Two books on acting & more on performance value

Read two books on acting this past week. The first was "I'll be in my trailer," by John Badham, the director of Saturday Night Fever. Badham talks about working with actors from a director's point of view. You won't find anything about shots or camera angles here. You will find a lot about why actors won't do what you tell them to do and what to do when it happens and why you don't want them to anyway. Overall it's pretty instructional and the good, gossipy anecdotes make it a fun, quick read.



Also read "How to stop acting" which is written for actors by acting coach Harold Guskin. A lot of anecdotes about well-known celebs in this one too, but not so gossipy. Reading it made me realize how strange the craft of acting is... doing scenes, "taking it off the page..." What also seems foreign is Guskin's language oriented approach; for him, acting starts with the dialogue. But what about our film where the dialogue comes last? The central emphasis of this book is to deconstruct acting, to make acting fresher, more process-oriented and improvisational. It seems like this would work better for someone with a strong acting background than a beginner.

It's intriguing reading about acting. I've written a lot about "performance value" in our film. This partially has to do with acting, but also about the interaction between performer, camera, props and a situation. I often wonder if my take on this is enough to carry a film?

It's also interesting that these acting books all have that 20th century, SO existentialist vibe to them. They're always filled with discourses on truth and being in the moment. I can relate to this from a directorial point of view. I realize that my problem with most visual effects is not the effects themselves, but with the fact that they are untruthful and poorly performed. A good example would be the butterfly scene in the Japanese film Casshern. There's a scene that caught my eye because it reminded me of our bird scene. There is a flock of butterflies that soars across the sky and into the windshield of a driving car (if I remember it right). But the scene doesn't ring true. It reads as an image without understanding, as a poor performance. I remember something similar in a book on Bryce, that old 3D software package. The cover was a beach scene with starfish in tidepools. The water was tropical green, but the sky was hazy, cold and blue. It looked like a mashup of northern california and the tropics. The problem here was that the scene did not ring true. It was another image purged of any understanding, context, history or experience.

You keep thinking about bird hits you're going to turn into a bird hit

I spent some time this am watching videos of bird hits on youtube. One problem, I realized, is that bird hits don't really look like anything. It's probably the glass, etc., but the videos don't look like the bird is making contact with the glass. Above is from one of the tests I did today to see if I could get the bird to "explode" on the windshield. This is the way a bird hit is supposed to look.

The Prestige (minor thematic spoilers)

I watched The Prestige the other day. I found it to be a dark, unpleasant film. As soon as it was done, I wanted to put it back into its envelope and hurry it back to Netflix touching as little of the disc as possible. One of the things I disliked was its cynicism, as if filmmaking has exhausted itself and there is nothing left to do except to manipulate and jerk around an audience. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising considering it was directed by Chris (Memento) Nolan. Further, The Prestige portrays life as an extreme political act/performance... it's reminiscent of the Ender's Game sequels in this regard, where everyone is constantly on guard, vigilant, living life as a facade. I found the rivalry between the two magicians almost unintentionally funny, like watching Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy come to life. This film reminded me a bit of The da Vinci code (the book, not the film). It's really engaging and well-crafted in a certain way, but afterwards it just seems ridiculous.

Programming: yahoo pipes, Quartz Composer, noise film (+ askville)

I've been doing a lot of things over the past week so I haven't been posting here as much as usual.



One thing I was doing was playing with Yahoo pipes (pipes.yahoo.com). It's a mashup/web2 visual programming language that allows you to make widgets that you can (eventually) post on your site or blog. So I could make a widget that allowed me to dynamically find the names of available apartments in Pasadena and post the locations on a map and see if they formed any conspiratorial shapes like pentagrams.

I've also been playing with Quartz Composer which is on the Tiger install disk (part of Developer Tools). I used to play with Pixel Shox awhile ago and was really surprised to find that in turned into Composer. Quartz Composer allows you to visually link up OpenGL and Core Animation/Video effects. You can try out effects or make screen savers, etc. MIDI and other input options makes it an appropriate tool for VJs. And if you have Tiger, you already own it! You can see some Quartz Composer work at www.zugakousaku.com.

