Saturday & Monsters Inc.

Just did a few little things yesterday. Did some tests in the red room. Checked out how to make Ben's huge back yard double for the desert. Biggest problem: his grey dirt doesn't match the desert's red dirt. Solution: find red dirt. Erik's scheduling the library for shooting soon. I don't know how most crews get so many setups done per day. I don't know if it's the practical effects, the props, the small crew or just me, but we rarely seem to get more than a handful of shots done during each session. The planned July schedule: out the window.

I've been watching Monsters Inc over and over with Sean. It got me thinking how weird the film industry is. Monsters Inc is incredibly well-crafted. But at the theater it costs the same to watch a Pixar film or a poorly made film. Are there any other industries in which you pay the same price for various products? Weird.

Desert shoot II: the return

Went up to the desert Wednesday. It was cooler than LA but still hot--definitely over a 100. Over 100 people have died so far in California in this heatwave. It's hard to think in those conditions. There is a huge glare spot on all of the shots of the truck coming down the road. If I had been thinking better it may have occurred to me to move the camera. My first thought was actually to use anti-glare spray. That's hundred degree weather thinking.

Having checked out the location on Google maps we knew that the desert lot was pretty big (we found out it was for sale). So we drove around until we found a long road and a low horizon. Even so, I'm going to have to do some digital removal of elements on the horizon line. It should be pretty easy though despite the camera movement. And in the shots of the peeling Joshua tree, I'm going to have to digitally remove trash. There was just too much of it. All in all, I'm probably going to have to do a lot of wire/trash/electric line removal. I could even remove the glare spot, but it's a lot of work.

The clouds were beautiful and Erik did a great job with the crane especially considering that we didn't use a monitor. It's all just guesswork. But I should have directed a little better. The same problems keep coming up over and over--

>LCD on camera is too small to use as a monitor so it's hard to assess shots in the field.

>It's tough to keep one's wits about oneself when shooting on location, especially a tough location like this one. I need to follow the lead of Oliver Stone (tent) Coppola (trailer) and Lucas (video village) and create a space on location where I can be disengaged and really look at what we shot.

>It's still hard to shoot and direct at the same time but that could be solved by the above.

Some of the shots that I thought would work well, don't cut quite as nicely as I hoped. They look a little static so I need to direct Ben better so there's more movement.

Aunty's apartment

You may have noticed that I have a new template for this blog. Its name: "oops, I accidentally erased the old template." Planning to finish shooting in the desert on Wednesday using the crane. Hope the life-threatening, three digit temperatures don't follow us up there.

The other week I wrote about my Aunty's apartment. Here's a photo I just got back (I used my Dad's camera and in order to get film developed in Hawaii, they now ship it to the mainland!). Note the varnished fiberboard, built-in shelving, blue frost formica, and brown, abstract-pattern linolelum. I really like it.

Crane test

Here are some previs shots using the $300 bargain-camera.com crane. The crane itself is made of powdered metal square tubing assembled by nuts, bolts, nylon washers and wingnuts. It's pretty simple and doesn't look particularly roadworthy. But what do you expect for $300? Here's our first test of a standard crane down car shot. The trick for these, we found out, is to leave auto-leveling on. The movement itself looks fine but it's really hard to get the camera to stop smoothly so you see a tiny bounce at the end [view].

The next previs shot is for the scene in which Ben finds a shrine filled with photographs of dead people. Disappointed, he lets the wind sweep the photo into the sky. Getting all the elements to work in this shot is tough. When it works, though, it almost looks fake, like it's done with CG. The photo is pulled directly toward the lens by invisible thread wrapped around the crane [view].

More on visual effects & project update

Titanic water simulation by Arete software.

About a month ago, watching Hitchcock's The Birds started me wondering what today's visual effects films will look like years in the future. Will we look at today's effects with fondness as we do Ray Harryhausen's stop motion work? Or will we look at the effects as poorly crafted and primitive like those in The Birds? Certainly there's no one answer. I think one possibility will be that certain visual effects will simply serve to date a film. They won't detract from the film, but will evoke the conventions of the time in the same that using outdoor locations and indoor sets identifies a film as mid-century. So maybe we'll remember the Arete CGI water period when water was always done using the same algorithms, or the Shake compositing period. Strangely, by the way, when I was arriving in Hawaii I noticed the water from the air. The wind was creating very hard, almost geometric striations and I thought "wow, that really looks like bad CGI!"

