Montage—a bad idea!

One thing I've discovered is that montage (the time-compression kind) is a bad idea. The first version of the film was full of montages: this montage represents the spinner spinning for a long time, this montage represents Ben's return to everyday life, etc. etc. But we've taken all of those out. They don't work. You have to convert everything into a specific scene. For example, rather than a montage that shows Ben with his wife, Ben eating and Ben at work, you have to condense all of that information into a scene. So now we have Ben eating with his wife off camera and then he goes to work. Another example of having to move from "symbolic" thinking to the literal world of film.

What is the point exactly?

One important touchstone for this film occurred over a decade ago in grad school. I read an article describing how instructional films are capable of depicting only certain kinds of information and themes because of dramatic constraints. For example, there is a tendency to frame everything in terms of having "good guys and bad guys." Curiously, I reread the article the other year and found that the article didn't have much to say on the subject. I remember it bringing up the idea but not elaborating upon it. Since that time I've tended to assume that most of my ideas were inherently non-telegenic. One reason for doing the film was to see if this was true. My other concerns...

Modernism
When I say I'm interested in exploring what it means to make a narrative film for people from an art background I'm really asking an old question—how does modern representing work within a narrative context? Mackendrick's book is really helpful because he deals with the issues of modernism in film straight on. As a dean at Cal Arts, he had to and the chapters in his book on the topic are well worth reading. In my experience, the solutions I've seen are unsatisfying: you either get really boring hard-to-watch art films or traditional films gussied up with interesting visuals.

Needs of the drama, needs of the narrative
It's not the fact that drama has protagonists and antagonists that I find problematic. Our project has two if not three such characters. There is Ben, then there is the evil force that he combats and the good force that tries to help him. The problem is two things: drama tends to literalize everything and drama wants characters to be strong. Obviously, as a literal medium, it works better to show your bad guy. But to me, bad guys tend to be invisible. They want their presence unknown and act only by doing tiny, imperceptible things. So that's one of the central problems of our film: how do you take dramatically weak, invisible characters and make a film that still sustains interest? This points to the larger problem of drama and narrative. What do you do when drama calls for one thing and narrative calls for another? Usually drama wins. But I wanted to make something where the narrative wins. So we have a spinner spinning. And the invisible antagonist tries to stop the spinner, a weak character performing a weak action (negating an effect). But I guess to me, that's the way the world works... authentically strong people look like weak characters doing weak things.

Convention & disclosure
I find that one of the things I dislike most about run-of-the-mill movies is their use of certain conventions. It's not Hollywood technique that I dislike, but the unmooring of a convention from any kind of understanding. My favorite example right now is the crash landing of the spacecraft on Earth in Superman Returns. You see the walls start to shake, the scrabbleboard shakes, the dog perks up and then whooosh, the spacecraft lands. The sequence certainly works as drama and communicates the importance of the event. But does a landing rocketship really cause things on the ground to shake -before- it lands? I don't think it does unless it causes a sonic boom. It's not the scientific inaccuracy that's the problem. It's the fact that Bryan Singer is using conventions to describe things outside of his own experience. This is not a problem of film necessarily, just bad film. I guess what I want is invention that comes from understanding... all the way down the line.

The standard response to my complaint is that art is not about accuracy, but about interpretation and communication. I would agree, but I think I have a very specific understanding of interpretation. Interpretation usually refers to exagerrations, style, conventions and subjectivity that help bring life to an art project. To me, interpretation might include those things, but only within the scope of larger understanding. Interpretation is more like truth disclosed and made public.

The plot thickens...

Been working on the new cut that incorporates everyone's feedback. As usual I've been cutting with temp music, in this case, the pretentiously named Eptesicus from Batman Begins. Everytime I use a different piece of music I get a different idea of how to put the thing together.