I've also spent some time on askville.com, Amazon's online question/answer community. You type in questions and other members answer them gaining credits for Questville in the process. However, no one knows what Questville is yet. At any rate, I posted some questions about where to find some movies I was looking for (I posted those here about a month ago). I discovered that Askville isn't good at that kind of thing. The people/knowledge base there seems suited to more generalized topics. Yet, posting there is a suprisingly fun activity and you can get into some engaging discussions with members.

In noise film news, I think we're getting closer to making the bird scene work. Writing this script is a lot like programming: you try a bug fix, but then the fix itself causes new problems. In this case, changing the research scene to a car scene solves a lot of problems, but now there are new problems--namely that it's hard to shoot a moving car! The DV Rebel's Guide (if I love it so much why don't I marry it?) suggests breaking down action sequences into specific shots and then solving problems shot by shot, sometimes using totally different solutions. Stu Mashwitz' examples for doing a breakdown are really helpful. So I'm taking that approach with the bird scene. I have a couple of the shots figured out, I think, and just need to figure out one or two more.

Results: inconclusive!

Both Ben and Erik have been quite dedicated to this project but last night Ben didn't show up for our night time bird lighting test 2. So Erik and I did the best we could. Here's what I found out—

1. When shooting a car interior just moving a big light back and forth outside the car looks great and helps a lot with the illusion of movement. I suspect a lot of film people do it this way because the look is very familiar.

2. It looks a lot better to have someone rock the car while shooting rather than applying the bumps in post. You can actually see the person adjusting to the bumps. This means we need to get a person to do this when we shoot.

3. The bird stuff itself doesn't look bad, but the results are inconclusive. I shot from outside the car looking in at the driver. Because there's light coming from the front of the car, the shot looks OK but weak. I'm wondering how this will look from the driver's POV--a backlit bird flying right at the screen. It didn't occur to me to shoot that last night.

4. The moment of impact: still not sure what to do about it.

5. The bad TV look. I now realize what a lot of TV shows do (or used to do). You just zoom in or push in to the driver from the front view. It's supposed to look like the car crashing or whatever. It's a really cheap and bad way to shoot this. We have to do better.

More tapes

David's next iteration of the tape cabinet for the final red room scene.

Progress report

>Items out for laser cutting at Pololu
>David is working on video tape prop for the red room. Will be done probably late next week. It's coming in an old metal cabinet we may have to pick up from Eagle Rock.
>I'm trying to schedule a night test with Ben and Erik for the bird/car sequence.
>Mini TV arrived for portable Memex prop
>Looks like I'm going to go with the Christmas decorations for stars. I tried shaping rock candy but that was a failure.

How the test went

Tonight I tested the shadow-in-the-face-at-night version using Sean and the ornithopter. It looks really good I think. So the next step is to test the whole thing with Ben at night. I'm wondering if it's possible to actually shoot most of this in his truck since it's interiors.

v.6, machines, shadows, belief, drama!

There are about four topics I've been revisting in the past month—problems with the bird scene, machines to buy, shadows & visual effects, and belief and persistence. This post covers all of them!

Bird scene
Here's the latest version: Ben is still driving back home through the desert consulting the portable Memex. But this time it's night. The car is filled with the glow of his device. Ben's looking at the Memex screen, doing research. Scary images. We get closer to his face and see the projected images playing across his face. Then there's a flash of light from outside, almost as if a car is headed toward him. He looks up. Medium shot. Slow motion. Ben is staring in fear and awe as a bird shadow dances across his face. Everything is glowing in the foggy air. Time is suspended as if this is some kind of religious moment. Then we cut back to real time and Ben's POV with a whack! Red blood on the windshield backlit. Ben turns off the road, etc.

Machines to buy
You know I never bought the tube radio. Part of me was satiated by my sister who's getting me one of those Gakken Berliner player recorder kits from Japan (see above). They're really cheap in Japan, about $25. You record on any etchable round surface and can play back as well. I see it as great for getting real analog distortion. I'm also really tempted to get the dragonfly because, uh... SEAN would like it. The dragon fly can hover which would make shooting easier. I'll probably try it with the old ornithopter first. But that thing is really difficult to aim.

