Monday, March 11, 2024

The Thieves - Kim Yoon-seok (2012) - City of Dreams, Macau

The opening scenes of the film were shot on the casino floor at what was the Hard Rock Hotel (now the Countdown Hotel). Much of the heist is based around the same area, all under the banner of the "City of Dreams", which I believe is the ground floor mall/casino area that connects several hotels including the Crown Towers, Grand Hyatt and Countdown (please feel free to correct me).

There has been quite a lot of digital manipulation of several of the backgrounds in this film (the most obvious one I will include as a post later), so it's hard to know what's real and what isn't. But there are a few - what appears to be genuine - shots of the heist being set up at the the top of the Countdown Hotel (images 2 thru 4) as well as some general views of that cluster of hotels. 

An example of digital manipulation can be seen in the lower image which shows us looking across the City of Dreams towards the Venetian and Four Seasons hotels, but in the distant background you can see the Galaxy, which is located elsewhere! This film is full of subtle little changes here and there and some locations have had me scratching my head as to where they could be, only to realise that the distant background, from which I am taking my bearings, has been added in post-production.


The whole night sequence, of which these two lower shots are part, is just one big massive digital composite showing the location of City of Dreams to be somewhere completely different to its real one. It's very reminiscent of the extreme digital tomfoolery witnessed in 6 Underground.

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