What I discovered now that we have a lot more footage is that like the ripples of expressions on an actor's face, a scene goes through many changes and it's helpful to be aware of those changes. A scene is not an undifferentiated mass, but flows from one emotion and idea to another. So I've started to create titles for each part of the first scene. They all end up sounding like the chapter titles from a DVD, but here I'm referring to changes -within- a scene, not from scene to scene. Titles for the first scene:

1. Another day, another 1000 days (Ben walks in)
2. Stars (Ben discovers particulate stars)
3. Midnight visit (The evil entity whooshes past the spinner)
4. A rainy day (The spinner is broken)
5. Pursuing a mystery (Ben looks at the video of the broken spinner)
6. A new hope (Ben tries to make it work)
7. Requiem for a dream (Ben gives up)

Anticipation & punctuation & Jaws

I was reading the Mackendrick book today while waiting for Sean at Korean school. There's a good chapter on anticipation. The idea is that as in animation, you have to structure the anticipation right because the activity itself is so quick. The idea is to create dramatic ACTION vs. mere activity.

The implication is that our search for punctuating the scenes is really a search for drama. The solution is not to give the scene more impact necessarily, but to set it up better. Makes sense. But how? Mackendrick uses Hitchcock's example of the bomb under the table. Two people talking = boredom. Two people talking with a bomb under the table unknownst to them = drama. It makes sense, but I couldn't see how that would work for our film. Then I started thinking about Jaws. A better model. Our antagonist is like the shark. It's sort of ill-defined. Interestingly, when you think about it, a lot of the early Spielberg films have that quality—Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters. So I've been wondering how it would look to "Jaws-ify" our project?

Well, there's a direct application to the dead spinner scene that Ben, Erik, Dan and I have been discussing in detail. For example, maybe the flyby shot is really a "shark's POV" shot. The camera starts slowly then gets closer and closer. dum dum dum dum dum dum and right before we get to the spinner, black!

Terabyte me... 500 GB for $129

For this project I've been using two 250 GB drives. But because I also use those for backing up other work, they are getting full. So I got another backup drive today—a 500 GB USB 2 drive for $129. A good deal at Fry's. So now I have over a terabyte of storage. I have so much footage and I need the free space for fx renders and other stuff.

Mom from hell

Discussions with both Ben, Erik and Dan brought up this idea of punctuation. I am wondering whether the current feeling that there is not enough punctuation comes from the music pads I'm using as temp soundtracks. So tonight I downloaded an mp3 to play with—something from the Dark Water soundtrack called "Mom from Hell." To me the soundtrack adds plenty of punctuation. I'll run it by the guys.

Looping

A note to those who care: looping the spinner does work. It wasn't hard but it wasn't easy either. You do have to cut it at the frame level. The spinner is amazingly erratic when you look at the motion closely. It has a nice analog feel that's apparently not obvious to the people who think the spinner is a composite! Interestingly, the longer you see the spinner spin, the wonkier the spinning looks. So maybe it's a good idea to put in some long shots. It actually looks more real.

Revised shot list

--------------
GREEN ROOM STAIRS
Ben finds the clue. Then goes off...

RED ROOM OR EQUIVALENT
More specific tape assembly

--------------
KITCHEN INTERIOR, BATHROOM INTERIOR MORNING
Mundane Ben eating breakfast listening to radio
Ben getting ready
Ben's wife calling from kitchen

--------------
WORKROOM MORNING
Finding the broken spinner
Different approaches to fixing the spinner
Covering the spinner up wide
Covering the spinner up POV

--------------
WORKROOM NIGHT SECOND UNIT

Orange workroom
Dolly of perpetual motion images

Night workroom
Surveillance cam of breaking spinner.

--------------
DESERT LOCATION STAND IN

Ben gets cut
CU of hand
Ben looks at hand

----------------
LOCATION TBA

Parade of books
dolly out spin of Ben interacting with pages
Ben's cut gets really bad

--------------
MISC
Subway shot? Ben going to work.
New store exterior

Jumps & flow: my shortcomings as a filmmaker

It's at times like these that my general weaknesses as a filmmaker come to the foreground. They are at least these two...

