The grotesque world of Cars

Yes, but who stacked those cans?

What is strange about Cars is the way that its characters live in a world that implies humanity yet exists without humans. So the film's creators have to go through all sorts of contortions to make things work. Lightning has to press on a pedal to leave his trailer. Doc has to get on a hydraulic lift to hold court. Lightning has to talk to Mack on a special video screen. Yet who made the video screen? Machines and architecture all imply a means of design and construction. But there is nothing about a car—lacking both hands and mobility—that allows us to imagine how these things were created.

This problem is unique to Cars because in the other Pixar films the characters either live in the World (Toy Story, Bug's Life, Incredibles, Finding Nemo) or adjacent to the World (Monsters Inc.). Cars, on the other hand, takes place in an alternate universe in which the characters are fundamentally not at home; they live in a world they could have never made.

There's something grotesque about all of this. It's like falling in love with the look of plastic surgery in which the principal attraction lies in the fact that flesh has been manipulated. Cars asks us to accept a world without origin that exists only as image. This world does not derive from understanding or practice, but from a monstrous collage of fragments; manipulation pleasurable for its sheer novelty.

Happy New Years

At a certain point New Year's eve stopped being a big deal and now I'm mostly excited by the fact that I'm a year closer to retirement. I do find the following statistic amazing, however. Blogger tells me I wrote 183 posts in 2006. That's almost exactly an average of one post every other day. Lucky you. Happy New Year!

Gadgets, props and the Hamster EZ bake oven

Today I spent the morning making a Mindstorms NXT robot for Sean. It's an incredible toy that allows you to build machines and robots and then program them from your computer. The kit is Mac OS and Bluetooth compatible. This means that you can build your robot complete with servos and sensors, create the program on your computer using a drag-and-drop flowchart, and then send the program wirelessly to the robot. This thing is begging to be turned into some kind of prop or maybe some kind of art installation.

I was thinking about the design of our props. Now that I think about it, it surprises me that I made them look so good. My usual sensibility is to take store-bought items and then hack them with tape and cardboard. A good example is our hamster environment. Julia got Sean a hamster for Christmas. He really likes it but I found out that we're both really allergic to it. So after thinking about it awhile, I put the hamster outside in the covered patio next to the plate glass window. I put an interconnecting section of the cage into a blanket-covered cardboard box with a heater next to it. It sort of looks like a zoo exhibit where you can see a cutaway of the hamster's hole. The heater didn't last long--it flipped the circuit breaker on that side of the house so I put a 60 watt light bulb in the box instead, an idea I got from chick hatcheries. So there's a hamster cage in a box with a blanket with a lightbulb. The whole thing is fairly ridiculous, but Sean really likes it and even fell asleep looking at it. If we ever do another film, I think the props ought to be more stupid-looking.

Amazon.uk

Today I stumbled upon this photo of Amazon.uk. I liked it because it reminded me of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ben and Erik are away for the holidays so I'm taking a break this week. Hopefully we'll be shooting late next week. Earlier in the week I put the shrine interior into the shrine. It looked nice I thought. Of course I happened to build the shrine interior upside down so it didn't screw in right.

Cast & credits

Contact us: bodymemory { a } yahoo.com

Featuring
Ben Davis

Written & Directed by Ron Saito
Gaffer/Assistant: Erik Tyberg

Consultant
Gene Totten

Production design/props
Ron Saito, Erik Tyberg, David Callaghan

Second unit
David Callaghan

Thanks to
Gracie Mehren Davis
Tod Robinson
Gene and Mary Lou Totten
Jim and Caryl Tyberg
Jon Tyberg

Technical
Shot in HDV format on a Sony HDR-HC1
Edited in Final Cut Pro
Visual effects created in After Effects

A pair of oddballs

I saw Courage & Stupidity today, a short (30 minute) independent film about Steven Spielberg making Jaws. It's shot beautifully on 35mm and the performances are great though Kahil Dotay's Richard Dreyfus veers into parody now and then. It's a real oddball. For Jaws fans, there's not enough trivia and inside jokes for it to be satisfying. For the casual viewer, the film is structurally peculiar. Scenes seem to exist for no reason and the film meanders like the tides at Martha's Vineyard. The basic idea for the story--that the greatest film menace is unseen--is not bad, but the idea is underelaborated and overplayed. The dialogue is well written and the thing looks great, but the overall effect is like watching a sequence of nice moments with no emotional or thematic core.

The other day I was thinking "why isn't there some kind of Netflix for books? Wouldn't that be great?" Then I realized--library! Duh. I was reading a bit about Orson Welles while waiting for Sean as he played Arthur's Math at the library. So I checked out the Kane DVD and watched about half of it again tonight. It's a real oddball. The film is like a montage linked with dissolves. My thinking about this kind of showy production is that its art lies in drawing attention to itself without drawing the audience out of the story. Here's my theory: If you're visually distinctive but the audience gets pulled out of the story you're an experimental filmmaker. If you're not visually distinctive then you're a traditional filmmaker. If you can do both, you're a cinematic genius. And that is the gift of people like Orson Welles, Darren Aronofsky and Michel Gondry.

Making worlds

I'm still thinking about Lady in the Water. The one thing about Shyamalan's work that I find really annoying is the way that his film worlds bend to fit the script. Why does Story wear Cleveland Heep's shirt throughout the film? Well, because it emphasizes her waifish nature of course. But Bryce Dallas Howard's cinematically meaty legs side, it just seems silly to me. Couldn't Heep make a stop at the Gap? I had the same problem with The Sixth Sense. If that kid is so afraid of dead people, why is he always sitting in the dark? Why do the ghosts always look like the the most gruesome moments of their deaths? The answer is obvious--it's dramatic license. I understand that, but somehow, I find these discrepancies annoying. Note that I'm not saying that everything has to be explained. That would fill a movie with exhausting narrative minutae ("Sorry, Story, everything else is at the cleaners and, uh, my credit card is maxed out...")

I think there are different reasons for this problem. One is the difficulty of translating from script into screen. Sure everything reads well on paper then you have to go film it and the character has got to be wearing something. Or those doors in Monsters Inc.... I'm probably the only one who finds the third act door chase annoying because the door rails don't allow for efficient random access. The only reason that dry cleaner mechanisms work is because someone plucks the clean clothes from the rail. But in the battle between drama and sense, drama wins every time.



