The movie Sir Peter should be making
Sir Peter did this for the Australian War Memorial. Can you tell the difference between the "real" footage and the CGI? I work in the business and can only differentiate when I see an S.E.5 or an Albatros going down on fire out of control or having its wing blown off. That's *fRickin' GOOD!"
Can you imagine a serious (i.e., factual) WW1 movie with this kind of ability in it?
Amazing dogfights! It is clearly a work made by people who know much about WW1 aircrafts... thank you Tom for sharing it, and yes, we can only hope (and imagin how good it would be!) that Sir Peter Jackson produces one great movie about WW1 aerial battles
Not my area of interest (i.e. "Flyboys, etc.), but this is top-notch stuff. The 'merge' and ensuing 'furball' was one of the best parts. Thanks for sharing.
Flyboys was a bad movie with a poor script and a director who is a well-known i***t, plus a producer who didn't know how WW1 airplanes fly and wanted them darting around like X-wings. You didn't dislike a WW1 movie, you disliked a bad movie.
Oh just great. Now that I watched this I need to head over to the Wingnut Wings site and purchase a bunch of WW1 kits and spend all sorts of money I dont really have. Could watch that over and over!
I like it! Is this an Imax movie? It appears to be a circular screen.
Probably - it's shown at the Australian War Memorial.
Amazing work, you can tell it's been done with someone with a love of his subject, not making money.
Almost worth a plane ticket to Australia the film is so well done. Right up there with the dogfight ballet sequence in "The Battle of Britain", before the days of CGI. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Nice! My father would've love it. There was a movie called The Blue Max. no CGI in that one.
Sorry but, it ain't the Battle of Britain. The best aviation movie ever with real Spitfires and Hurricanes. One can niggle the 109s and a few other scenes but, the aircraft where made of metal and not digital electrons floating about.
Sir Peter, has done a lot for the modeling community and WWI buffs with his recreations of WWI aircraft when it comes to modeling and preserving canvas. But, once you have been to a drive-in movie and watched the images of "The Battle of Britain" on a five story screen with a life sized Spit in the clouds... everything else pales.
I might add "Catch-22" is in a close second...with real B-25 s. The S@%$.
Steve - all the flying except the actual shoot-downs are likely done with real airplanes, since they have that whole World War I air force down in New Zealand, and the guys who did BoB would have had no trouble using CGI if it had existed, to do the close combat scenes where airplanes get shot up (as here).
Tom,
IF it weren't for the movies " The Battle of Britain" and "Catch-22" I doubt that the many current air frames that are now flying ,educating and informing the general public about British, Common Wealth history and American history wouldn't exist today. Had CGI been around in our throw away society in the 60's ,,,the preservation of historical aircraft and the movement to preserve them would have greatly been diminished. This is a case of Hollyweird doing good regular less of the profit motive and the bean counters. It was the after math and the air frames that where left behind... for those who care about history.
Sorry, my good friend. Irrelevant. There are no original WW1 airframes flying. And those airplanes only got restored for those movies because the filmmakers didn't have CGI. I hate to be a wet blanket here, but if CGI of the quality you see in this video had existed in 1967 (when they made Battle of Britain) or 1969 (when they made Tora-Tora-Tora) or 1970 (when they made Catch-22), I can tell you for a fact as someone who has spent 30 years in "Duh Biz" that there wouldn't even have been a momentary argument among the filmmakers of those movies of dropping "the real thing" in favor of CGI. Go get the BoB "Collector's Edition" DVD, with the extra DVD where the filmmakers talk about all the trouble they went to, to do those flying sequences. With modern CGI, they wouldn't have spent 20% of the hours they spent to get moments of film. And they wouldn't have thought twice about having a way to control what they were doing without worrying about weather, the ability of a cameraman to track an object, etc., etc.
I'm sorry to tell you, but even 50 years ago, moviemaking wasn't about some "artistic" take on the topic. It was ALWAYS about how much did it cost to get what we need?
And quite frankly, knowing as I do that most warbird owners are Trumpscum, and have been far right fools for as long as I have been involved with warbirds, they can all go crash. Hopefully fatally. With a permanent wipeout of the airframe.
"I’m sorry to tell you, but even 50 years ago, moviemaking wasn’t about some “artistic” take on the topic. It was ALWAYS about how much did it cost to get what we need?"
I agree and thank fully the bean counters didn't have the technology and real planes had to be used and if they could they'd get rid of the writers and the actors with CGI too. Reality shows and any new gaming system have proven that. Lucas's tribute to the Tuskegee Airman bombed for a reason with all of the CGI. They used two P-51s saved a ton of money and spent a ton of money making a not so good movie. Guillermo del Toro likes to create sets and characters that are not based on CGI he prefers actors and artisans over electrons. I'd rather see a Brit in a British plane with heart and soul than a soul less slight of hand carny CGI job.
It's always been that way, which is why it's two words: "show" and "business."
The problem with Red Tails was George Lucas can't write a script; the only two good ones he ever did were "American Grafitti" and the original Star Wars movie. And there he had lots of "additional input", which he wouldn't accept for Red Tails, which he saw as a comic book movie (and did as such).
A great post Tom. The AWM has a huge curved screen which is undoubtedly what we're seeing here.
Like Craig Abrahamson said, the merge and the ensuing fur ball were AWESOME and REALISTIC. Most folks visualize aerial combat as some type of gee-whiz Top Gun music video. This clip really shows how the speed and turn radii of these planes kept the fight truly "up close and personal". No BVR shots here...Very Well Done!
Love the voice yelling “Shweinhund!” at 5:20 after the Camel destroys the balloon! Great film, thanks for finding this, Tom.
I am fortunate to live about 20 minutes from the AWM and have seen this presentation a number of times. I was impressed the first time I saw it, and still am each time I go. You need about an hour to watch all the presentations in the ANZAC Hall, an hour well spent in my opinion.