Flow
I tend to cut for flow which gives everything a kind of smoothness. Earlier I called this "the effect in which my videos will put you to sleep." Sometimes this is good. I like a sense of mysterious flow. But cutting this way causes two problems. First, I tend to underplay things so there is not enough emotional or visual emphasis when needed. Sometimes you WANT to disrupt the flow. Second, cutting for flow sometimes makes it hard to understand the narrative. Maria was good at pointing out logic flaws in my edits.

Jumps
In the video I'm always trying to jump from here to there putting in as few connecting shots as possible. Dan said he was sometimes confused by the geography of the film which makes sense. If you look at the current cut you'll see that there are few exteriors and few scenes of arriving or leaving or driving, etc. I think this partially echoes the way that I live my life. Most of the time I'm thinking about something and the actual geography of where I am... at home, in the car, at school, doesn't matter much. But in film, practically everything gets turned into geography, you know the George Lucas, "if we're on the volcano planet this must be the finale" idea. That approach IS embedded into our film. The red room is the finale. Green is work. The workshop is abused brown. But I think it's important to help the audience connect the geographical and chronological dots.

Ben & Erik's notes

Talked with Ben and Erik today for several hours about Assembly 2. Ben agreed with Dan that some areas needed to be more punctuated. Ben also said the first scene needed to be better developed. He felt that it read as a montage now and we discussed treating it as real time instead. To do that I need to reinsert the details of Ben entering the room, etc. In general, my problem is that I'm always trying to gloss over the boring areas and in doing so, I frequently leave holes. My work, in general, tends not to dot every "i" if possible, but sometimes you need to use good grammar, or in this case, good "film grammar." Ben and Erik also felt that the spinner shots needed to be longer. I said that I wanted to put some really long spinner scenes at the beginning to emphasize the long-spinning motion. But I didn't have any shots like that. Ben said why don't you just loop sections of the existing video? Brilliant! Or maybe I'm just dumb. Or not an editor. I never thought of that. So I'll try that... theoretically, it ought to work. Theoretically communism works. I also think the feeling is that the VO is sorely missed. It's interesting... the VO really serves to anchor and propel the narrative. Without it, you're engaged in this difficult task of really concentrating to figure out what's going on.

We spent a LONG time talking about the broken spinner. Concurrence with Dan on making the spinner break. We talked about how we could emphasize the fact that the spinner is broken. This is really important and not coming across. We then shot some test footage with Ben trying all sorts of actorly approaches. His first inclination was to go for sorrow. Mine was to go for anger. We tried some really over-the-top stuff. Ben's good at critiquing himself looking at the tape. I'll try cutting in the footage tonight to see how it looks. We tried two approaches. In one, the camera pushes in while Ben rushes toward the spinner. It sounds like it should work well, but strangely the second approach seemed to work better. In this approach, The camera is focused wide on Ben. He turns to the camera then rushes toward the spinner, but this time, the camera pedestals down to reveal the broken spinner.

Ben and Erik concur on the real-time, breakfast, going to work idea. We stopped at Ben's house this afternoon to see how his place would work. It's really disheveled now that they've moved into the new space. The color is bland ivory, but it will suffice. Ben concurred with Dan on the portable Memex. It's too distracting to do while driving and lessens emphasis on this important research task. Dan suggested making the Memex scene stationary but today we decided to nix it altogether and fold the research segment into a following scene. So the bird scene works like this. Ben finds a clue, goes out to the desert, sees "ex nihilo," cuts himself on the shrine, the bushes shake and then he drives off into the oncoming storm.

Then, the new scene.With Dan I was talking about making a spatial montage with flashes of papers and media in a bluescreen window. Here's what we have now. I did some minor changes subsequent to my discussion with Ben. The camera dollies past a series of books on the occult or other scary things. Presumably, he's been doing some research. Now we're on a closeup of Ben manipulating photocopies of scary pictures, presumably from his research. There are notations relating this to "ex nihilo." His hand is noticeably bandaged. The camera is pointing straight down rotating on Ben as he works on the floor or a table. As we get wider and wider, we see all of his items sprawled out. Finally we cut to a closeup of his finger which is now black. Erik had the good idea that maybe somewhere, we foreshadow the blood. Maybe blood is dripping here and there or the like.