And yes, I do remember that this is a production diary not my 'write about visual effects, objectivity and complain about Dan Brown blog.' But nothing's happening! I'm back in LA now but Ben has relatives here again. Good for the soul, bad for the production schedule! I got the crane and tried it out, but I can't give it a good workout until I get my good tripod from Ben's. I can already tell that it's going to be tough, if not impossible to get the crane to stop smoothly. Haven't heard about the pickup truck yet. Both Ben and Erik have been incredibly committed. So hopefully we'll get going again soon.

Backstory shmackstory

After discussing the shrine interior with Dan I've come to realize that I don't feel any need to develop a backstory for the thing. Instead, I'm thinking of it from a certain artistic point of view. The shrine interior is about aging and layering, about how things take on different uses over time. What starts out one way turns into a shrine for dead children which turns into a shrine for Shirley Temple. I think art boxes, like Cornell boxes, derive their poetry not from their backstories but from the attention paid to the qualities of things. Shirley Temple's photo, if I do use it, comes not from any prescribed "meaning"--in fact, she's still alive. Rather, I keep thinking about her because her photo keeps staring at me from an old scrapbook I bought on Ebay.

Immersion and objectivity

Yesterday evening Ben and co. left for LA. Hopefully we'll get some shooting done this coming week. The crane arrived and Erik is trying to see if he can get us a prop pickup truck. I'm wondering whether we'll see any of the smoke from the Yucca Valley fires in the desert?

Took Sean to the zoo yesterday. The guinea pig and koi habitats in the new children's section were interesting. The guinea pigs roam around within an indoor and an outdoor cage. There is a tunnel in which a kid can "play guinea" pig and pop up within the guinea pig's habitat in a smaller cage. The koi pond is similar. There is a tunnel that takes you to an "island" within the pond. Both of these projects seem to be built on the idea of immersion; zoos for the video game generation.

And yet I wonder if these exhibits are less about immersion and more about objective representation. These exhibits break down the picture window of the ordinary zoo display. But the sensation of moving within the animal spaces only functions because we can see the animals from a variety of points of view. We see them faraway and then get closer, our view constantly changing. These displays are like Google maps in which we zoom in and out, with terrain objectified before us. Here we see objectivity masquerading as immersion; the animals become specimens to be inspected from all angles. What makes the exhibit novel is an evolution from objectivity-as-picture-window to objectivity-as-interaction. The security cam representation of objectivity is replaced by the probing of an objective camera repositioned at will.

NASCAR Racers is for (Hitchcock's) The Birds

Strangely, now that I'm in Hawaii, I find myself blogging -more- and not less. It's what I do when Sean's asleep now that I've finished *ahem* Angels & Demons. The other day, NASCAR Racers, an old TV series from 2000 was on. It's a hodge podge of 2D animation (people) and 3D animation (cars). It made me think about The Birds and its now pastiche-like visual effects and got me wondering whether that's what today's visual effects films will look like years from now. We'll be watching Superman Returns in 2040 and seeing it as a weird mish-mosh of 2.5D, 3D and live action instead of as a seamless whole. The difference between earlier visual effects films (e.g. King Kong) and today's films, is that in the old films, the effects segments look like shots interspersed with regular footage. In today's effects films, the effects and footage mingle within the frame and across frames often creating a peculiar visual ambiguity.

Victorian post-morterm photo reference

Reference for shrine interior.

Shrine interior reference

Cereal box reference

The first clue will probably be hidden in a generic-looking cereal box. Most of these are from theimaginaryworld.com tick tock galleries. Most of the clues in the film were designed to be shot in close-ups so I can change them as needed (for example, the shrine interiors will be shot long after the location shrine exteriors). The cereal box is one of the few clues in which the clue itself will be in a medium shot.

Noise day at Waikiki beach / Aunty's apartment

Stock image of San Souci beach. We hung out near the lifeguard stand where some guy was playing a ukulele.

In a moment of independent short film synchronicity, Ben, Gracie and I went to Waikiki beach yesterday along with various spouses, sisters in law and kids. I knew I would think of the perfect thing to shoot only after I arrived here. My aunty's apartment near Ala Moana would make a great location for Ben's place. It's a marvel of low-cost forties/fifties design. Done in that acidic blue/green color that I'm so fond of, it features old window frost style formica countertops, brown linoleum tile flooring and varnished, exposed particleboard. I've come to realize that all my production design ideas come from growing up here: the acidic colors, the run-down mid-century design with exposed wiring, the small, pre-condo era apartments and workplaces rendered through the haze of nostalgia and memory.

Dan Brown

Look at him, standing there in his turtleneck and tweed jacket, the trademark outfit of his hero Robert Langdon, as if his protagonist were a projection of the author himself into a universe run by movie cliches.

