Sky replacement? No problem

The revised bird scene... uh, "no bird" scene... ends with Ben driving off into stormy skies. Did a test tonight to see how hard it is to do a sky replacement. Verdict: if you shoot it so you don't have to roto it, it's really easy. Here's my test. I took a still image, superimposed it and feathered the bottom. Then I darkened the bottom of the truck shot and corrected it to make it match better.

Dubious DVD commentary director theories of comic book style movies

For some reason tonight I was thinking about two DVD commentaries in which directors talk about their dubious theories. In the Daredevil DVD, Mark Steven Johnson says that in the courthouse scene, the camera doesn't move to follow Ben Affleck expressing his powerlessness within the court system. So when Affleck moves, they simply cut to a different shot. It's actually an interesting idea—represent a character's weakness by his inability to draw the attention of the camera. Except when you see the effect, it doesn't express anything in particular...it just looks like they chose to cut instead of follow Affleck with the camera. It's a cute idea though.

Then I was thinking about Underworld Evolution. The commentary is pretty interesting—lots of good director stories about working within a (comparatively) limited budget. Anyway, Len Wiseman talks about adding rocks to the side of the road to make the truck chase scenes look claustrophobic. Sounds good. Except it just makes the roads look smaller and the production cheaper. Another dubious idea is the use of a stuntman on a wire to play the role of a demon to add to the sense of realism (the wings are CGI extensions). Actually I thought the whole creature was a composite; it really looked like one.

The complete guide to low-budget feature filmmaking

Picked this up at Border's last week. Becker, if you recall, is the guy with the website (beckerfilms.com) who is always ranting and raving about how films have gone downhill in the past 30 years... you know, the guy who doesn't even like widescreen. His book is pretty restrained though, one of those standard low-budget film books, although his definition of a low budget is $100,000.

I put this book in the same category as The Film Director by Richard Bare. Bare is best known as the director of Green Acres though he did some features. It's a nice read, an assortment of director tricks, observations and war stories. Good to read on the plane which is why I bought it years ago. Like Bare, Becker is best known for his TV work (Hercules, Xena) though he has worked on some features. His latest effort is Alien Apocalypse, a B'er than B made-for-TV movie.

The thing that struck me most about Becker's book was his advice about directing actors which contradicts everything you'll read out there including John Badham and Judith Weston's books. Here's an excerpt:

On a very basic level, the actors need to know the director is there with them and that they're not out there all by themselves looking foolish. If you like what an actor is doing, tell them so. If you think your reading a line for the actor will help, then do it. If you need to act the whole scene out for them, then do that. Frequently I will tell actors which words I want them to stress in a line... The actors at Warner Brothers in the 1930s and 40s used to regularly make fun of the great director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Mildred Pierce) because he always acted out the scenes for the actors with his very thick Hungarian accent. That may have seemed silly to Cagney and Bogart, but Curtiz managed to communicate his ideas and consistently got strong performances. The main directorial approach of my favorite director, William Wyler, was to be consistently disappointed with the actor's performances and to let them know it, and this seemed to make them try harder and harder. He took Charlton Heston aside early in the shooting on Ben-Hur and said, "Chuck, you're just not good enough." Heston asked what could he do? Wyler shook his head in disappointment and said, "I don't know" and walked away. Charlton Heston got the Best Actor Oscar for that performance...

More bad language

I was talking to Ben and Erik today about the Lily Tomlin Davd O. Russell argument video. They hadn't seen the companion piece with Lily Tomlin in the car. Here's the link [VIEW].

More context on these clips can be found at Defamer.

More on withholding—Curse of the Golden Flower

I was watching Curse of the Golden Flower today. I couldn't make it past the first half hour. It was just talking. People talking about how they feel and what they're doing. Yuck. It made me realize that I want the idea of 'withholding' to be carried through the entire movie. I want to see characters hiding things, speaking but obscuring their thoughts and feelings. I want the plot points to come out in spite of what the characters are doing. I think that's what I liked about Hero (by the same director Zhang Yimou). Everything's cryptic and hidden and yet the story seems to seep out through the cracks.

I think that normally psychology is used as the justification for what I'm calling "witholding." We mask the deep brooding thoughts we feel inside. But I think withholding has nothing to do with hidden subjectivity and more to do with the idea of existential "concealment" and performance as a process in which things become unconcealed.

There's also a kind of shrill quality to the film that I didn't like. I understand that the film wants to be visually sumptuous to the point of being oppressive. But when this kind of visual sense is reinforced by a script that also holds nothing back, the effect is like constant screaming. Everything is just laid "out there" asking us not to perceive or to contemplate, but to gasp in awe.

Bye bye birdie

Well after lots of tries, I'm thinking of going another way with the bird scene. It's just too hard to make it work. Here's a new version. Let me know what you think.

So Ben is at the desert shrine. He looks in at the shrine. "Ex Nihilo." Then he reaches in to touch the evil eye and then *ouch*. He cuts his hand on the eye. And he looks at his hand and there's a dab of red blood. Now he's driving in his car. He's looking up "ex nihilo" on his mini-computer. Scary images. More scary images. And Ben notices his hand again. And it's still bleeding. Only this time the blood is bluish black. And we see Ben's car driving off into dark, brooding clouds.

Angry director—the movie

Carlo sent me this link to a video showing Lily Tomlin arguing with director David O. Russell on the set of I Heart Huckabees. [View]. Not your average DVD extra.

Every web crawler's a critic

My other blog, boopbeep.com is down now because Blogger's crawlers believe it is a spam blog. So I'm now in the process of trying to get it back up again. Here's what the notice from Blogger said about my site and spam blogs in general: [they] can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site. hmmph. Insulted. And by a machine, yet.

The Mark Harris fallacies

Today David dropped off an article from Entertainment Weekly by Mark Harris called "Micro-Mangling." It's about the film 300 and its visually perfectionistic, blue-screened inhuman sterility. Harris goes on to talk about directors like David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky and George Lucas and the similar problems with their films.

Reading the article was helpful because it helped me realize that I need to differentiate between perfection and performance. Let's take the example from the film Stealth that I always use—a plane whooshes by as a virtual hand held camera shakily pans from left to right in an attempt to keep the plane in frame. The problem isn't that this shot is 100% virtual or that the cloudy sunset is too perfect. The problem is that the shot is poorly performed. The virtual camerawork, however it was done, looks like someone saying "hey, look at me, I'm handheld!" This is where the idea of witholding comes in. Authentic camera work looks like someone trying to keep the camera steady. A good camera performance would have looked shaky in spite of itself. It's the same thing with the "drips on the lens" all-CGI shot from later in the film. The shot doesn't ring true because it seems to be a celebration of splatter—not inadvertant splatter that occurs in spite of a camera operator's best efforts.

That's the thing about CGI—it foregrounds performances in areas not typically thought of as performance-oriented. One thing Harris points out is that in 300, the skies look too perfect causing them to appear inconsequential. Again, this is a problem of performance. Snyder has claimed that the 300 skies are like mood rings indicating the temperament of the scene (from WIRED)—

WN: Did you go through the film scene by scene and manipulate the backdrops to match the emotional impact you were after?

Snyder: Absolutely, I would adjust the sky in every scene so it reflects the mood of my actors. It was like a big mood ring.

One of the characteristics of poor performance is "indication," what I've called "face acting" in the past. Here, a performer is trying to overtly express a certain emotion resulting in a too-broad performance. The problem with the 300 skies isn't that they are perfect, but that they indicate; they are poorly performed. A well performed sky, again withheld, might look like a beckoning storm. Or it might play ironically as a stark, cloudless gray mass. Like background music, the skies ought to serve as counterpoint, not bombast. The problem with the 300 skies isn't perfection, it's vulgarity.

The incorrect conclusion that Harris reaches is that these films are overcontrolled or over-art-directed. By implication, the solution is to add grit or grime or imperfection or randomness. This is one of the most common fallacies of computer simulation: realism = randomness, noise. The visual effects people in the CINEFEX article I quoted in an earlier blog entry also fall into this trap. But as an artistic endeavor the goal of art is not to replicate the apparent "noisiness" of the world, but to behold an emergent moment coming into being.