A couple of things. I was saying that when we do this scene, we need to make sure that the sprawl doesn't reduce the punch of the red room by going overboard. Ben made the excellent point that these are two different kinds of sprawls. The red room is a result, an organized sprawl. In this scene, on the other hand, Ben is just starting to figure it out. So we don't have to worry about going overboard. Plus visually, they will be much different. This scene is on a table or a floor. The red room scene is, uh, red. Second, Ben's inclination was also to put the black finger at the beginning of this scene. But the more that I think about it, I think we need to end with a greater punch.

Then, not many notes on the red room except Ben says start the jib shot to the gas line earlier so that we can see what's happening. Good point. If anything, I tend to cut too short and really tight.

Disappointing things come in small packages

Happy to find an inexpensive Sputnik model, I ordered the World Space Museum 01 Sputnik shock over the weekend. In the tradition of disappointing cereal premiums, this thing was tiny. The earth is literally a big glass marble and the sputnik looks like a plastic paperclip. Plus, it's very poorly made, especially for a Japanese miniature. Terrible paint job on both the earth and the Sputnik. Really really disappointing.

Being obvious

A lot of Dan's comments centered on the need for emotionally punctuating/emphasizing certain events. To me, emphasis means spending more time on something, making the idea or emotion more apparent. It may mean blocking something differently. I'm not sure it means trying to get a more emotional performance from Ben.

This emphasis problem also relates to the codex video. Last year when Dan first created the codex AUDIO we came to the conclusion that his first version was too arty. His second version solved the problem more literally: it wasn't a stylized composition of collaged words—it was literally a collage of words. I think I fell into the same trap with the codex video. I had this whole backstory in my mind about the video: Ben's figured out a way to composite RGB guns to create layered images. He goes through the codex audio, transcribes the text, and then burns the type into videotape using the RGB guns which are always going in and out of focus. The problem is, the text doesn't look like a collage of images.

It's interesting that Dan and I automatically and intuitively jumped to a certain way of thinking. We both wanted to go beyond the obvious. We wanted to take the idea of collage, but reconfigure it. But for this kind of piece, it makes more sense to do the obvious. The pieces don't have to carry the film. They are part of a larger performance. The RGB gun idea is an interesting one that exhibits an understanding of the medium. But for what we're doing, it's too subtle, too obtuse. I think we've both instinctively learned restraint but for this kind of thing, we just need to be blatant.

Shot list

TENTATIVE SHOT LIST

Realistic/conservative schedule for pickups/reshoots. Four days:

--------------

Green room
Ben finds the clue. Then goes off...

Red room
Early assembly with tracking dots
More for tape assembly

--------------

Morning house interior
Mundane Ben eating breakfast listening to radio
Ben getting ready
Ben's wife calling from kitchen


--------------

Morning workroom
Finding the broken spinner
Different approaches to fixing the spinner
Covering the spinner up wide
Covering the spinner up POV

****
(2nd unit)

Orange workroom
Dolly of perpetual motion images

Night workroom
If necessary, surveillance cam of falling spinner.

--------------

Desert stand in
Ben gets cut
CU of hand
Ben looks at hand
Ben looks at portable Memex
Ben's cut gets really bad

Meeting with Dan

Met Dan in a five hour meeting today though it didn't seem long at all. We went through the film structure again after taking a look at the current draft (assembly 2). Need to run these by Ben and the guys.

Notes...

>Likes the Rube Goldberg Something for Nothing narration as does Ben. Use under pics of perpetual motion machines, books, beauty shots, etc.

>Prefigure the surveillance camera shot.

>Punctuate Ben's finding of the broken spinner.

>Spinner dead=broken in half

>In surveillance shots, there's a burst of static then the spinner drops. The shadow doesn't work. Make more mysterious.

>Make it clear that Ben tries different approaches to fixing the spinner. Maybe spark of soldering near crystal, Ben in glasses, the spinner falls... "And each trial ends up in error..."

>Ideas for narration:
[They say that] every cloud has a silver lining, every dog has his day, and that Jesus rose from the dead. But sometimes, it's just worth saving something....