I think it comes down to what it means to make a world. World-making and film-making are two different things. In commercial filmmaking, the film usually takes precedence. But it is possible to imagine a film in which the world is consistent and internally coherent. Perhaps we should be reluctant to describe most filmmakers--bound as they are by the needs of their drama or audience--as makers of worlds. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe them as creators of novel dramatic situations. In my case, one of the reasons I think I'm creating a narrative and not a drama is that the world takes precedence over drama.

Jet Li's Fearless & Lady in the Water

Goals for the winter break: finish the bird scene, do the shrine close ups and whatever else we can fit in.

I watched Fearless the other day. I'm really surprised it has such a high metacritic score (70) and got a positive review from Slate. It's a transplant of the classic hero/Jerry Bruckheimer formula into the kung fu genre in which the hero descends into a heterosexual communist pardise of an abyss. Because of where I am in our film, everything I watch seems to be a lesson on structure. It took a looooong time for the hero to get to the abyss. Annoyingly long. We all know it's coming so I wanted the movie to get there faster.

If Fearless is a lesson in conventionality, Lady in the Water is a lesson in awkwardness. Every device used to keep the story moving seems contrived or clumsy. The overall effect is a bland sameness in which watching the film becomes an exercise in keeping up with odd characters with odd names. Portions of the film were surprisingly incompetent. The first appearance of the scrunt made me laugh. It was goofy. Also I'm really tired of scenes in which some character initially doesn't believe in what's happening. We all know it's just a matter of time. Shyamalan didn't seem to have a good handle on Paul Giamatti's character's change of heart.

I guess what's annoying about these films is that we all know that certain plot points are coming up and the filmmakers pretend we don't know that or handle the plot points clumsily. I guess it's just difficult. I'm still working on the "discovery scene" when Ben discovers the clue that takes him out to the desert. The first try--Ben doing a double-take--was just lame. My fault. That sort of thing is virtually unfilmable in this context. My next idea--fly flies from the spinner to the clue. Better, but maybe too cute. Maybe it's better to dispense with the idea of serendipitous surprise altogether. Maybe Ben is just looking through some papers and lo, there's the clue!

Going all the way

I'm always writing about films I can't watch all the way through. Here's my list of films I did watch all the way through recently.

My Super Ex-girlfriend
Talladega Nights
My Geisha (Shirley Maclaine from 1962)
Jet Li's Fearless

I guess the common element is that these are all frothy fare.

Also, I somehow missed until now the fact that the 7-disc Norm Mclaren box set just came out recently.

Subtlety begone

I've always believed in the idea of establishing a "palette"--of pushing an image too far—and not pushing an image enough—to create a space in which to work. Looking at the burned-out spinner now, I think I went way too far. I like it as an object, but I think we need to pull back and be more subtle when we shoot. Hmmm, maybe I could sell this thing on Ebay?

The Rosetta Stone

Here are some photos of the almost-done "Rosetta stone," the assemblage of clues that sets Ben going in a certain direction. These clues constitute a folk/bad/non-typically rational approach to reasoning. The reason I was working on the shrine interior last week was because a photo of it was necessary for this image.

Perpetual motion & the new physics

I stumbled upon this flyer prop for an earlier version of the ending of the film. I'm surprised I wrote as much text as I did instead of simply greeking it. Click to read.

The shrine interior & Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi

The shrine interior is pretty much done. When Ben and Erik saw it they laughed. I'm not sure what that means. I've written a lot about how making these objects is like performing and I finally have an example. When Martin Landau described his Academy-Award winning performance as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, he said that he tried to play the accent as if he were a Hungarian trying not to speak with an accent. This is pretty similar to what you have to do with props. If you age things and distress them like you're trying to show off the wear and tear, they look obvious and contrived. Instead, you have to really try to make the thing look good and straight and nice--in spite of itself. The "ex nihilo" letters, for example, are all crooked. But if you tried to intentionally make them crooked, they would look like the "Toys R Us" logo with the backward R. They wouldn't be believable. So I had to make the letters as straight as possible without using a ruler. As they started to droop (I didn't engineer them very well) I taped them to hold them in place. They continued to droop in places and that's what you see. "I'd like to thank the Academy..."

Bird mask reference

The terrible two's

Today we celebrate the second birthday of our project. It was two years ago today when I wrote the first treatment of the script while visiting my parents in Hawaii. The details have changed significantly but the basic storyline hasn't. If I want to make the two years sound longer, I just have to think, "we've been working on this thing for half of Sean's life."

Crafts & shrine interior

One of the weird developments of the past few years is the upward mobility of everyday crafts. This craft world draws consciously from the collage/assemblage/surrealist traditions (Joseph Cornell is a big favorite) rather than folk art (e.g., chickens and flowers and Pennsylvania Dutch). This makes Michaels a suprisingly good place to find materials for building props.

Above is the shrine interior in progress. The tin letters come from Michaels and are sold for use in scrapbooks. They are rusted with Sophisticated Finishes rusting products also sold at Michaels. The black background is cheap acrylic paint from Michaels. What looks like white calcium deposits is gesso undercoating purchased at Aaron Brothers.

The photos of children come from collage supplier Mantofev (mantofev.com). The ribbon comes from a scrapbook I purchased on Ebay. The cross comes from the San Gabriel Mission and is going to be augmented with cheap crosses from Michaels. The spinner segment, like the main spinner, was lasercut by pololu.com and rusted like everything else.

Narratives and bracketing

There were two ideas that enabled me to start on this project: narrative & bracketing. I don't know much about stories and I don't seem too interested in drama. But what I like about narratives is the idea that they are a tradable means by which we try to understand the world (see "no one cares about your stupid dreams" for more on this idea).

Bracketing comes from thinking about design. I suspect that design functions on one's ability to bracket out certain background features of the work. For example, using a computer to design a poster on ecological concerns involves bracketing out the problematic ecological concerns of using computers (mercury, PCBs, third world reclamation, etc.) themselves. The idea is not to let problematic concerns become transparent but to consciously set them aside so that we can pay attention to the content/narrative. Therefore, I guess this isn't a "cinema arts" project as much as a "narrative design" project.

More shrine reference

Been working on the shrine interior. The performance metaphor helps. It's like learning to hit marks naturally; tough to make it look natural. Here's more reference.

Frequency: why 32x fast forwarding was invented

Now that was a weird movie. Imagine, if you can, Field of Dreams + Sound of Thunder + Somewhere in Time + The Little Mermaid. What I remember: some really atrocious acting/directing, firetruck shot tight so that the shot can stand in for 1969, horrible montages, typical time paradox problems, split screen montage that doesn't respect personal space, mandatory-but-tiresome "can this really be happening?" sequences. Also, did I mention that this was a weird movie? Amazingly, if you check around the web, this seems to be pretty popular and well-reviewed.