The common fallacy, also one that I've fallen into from time to time, is that performance value derives from specific techniques or methodologies. That speaks to the fallacious origin of the Noise film. As you recall, the film was going to be a real-time performance captured on tape until I realized the problem: this would not make the film any more dynamic or "live." A performance can soar whether it is experienced live in a theater or captured on film. Further, capturing a performance in real time does not necessarily increase its performance value. A good animator, for instance, can draw a good performance from the outside in, frame by frame, over a period of time that is anything BUT realtime. So performance value is not a result of approach, but of understanding the way performance is expressed within a particular medium. And what's making the all-CGI films look so problematic is that we have not yet come into a full understanding of how to perform skies and blue screens and virtual camera work. What I was trying to do in the "Performance Conjectures" post from earlier this month is describe some qualities of a good performance whether it involves acting, or the creation of props or using CGI.

Here's another example. When making the first Caspar movie, Dennis Muren and team tried mo cap but went back to traditional animation when they found they couldn't get the expressive results they wanted. The problem wasn't with mo cap. The problem was that people at that time didn't understand how to render an expressive performance using the technology. Since then, Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings) and others have begun to refine the craft of mo cap performance. In the same way that film acting is different from stage acting, mo cap acting requires a certain approach to performing.

As I've said many times before, "the shot is the performance." What CGI does is give us greater control over the shot and in that way, expands the ways in which performance value is expressed.

Multiple takes

I saw Ben yesterday. With his beard shaved off he looks like a little kid! Now that we're basically done with the red room it's on to the last big scene: THE BIRD SCENE.... I'm still thinking of alternate ways to do it. I realized that my strategy in doing things is linear rather than horizontal. This means that it's generally hard for me to shoot something two different ways. I usually believe that there's only one way to go forward and if that doesn't work, I'll try another. It's hard to get performance value when I shoot something two different ways at the same time because one of the takes will get short-shrifted.

That thing has so many holes you could drive a pickup through it

Went to Ben's and shot some pickups today. I hate shooting this stuff. It takes so long and it's so uninteresting, like buying socks. The underground shot came out great. I'm finding that what the jib is good for is not those panoramic shots so much, but shots like this that need to be smooth. It's also a good substitute for dollying and easier to set up. The jib shot we did today is where the camera goes down through the floor and reveals the gas line. We did it tons of times before we realized that it would be better to shoot it backwards. That way, when you reverse the shot, the camera stops nicely. I also shot some b-roll and that was it for today. BTW, the name of this post is how you would badmouth someone's foosball defense.

Play Misty for me

Here's a nice big approximately color-corrected frame from the last red room shoot. Just looking at this makes my throat start to tighten. This morning I stopped by at Ben's house to pick up a cord I left in the red room. I was in the room for less than a minute but I had a headache for the rest of the morning. I think it was a combination of the cat hair (I'm allergic), the air fresheners and the spray haze. You can see the dodgy lighting at left and visible red light at right). I slowed down this shot and Ben looks like he's doing some weird snaky dance. I really like it and hope the shot stays in the film.

Red room shoot

Shot yesterday for about three hours. The red room should be finished, but as usual we left the set standing in case we need it again. Ben is happy that he can now shave his beard off. Before shooting we used some of Krissy's makeup to make his eyes look sunken and his complexion drawn and pale. Not quite sure how that looks yet. We talked about a bunch of strategies for making Ben look bleary eyed. His approach ended up being sticking his thumbs in his eyes for a few minutes.

The "ET effect" worked well but it's amazing how insensitive the camera is to smoke. To the naked eye, the room was incredibly smoky, like a 60's Elk's lodge on Saturday night. But on camera the smoke doesn't really show in any obvious way, you just see the light shafts. I sure hope that stuff is non-toxic like they claim. When we were done, the camera lens and my glasses were covered with a fine layer of oily substance. It's funny how smoke/fog is such a ubiquitous movie convention. I remember the other year when we tested some flashlight shots I was surprised because we didn't see shafts of light shooting up into the night sky like I was expecting.

