, really. In every single possible instance that something could be shot using real elements, it is. The costumes and sets and props are nearly all real, the forced perspective shots are real. As often as possible hobbit actors are just on their knees or the other actors are on appleboxes or replaced with larger/smaller actors from behind instead of being digitally shrunken down or up. The sets were largely built by hand or on location, and the only greenscreen factors in once you get to the far distance. They built the frickin chainmail by hand, even.

Which is the OTHER reason that it holds up. Your eye knowns when you’re looking at a real thing, even if your brain can’t quite articulate why.

Which is why an image like this:

Or this:

Which are all effects shots! Feel more real than this:

Or this:

(This is honestly the main reason why I had trouble watching MCU films for so many years. It just don’t look real, guys. I can’t think of anything but how you’re shooting this in a studio somewhere.)

Marvel and LotR are using the same tools, including set extensions, CG, color grading, all of it, but Marvel tends to use CG and greenscreen on almost every element. LotR is real in every possible way that it can be.

Marvel films are stylized and made to look unreal just like LotR - but they also largely ARE unreal. LotR is mostly real but faked, and there’s a big difference between those things.

Like this image:

The boats, the water, the cliffs, the actors are real. And the statues were real too - just small models, probably smaller than a person, shot separately in similar lighting, then comped onto this shot to look thousands of times larger than they actually are. Then the whole image is graded and blended together so that the colors are seamless, the cliff edges are extended so that you can’t see the edges, add a little digital mist in the far background there to really sell it - and boom. Feels real.

Your gut knows when something is real - which is why it holds up when you rewatch it. No matter how advanced CG gets, and it’s pretty damn advanced at this point, it’s still little pixels on a screen. But real chainmail on a real person standing in a real forest with a little CG far in the back? Two actors of roughly the same size looking like they’re two different sizes just because of where they’re sitting? It feels real because it mostly is.

It’s not just color grading and blending, it’s knowing when and where and how to use things, and then actually taking the time (and the expense) to do it right even when most people won’t be able to tell - or, in a lot of cases, even care.

(CG and greenscreen is absolutely a practical solution in the sense that scheduling issues are hell the way that Marvel shoots things. LotR had the luxury of shooting for a year straight, Marvel has to piecemeal and they don’t always know who they’ll have when, so it’s cheaper to build sets and even costumes in post than it is to build them in preproduction. But it won’t hold up as well as the 20 year old LotR films have over time.)

overthinkinglotr

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is an amazing addition!!!

Yeah the reason LOTR’s visuals have held up so well is the combination of careful stylization AND using practical effects whenever possible.

As a result, the things that look unrealistic, look unrealistic on purpose. It’s wasn’t “the visual effects artists weren’t given enough time to finish the shots” (which was actually the case for Black Panther) it was “they were deliberately and carefully trying to get that very specific storybook-illustration effect.”

The end result is that the LOTR movies feel….. “hand-drawn?” Yes all CGI effects are ultimately created by hand, by skilled artists– but in LOTR you really feel the way everything was carefully hand-painted and hand-sculpted. The unrealistic elements of LOTR just feel like the artists are choosing to show their brushstrokes.

captainperth

disruptedoriginal

Best reaction to a zombie.

bilt2tumble

Excuse me?… Dystopian Hellscape, here? I am NOT dealing with your dead ass right now! Get. Back. In your. Hole.

kreugan

Sketch of the picture my cat destroyed, lmfao. Too lazy to work on it more (again) :|

Just a combination of two Loki shots from the trailer, because I thought they were badass and wanted to sketch them! plus I am sure you do not have enough creepy Loki on your dash already

aarontaylorjohnson

Wall-e (2008) dir. Andrew Stanton

gnatsattack

I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.

berlynn-wohl

I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”

I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:

transformativeworks

citrus

naknaknakadile

@vergess

vergess

Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.

Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.

YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments

Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.

AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.

Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins

BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.

DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.

Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.

Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements

Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements

Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.

WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”

Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.

Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.

Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.

Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”

Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.

Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.

Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.

Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.

Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.

Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.

Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.

ryttu3k

‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.

callmearcturus

Drabble: A fic that is EXACTLY 100 words. Often used as a creative exercise in telling a story in a very small constraint.

Ficlet: Fic that clocks in somewhere between 100 to 2.5K words.

Crossover: A piece of media in which two or more source materials are treated as the same universe. Characters from Fandom A can meet characters from Fandom B. (The Doctor Goes To Hogwarts And Meet Harry Potter!)

Fusion: A fusion takes the characters of one source material and *surplants* them into another universe entirely. Characters from Fandom A cannot meet characters from Fandom B. (Dave Strider is part of an Inception team!)

TPTB: The Powers That Be. Almost always redundantly referred to as “the TPTB.” A collective term for showrunners, actors, producers, writers, et al, anyone who is part of the team that creates the source material.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary. A shorthand way of saying “this is how I see it/have experienced it though I realize others might have a different perspective.”

Tinhatting: Often used in RPF fandoms, the situation where some fans are convinced two celebrities are in a relationship but its being kept a secret.

sadbhyl

I hadn’t realized many of these words had gone out of use. We need to teach the next generation…

elizabetholsens

Believe it or not, it’s kinda hard to find someone with shared life experience.

#it really is a shame scarlett johansson is such an asshole

ch4oswalking

•like or reblog if you save

returnofahsoka

the only three truly iconic scenes that matter in superhero cinema history:

1. the no man’s land scene in wonder woman

2. the leap of faith scene in into the spiderverse

3. the bridge fight scene in thor ragnarok

grimauxiliatrixofficial

4. the part where T'challa walks out of that flaming wreckage and calls out “N'JADAKA!” and Erik replies “wassup?”

eloise-t-g

5. when carol blasts her abuser into the side of a cliff before standing over him and saying that she has “nothing to prove to [him]”

themcutrashlady

6. When Bearded!Cap emerges from the shadows.

greensea-iza

Hercules (1997) Zero to Hero

chrisevansupdates

Avengers: Endgame Commentary Track: Stephen McFeely: This is some of the best acting Evans has done. Joe Russo: He’s very subtle and internal in this scene. Christopher Markus: He’s feeling the exact opposite of what he’s saying.