>Make it clear that Ben tries different approaches.

>Show Ben covering spinner. Maybe POV shot then fade to black.


***TITLE

"The romance of everyday life"

>Ben's eating breakfast. Gets ready to go to work. Maybe Gracie calls out "Ben don't you have to go to work today? Ben, it's time to go to work..., or Ben, it's almost 8. OK..."

Some sample dialogue/narration:
Get dressed. Eat. Go to work.
Eggs as usual. Today, salsa and coffee black.
Catch the 27

>More humble storefront?

>Reshoot Ben finding the clue. Maybe he draws on it. Then he walks up the stairs.

>The clue should be here. It needs to contain a map that extends into the shadows. It says "Infinite Motion" Nevada.

>Emphasize Ben getting cut.

>Emphasize Ben looking at the Memex. Make it stationary. He needs to fully concentrate.

>Emphasize the cut. Maybe it is bandaged and really black. Maybe there are ants. Make more disturbing...

***

"Pre/early red room scene"

>Ben taking the ex nihilo images. Puts them together. Adds weird cheesy images. Fast food. Pizza. McDonalds. Now images flash by behind them. Blood circulating. Strange items and codes. Green screen?

***

Red room:

>Emphasize the wide shot of the red room. Give us time to take it in.

>Make the tape clue assembly more step by step.

>Maybe the currently fast-motion section should be regular motion.

>Prefigure the burning house.

>Put Gracie back in

>Type in the codex video should be more ransom note-like.

Review of Dan's concert

March 31, 2007

Excerpt of LA Times review of Dan's compostion/performance with The Nimbus Ensemble.

...In Hosken's piece, the composer manned digital gear and manipulated material atop the Xenakis, which was repeated by the live ensemble. Hosken treated and mistreated the work, live and on the fly, supplying echoes, samples out of context and other sound alterations and also smearing on his own sonic debris. He wielded his "Wizard of Oz"-like power impressively, with offstage controls and an expansive toolbox....

Muppets!

Since we finished principal photography Ben and Erik were wondering what my next project might be. Ben had astutely guessed that there would be a part of me that would want to test out the understandings gained in this project. If I do another film project, my guess is that I'd like to explore the following--

>Dialogue. As in having actors actually speak!

>Continue studying the integration of artistic modes of representation with film grammar. I'm learning so much about the problems one encounters when trying to mix modernist abstraction with film. BTW, cross-cutting the codex video worked well. That and making it shorter helped a lot.

>Maybe do something with puppets?

Process schmocess

I've been noticing that while my creative process is horribly inefficient, it is useful and curiously consistent.

When I first started working on the film we created as solid a structure as we could. Then, when we started shooting I started improvising and shooting new things like the "photo flying out of Ben's hand in the desert" shot. Then after improvising I seem to lose track of what I'm doing. I just go on auto-pilot and keep working. Then there seem to be gaping logic holes so I try to fix things, sometimes radically restructuring the project. That's the stage where I added the voice over. Then I think this is nonsense, let's get back to basics, so I try to strip everything down to the core. Then I start adding things back in. Then I finally figure out how and why we did everything in a particular way in the first place.

So it's like starting out with a vision, losing your way and exploring and then finding your way back to the same place you began. Like Dorothy said, "there's no place like home."

The disadvantage of doing things this way is obvious: it takes a lot of time and energy and is brutally inefficient. The advantage is that you really learn a lot about what you're doing inside and out.

Weird camera moves & Inside Man

Watched Inside Man the other night. This may have been the first time I watched a film because I liked the cinematographer. The arty Matthew Libatique (works often with Darren Aronofsky) mixes light temperatures a lot which is a nice look. He's also good at doing that flourescent green look I like so much. The more I think about it, the more it's amazing to me that before the last few years, most films didn't go through digital intermediates. I don't think this went through a DI either (I could be wrong)*. At any rate, between Libatique and Spike Lee, you couldn't get a more unlikely pair of creative types working on what's basically a seventies-style caper film.