Angels & Demons is thematically a lot like our film. But while Brown's novel is a story meant to capture the imagination, ours is a narrative meant to describe how a world works. And while Brown's dissimulazione is an offensive strategy, ours is defensive. It requires some surgery to separate these two Siamese twins: one coarse and misshapen, the other fetal, nascent and bitter.

Ah, my archnemesis Dan Brown. So we meet again....

[Conains Angel & Demons minor spoiler]

Today, I picked up Angels & Demons as a vacation read. It's the prequel to The da Vinci Code featuring the Robert Langdon character and is being turned into a film (2008). If you remember a few weeks ago I was complaining about author Dan Brown's throwaway use of Newton. Now, I find out that Angels & Demons has a segment about a physicist who creates matter ex nihilo. Yeesh. This is getting ridiculous! Plus, this is mostly a throwaway idea used to set up a standard beat-the-clock plot. I am now convinced that Dan Brown is part of an evil conspiracy bent on trivializing my work by spewing chaff into the literary ether. Dan Brown my archnemesis, we meet again!

I like 'em big, deep and still

I guess whether I'm in Hawaii or LA, I'm always thinking about the same things. Maybe that's why I'm not that interested in traveling. Siwaraya says that except for school I never leave Pasadena.

Those of you following this production diary know that one of the purposes of this project is to think through what it means for people with traditional art/design backgrounds to create narrative film.

The first approach is animation which is the marriage of drawing and film.

A second approach would be to use abstract mechanical/ expressionistic approaches within a film. This can be done diegetically and non-diegetically. The perfect example of the diegetic approach is Stealth. The plane is flying. Cut to the video display where we see some motion graphics. Then we cut to a wide shot of the plane as a (virtual) shaky, hand-held camera attempts to keep the plane in frame. The second approach is non-diegetic. This is what the students usually like to do. Burns to white. Highly effected flashback sequences. You know, like Underworld: Evolution. Stuff that looks cool that draws from a spatially-oriented visual arts vocabulary.

A third approach would be a combination of the "USC Cinema style," traditional animation and abstract film that George Lucas uses for Star Wars. If you're interested in what I call the "USC Cinema" style, see two excellent resources: Innocence of the Eye by Ed Spiegel and The Visual Story by Bruce Block. These books derive from post-Eisenstein(ian) formalism as channeled through Slavko Vorkapich and the USC film department.

I seem to be using a fourth approach, one that backgrounds abstraction. In this case, artifacts become a means of disclosing thought/communication. As I wrote in an earlier post, our film seems to be about one person, but I think of it as a fight between Ben and an unseen adversary. The objects visualize a series of escalating confrontations, points in which two worlds meet.

Visually, here's how the film is turning out (see post on Thinking about terminology for some definitions)--

>Big (when possible)
>Deep (e.g. non-flat)
>Still (e.g., Theatrical)
>Spectacle through energy without expense
>Inexpensive but not cheap
>Directed from the editing room
>Craft coming into being

Aloha from Hawaii & process notes

I've been in Hawaii for two days but it seems like much longer because of the time difference. I'm surprised that I've been doing work on the film. I was up early yesterday so I previsualized the "hyperfoley" scene in Cinema 4d. It only took about an hour and a half. I'm also following up on some photo props with Sara at mantofev.com and was able to check on the arrival date of the camera crane. Plus I've been corresponding with Dan about the final red room exposition. Actually, a lot of work on the project was done in Hawaii. I wrote the script here a year and a half--and three different endings--ago.

Telecommuting seems so mundane these days. Here's an "I remember the days" story. Back when I was at UCLA, my sculpture instructor Gary Lloyd (Google him) had to be in New York so he decided to hold class "long-distance." That meant talking to us on the phone and sending us some images (an anime-style drawing of a woman saying "Gary I love you") via a Qwip system. A Qwip system was a prototypical FAX machine that was available before the term "FAX" was coined. Yes, this was back when FAXES were hi-tech. Yikes. Let's move on before I start talking about how I used to walk three miles to school every day (actually I didn't, but I did have to take a bus home).

Ben arrives this am and I'm going to pick him up at the airport and spend the day with him before Kris arrives. BTW, the end result of the "Hawaii shoot" idea is that we're not going to shoot anything here. We just couldn't think of anything to do that made sense. Ben was also afraid we'd get a review like "the scenes shot in Hawaii look like the producers were trying to parlay a tropical vacation, Roger Corman-style, into a film" (see She Gods of Shark Reef for an example).

Notes to myself on our current production process:

1. Check out/build location and take photos.
2. Previs in 3D
3. Rehearse with Ben and camera, look at footage and improvise/critique
4. Create shot list
4. Shoot down the shot list

New--added to crazy peoples' lairs

I added pix from the original The Omen to the section on crazy peoples' lairs. Here you'll see the crazy priest's room papered with bible pages for spiritual protection. Sounds more Protestant than Catholic though doesn't it? [VIEW].

