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New D&D Movie Announced


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dragonslayer is neat film. Sure the special-effects aren't modern, but the acting is good. It's one of the few fantasy films I can stomach.
 
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ssampier said:
dragonslayer is neat film. Sure the special-effects aren't modern, but the acting is good. It's one of the few fantasy films I can stomach.
I think the effects hold up rather well. The dragon, IIRC, is pretty well done. Some matte shots might seem a bit rough (because they didn't have CGI then), but the stop-action and puppetry are fantastic. I really like this movie. It's much better than any recent dragon-based movie has been.
 

To get slightly back on topic about the proposed movie, I dont think a DnD movie or TV show is necessarily doomed to failure. I mean DnD is based on classic fantasy tropes-with a good story and a minimum of corporate interference it could work. Two biggg ifs, those.

Look back to the 90's and computer rpgs. After years of terrible games,TSR got Black Isle and Bioware to do games. The result was the Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale series, some of the better DnD games if not rpgs ever made. And they were set in the Forgotten Realms, a setting that many think of as a munchkin paradise, and the devs took the best parts of the setting and gave the player an epic tour of the Realms.

What I mean is, in the hands of a good team the material could work.Using an established setting and characters (like Raitslin or FR) with a fanbase instead of doing a generic movie like the first debacle is a good start.

Anyway, Im just hoping the first DnD movie was a result of the corporate leagcy of TSR's final years. Hopefully now in the wake of LOTR, studios will see that some modicum of quality is needed and a movie just can't have graphics and a recognizable logo.

I hope, but am not really holding my breath.
 
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ssampier said:
dragonslayer is neat film. Sure the special-effects aren't modern, but the acting is good. It's one of the few fantasy films I can stomach.

Best Dragon Movie Ever. Hands down. Get the DVD. The film is restored and as a result you don't get the deterioration that makes the special effects stand out like a sore thumb. Also, in letterbox format you actually get to see the scenery in the film which really changes the impact of the film (its frikkin gorgeous)

Top fantasy movies IMO (excluding Myth and Legend movies and modern stuff like Highlander and just sort of weird or quasi period stuff like Time Bandits):

1: Lord of the Rings (I count it as one movie... probably will never be unseated in my lifetime)
2: Dragonslayer
3: The Princess Bride
4: Conan the Barbarian
5: Willow
6: Ladyhawke (may tie with willow)

It will be interesting to see The Hobbit and The Last Unicorn.

Every time I see the end of Brotherhood of the Wolf I keep thinking "Wow, THIS GUY should play Drizzt."

Though I still need to see The Gamers.

Aaron.
 

Alcareru said:
Look back to the 90's and computer rpgs. After years of terrible games,TSR got Black Isle and Bioware to do games.
Huh? The SSI games weren't all perfect, but many of the early 90s ones are considered classics. Eye of the Beholder is literally the one thing that got me into tabletop RPGs that many years ago.
 

Yeah Dragonslayer rocks. Fatally hampered by an incredibly annoying lead, but the girl is awful dishy and the dragon is AWESOME.

It's an interesting story, the effects work in that movie. Dragonslayer was one of ILM's first non-Lucas projects, I believe, and they built the dragon effect around a technique that was called "Go-Motion" (in contrast to "Stop-Motion", natch) -- in which tiny stepping motors pulled the model an infinitesimal amount WHILE each frame was exposed, thus creating an image ever so slightly blurred and eliminating the "jerky" look stop-motion always has. The scenes of the dragon crawling up from its lair are eerie in the realism they portray.

Go-Motion was, I think, used with the initial version of the Rancor in Jedi, and also the bicycling kids in E.T. but by that time CGI-based effects were taking over, and they were so much cheaper and quicker to do that Go-Motion pretty much fell by the wayside.

This is all based on my now-twenty-years-old-and-never-very-reliable-in-the-first-place memory, so I've probably got some dates and stuff mixed up, but I remember the stuff on Go-Motion in Fangoria or whereever it was we got this sort of information before the Internet...
 

barsoomcore said:
Yeah Dragonslayer rocks...the dragon is AWESOME.
True dat.

barsoomcore said:
It's an interesting story, the effects work in that movie. Dragonslayer was one of ILM's first non-Lucas projects, I believe, and they built the dragon effect around a technique that was called "Go-Motion" (in contrast to "Stop-Motion", natch) -- in which tiny stepping motors pulled the model an infinitesimal amount WHILE each frame was exposed, thus creating an image ever so slightly blurred and eliminating the "jerky" look stop-motion always has. The scenes of the dragon crawling up from its lair are eerie in the realism they portray.

Go-Motion was, I think, used with the initial version of the Rancor in Jedi, and also the bicycling kids in E.T. but by that time CGI-based effects were taking over, and they were so much cheaper and quicker to do that Go-Motion pretty much fell by the wayside.
You're pretty close, except for the CG effects. Go-motion was first developed in 1979 by Phil Tippett for the tauntauns in The Empire Strikes Back but CG creatures weren't done until 1993's Jurassic Park, unless you count the water tentacle in 1989's The Abyss. The first morphing effects were seen in Willow in 1987, but creatures were all guys-in-suits, composited puppets or stop/go-motion until Jurassic's dinos.
 
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The Black Cauldron (85, if memory serves) was one of the first films to use CG.

And Young Sherlock Holmes (year?) used CGI for the knight that jumps out of the stained glass window.

I'm interested in a sequel to D&D.
ANY heroic adventure movie is worth seeing to me, especially in the fantasy genre.
 

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