One of the reasons I wanted to see the film was to see the moving desk shot. If you remember Spike Lee's work from his TV commercials, he was always putting people on platforms and moving them around. In Inside Man, Lee puts Christopher Plummer on a desk on a platform and moves the whole thing. The result just looks like an exaggerated push in, almost like a push in/zoom out. It's a nice effect that doesn't stand out as much as you might think. It's a lot of trouble for that one shot but made sense for the emotional content.

I had my own weird shot escapades the other day. I wanted to do a slow push in to a prop camera. The problem is, the prop camera was pointed at a slight downward angle. When I did the push-in the prop camera seemed to rise in the frame because of its angle. It was a weird, unexpected effect that could be useful for something in the future. You have to do the shot in one of two ways. You either stop the camera when the subject is centered within the frame or you keep tilting the camera upwards.

Siwaraya ran into the same camera move problem with the push she did in her phone Nazi film. She was pushing in to the guy on the second floor but because she wasn't tilting the camera, the push seemed to go into the wall. It would have looked better to cut out of the shot earlier.

Speaking of weird shots, I was looking at hollywoodcamerawork.us the other week. They sell an instructional DVD about blocking and camera movement. They have a couple of videos posted that are pretty useful and interesting. I liked the one on pivoting.

*Inside Man DID go through a DI.

So where's the satellite?

As you recall, this was Ben and Erik's first question upon seeing the world globe footage. That shot was supposed to look like a space scene recreated. You'd see the stars from the spinner. Then you'd see a world globe and a model satellite in the workroom and then the spinner itself. The idea was to create the sense that we were flying in from space past a potentially malevolent satellite right to the spinner. At any rate, I nixed the satellite because I didn't have time to build the model and I couldn't find an inexpensive pre-built model.

The way it turns out, Sean has been bugging me to make the Revell Vostok model he found in the closet so that's what we did today. I bought the Vostok to use as a stand in for a satellite. I really wanted to use a model of Sputnik but amazingly, I couldn't find one after looking for months. Despite the fact that the Vostok was a one-person spacecraft, it still visually looks like Sputnik, especially if you display only the spherical portion. Building the model you get a sense of the MRI-like conditions within the craft. It's really small. An interesting fact about the Vostok era spaceships was that the astronaut did not land inside the craft. After reentry, the astronaut ejected from the falling craft and parachuted down in an ejection capsule. That had to be a terrifying experience.

So maybe I'll try to convince Erik to reshoot that sequence with the Vostok model. That's if I can figure out what color to paint it and if Sean doesn't break the antennas off of it first.

Movie magic

We shot for about 2 1/2 hours today. We simulated a sunny morning and a sunny day shrine exterior in the garage: movie magic. It was rainy the entire time which made shooting difficult because I wanted to put the Tota outside the window to light the workshop interior. So we tried all sorts of lighting and camera configurations but none looked right. Finally, Erik taped the Tota under an umbrella (a real one, not a photographic one), took it outside and then lighting was easy. Next, it took awhile to do the rack focus. We had to cheat the camera position (the subject) to get an out-of-focus look. Finally we did the shrine interior. Three shots in 2.5 hours. That averages to 14.4 setups in a 12 hour day. I have no idea of what an average # of setups is or if there is even such a thing. I've heard a low of 3 (David Lean to get a sunset), to 12 to 20 (Penelope Spheeris) to 24 (Josh Becker) to 36 (both Sky Captain & Episode II) to 47 (the maximum number of shots for Mirror Mask). It seems like those virtual movies go a lot faster.

Box office death!