Shadows & visual effects
Yes, I'm back to shadows again. But really, it will work this time! Dan and I once talked about the idea that all malevolent forces would be shown as shadows. Common but effective if you can make it work.

Belief and persistence
I believe that persistence comes from belief. I think I mentioned this before—you really have to believe that your next solution is going to work. If you don't have that belief, you won't have the motivation to try your solution. This is the drama of getting this sequence to work. I've tried strategy upon strategy, all of them failing. Will this next version work? Stay tuned...

That idea was short-lived

I spent the last couple of hours working with Cinema 4D. I keep forgetting how much I hate doing this kind of stuff. I'm just not a photorealist. So that's a no go. I don't think I could find someone else to do it either. It's not an easy shot. So here's my new idea. Wowwee now has a product (currently exclusive to Radio Shack)—a flying dragonfly. You can see video of it on youtube. t's essentially an RC ornithopter but cheap—$50. Then I'll move the shot to night and have the dragonfly backlit going toward the car window (it flies just like a bird). That could look good. Plus the portable Memex will be glowing in the passenger seat. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe it will work with the old ornithopter. Maybe just changing to night will help.

Desperate times call for desperate measures

On Friday Erik and I did the bird test. What can I say? It just looks like a blob hitting the car window. I was thinking about it, trying to analyze the difficulty of getting this scene. It comes down to this: we are trying to shoot a bird without using a bird and make it look even better than the scene that we're copying from The Birds which uses a bird. So this calls for more drastic measures. I spent part of the day yesterday looking up powered ornithopters. You can get one for $100. But I don't think that's the solution. Plus, it's expensive. At this very moment I'm rendering a flying bird animation I found at creative cow. It's actually the perfect bird (pigeon-like) doing the perfect thing (flapping its wings) in the perfect format (Cinema 4D r8). The question is whether I can composite this thing or not. It's probably not more than about 30 frames so that's in my favor. I'll let you know how it goes.

Laser cutting

In case you were interested, here's what the files I send to the laser cutter (pololu.com) look like. I send them an Illustrator file and they send back the cut pieces in the mail. The line thickness doesn't matter. The machine cuts right down the center of the line.

I love offsite fabrication. I was never really good at using the big power tools. This makes it easy. It's weird using Illustrator as CAD software. On the one hand, as a vector program with its distant roots in CAD, it feels so right. On the other hand, Illustrator was designed from the ground-up as an art/design tool and it feels so wrong.

The Levitron

I spent much of the day recovering a bunch of files from my computer. I stumbled upon an old bookmark for the Levitron—a gadget that works just like our perpetual motion machine. Like our spinner, the Levitron works magnetically. Unlike ours it doesn't spin forever! [Levitron site] If you want to see one in action, view this youtube video [ link].

David's prop progress

David's been working on some props for the red room. Here's a picture he sent me. Those are VHS tapes he opened. Ben will be cutting and assembling them to form the final exposition instructional videotape. If you look closely, you'll see razor blades which are di rigueur in this sort of scene along with bare light bulbs. And dirt. Because crazy people are dirty. The idea of having the final exposition displayed as a covert instructional videotape is one of those things I find endlessly funny but no one else will think so. I spent over seven years on my instructional design degree and I'm going to make it pay off!

Connecting old TVs to a DVD player

Everyone thinks it's easy to attach video to a TV screen in post. Actually, it's easy to do, but it's tough to make it look real. So I always opt to shoot real screens (usually fed by a DVD player). But what if your cool vintage TV lacks RCA ins? If you remember, at one time I was researching low-power TV broadcast units (about $100). But I double-checked with our tech Brian and he confirmed that you can connect a DVD player to an old pre-cable TV using the antenna connectors. You just need an RF modulator (cheap, see above picture). Even though I have two RF modulators lying around I haven't tried it yet, but it's an ideal solution. On a side note, remember Claire? I think she did some of the motion tracking to map images to the TVs in Superman Returns.

A radical new approach to creation ex nihilo

Many of you know that one of the themes of our film is "creation ex nihilo".... the creation of matter from nothing, a physical impossibility.* At any rate, I never made the connection of this idea to new age thinking. I know that much new age thought focuses on the idea that we are the creators and shapers of our own reality. But I found out that Ramtha, channeled through J. Z. Knight, claims that if you cast aside any doubt, you can actually materialize objects from nothing. This excerpt [full article] describes ex-follower David McCarthy's experiences with Knight's spiritual college. I thought it was funny.

Year after year, McCarthy kept coming back, working at his disciplines, seduced by the promise that his new powers were right around the corner. He suppressed his doubts. "You're taught that doubt is your problem," he says. "We are sleeping Gods, and Ramtha will wake us up."

One day, McCarthy and other masters were working on "manifesting"--creating a physical object out of nothing by focusing on a mental image, like a gold coin, a rose, or a blue feather. "After several days, I'd not created anything solid," he says.

Then, across the Great Hall, he heard people shouting. He saw a woman walking through the crowd holding a blue feather over her head. Pandemonium broke out. Over roars of appreciation, the woman took her place next to McCarthy. He leaned over and asked her how she did it.

"She says she went into the store and bought it. I said, 'That's not creating something out of nothing!' And she said, 'Yes it is!--I've created my own reality.' And I thought, 'I have to get out of here.'"

*Creation ex nihilo violates the principle of the conservation of matter. The basic idea, as I understand it, is that matter is neither lost nor gained, but can be changed from one form to another. I don't know whether Knight is making the larger claim that matter can be created from nothing, or the smaller claim that the mind can control the process of matter conversion. An ad for a book by John Randolph Price sold on the Ramtha website suggests it is the latter—"Price provides you with a special course of study on the Truth of Being, the synchronous activity of Superconsciousness, and the materialization of form out of energy to help you enjoy whole, full, rich lives."

David Lynch, ambiguity, one-eyed spiders & Tim Burton

Been thinking about multiplicity in interpretation. In the David Lynch approach, multiplicity derives from visual poetry. There's nothing to "get" from a Lynch film beyond the rich meanings and experiences evoked by his films. I guess there several kinds of multiplicities at work. In one, the meaning of the work is constantly shifting. In the other, each viewer is parsing the meaning slightly differently.

This is really different from the kind of interpretive ambiguity I'm attempting. There are two distinct threads in our film. You can interpret the story as "Ben is delusional" or "Ben has stumbled upon a truth." So I constantly have to go through the film checking to make sure each interpretation can be validated.

I'm also thinking about the peculiar unambiguous nature of film. In visual art, it's easier to make something like a shadow-person-figure-cloud. In a film, though, it's pretty tough to do that. I'm not talking only about the technology of photography, but about the way photography, as a cultural force, has shaped our vision. In film you can create a person, or a person in the shadows or a shadow of a person. But creating something with the same ambiguity as a drawing is tough. David Lynch's contribution to film is finding a way to make live action film function like animation.

On a different note, I've been working on the TV for the final exposition. It's evolving to look like a one-eyed spider—a small round TV screen mounted on a tripod backlit with tons of wires. Probably the first one-eyed spider I saw was in the Jonny Quest intro (above). The last, I think, was in Mirror Mask. Curiously, I don't think you'd find a one-eyed spider in a David Lynch film. You might, though, in a Tim Burton film. Tim Burton, moreso than Lynch is known for bringing a certain animation sensibility to feature film. I wonder if this has to do less with production design and more to do with a certain orientation to visual ambiguity. Nelson Goodman's term was "syntactic density" which means that a particular image/line/shape could be read in any number of different ways.

Blogging with impunity

We're in a lull while waiting for things to fall in place. David's constructing some props for the red room while Ben grows his beard. We're testing the bird-in-the-windshield on Tuesday. I have the eye for the shrine redesign out for bid from Pololu. I found a world globe at Sean's school. I think they'll let me borrow it. Everything at that school is vintage down to their Bontempi toy fan organ.

I was watching Pi which is a pretty good model for our film. A guy becomes obsessed with a gadget that discloses a world-changing secret! Lots of voice over too. In terms of the theme, however, it's totally different. And in terms of presentation... Pi is so clear. You always know where you are. Everything is outlined and described in great detail. In comparison, our effort is like one long fuzzy montage... things fading in and out and overlapping. It's almost like ours is done in quasi-realtime, somewhere between a montage and the real time of conventional films. I think that's what makes it so sleep-inducing. You can also see such a difference in film grammar fluency. Pi is very fluent. Ours looks like someone struggling to learn a language. Being fluent is fine. But I also like the sense of watching something struggle into existence.

The title of this post comes from Ben who says that's what I do.

reference for shrine eye

Does anyone have a world globe I can borrow?

Something like this would be ideal.

Film phenomena, syndromes and effects

Roger Corman phenomenon
Shooting at a location using the same camera angle and lighting even when the shots are supposed to represent different days and times. Gives film an overall sameness. See it: Bucket of Blood

Author! Author! syndrome
Named after obscure Al Pacino movie in which he plays a famous playwright except they never show any bits of his plays; like having a song in a movie that's supposed to be a hit song but they never play the song. Similar to Macguffin. See it: PI, in which the protagonist genius has figured out how to predict the stock market but they never say how.

Home Depot phenomenon
Every tiny little product has a theme or a design whether it's a knob or a moulding or a bracket. When you put everything together, you have 30 pieces of over-designed elements fighting with each other trying to attract attention to themselves. Example: reason why most of Mike Ford's work (see earlier post) wouldn't make good props.

Close Encounters effect
Trying to make something look huge by only showing tiny little lights that imply gigantic shapes. Example: I'm going to try to make the red room look bigger using the Close Encounters effect. That's why I'm buying so many light bulbs.

Shopper syndrome
Working some gadget or item into your film so you have an excuse to buy it.

Versatile disc conundrum
DVD you want to watch just once is available for purchase on Amazon but not for rent on Netflix.

Noisefilm blog effect
Blogging to avoid work on your film because all the remaining shots require some kind of hard-to-make prop or difficult-to-reach location.

Shot list notes

RED ROOM
Ben, red room haggard and bleary eyed
Ben, assembling media fast motion
Power line pull away
Red room burning oiutlet

CAN SHOOT NOW
Abstract beginning
sunset spinner beauty shots

REQUIRES CLUES
assemble pages fast motion

REQUIRES SHRINE REDESIGN
shoot interior

REQUIRES TEST
Fly attack

REQUIRES GLOBE/SPACE CRAFT
Spinner attack 1

REQUIRES STARS
Stars bouncing wide
Stars CU

LATER
bird scene
Gene CU
driving through nieghbor hood
cu bird scene media
BEN--WAIT ON HAIRCUT
Broken spinner and ben

WORKROOM
Ben looking at broken spinner DAY
Ben fixing spinner DAY
Looks spinner surveillance cam (WEIRD LIGHT DAY)

With no wife to stop me...

I'm pretty close to getting one of these $50 battery-powered tube kits and assembling it in a different box. The red room needs more props and I've been wanting to get one of these things for a year anyway. There's nothing like the glow of a real vacuum tube! Speaking of tubes that kill... I was disappointed to find that Nixie Tubes require such high voltage. So no Nixies for me. Also, I just ordered an antique lightbulb. Beautiful thing that almost looks like a tube and runs under standard 120V power (below). Amazing how the red room always seems to need more props right about the same time I want to buy something.

More retro electronics

These you can buy but >gulp< the price! [arcs and sparks]

Mike Ford

Since I posted the ElectriClerk, I thought I'd post this example of Mike Ford's circuit-bent work in case you hadn't seen it [flickr site]. It shares with the ElectriClerk a highly-polished take on retro-electronics. You can see his work in action on youtube.

The ElectriClerk

No, this isn't the portable Memex, but a prop from a really interesting site I found [link]. This Brazil-inspired fully-functional Mac SE/typewriter was designed for an HP Lovecraft society role-playing game. These guys are really serious. On the game site you'll find downloadable historically accurate paper props along with some custom-created and free-to-download fonts. You'll also find a trailer for a nice-looking b/w film these guys did. I like the ElectriClerk prop but I also like how homely ours looks in comparison. We're like the Ugly Betty of the prop industry.

The ElectriClerk site popped up while I was doing research on exposed CRTs. I'm trying to think of how I can make an exposed CRT prop like they did in Brazil. But I'm also a little scared since touching the back of an exposed CRT can kill you. Our tech Brian said he got a shock from one when he was a kid and it threw him across the room.

