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.