The idea of a blockbuster movie containing 2,700 cuts, isn’t always the most thrilling notion. Many summer spectacles are cut to the point of incomprehension, with the action on screen reduced to a blur of moving parts, but with little sense of impact or geography. Not so with “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and this quick new video explains why.
Vahsi Visuals uses a scene from the film along with an interview with cinematographer John Seale to quickly show how the viewer knows everything that’s going on in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and the solution is simple: keep the action in the center of the frame. By using “Eye Trace” and “Crosshair Framing,” Miller instructed everyone working on the movie to keep the action always in the middle of the anamorphic frame. The result? Your eye always knows where to fix itself. And all you have to do for a study in contrasts is take a look at something like “Avengers: Age Of Ultron” in which the camera and action seems to never stop moving, making the eye jump all over the place to keep track of what’s going on. And it makes the difference between being excited and exhausted watching a big blockbuster film.
After you watch the video below, check out a great gallery of images from FXGuide highlighting the VFX work on the movie, which despite the emphasis on practical effects, there was still quite a bit of. “I’ve been joking recently about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt driven film – which it is. But also how there’s so little CGI in the film. The reality is that there’s 2000 VFX shots in the film,” Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Jackson said. “A very large number of those shots are very simple clean-ups and fixes and wire removals and painting out tire tracks from previous shots, but there are a big number of big VFX shots as well.”
READ MORE: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Soundtrack Details Arrive, Listen To The First Pulse-Pounding Track
“Mad Max: Fury Road” is now playing. How many times have you seen it?