Props and believability & Ben look below

Finally figured out a way to handle the portable Memex. My first thought was to make it a digital device, you know, type in "ex nihilo" and the Memex responds "searching...., searching....," etc. Then I thought that idea was too far-fetched for the way it looked. So I had the idea that the Memex would be an audio/video radio/TV receiver that connects to an off-site microfiche reader. Still too far fetched. So I rethought it and came up with a solution I like. The Memex will actually be just a portable encyclopedia. It contains several rolls of microfilm and Ben uses a pot to scroll through them. There's a little pointer (probably a paper clip) that shows him where he is within the alphabet. That's it. A pure analog device. I've become so steeped in internet thinking that I was assuming this box had to have access to ALL information. But one encyclopedia is enough and is believable. Plus I think the visual of information scrolling quickly sideways will be nice. BTW, what you see is the earlier pre-encyclopdia version of the Memex. The viewing port will move down to the box itself. Nothing is glued on or assembled at this point.

Here are my two favorite passages on believability and props. The first is from The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield written back when classic Star Trek was thought of in reverent tones (pg. 380):

It has been said that if you repeat something loud enough and long enough, people will begin to believe it. Perhaps Gene's insistence on the Believability Factor has been responsible for the attitude I have observed in the cast and crew of Star Trek. Or perhaps it is a number of other things. At any rate, time and again I have observed indications that those connected with Star Trek really do believe it all.

For example, I was on the set one day recently observing a scene that was taking place on the bridge. George Takei was standing beside his Helsman's position. The director was going over some of the action that would take place in the scene they were about to shoot. After reading through a few lines of dialogue with Bill Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, the director turned to George and said, "Okay, and at this point Sulu fires the phasers. So you hit this button and fire the phasers." And the director indicated a particular button on Sulu's instrument panel. George promptly replied, "No that's not the right button. The phaser button is this one over here." And George indicated a button on a different part of the panel. The director gave him kind of a funny look and said, "What are you talking about? What difference does it make? This is a set on a sound stage, remember? Push the button and let's get on with the scene." George steadfastly refused to push that particular button saying, "If I push that button, it will blow up the Enterprise!"

On another occasion, during a scene in the transporter room, Jimmy Doohan refused to move a lever in the direction requested by the director. He argued with the director, insisting that he was being asked to do it the wrong way. You move the lever one way to beam a person down, and the other way to beam a person up. He actually refused to do it the way the director wanted, even though the camera was all set up for the shot.

This sort of thing happens all the time. A director might ask an actor to activate a certain set of controls and then immediately report the results to the Captain. The actor will object and say he can't do that because it takes a couple of seconds for that to happen. Therefore, he will have to wait a few seconds before he can make his report to the Captain. No amount of pleading from the director will make them change their minds. They really believe it.

My other favorite passage comes from the just-released DV Rebel's Guide. If you don't have this book, get it now! From page 32:

You know how to use a computer. Your mother knows how to use a computer. So why do characters in films and television always use bogus terms and silly, outdated computing concepts? Does a list of 20 or 30 names of international spies need to be transported on a high-density optical disc? The text-only file would compress down to about 2 kilobutes and could be stored as a tet message on a cell phone, emailed from a Blackberry, or encrypted into the barcode on a box of cereal. Does an analyst in a high-tech counterterrorist organization need to put a file on a Zip disk and scoot her chair across the room to hand it to a colleague? And why is every computer in every movie running some non-Mac, non-Windows, non-Linux operating system wth a giant font and a text window for entering plain-English commands like "find the information" or "shut down the reactor"? Most 10-year-olds know enough about Photoshop to realize you can't enhance a blurry photograph to the point where the nostril hairs of the bad guy leap into crisp focus.

Below is a picture for Ben. Ben, being a wise ass, asked if the Memex was going to project an image into space like a holographic image in Star Wars. Uh... yes!

