Comments on: Shane Carruth Talks Sci-Fi ‘A Topiary,’ Shares Plot Details, Reveals Steven Soderbergh & David Fincher Were Going To Produce

By: JB

JB — Fri, 13 May 2016 10:25:15 +0000

yet they gave a first timer (Kosinski) a $170M budget to do a turd like Tron Legacy…. oh the power of franchise …

By: goldfarb

goldfarb — Fri, 13 May 2016 10:25:15 +0000

"…built his own CGI equipment" – meaning computers?
from the Wired piece "…He even built his own small-scale CGI system, renting cloud computers and writing code."
this also has little or no meaning…
small scale CGI system = mac/PC + Maya.
renting cloud computers = rendering on a rented farm
writing code = little scripts that VFX artists do everyday != applications like Maya, Houdini etc
that the playlist would just gloss over these things is expected, but Wired?

By: Jon Davies

Jon Davies — Fri, 13 May 2016 10:25:15 +0000

You can actually see a bit of effects test footage (confirmed by Carruth at a Q&A tonight) of A Topiary in Upstream Color. Appears in an early scene where Amy Seimetz's character is working on editing a film for a brief moment :).

By: 345

345 — Fri, 13 May 2016 10:25:15 +0000

They're both sci fi adventures about young people set in the recent past, so — similar for sure (not counting A Topiary's weird adult civil-service guy/cult prologue). I was looking forward to Super 8, and it didn't deliver. After reading the script for A Topiary, it doesn't really deliver either. It's also a very hard to read, super-long screenplay. Not to say I don't wish it would have been made. On the page it was sort of clunky, but could've been awesome onscreen. But it has the truncated, scenes-ending-abrubtly quality of Carruth, which got annoying. But it's not nearly as dense as Primer or, I imagine, UC. The main thing about it that's hard to get is how exactly the prologue connects. I mean, it clearly does by the end, but not in a way that makes it seem like it really needed to be there

By: DG

DG — Fri, 13 May 2016 10:25:15 +0000

I read somewhere that the release of Super 8 was the final nail in the coffin on this one, that there were a lot of similarities with the plot. Not sure if that's true or not but it seems interesting, especially since it sounds like A Topiary was being developed first