Gunfight Animation Test - WIP #8 (Patreon)

Hello all,

Finally, some gritty action.

The sound design will obviously do a lot of the heavy lifting later, proper machine gun effects and environmental sound will make everything feel far more convincing, but here’s how the visuals are shaping up.

I did feel like a bit of a sadistic sicko animating all these unfortunate Exxilons getting mowed down, though in the Daleks’ defence they were provoked in a rather spectacular way earlier in the sequence. Pushing one of them off a cliff will tend to escalate matters.

A lot of the staging here was inspired by classic Hong Kong action cinema, particularly John Woo’s films from the late 80s and early 90s. The slow motion shots are very much a nod to that style.

I watched Hard Boiled (1992) recently and was reminded just how outrageous some of those gun battles are. There’s a warehouse shootout in that film that’s absolutely phenomenal between the choreography, the rhythm of the cuts, and the sheer scale of it. Outside of things like Robocop or Predator, I can’t think of many films that lean into that kind of operatic gunfight spectacle with such amazing gusto!Watch the warehouse shootout scene - https://youtu.be/5xx7gBc0ymY?si=G8jjTaYDuppG64Uz&t=151

It made me assume there must be other films in that vein that people tend to overlook.

If you had to point to one action film that absolutely nails large scale shootouts, which would it be? Hard Boiled, The Killer, something more recent?

– Paul