Kudos go to anyone who can guess two other movies that were highly recommended to me.

Oops, wrong story

I sucked it up and read Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away all the way through. It felt like doing homework. The manna part, the part I was interested in, was only slightly elaborated upon and the story itself was mostly typical S & S stuff with weird worlds and weird people with weird names. Then I discovered I read the wrong story. I was supposed to read Not Long Before the End (in the same book) which I did enjoy. It was pretty much what I was expecting. An excerpt:

His last experiment involved a simple kinetic sorcery set to spin a metal disc in midair. And when that magic was done, he knew a truth he could never forget.

Research on Satan & ex nihilo

From guardian.uk:

The world God made soon turned out to be flawed, perhaps - as the Manicheans suggested, inherently evil. Who could be held responsible for its moral mess? Not God himself, who assures us throughout Genesis that his work is good; there had to be an agent of corruption, a tempter. Satan was therefore conjured up, created - as Kelly shrewdly remarks - out of nothing, like the universe that God allegedly fabricated ex nihilo. Once the stooge had been invented, he was demonised, turned into a bogey to frighten the credulous. Hence the red-hot eyes, the horns and the cloven hoofs, the shaggy pelt and the stink of sulphur. The iconography is a costume, wittily shed by the dandified, sophisticated Satans of the 19th century. When Mephistopheles appears out of a puff of smoke in Gounod's opera Faust, he shows off his natty cape, his plumed hat and a rapier with which he intends to prick all sanctimonious certainties. He is, he says with a Byronic grin, 'un vrai gentilhomme'.

read article

David Mamet On Directing Film

I read David Mamet's short but excellent book on directing film. His basic idea: follow Eisenstein, know how "the play's the thing" and everything else will fall into place. One of the reasons I respond to the book is because it echoes my sentiments concerning design (e.g. interface design). When I was more involved in that world, colleagues were always trying to fix interfaces using text labels. It drove me crazy. My feeling was that the label should be inherent in structure, that designing meant de-"sign"ing the project so that movement didn't depend on propositional cognition. In fact, half of Mamet's book is about this idea: getting rid of "narration" (what I've been calling "indicating") and letting the structure do the work. It's the same thing that drives me nuts about Trader Joe's cats cookies. There's a little label on the cover that says, "not for cats." That's not the way to solve the problem: change the stupid name!

So now I'm trying to Mametize our project as an exercise. But there's something about Japanese culture that is inherently sign-based. A lot of Japanese TV shows have continuous text scrolls (like we do on CNN here) and a lot of films are also filled with signage (e.g., Rampo Noir). I remember how everything seemed to be a sign in Tokyo, from audio cues on escalators to smells, almost as if Japan was an Empire of Signs.

Plus, our project is based on the idea of narrative, not drama as is Mamet's. My take on narrative stems from Jerome Bruner's work and is something like this: "a sequential working out of a non-canonical situation usually emphasizing human agency." This definition takes us in a different direction than Mamet's understanding of drama. In Mamet's thinking, a hero tries to solve a problem. But I don't think our perpetual motion device really qualifies as a problem. What we have is a narrative describing a potential battle between two forces concerning the development of a non-canonical (e.g., physically impossible) device.

Finally, Mamet's theory consciously ignores any sense of visual pleasure. But for me, this pleasure is a primary reason for watching film and hard to ignore.

Larry Niven & Cars

I've been reading Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away. Some goofy imagery and awkward dialogue, but the true ancestor of our film. This is one in which the world is more interesting than the book. We can ask this question of our film: if the world is more interesting than the film, is there still reason for the film to exist?

I've also been watching Cars with Sean. It's surprisingly sucky. It screens as though John Lasseter was concerned about the increasingly baroque quality of the Pixar films and wanted to strip everything down to the basics. But all this does is reveal the film's roughly-constructed mechanics. This is one of those films where the hero speaks his motivations and the filmmakers use clunky devices to keep the narrative rolling (characterization via interview? building a road? kicking a can into a garage?). To me one quality of a bad film is when I can start to hear the filmmaker's voices instead of the voice of the film. You can practically hear Lasseter thinking, "we've got to keep him stuck in the small town... but how? Now what is magic moment where we fall in love with this place?" It's the same reason I can't watch Adam Sandler films. I always feel like I'm part of a scheme to turn him into a romantic lead. In Cars, I never felt they resolved the awkwardness of using cars as characters and the car-thropomorphizing of life (vw bugs as bugs?). Then again they have 244 million reasons *not* to care what I think.

Tapping human potential

The other day I had to put something away in the laundry room and it struck me. It's beautiful. Our laundry room is a bad extension put on by former owners-- a cheap wood wall and a couple of windows with a brick floor. Now it's home to our washer/dryer and an unknown number of black widow spiders. But in a movie set way it really is beautiful with exposed pipes, peeling paint, a bare light bulb on the too-low ceiling, and minty green paint. So it might end up in the movie somewhere, maybe in the bird scene.

Still thinking about stillness. In David Lynch's Rabbits, nothing much happens. But the fact that there are people (er, rabbits) there creates a tension: something COULD happen. Harakiri is another example. A lot of the movie is just two guys talking and a bunch of samurais watching. But the stillness becomes activated by the potential for characters to act. The difference between Rabits and Harakiri is that in Rabbits, our expectations are confounded whereas in Harakiri, our expectations are fulfilled in a climactic brawl.

Great movies

I just couldn't make it through Superman Returns. At a certain point--I think it was when Superman x-ray visions Lois's home life--it turned into a movie of the week. My favorite part of the movie was casting James Marsden as Kate Bosworth's love interest. It's a funny joke that Lois Lane would be cohabitating with an X-man and I was always sort of curious what his eyes looked like. BTW, I liked X-Men 3 just fine.

The other week Ben's wife Krissy asked me, "so what movies do you like?" I get this sort of question all the time since apparently I sound like some sort of hater.

So here are movies that I think are great movies.

Ed Wood
Richly textured visually, thematically and emotionally.

Living in Oblivion
Funny and instructional.

Starship Troopers
Discover your inner Nazi with "the best pro/anti war film ever made."

Team America World Police
Intelligent, multi-layered, fantastic satire and totally stupid.

Harakiri
It's genetic.

*I added the following later...

The Matrix
Duh.

The Godfather
Everyone's favorite.

Rampo Noir, hyperrealism and the speaker problem [video]

I'm not sure I'm going to make it through Superman Returns. So far it's like a xerox of the Richard Donner versions in which Bryan Singer mistakes seriousness for grandeur. I feel like someone should be paying me to watch this.