Summer slowdown

With everyone's summer schedules we'll be slowing down production in July so updates will be few for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully we'll finish the red room tomorrow though. Holidays are great if you need a break, but wreak havoc on shooting schedules.

Thinking aloud: terminology

Visual symbolism in the theatrical Harakiri (1962)

Some definitions for terms I find myself using...

"Screens like a movie of the week"
>Lighting setups not changed and scenes lit flat to make shooting faster.
>Shot mostly with masters and occasional closeups without much thought about how the film will be edited.
>Edited usually from master to close ups.
>Conservative lighting done out of the fear that detail in mids and dark areas will drop out.
>Music, wallpapered throughout a scene, provides an emotional cue for what's happening; music substitutes for shooting/editing/performances.
>Overly-dependent on dialogue.
>Generally speaking, highly budget-conscious film aimed at ensuring the point gets across, safe film that doesn't take chances.

"Screens like a feature"
Pretty much the opposite of the above.

"Looks small"
>Everything is shot tight because of the difficulty of getting big sets/locations.
>Use of matte paintings to try to give the illusion of size. Therefore, none of the wide shots move or none of the subsequent shots in a scene are wide.
>Use of tricks (like lots of fog) to hide small sets or miniatures. Sometimes this is an artistic choice.
Example: Underworld Evolution, The Undead. Star Trek TNG TV series.

"Looks cheap"
Green screen, visual effects and other tricks used poorly to make a film seem like it has a bigger budget. Examples: Revelation, A Sound of Thunder.

"Theatrical"
>Stylized, as in Japanese film.
>In many shots, characters and camera are virtually immobile. Action comes from the cuts.
>Ritualistic performances.
>Some wide shots shot straight-on (this doesn't look good too close) or straight on with a push in.
Example: Harakiri, Lot in Sodom.

"Flat"
>Lighting not used to model objects/people.
>Lack of camera movement prevents feeling of entering into space.
>Lack of use of foreground/middleground/background to create depth in compositions.
>Poorly lit items shot straight on and too close.
At one time I would have said theatrical IS flat. Now I distinguish the two and find my tastes run to theatrical but NOT flat.

"Face acting"
Scrunching up one's face and other facial gymnastics aimed at projecting emotions, usually sincerity; indicating. Example: Kentaro Seagal in Seamless. One of my students calls this mugging, but I reserve "mugging" to describe the use of expressions and gestures intended to produce a specific effect like something Sandra Dee would do.

"Film"
Refers to intent and tradition rather than a medium. For example, I would call Superman Returns a film through it was shot digitally. From my observation, these kind of terms stick around long after they don't make any real technological sense (like "desktop publishing"). "Cinema" just sounds too pretentious.

Getting my props

Won this TV off Ebay for $10 + $30 shipping. I liked it, it was pretty cheap and no doubt we will need a TV prop sooner or later for our ambiguous 50's-60's-70's universe. The question: how do you get a DVD to play on the thing? There are a lot of cheap low-power TV transmitters out there but I'm looking for something that's prebuilt and not a kit. Usually that means a big jump in price. There also may be a way to use an RF modulator to make the TV show DVD output. Or maybe I'll gut the TV and replace the tube with an LCD screen. I asked Brian our department tech whether it was true that the capacitor in a TV set can shock you even when it's unplugged. He said, YES, it's true.

At this point in my life, I don't feel too bad about buying these kinds of things without a specific use in mind. My taste doesn't change much so sooner or later this TV will end up in a video or a project somewhere.

PS: I received this response from northcountryradio.com-
Our LPTV transmitter would do what you want. Th works on VHF CH 2-6. The kit is $52.95. We can supply an assembled unit for $98.50. It runs on a std. 9V battery

Biting the (magic) bullet

Sooner or later I'm going to have the bite the bullet and pick up a copy of Red Giant's Magic Bullet to create the conversion from 60i to 24p. Problems: it's expensive ($500 academic) and slow on my machine. Besides 24p conversion tools, Magic Bullet comes with something called the "look suite" that offers preset/customizable color grading. This software is a bit like the earnest assistant who tries too hard and ends up doing too much. But it's fun to play with and some of the effects are kind of nice.

Here are the basic looks:
[view]

Here are my tests:

Preset: Warm and fuzzy


Preset: Basic warm to the max


Preset: Mexicali
This preset is based on the movie Traffic and is pretty in a kind of funny way.



Preset: Tropico Wash


Original red room: