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

Meeting with Dan

Today I met with Dan. I was telling him that I shoot the way I write. I usually condense things and tend not to like a lot of elaboration or business. At the beginning of Disney's Pinnochio, Jiminy Cricket stands there on the fireplace fiddling around with this or that for what seems like five full minutes. It drives me nuts.

The problem is, at some point, a film needs to have business, or animation, or movement, or elaboration or detail. Call it what you want. In our effort, everything is straight to the point and stripped to the bone. But that doesn't always work dramatically. You have to have something like the cat jumping out at you, the false alarm. Or the voltometer needle jumping up and down. Or the lights flickering on and off. Or the security guard walking by the door. Or the kid going back for the dog. You need to build suspense over time. Otherwise your suspenseful scene is just a camera pushing in and that's it.

There are two problems here. One is elaborating the suspense without puncturing it. The other is thinking of -good- business--something that's not too stereotypical, something that adds to the story rather than just being used for effect.

The timing is also a bit difficult. So Dan agreed to make some temp audio for the suspenseful scenes. We need to have time enough to let the scene build. He can determine what 'enough time' is and I'll edit/shoot around that.

I was also telling Dan about how I want to change the church scene. You remember the church scene--Ben reading an arcane books, the birds attack, etc. etc. Every time I look at the footage I dislike it more and more. It's the scene that I feel is too contrived. If we could have found a better location I think it would have worked. But every time I see it, it just doesn't hang together visually. It's mostly the location. A Protestant church just can't look like a Catholic church.

So I've been thinking about shooting in our slide library at school. The slide library at school is really interesting. It has these huge metal drawers with vertically mounted built in light boxes You pull out a sheet of slides and you can see dozens of them at the same time, like a backlight mosaic or stained glass window. In that way, it's the same idea as the church, only more visually unique. Since I can't get the kind of church I want, I figure I should go the other way and take the scene in a more sterile, mechanical direction.

Oh yeah, the score. Dan showed me the original score for the Codex intercut audio. It is literally a score. On huge composer's music paper, Dan has the entire thing written out in notes. It's an amazing thing to see. But Dan's not using the score anymore. That was for when he was thinking of the audio as "art"--something in which the artist's hand was evident. Now that he's reconceptualized the sound as something that ought to be mimetic and less art-like, he's doing part of the first intercut in Performer to give it a more hand made feel.

Thumbnails

Here's a sheet of thumbnails of the film so far. With in-the-ballpark color correction.

The origins of the story

Today I put our 5 minutes or so of completed footage together. It looks pretty consistent. Definitely the same brain at work there. It has the same greenish orange palette throughout. Everything is shot on the big side. It's obvious I was using a tiny monitor because though shot in HD(V), the images seem optimized for 500 x 280 which is what I use for testing! So we see a lot of Ben's big head.

For some reason I was thinking about the first incarnation of the film. I remember telling Maria the story on a trip to the Long Beach aquarium but back then it was a big budget visual effects noir piece loosely based on the look and feel of Dark City. The spinner was huge then--like a turbine in a hydroelectric power plant. The bad guys (you actually saw them) levitated into the air with quiet, arrogant menace. The idea, like now, was to create a film that was the opposite of The Matrix.

Erik tames the spinner

If you're not sick of seeing shots like this then you haven't been reading this blog for very long. This is the revised workroom set. From our shoot on Saturday night.

Last night the second unit (that means Ben stayed home) shot the "workroom night attack scene." Erik has mastered the spinner. The trick--"wind it up" counterclockwise. Then set it spinning. This is the scene where the sound from the radio becomes distorted and vibrates in time with the spinner with frightening resultsl! Erik had all these "Close Encounters" ideas for the scene. The voltometer starts to go crazy. Maybe the lights start to flicker. Maybe too far? Erik has the voltometer now. He's going to try to rig it so the needle will jump up and down. We finished in about four hours.

Today's lesson on film is from Kim Jong Il

With all the news about North Korea and its test firing of a nuclear weapon, I got sucked into reading about Kim Jong Il and eventually stumbled upon his writing about film. There's a lot of stuff--you can even buy one of his books at Amazon. Fortunately, for those of us who don't have the $27, one of Kim Jong Il's books is available in pdf format for free at http://www.korea-dpr.com/library/209.pdf

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting; my limited knowledge of Kim has been shaped largely by watching Team America: World Police three or four times. Some writing in the book aims to describe a non-capitalist theory of film based on the juche North Korean philosophy. But the vast majority of the book is a Borders-worthy text on common-sense filmmaking craft. A sample:

The director should pay attention to editing even when filming. Whilst the filming is being done he should already be creating the speed and rhythm at which the shots that are arranged in the director's script flow and should also provide the occasions for the switch from one shot to the next, taking into account that they have to be connected. The director should pay particular attention to the editing that must be done within individual scenes by directing the movement of the camera, because this must be determined during the filming itself.

One of the films Kim produced, Flower Girl, is supposed to be a real tear jerker. Then there's Pulgasari, the Godzilla clone Kim produced using kidnapped South Korean director Sang Ok Shin. Interestingly an escaped Shin eventually went on to direct the American kid's film Three Ninjas.

More conversations with Dan [audio]

From a recent email with Dan in which we discuss this audio excerpt he sent [LISTEN]. My comments in bold.

There are two ways in which we can approach this thing I think. I was listening to blackbird fly again. Something just like that except with this text would probably work great. I like the speed of it and its musicality and the granulated sound. So I guess that would be the "music composition" approach.

Obviously I have a bias toward this approach, but in this case I'm not sure it would work (or at least I'm not sure how to make it work). What drew me to Blackbird Fly a a poem was the poetics of it---there are clear moments of emphasis that lend themselves to a musical treatment. I actually wrote out the pitches and rhythms of Blackbird Fly the same way I would set a song. The codex text has some characteristics that work against this. First, it is prose which deprives it of the concise rhythms of poetry (prose has rhythm but is tends to be more vague). Second, the codex prose is at once bland and overblown. It is stated in a matter-of-fact way that doesn't lend itself to poetic treatment and the words themselves are over-the-top (magic, the fluid metals, time of change) in a way that perfectly balances the matter-of-factness when read but sound ridiculous when treated more poetically ("Magic!"). I've heard prose such as biblical text set, but their success often depends on the characters involved (a sort of operatic leaning) and the hieratic nature of the text.

I really appreciate you going through this with me because I couldn't figure out at first why I was confounded by how to treat the text. Everytime I hit the important words as I normally would it sounded silly.

I think if we were to want a more compositional approach, it would essentially have to be in between the action or accompanying action that doesn't further the plot. This is, I think, the basis for the MTV moments in so many TV shows: moody pop song plays while character walks and looks moody and interacts in meaningless ways (plot-wise) with other moody people. The TV show Alias used to do this about 5 or 10 minutes before the end of each show.

The other strategy is the "sound design" approach. In terms of this approach, I have some specific comments.

A. For some reason, size implication is really important to me. The implication of something small, homely, home-made seems important and congruent with the film in general. I think it's also a personal preference (or obsession). When I was using Reason a lot, I was constantly running audio through any Scream setting that evoked small devices (cassette, tinny speaker, small transistor radio, etc.). I ran your audio through something like a telephone EQ and it seemed more 'aesthetically correct' to me I think because of this small device association.

Absolutely. I had planned to run it through a reverb that would give it the sense of being played in a confined space, but your telephone EQ approach takes that kind of idea back to the source itself.

B. If you remember a long time ago we had a discussion about pitch shifting and I guess this sort of follows up on that. I think it's important that there's a sense of a warbly speed, like a turntable with a bad motor. I ran your audio through my Reaktor ap that does exactly this--you draw a curve that speeds up/slows down the audio using a hand drawn curve and that basic sound seemed right. I think the reason this is important is because it reiterates the old school technological feel of the devices--the analog type distortions that might come from a spinning apparatus.

Again, a good idea. My tape speed glitching was extreme and occasional leading to interesting thumps and squeals, but not what would come from an actual physical source.

C. I also tried a version in which I inserted some blank spaces randomly throughout the piece. Breaking up the piece seemed to evoke the tape splicing idea. I know you weren't going for that yet, but in the long run, something that implies splicing would be important from a sound design type standpoint.

This works nicely. My favorite spots in my own version are things like "sssssecret" and the very slow "controlled" because they seem like they're straining to get out (they remind me of the effort that people who stutter put into their speech). Your random blank spaces give it that held-back feeling. There's a little space after "sssecret" that is there because I needed to adjust the rhythm, but it acts a bit like the spaces you mentioned.

D. I was thinking about the idea of withholding. I don't know if you ever read the blog entry I wrote about the green shrine...

You can find it at http://noisefilm.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_noisefilm_archive.html
(see story of the Green shrine)

Here's an excerpt of the important part:

Making the shrine was really educational. It helped me to realize that these props are performers, just like the actors. You even have to think like an actor to make one of these things. Ben was saying that in film acting you have to consciously try to withhold emotions. The same thing is true with the shrine. One of the reasons the first attempt looked so bad is that the shrine looked as if it were saying "look! I'm old!" The more I covered things up, the more I tried to withhold the appearance of age, the better it looked. Sounds so much like Heidegger's idea that entities withhold themselves. I should look that up. You can see the green shrine in the desert pre-vis.

I wouldn't even know how to do this in terms of audio)... but it would be great if we could do the audio equivalent of the green shrine. Right now the audio is sounding purposefully distorted. It should sound more like the sound is just distorted and noisy but somehow, legible words are forcing their way out. Right now the distortion sounds more like someone trying to make the glitches and distortions apparent. It should in instead, sound like it just IS glitchy and noisy and the legibility is pushing its way through despite the best attempts of the noise to keep it back. Does this even make sense??

That makes a great deal of sense. it should feel like the problems are from the source rather than laid on afterward. Part of the aesthetic that I'm (accidentally) bringing that's left over from the compositional approach is the conscious crafting of materials so that the artist's hand is apparent. Despite my appreciation of and what I thought was an understanding of the sorts of ideas that Cage propounded, I guess I'm still a traditionalist at heart----the artist makes the art!

This is, I suppose, what really makes a sound designer (as opposed to a composer): the craft it hidden, the goal is mimesis. I'll try to think this way some more. I realized that I created the glitching and tape speed squeals using statistical approach (random number generators) in Csound, but perhaps this feels like too much of a post-process. While creating the intercut and looking for the words, I was essentially recreating Ben's activities which helps to explain why the intercutting sounds authentic to me (although as you mentioned, there's not enough). I was thinking about inserting blank spaces using Csound, but maybe I'll just do it in Digital Performer some more---that might give it a more hands-on sense.

Perhaps I should kill off my own time stretching (I wrote out all of those as rhythms) and keep Tod's relative pacing (but a touch slower) along with the warbly tape speed. Interestingly, once I started glitching it I barely noticed my own time manipulations---I was too busy trying to hear what the hell was being said through all the glitches. I played some versions for Bekki and she had a lot of trouble understanding the text once the glitches started.

Here's what I'm going to try next:
1. start with the intercut version
2. tape-speed manipulate it so that it is slower overall (but with the same relative pacing) and has gentle changes in speed/pitch
3. use the blank spaces insert idea
4. telephone EQ it
5. see where we are---this should be relatively understandable, but not completely so.

I like the delay, but I need to rationalize it a bit to figure out where it comes from in the process.

The red room scene evolves...

Dan sent me some of the preliminary audio for the big finale. Here's an excerpt of my response...

Been listening to your audio. It made me realize that the way I originally planned the visuals is probably going to have to change. If you recall, I had originally envisioned a kind of slide show composed of photos of the red room walls. The audio would start and we would see close up what's on the walls ---the visuals would play off the audio. But the audio has so much movement, that I'm thinking I may need to go to video. The idea would be that Ben has not only pieced together the audio but has pieced together video and is trying to run the two in sync. This reminds of things I used to back in the Super-8 days when you pressed play on the tape recorder and pressed play on the movie projector hoping the two ran together. There would be code numbers on the video and of course it would look all weird and garbled like the piece we made for Shim Chong. So the video and the audio would occassionally sync up then wander. Both would be glitchy. If the audio gets too distorted, there could be some video support for that section.

Interesting....

Today I showed Craig, one of the instructors at school, the latest spinner footage to see if he thought the spinning motion was too awkward. He thought it looked OK. Interestingly, when I asked him about it, he thought I had done it as an After Effects composite because the spinner shape looked flat so he automatically assumed it ws a 2 1/2D object. Weird. It's like me and Underworld: Evolution where the flying demon that I thought was a composite was really a practical effect. His comment was that the spinner room reminded him of Myst, the old Cyan computer game... you know, a land of mysterious machines. Also interesting. I studied Myst quite a bit when I was in grad school examining the way it handled interactivity. Myst was also interesting to me because it was done with software I was familiar with—an off the shelf version of Stratavision Pro, and a souped-up version of Hypercard. I had done a number of Myst-like tests at the time. Craig also said the video reminded him of wax web, story about a kook that discovers the television of bees (or something like that).

More spinner troubles

Our tempermental star, the spinner acted up again yesterday when we tried to shoot some cutaways and 2nd unit stuff without Ben. I moved the set near a window to make it more photogenic which means that the drill mount is no longer in the right location. So we tried to make the spinner spin using the technique Ben used in the red room--simply hanging it from the ceiling and spinning. But we got too much side to side sway. When it works, the effect looks great. But generally I rue the day I came up the idea of a levitating spinner. Also, I realized that Ben and Erik spin the spinner in different directions! On the drill mount the spinner goes clockwise. When Erik did it, he spun it counter-clockwise. So I had to reverse all the footage. Spinner continuity. Yeesh.