So I went on to Rampo Noir. This excrutiatingly beautiful and painfully grotesque Japanese film screams art horror at you for two hours. The symbolism is trite--butterflies evoke transformation, mirrors evoke vanity--but if you're watching this for the story and not the luscious cinematography, you might be disappointed anyway.

I've been thinking about the speaker scene problem all day. I keep talking about it so here's a link with temp audio [view].

In the speaker scene a wave of sound disrupts a radio broadcast and ends up destroying the spinner. When I first shot this, there were two things in my mind: build suspense and visualize the sound. That's why I shot the slow push-ins and the shaky table and the shaky spinner. I thought the smoke blowing out of the spinner was a bit much but what the hell, this is just a rough version. You'll also see the rack focus that seems like it took 30 minutes to shoot. The temp audio is Organic from Koyaanisqatsi. There's also primitive cricket-like temp sound design. Look closely at the beginning of the sequence and you'll see Erik's head in the bottom lefthand corner.

When I've thought of hyperrealism in the past, it's usually been in terms of movies like The Matrix--obvious examples of films that are essentially photoreal cartoons. But I'm realizing that hyperrealism is a concern even on this microlevel. The question is this: how do you visualize malevolent sound? I originally wanted to have the radio or the speaker vibrate but that seemed like too much. So I ended shaking the table. The problem is this approach doesn't exhibit any real understanding of sound. This depiction is a cartoon, sort of like indicating "smelly" by using stink lines. The scene visualizes sound. But the relevant question in our case is the phenomenological question: what is sound and how does it present itself via cinema? So I've been thinking of other ways to replace or augment the shaking table approach.

I was recently looking through some of my posts and discovered a reference to the problems with this scene on November 13. So I've been pondering this for two weeks already. Get a life!

Superman Returns

I can't remember the last time I saw a DVD all the way through. Usually I have to watch a bit here and there. Anyway, I'm about 20 minutes into Superman Returns. The first thing I noticed was how dingy it looked. I have to believe this was due to an aesthetic decision and not related to the fact that it was shot HD on a Panavision Genesis. That makes two ugly films in a row--Superman and The da Vinci Code. I'm wondering if it's because I don't like soft light that much. Both films looked alike to me: murky and grayish with poor blacks. At least I'm not alone when it comes to the da Vinci Code. Here's an excerpt from DI Studio magazine:

The Da Vinci Code is one of those movies that had a DI — this one at Efilm – but probably needn't have. OK, the fact that it was shot in Super 35mm necessitated a DI for the digital blow-up. But the look? That was determined by the combination of production design (by Allan Cameron) and cinematography (by Salvatore Totino) that confused the color black with suspense and the lack of detail in said blacks with mystery. Why else was frame after frame a jigsaw puzzle of large swathes of black broken up by a face, a painting, or an object? And the use of atmospherics — fog, mist, etc. — made sure that any detail in the blacks was lost to history. Don't blame the DI colorist for decisions made — poorly in my opinion — in production that darkness would heighten the drama. After the umpteenth time that Audrey Tautou's very dark hair obscured more than one-third of the screen in a two-shot, I was just plain annoyed.

There's a part of Superman that looks just like the problematic area of our film. You see Ma Kent. Then there's rumbling, things start shaking, the radio goes haywire and whooosh, there's an explosion outside. The scene isn't suspenseful, it indicates suspense. It's efficient and gets the job done and it's probably appropriate for a film like this. But for ours, the suspense should be expressed, not indicated.

The Lex Luthor intro scene was problematic. I saw a bit of a promodoc showing Bryan Singer directing Brandon Routh. He was micro-directing the way Routh did a specific action. I remember thinking at the time--wow, it's amazing that this scene will cut OK and not look over-directed like when I try to do that. Then, when I saw the Lex Luthor scene I realized that it was probably shot in the same way. And it does look over-directed. The direction/performance seemed stiff.

I'm realizing it's not the stylization of typical mainstream films that doesn't look right for our project but the stiffness and overindicating. That's what's making this film project so interesting to me. It's a lot about discovering the medium's potential in light of one's own sensibilities.

Notes from class

Watching videos in class today was good. It gave me a lot of ideas for what I'm working on now. First, the sound attack scene problem. For the past week I've hated watching it. It's a slow push in to the spinner cross-cutting with a slow push in to the radio. I think I don't like it because of the way the scene telegraphs emotion. You watch it and go "oh, I'm supposed to think something scary/mysterious is happening." Of course, it's not surprising since my main influence for the scene was Raiders of the Lost Ark (slow push in to idol at beginning of the movie) and Jurassic Park II (push in to attacking dinosaur). But the more I see it the more it drives me nuts. When I get a chance I think I'll reshoot it with an unmoving camera. I've been thinking a lot about camera movement. I remember Harakiri--there was a lot of camera movement but most of it was just dollying through hallways and stuff. And watching David Lynch's Rabbits was good today. It was just one long wide shot. Even his Dumbland videos were absolutely still in portions--technically, "dead" shots.

The rabbits also reminded me of Donnie Darko. I guess there is just something sinister about rabbits. It gave me the idea that maybe somewhere in our film we need to have a giant animal.

Then I was thinking about anachronisms. I forget why it came up but we were talking about production design and the ambiguous universes of David Lynch and Tim Burton. It made me think that I should be more ambiguous with our universe. Right now the film looks mid-century but maybe I should throw in some things to mix it up a bit. The hard part is integrating the items so they don't look like bad production design. I would love to throw in some colorful IKEA items and a 70's GTO and not have them look stupid.

That Maya Deren documentary gave me an idea. I had already planned on having Ben create the 'rosetta stone' on the floor (on paper). Now I think I'll have him draw literally on the cement floor. I like the ritualistic and artistic connotations.

Finally, music. I've been editing to Anna and the King (I had it laying around) and Organic from Koyaaniaqatsi. They both work pretty well, but Anna and the King evokes a certain sentiment so clearly that it closes off other potential readings and emotions. So maybe I'll try editing to some other pieces.

Version 14 & stunt spinner

Stunt spinner version 1.0

I'm now on version 14 of the treatment and I think I have the entire thing figured out. Yes, we've heard that before. I've designed the desert clue. I moved the bird scene to the workroom and added rain. I think I have the visuals for the codex audio worked out. The desert clue leaps out at Ben as it needs to. The bird scene moves straight into the desert scene while adding in elements of the supernatural. It prefigures the pop culture clue-building as it's supposed to do. I nixed the church AND the library.

The more I watch the first quasi-assemble, the odder this thing screens. If you look at a particular section it really looks like a typical movie. Makes sense--I've been using mainstream films as a guide for sometime now. Seen as a whole, however, the project might come across as an incoherent mainstream film. Not sure. There's this weird tightrope I'm trying to walk where we're using a typical cinema vocabulary but using audio and the connective tissues in such a way that the thing looks like it makes sense but you're not really sure how.

The other week we were in a rush to get the stunt spinner done. When looking at the footage I realized that it wasn't wrecked enough and the rushing showed. So this past weekend, I really bent the metal off center to make the spinner look more obviously thrashed. In this sequence, we need to understand instantly that the spinner is fried. Also I was putting the spinner down for storage and caught a look at it in the sunlight. It was really nice. I put all this gloss finish on the spinner to make it look like heat-hardened ceramic coating. That contrasted nicely with Ben's torch job. I need to light the thing better. Over the weekend I was also able to sand off some of the obvious brushstrokes that were annoying me. It just looks better now. Of all the props, I thought this one would be easy because it just had to look thrashed. But I've discovered that at least for me, doing the beaten-up wear-and-tear stuff is actually a lot harder than making the newer-looking stuff. It's so easy for the props to get too self-conscious looking or overly-arty or overly manipulated and finicky.

More comments & Larry Niven

Cho Eun came over yesterday so I showed her the cut in progress. She had the exact same comments as everyone else. Ben looks good. There's no dialogue? She did have one new comment, however. "The movie is about the object, not the person." That was a good observation. Ben is not so much a character as an operator of things. It reminded me of grad school. One thing I always wanted to do but never did was create a series of moving sets or objects started by an operator--something like a Tom Jenkins performance/sculpture but with more theatrical sets.

It also reminded me of one of the distant, half-forgotten (Harry Potter-esque?) influences of the project. When I was in high school I was reading one of those b/w sword & sorcery comic books--you know, like Krull or Conan the Barbarian or Solomon Kane. Inside was an adaptation of Larry Niven's "Not long before the end." Here's the way I remember it (no doubt inaccurately). There are two magicians dueling. It goes back and forth. One magician finally gets the upper hand. So the other magician pulls out his secret weapon--a spinner! He tosses the spinner up in the air and it spins faster and faster. Eventually it "burns out." Apparently magic--the world's "manna"--was a fixed resource. The spinner uses up the world's supply of magic and thus we end up with today's magic-less world. I really liked the story back then and obviously it stuck with me.

UPDATE: The comic book I was reading is called: Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #3.

The people speak!

My parents and sister are visiting for Thanksgiving so the rough first six minutes of the film is getting the "normal person" test. The comments are pretty consistent and include, "Ben is very photogenic," "where's the dialogue?" and the video "looks nice." Kim had the most interesting comment: "it looks like Harry Potter." When I asked her to explain she said it had "Harry Potter" special effects." Hmmm. I think of Harry Potter films as having lots of CGI and compositing. We have a spinner floating on a thread. Kim didn't seem too impressed with the stars. "What are those, Christmas decorations?" I'm still hoping the stars scene will work. My dad thought it was a period piece because of the radio. "When does this take place, in the fifites?" Kim said it looks like maybe the sixties or seventies. I told her what Dad said and she said, "No, look at Ben's hair!"

Other comments on the footage from other "normal people"--upon seeing the desert scene, my niece said, "It looks like some kind of mystery." Someone else said, "hey, it looks like a real movie!"

So I guess what we have is a mid-century supernatural mystery film with no dialogue that looks like a real movie. That doesn't sound so bad, but also none of these people have any idea what the film is about. It is possible that we will have to include more information at some point (text scroll, voice over). But we'll see.

A star is purchased

For the past half year I've been trying different approaches to creating the crystalline stars. My most successful strategy to date: buy Christmas decorations from Michael's. These LED stars look very similar to my prototype drawings. I hope they work because they were expensive: six in a box for $24.

So LA....

It's sort of fun walking around with the spinner base. It's like going to the prom with the prettiest girl in the senior class... everyone is staring in awe and wonder. Maybe not quite, but literally everytime I carry it around to get parts I get stopped and asked what it is At C & H, one of the workers asked what it was. When I said it was a prop he gave a knowing nod and said, "I was watching you walk around with that thing and I was wondering what that was! Looks great! Actually I think a lot of people get prop supplies there.

Then later I was getting some screws at OSH. An older guy in a red trucker's cap asked what it was and I gave him my usual answer, "it's just a prop." He said, "oh yeah, I'm looking for props too." He was an actor drafted into making a projection lantern prop for a theater performance in Burbank. It's about a girl who ages at four times normal speed.

It made me wonder if a lot of the people you see wandering around hardware stores are really just making props for theater and film. That would be so LA.

Nooooooo!

The title of this post could refer to the beating the spinner took today. Ben took a blowtorch to the stunt spinner and burned it up for its appearance in the post-spinner disaster sequence. Yesterday, when I told Erik we needed to burn the spinner he seemed quite excited about the possibility of destroying his arch nemesis. But today he didn't seem to care.

Actually, the title of this post refers to the fact that C & H Sales in Pasadena is closing. Everything is currently 50% off. If you remember from an earlier post, C & H is filled with old mechanical, electronic and optical parts. Cheap. A lot of the nice wood-cased electronic instruments were gone, but there are still a lot of interesting things there. I bought $25 worth of stuff today including some nice glass view panels, eye pieces, motors and baking tins. Stop by soon. You still have a year though. Apparently they're selling off their inventory before they shut down for good.

Notes on the last cut & the fly whisperer

Showed the latest cut to Ben, Erik and Gene today. They had good feedback. Ben says the opening montage needs to convey the idea of a long expanse of time more clearly. Erik thought we need to clarify that the printing press is where Ben works.

We also had a good talk about seriousness. Some of you know that I hate overly serious things. It's a plight especially true of films like ours. Ooh. Mystery! Scary! I'm trying to figure out how to get some silliness into the production. But it's surprisingly difficult to put in mood-puncturing elements. The closest successful attempt I found is Guy Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon which is beautifully surrealistic yet a little strange and a little funny. When the train goes up in flames the wise old man chokes out, "oh the humanity!" And the characters all do this weird teeth chattering.

Later, I was also telling Ben and Erik about my idea about using a fly for a couple of shots. Erik's face dropped when he heard that because he figured he would be the fly wrangler. But I think I figured out a way to do it.