The set ended up being really complicated. We had the one 500 watt backlight, a couple of colored floods, and another 500 watt fill. It seems like most of the time nowadays, we're using just two lights, a hard light raking in from an angle and a soft fill that also lights the background. Then we had a TV set going, the eye TV with a DVD loop and tons and tons of junk everywhere. In terms of the stuff David made, the clothes hangar stuff is the most visible. The tapes inside the cabinet are mostly obscured by the backlight. With these props we make the same tradeoffs as big budget films. Detail costs more (as in time spent), but gives you more options when shooting. It's annoying not to be able to do a shot because a prop/set doesn't have enough detail. Lighting also makes a difference. The red room lighting was dramatic so a lot of the details didn't show through. In the workroom, the lighting was brighter and all the detailing we did shows up, especially in HD.

That place was so full of junk that there are all kinds of little sloppy things in the shots. After I got home I realized that one of the red lights is plainly visible. During shooting, Ben found one shot that had an Omni prominently displayed. Reasons for these problems:

1. The set is so messy looking that it's hard to take everything in.
2. Same problem as usual with the lack of a true monitor.
3. Lack of DP to look for stuff like that before shooting.
4. Cramped, smoky, cat-hair filled working conditions makes you want to rush through shooting.

Tinkering with light placement & Shinobi

The other day I mostly finished dressing the set and getting the main lighting setup done for the red room shoot. Ben HATES being down in the red room. It was bad enough last year with the flea infestation. Now his cats live in there so the chair is covered with fur. There are dead bugs on the floor and you can usually find a black widow or two if you look around. If you stay down there long enough your throat starts to constrict. The shot we set up is called the "ET" shot generically after something Spielberg would do. Ben is backlit and the room is filled with spray haze so there are beams of light shooting out from Ben as he works on his tape assembly. Sort of.

I found that I like getting 80 or 90% of the way there in terms of the set and lighting. As I keep mentioning, I think the shot is a kind of performance. If you get it all figured out beforehand you don't have the energy to make it work when you shoot. Everything is like that—the "how can we recapture the energy of the demo" problem. When you're actually shooting there needs to be a sense of discovery there. It does come across on screen. I think that's why DPs like to tinker around with lights. They're not necessary trying to make the lighting better. They may just be trying to make the moment new, bringing freshness to the shot.

Watched Shinobi the other night. I've heard it called a ninja film, but it's reallly more like medieval Japanese superheros. I'm talking X-men type powers here. The most Japanese character to me was the guy who could shoot strings of hair from his fingers. One of those films from the emerging "cheap Asian CGI fantasy film" category. What's interesting about the film is that there aren't any plot points in it. There's no "Luke, I'm your father!" moments or anything like that. The film just starts at point A and ends at point B which is pretty unusual for a feature length film.

Remote-control birds

I forgot if I posted about this or not. Dan sent me this link the other week about Chinese scientists and their discovery of a way to control pigeons via telemetry. This was actually the backstory of the bird attack scene... somehow the conspirators had figured out how to control birds remotely. To end the scene we talked about showing a dead bird and a tiny electronic receiver in its blood.

Used/cracked auto glass sources & old electronic equipment?

I'm looking for cheap auto glass and also any old electronics equipment (stereos, VCRs, etc.) that you may not need. To be used for (what else) props. Thanks for your cooperation!

Parenting and result directing

All directing books tell you not to be a result director. For example, you shouldn't say "act happy," or "now faster, with more feeling." Where do we learn result directing? My hypothesis: from our parents, and their number one result direction—"be careful!" Therefore, we parents should learn to give specific, actionable direction, for example, "slow down at Pike's peak because it's wet when it rains." My parenting thought for the day.

Performance conjectures

Been thinking about performance. Here are some conjectures.

Good actors...
1. Know how to act naturally on camera.
2. Know how to hit a mark naturally.
3. Are emotionally expressive.
4. Have a sense of energy communicated on screen.

Very good actors...
1. Are inventive--they find new and meaningful ways to do things beyond stereotypes.
2. Understand the idea of "withholding," the idea that things want to remain hidden on one hand, but reveal themselves anyway. In other words, knowing how to play a scene such that emotion and thought are expressed despite one's best attempts to withhold them.

Great actors...
1. Present themselves on screen in a compelling way but maintain absolute mystery about how this is being done. My favorite example is Al Pacino in The Godfather. He looks like he is doing absolutely nothing. Yet he projects enormous magnetism.

Facades

Today I dropped off David's cabinet of tapes at Ben's house (he calls it the cabinet of Dr. Caligari). I painted it a bluish green. If you look at the photo in the previous post note that the cabinet looks chock full of tapes. That's just a facade! Actually the tape is mounted on cardboard which gives it an illusion of depth. I was actually delighted to discover this since I really like facades, you know like those old Western towns that are just flat hotel and store fronts. I've also been thinking about digital facades. One of the things that separates visual effects from traditional computer simulation is the emphasis on appearance and computational efficiency over accuracy. That is, it's not important whether a wave or hurricane is accurate. What's important is whether it looks right and whether it renders quickly—a movie facade for the digital age. Actor/Programmer Masi Oka describes visual effects programming (from WIRED magazine):

"The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated," said Oka. "I would simulate viscosity or advection, things that are specific to the way water moves. We'd do a cheap simulated effect for these movements and they were used for things like the spray and wakes in The Perfect Storm."

Now THAT's obsession

The cabinet of video tapes prop by David almost ready to go!

I'm so cool, The Core, dragonfly, Tideland

Looks like we're getting the bird scene more or less figured out. If the bird hit doesn't work, we'll just shoot it as if the bird attacked the car while Ben was gone. Not great, but better than nothing.

Got the laser cut parts from Pololu yesterday. Here's a picture of Ben's homemade TV used in the red room scene. The word "cool" and me don't often go together but I really like it so I will say I'm so cool. The vintage tripod comes from Ebay. Ben says all the new stuff has a retro futuristic vibe. duh. The TV's supposed to look like a big eye. Are we watching it or is it watching us? Profound. Remember I was calling it the one-eyed spider? Maybe it's more like a TV set from Mars. BTW, the TV actually works. There's an LCD back there.

Watched the beginning of The Core, a really odd movie with Hillary Swank. I really couldn't tell whether it was a comedy or not. In the first scene, a guy drops dead on a glass table and you see his face squash cartoon-like on the glass. Then later, a single flapping pigeon takes down an entire double-decker bus. This can't be serious, right? I rented it because there's a state-of-the-art bird attack scene done with CGI birds. It's pretty over the top. Not sure I got anything from watching it other than it's hard to make a bird attack look good. So it's not only me. Ben says I have a reference scene for every scene in our film.

I also learned something about acting/directing. The opening scene with the three executives wouldn't have looked so stupid if the execs were given something better to do, or if the director had nixed their high school pep rally behavior. What makes something look fresh is when a behavior is inventive and not stereotypical. But then you can't necessarily plan invention otherwise it looks contrived. So you have to dowse the stereotypical but allow invention to occur spontaneously. Huh?

In more bird news, I actually bought that Wowwee dragon fly from the local Radio Shack. But it didn't work so I returned it. Somehow, I thought it would be like the other Wowwee products and made of PVC plastic. Of course, now that I think about it, no way. The dragonfly is made of colored styrofoam. The electronics are taped inside. Really delicate. I can't imagine this thing lasting more than a few months.

Fast forwarded through most of Terry Gilliam's Tideland. Beautiful lighting and production design, a great looking 12 million dollar movie. More drug-addled crazy person drawing on the walls. It had a smooth digital look so I was wondering if it was shot on Panavision Genesis or a Viper. But it was shot on film and digitally graded. DP Nicola Pecorini is apparently a steadicam master so lots of steadicam work. As a narrative Tideland meanders and goes nowhere. The point seems to be that life is painful so that you have to retreat to the imagination. Over and over again (the point, not the retreating). Also, you have a be a little wary of any film that has a director's disclaimer at the beginning. BTW, if you want to see a bunch of footage from the aborted Man of La Mancha (not shown in Lost in La Mancha), head on over to Percorini's website [link].