Narration rough2/If you know After Effects everything looks like a visual effect

Showed the rough assembly to Ben, Erik and Gene yesterday morning. Ben thought it was light years beyond the previous version in terms of making sense. That was encouraging. The main difference between this version and the other was that I rewrote the voice over a lot and I also worked on the structure. This past week I happened to read a section in Mackendrick's On Filmmaking that describes a concept called "point of attack" or something similar. It's the place where the story starts and is different from a 'non-canonical situation.' In the earlier version, there was no point of attack so I added one. Curiously, this makes the structure a little strange. There are four attack/counter attack sequences now instead of three. But it works better. I also added a short bridge sequence before the red room to soften the transition. It's more narration and blunt narration at that. But it makes the film more understandable and more fluid. It's also interesting how much difference music makes structurally. I found that long sequences like the falling stars work fine if the music swells to animate the shots.

We talked about one of the attack sequences and speculated that a "fly attack" might work for that. Ben, very seriously, described how easy it would be to wrangle a fly. You put it in a refrigerator to slow it down. Then attach it to a thread and warm it back up. Of course he was expecting ERIK to do that. Erik gave his "yeah right" look. This is where my current thinking on vfx and its problems comes into play. The temptation of fx is to visualize something that sounds good in your head. You brute-force an image into existence. But a lot of the time, these images really don't work well. That's why a lot of fx don't look good... they were never meant to be images in the first place. So we'll have to do some fly shadow tests. Will the effect look better as a practical shadow or a composited particle swarm or what? Or maybe even a totally different image? You just have to try it and see. Now you know why this thing is taking so long to complete.

Later I had lunch with Mona so I showed the rough to her. Craig thought the spinner was a composite and so did Mona, thus the title of this post. Mona didn't understand exactly what was happening but she said it was interesting to watch. Mona is kind of like your mom—she will always find something nice to say. But I think she was saying that the film is hard to follow logistically but there is a kind of forward momentum. If that's what comes across to others then I will feel like what we've succeeded in terms of structure. I think one thing that detracts from conventional legibility is that there is a kind of fluid quality to the film—not visually, but because of the narrative and the wall-of-music temp track. I like the way these create an underlying similarity... the bird attack is just as dramatic as discovering a clue or looking athe spinner. In the end, the effect is to induce drowsiness, but that is pretty typical of everything I do. I just like that quality. I remember watching the old Monty Python TV show. Everything transitioned seamlessly giving the show a dreamy quality. The other thing that Mona said was that the piece definitely has a mysterious quality. That's the one thing I knew would come across. Dreamy and mysterious.. that's me.

Shot list for Ben & Erik

To finish the first eight minutes (e.g., get rid of the temp footage in the current rough cut) we need to do the following. If we had to, we could finish this off pretty quickly. The only hard thing is the desert bird attack.

FIRST UNIT==============

WORKROOM
Ben looking at broken spinner DAY
Ben fixing spinner DAY
Looks spinner surveillance cam (WEIRD LIGHT DAY)
Assemble pages fast motion

RED ROOM
Ben, red room haggard and bleary eyed
Ben, assembling media fast motion

BIRD ATTACK SCENE
About 10 shots


SECOND UNIT==============

WORKROOM
abstract video beginning
stars bouncing wide
spinner attack 1
Broken spinner machine (several shots)
Sunset more spinner beauty shots
Fly attack

OTHER
stars bouncing CU
shrine interior with eye
driving through neighborhood
Gene CU
CUs bird attack scene media

Battle of the fonts

A lot to write about today, but here's a post about fonts. I just spent about two hours looking for fonts for the film. There are two fonts needed—one for the portable Memex and one for the subtitles in the ending exposition video. It's interesting what seems to work. I must have gone through about 50 or more bitmap or video game fonts thinking that those would look the best. They do work for the Memex I think. But for the subtitles, the ones that look the best are faces that look like old electric typewriters. Sure Univers is prettier, but that MS Gothic font is almost perfectly clutzy, like a font ball for an IBM Selectric gone bad. I love the monospaced look. Look at the overall 'color' of the face. Those Ms and Ws are like dark blotches, squeezed in to fit. And the spacing between the "T" and the "I" is perfectly horrible... or horribly perfect. Compare to the Univers which is so beautiful and even. In this case, truth before beauty. MS Gothic wins hands down. Of the two video game fonts I think I prefer joystick. It looks a little less blotchy.