Been thinking of ways to streamline the ending. I think I figured out a way to make everything work including the "bird attack" sequence. I've also been working on the clues. The idea is to "Blow up"-ize them. Before, the clues that Ben found were too literal. I realized that I need to make them ambiguous to convey the idea that these clues may exist only in Ben's mind.

Audrey Tatou + Blow Up = Us

Curiously, I've been thinking about another Audrey Tatou movie--Amelie. There's the sequence in which she drops a ball-like object which rolls on the floor, bumps into the wall and reveals a secret compartment. We need something like that so that Ben can find his first clue. The clue (at least today) is a postcard with a shrine that appears to hold a spinner. It's like Blow-up. You blow up the image to find out if you're really seeing something. But the film grain (or in this case, the halftone dots) obscure the image.

A Ron Howard duo

Finally saw The da Vinci Code. It's one of those novels that doesn't translate well to the screen (duh). But it wasn't the code-solving sequences that stuck out, it was the other stuff. It's one thing to have your albino hitman walking around in a monk's robe in a novel. It's another thing to see it on screen--the perfect guy to blend in with the crowd, NOT. Then there's the super-complex switch around in the Knight's Templar temple. On paper the clumsiness of the action is obscured. On film, it's absurd. It's not Ron Howard's fault. It's just undirectable. And then there's the dramatic final scene with a not-particularly threatening villain. Yeesh, even I could take the guy out.

I was a bit surprised by the look of the film. I imagined something rich, dark, arcane. But watching Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou traipse through a contemporary Paris shot flat and grayish was a bit disappointing. And the way they shot Audrey Tatou... I kept thinking about what Quint from Jaws said: black eyes, like a doll's eyes....

Probably the most surprising thing was the way the message of the novel was changed to make even less sense. The novel focuses on the restoration of the sacred feminine. The film is about Jesus' humanity. What? Theologically the conflict doesn't make any sense. The Catholic church has never denied Jesus' humanity. Hello, Christian paradox and all that.

Right now I'm watching Curious George, another Imagine Entertainment book-to-film project that doesn't make sense. The problem here is different--how do you stretch out a series of short books to make a feature-length film? First, you answer a lot of questions no one ever asked--like how the man in the yellow hat got his yellow outfit. Maybe the George sequel will describe how the man with the yellow hat found his mitochlorians. Then you trade one set of politically incorrect ideas for another. In the book, Curious George is taken from Africa by the MWTYH to be put in a zoo. In the movie, George follows the man out of curiosity. Understandable change. But now there's this whole Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque plot surrounding the plunder of an African idol. It's like each attempt to fix something results in even more problems.

Rosetta stone & Cecil B. Demille

You know you're famous when you shoot with a camera that's bigger than your head.

Ben had the idea that there should be some kind of Rosetta stone, a key that enables his character to decode the secret messages. I thought that was a good idea. On a different topic I've been reading Cecil B. Demille's lecture on directing. I liked this bit...

Take a scene where a man comes in, sits down, and picks up the telephone. The first-class director has the man come in, sit down, and pick up the telephone. Your highest class director says, "How on earth can I make that interesting, so it will hold an audience for just a second, so that it is not just a man. coming in, sitting down and picking up a telephone? What twist can I give that to make a little smile come to the audience? If merely the cord of the telephone catches in the drawer that little incident means a lot because the audience thought they were going to be bored and then they say, Oh! That little exclamation, Oh! has a great psychological effect." That is the way every scene should be worked out in the mind of the director.

It made me think about the radio-sound-destroying-the-spinner sequence. It's just so damn boring. The camera pushes in to the spinner. Then pushes in to the radio. Then the spinner. Then the radio. CUs of things starting to shake. It's too predictable. It builds suspense but in an uninteresting way. The audience knows something dramatic is happening, but there's no shading, none of the quirks of real life. It's just uninteresting film technique life. That's how I felt about Jurassic Park. I literally could barely stay awake. Lots and lots of techniques.

It's not the notes it's where you put them

The accidental fake slow-mo shot.

Shot more light-streaming-through-the-window, color-balanced-to-look-like-sunset shots on Saturday night with Ben. One of the problems with the master was with Ben sitting down. There must be something out there that talks about how to direct people to sit. It just didn't look right. It might be the actual sitting or more likely, the lack of motivation to sit down on a mark. One of the shots I like came about accidentally. Ben was looking out the window but the spinner was spinning very slowly. I shot it anyway. It looks like a bonafide high frame rate slow motion shot. Until Ben blinks. BTW, for the first time I've been bemoaning the lack of true slow motion. I really want to see the tiny stars bounce on the table. But the usual technique of slowing down in post doesn't work for tiny images like the crystals. All you get are streaks and blurs.

I have the first four minutes of the video cut together. I wasn't sure how to time the cut so I did my usual strategy of throwing in a sound track. I used Anna and the King which I had left over from my wedding. It's interesting to see how romantic it made everything seem; the beginning really looks like a chick flick, especially because now the portrait of Gracie is in there. During the part where Ben is looking at the crystal stars the music takes on a pretty, wistful mood. It occurred to me that what makes a good sound track is not necessarily the notes, but where you put them. Sound tracks are a kind of audio grammar that use a similar vocabulary. There's always the suspenseful high-strings cue, the moody tinkly cue, the action cue with big percussion. What made the stars segment nice was the way it underscored the video in a slightly unexpected way. The music itself wasn't that interesting but the way it interpreted the scene was. And it gave me the idea that somehow the stars should be moving. We should linger on them for a bit.


Ben calls this the "it's so Tim Burton shot." That's because Tim Burton put Johnny Depp in binocular glasses ONCE in Sleep Hollow. These $10 binocular glasses came from Ebay. I painted the logo over. They are obviously helping Ben do something very important.

More on Dan Brown

I was reading an article in Slate describing how Dan Brown says he structures his thrillers. Here's an excerpt--

Brown has done a lot of thinking about what makes a successful Dan Brown thriller. He has found that it requires a few essential elements: some kind of shadowy force, like a secret society or government agency; a "big idea" that contains a moral "grey area"; and a treasure. The treasures in Brown's four novels have been a meteorite, anti-matter, a gold ring, and the Holy Grail. The shadowy forces have included the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, and the National Security Agency. The big idea, if I'm reading him correctly, goes something like this: Is the Vatican good … or is it evil? Is the National Security Agency for us … or is it against us? When all of Brown's elements come together, doled out over cliffhanging chapters, with characters that exist to "move the plot along," it is like mixing the ingredients to make a cake.

Our film seems to fit neatly into this formula. The shadowy force is Ben's unseen adversary--"The Tradition." The big idea is the conflicting medieval and modern world views. The treasure is the perpetual motion device. Now, pass the eggbeater.

"All patterns contain a message" — trailer, The Number 23

Like the character in our film, I am becoming obsessed, seeing traces of our project in everything around me. Now, a few days after reading about Fissures, I saw the trailer for The Number 23, Jim Carrey's new film in which he plays a man who sees the number 23 in everything and becomes convinced that it holds a special meaning for his life. [VIEW TRAILER] Note the obligatory obsessed writing/crazy person's lair image above which is taken from the trailer. I suppose the proliferation of these cryptological, pattern-solving films comes from the datacentric nature of our culture. It makes sense that more and more films will veer toward the manipulation of information in which the boundaries between representation and reality become blurred. Curiously, this makes academic life increasingly heroic since a huge part of what we do is navigate information.

A list off the top of my head:

Blow Up [photography]
The Conversation [sound]
Blow Out [sound]
The Matrix [software]
The da Vinci Code [theology/cryptology]

Fissures

I've written about both The Conversation and Primer so Fissures sounds like something I need to watch. From Ain't It Cool News...

Writer/director Alante Kavaite contributes one of the grooviest films I’ve seen this year. FISSURES is a cross between THE CONVERSATION and PRIMER. It’s a French film about a girl (Emilie Dequenne) who works as a sound engineer on movies, specializing in recording natural sounds on location. When her mother is murdered, the girl returns to her mother’s home in a small village, determined to sort out what happened and who did it. The twist comes when she begins to pick up the past on her audio equipment. She realizes that her house, by some fluke, has become a sort of echo chamber, and that she can decide what moment in time to listen to by moving her microphone. Each point in space is a different point in time. So she begins a crazy, obsessive race to find the moment of her mother’s murder in the house, so she can identify who did it. In the process of listening to her mother’s private life, though, she rediscovers this woman who raised her, and she hears what her mother really thinks of her, and she flashes on happy times and hard ones, too. There’s no pseudo-scientific explanation for what happens in the house, and there’s no magic one offered up, either. It just occurs, and it drives her a little crazy for a while, but it also helps heal her in regards to her relationship with her mother. It’s good stuff.

Codex video test [video]

Been working on a test for the Codex video. I'm starting by animating the spinner in After Effects. I then export and run it through Moving ASCII which is a nice utility that converts videos into ASCII movies. I then bring it back into AE, split the channels into R, G and B layers and then use the Wiggler to shake the channels. The idea is that this image is going through a real cheap video system and the RGB guns keep vibrating. I then blur out the edges and use a home-grown video noise movie as a displacement map. I got the noise movie from about 9 years ago when we were still doing VCR to VCR connections at school. The displacement map causes the spinner image to shake and shudder. I then go back in and chop out little sections here and there to create glitches in the rotation.

VIEW

And in ornithopter news...

I thought it was hard enough getting our ornithopter prop to work. I just heard about a scientist who spent 30 years getting his giant ornithopter to fly. It's big enough to carry a pilot and flew 2 seconds longer than the Wright brother's first flight. See ornithopter.ca for video.

Codex video + Erik + Damn, that high quality American craftsmanship pt II

Dan finished the codex audio this past week. It sounds great. I've been trying to figure out what kind of video to make to accompany it. My first thought was to piece together images and film clips... something like the video equivalent of the audio. However, there are some images I want to create that just don't make sense in this content--like an animation of how the spinner mechanism works. Where would you find an image like that? It doesn't make sense. I need the ability to create images/animations that aren't found in the real world.

Some alternatives: make something like a stop motion grid in which Ben places x's in the right place according to a code. When filmed in sequence, we would see an animation. Another idea is to create a primitive computer on which we see something like an ASCII animation on a low-res screen. The idea is that Ben would be inputing Basic DATA statements or hexadecimals or something and then we would see the animation spring to life. Another idea is to make a giant wheel. It would sort of be like a big phonograph record with both the video and audio data. The wheel would spin slowly playing the audio and displaying images in sequence.

Tonight Erik came over and we shot two short pick up shots. One shot was of the "stars" falling. Easy, if you don't count last week when we shot it and it didn't work because you couldn't see the stars. The other was harder--the spinner shaking and blowing steam from its center hole. We finally found a use for the Haze in a can. That's a Lowel Omni you see blasting through the hole along with the haze.

BTW Erik--my phone works. (I accidentally washed my cellphone last weekend. After drying it and recharging it, it's up and running. Amazing Motorola technology.)

Brian dePalma's Blow Out (minor spoilers)

If Enemy of the State is the unofficial sequel to The Conversation, Brian dePalma's Blow Out is the unofficial sequel to Antonioni's Blow Up with a bit of The Conversation thrown in. I watched it because I thought it would be a good model for our looking/investigating scenes and indeed it is.

When Blow Out was released I was an undergrad at UCLA. I remember one of the other art students saying, "I can't believe John Travolta made me cry." Back then, John Travolta was known for Saturday Night Fever and Grease and was trying hard to be taken seriously as an actor. He gave a good, natural performance I think, aided by cigarettes which are always good when you don't know what to do with your hands.

dePalma is obsessed with split screens in this film. Sometimes it looks like he's using the split-focus lens he used in Carrie---huge object in focus in the foreground / tiny things in focus in the background (thanks to David C. for this info). At other times, the screen is literally a split screen, sometimes distractingly so as in the TV scene. But for a dePalma film, it's very restrained. It's also interesting to see how the film plays now 25 years later. The music is SO made-for-TV with delusions of Lalo Schiffrin dancing in its head. Having John Lithgow, Dennis Franz and John Travolta also doesn't help dispel the "made for TV" vibe.

Blow Out is about sound man Jack Terry who inadvertently records the sound of an assassination on tape. One scene is phenomenologically interesting. We see Terry scrubbing the tape as he listens to a gunshot and a tire blow out which are almost instantaneous. He keeps scrubbing and then finally we hear the sound as Terry hears it--two discreet pops literally separated in time (25:33).

Also interesting and very analogous to our project is the piecing-together-the-evidence scene in which Terry syncs his audio with a reconstructed film of the incident (33:00). What makes the scene interesting is not necessarily the suspense, but the sheer pleasure of watching something being constructed. Something to think about for our effort. The analog tapes with labels are a good idea for close ups in the red room. Also, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the clarity of the later continuation of the scene is enhanced by pointing--Terry literally points to the important part of the film over and over (51:00).

Like any good conspiracy film, this one features the crazy obsession room, in this case Terry's studio (above) which is a mess after he tries to find a presumably deleted audiotape (1:07). Another good addition to my list of Crazy People's lairs.

Slide library

Slide library images taken with my iSight camera. Here's a joke that is too lame even for Sean. Where should you eat when listening to an iPod? At iHop.

Collaboration & the cultural logic of late capitalism

Went over to Dan's yesterday to discuss the 'codex' text. This is the text at the end--the grand exposition that explains the story. It's an audio collage pieced together word by word from various public domain sources. Some of the text I had written was bugging me--it was too literal. I figured that some of the language needed to be gentler, a bit less bald and broad so I had a list of changes for Dan. He has been working on this thing for about three weeks now and it has taken him a tremendous amount of time to piece together the text from various sources. Plus he's been doing a lot of experimentation with notation and writing C-Sound scripts, etc. But I just breeze in and suggest all these changes.

I remember back in my interface days, I used to design and program interfaces by myself. The engineer in me tended to win out so I would design around what I could program relatively easily. There are some benefits to this approach. But in general, there is a nice tension that is created during collaboration. When you're making suggestions about someone else's contribution, the work involved is invisible, so it's often easier to make suggestions. It's like the idea of being a ruthless editor. Sure that shot may have taken hours to set up, but if it needs to changed it needs to be changed.

I wonder if this suggests, strangely, that a disengagement from cost--economic, emotional, material--may sometimes lead to better artistic decisions?

Another issue this brings up is related to design process. Film is traditionally a waterfall process: highly planned and prespecified. But the only reason I felt I could make a narrative film is because I figured the technology (and people I worked with) would enable me to use a more bricolage-like approach in which the details emerged during production. You always hear about film fx people and others saying "it was great working with him because he knows exactly what he wants." I think they mean something very specific by that--that this person is a good visualizer and good at prespecifying things. On the other hand, while I do know exactly what I want, I don't know what it is until I see it! I think this would earn me a reptutation of never knowing what I want. But it just amounts to a difference in process. I think. Or does it?

Tween girls in wonderland

I'm wondering what's up with all those tween girls in wonderland films that are coming out these days? They all seem to be about a lonely girl entering a fantastic dark world of computer generated imagery:

Tideland
Pan's Labyrinth
Mirror Mask

11/17/06

Today's LA Times has an article on just this issue. Here's an excerpt from Fairy Tales for a Mean New World—

Still, not every filmmaker shares the director's protective attitude toward children. Case in point: Terry Gilliam, whose Gothic fantasy "Tideland" follows the plight of 10-year-old Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) after the back-to-back drug overdose deaths of her junkie parents. A paranoid taxidermist, a lobotomized epileptic and a bunch of talking headless dolls vie for her attention in the film's creepy, pastoral Wonderland.

Although the Motion Picture Assn. of America gave the film an R rating for what it describes as "bizarre and disturbing content, including drug use, sexuality and gruesome situations — all involving a child …," Gilliam insists Jeliza-Rose is never in peril. Moreover, he dismisses the notion that children are any more deserving of sympathetic treatment in films than adults.

"We seem to be trapped in a lot of middle-aged people's idea of what a child is," Gilliam says. "That usually means some delicate little creature who's a victim and who needs care constantly. I think that's nonsense."

He adds: "They're much less vulnerable in many ways than adults. They are tough little creatures. I find it shocking that people don't want to believe that.

Things that go suck

While cleaning out my hard disk I stumbled upon my copy of Belief's Untitled003:Embryo, a short film I bought on iTunes. I had been following this film for awhile since I'm familiar with Belief (motion graphics company) and their work. It looked to be an experimental visual effects piece that might be poetic and sort of interesting. But it was unbelievably lame, like a demo reel for music videos glued together with a cliched narrative posing as an experimental film. Sample dialogue: "For your dream might well become your nightmare!" But seriously, what exactly was I expecting from Belief?

I also recently purchased the '06 premiere of SNL starring Dane Cook. More money down the iTunes drain. I'm sort of intrigued by iTunes because essentially it offers what cable companies have refused to provide: ala carte pricing. But on regular cable, you watch something sucky and you just go "meh." When you pay $2 for a video and spend 15 minutes downloading it, it just seems to suck more.

Raiders, again & workroom lighting notes

I've been watching Raiders of the Lost Ark again to get ideas about suspense-building. Actually what struck me this time was the image of Harrison Ford as a white overlord watching the grubby Egyptians dig up treasures for him. This must have stuck with me somehow. This morning, in that hazy state between dreaming and waking I found myself working on the lyrics for an unknown musical...

We play in the sun doing whatever we pleases
While the white man brings in an array of diseases

Lighting notes

Night:
Flood pointed at window from outside
Red light bulb
Desk lamp
Omni with umbrella, for interior fill

Evening:
Tota and Omni pointed at window from outside
Omni with umbrella, for interior fill
White balanced to look orange

Damn that high quality American craftsmanship

Erik and I shot more second unit stuff tonight. Spinner shaking. "Stars" falling from the spinner. Lots of close-ups. Getting the spinner base to shake was difficult. For some close ups, we tried all sorts of appliances trying to get the items to vibrate. Vornado fan. No good. The motor is too smooth. Blow dryer. No good. Too smooth. Damn these well-made products. Electric hairclippers. Ahh, just right... if held in a particular way at a particular angle under the table. For most of the shots though, we just did old fashioned table shaking. And then there was the rack focus. The HDR lens doesn't track accurately, so you have to purely eyeball focus changes. In other words, you can't mark a lens adjustment on the camera. Erik is a good sport. I always think that I can somehow do the shaking faster or better than him and he lets me try and of course, most of the time I can't. He also helped me plant a tree this afternoon.

Pot pourri

Some new additions to "crazy peoples' lairs"...

Simpsons - "My mother the carjacker"
Homer thinks a clue in a newspaper clipping is a message from his long lost mother.

Fade to black
I saw this movie back in college. Not worth renting even for the nostalgia value. The protagonist's room is obsessively covered with movie memorabilia, the first step in his descent into movie-inspired psycho killing.

* * *

Production advice

Turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller

Production kelp, hamburger style

My student Carlo bought some life-size plastic seaweed off Ebay for his spectacular underwater scene. It comes from Disney's 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride. Still lots available.



Green screens

My Name is Yu Ming (on Shorts! Vol. 3)
Shot on DV white-balanced off plum to create greenish image.

November
Shot on DV white balanced to create greenish and other color effects.

Daredevil, courtroom scene
Shot on film, yet delightfully green