I put the exposition video at the end of the current edit this morning. It's box office death! Interesting. I think it works fine by itself but when you juxtapose it with the other edit, it just sits there doing nothing. Plus it's a full three minutes out of a 12 minute film. Now I can see why they put those dreary reenactments and flashbacks into the da Vinci Code and other films. They were dumb, but dumb is better than box office death! So now what? The problem is that the audio is so garbled that you have to be able to read the text flashing by. So I can't do the standard cutaways of Ben looking at the video because you would miss some of the text. I guess I could do some kind of split screen thing, with the video on one side and Ben's face on the other side. That's SO been there-done-that but anything is better than box office death! Maybe I should do a Hitchcock-like thing to up the tension. Imagine this: split screen. Sometimes the exposition is on the left, sometimes on the right. Sometimes bigger, sometimes small. Sometimes cut off. On the other side of the split screen we see cutaways... Ben's face, his grotty finger. We see the camera sneaking up on him and then going underground to the gas pipes. And then the fire starting. That's not bad. Then we have to wait for Ben to grow his beard back. Or maybe we have to do a "Brando"—obscure Ben's face in the darkness like Brando's large body in Apocalypse Now. Whatever. Because anything's better than box office death!

Codex video

The codex video is done except for a grundge/mask pass. The codex video is the 3 minute long exposition that describes the conspiracy in the third act. The experience of doing these videos is so different from going on a shoot. As I mentioned before, it's easy. But it also engages a different part of the mind. When you're on the set you have to really be aware; it's a performance of sorts. Doing these videos in post is very mindless: you drift away and before long, hours have gone by. I used a Pete's Plugins filter to create a vertical roll. If you use After Effects you should check them out. They're not flashy but really useful. Plus they're free. There's also interesting stuff for Motion—petewarden.com

Energy & crowd scenes

Ever since the development of MASSIVE and other software, virtual crowds have become a staple of big budget films from Episode II to Troy to LOTR. But what is curious is to me is the unimpressiveness of these scenes. What ought to be spellbinding is surprisingly dull. On the other hand, I find the battle scene in Spartacus compelling. The reason for this is not that the throngs in Spartacus are "real" while the others are CGI. As I mentioned earlier, the problem is typically one of performance, not technology. Therefore, I suspect that CGI scenes are somehow performed incorrectly. I also do not think it has to do with the way the sequence is framed by its narrative.

Think about the the battle scene in Spartacus. The army looks like a huge patchwork and moves as an undifferentiated mass. The sequence seems to take forever. In Episode II, Troy and LOTR, on the other hand, the warriors seem distinct and discrete having no visual weight. They move quickly. Often, they look like toys. Perhaps the problem comes from the nature of the algorithms used. If I remember correctly, MASSIVE uses simple rule-based AI to guide each digital extra. I wonder if this is an incorrect conceptualization of a crowd. Perhaps crowds are led by a kind of group-think instead of individual behaviors. Perhaps changes ripple through the crowd more slowly than we see in contemporary efforts. Or perhaps it has something to do with direction and acting. What makes the Spartacus scenes so riveting is the feeling that there are thousands of individuals holding together yet ready to burst into action. In LOTR on the other hand, the battles look like people marching or yelling and waving their hands around, the visual equivalent of a walla group. Scenes that should be sizzling with the energy of thousands of people seem to be hollow spectacle.

In the contemporary films, the directors want to keep everything on the move. They do not trust stillness or anticipation. Maybe where the performances of the CGI characters fail is not in action, but in performing readiness. The CGI crowd knows only action or motionlessness. Kubrick's crowd was neither; it was comparatively still, but with the anticipation of action.

Energy—some half-baked ideas

I believe we respond to the energy expressed within each frame of video or film. What makes Stan Brakhage's scratched emulsion films so compelling, for example, is that each frame is like an individual painting and the time spent on creating each frame shows. The Episode III DVD has a nice feature on this same idea. There's a segment that shows what goes into making one minute of film. The way I think about it is that part of what we're responding to as viewers is the energy of all those people stored in visual form.

This relates to our film because I have lots of energy saved as After Effects files and that energy is now being expressed within the exposition video. Sometime ago I created a bunch of AE tests that I don't even remember doing. Now I'm applying them to the project at hand and they're working well. I have one file that splits the image into RGB channels and jitters each channel individually. I applied this to the exposition text and it creates a nice analog video feel. I realize that the look I'm after is analog video, as opposed to film or digital video... analog video with smears and misaligned RGB guns and handmade edits. I also like the fact that the RGB splitter effect was designed for different video footage. This makes its application to the current footage look less planned out and a little more authentic.

I find two notions related to this energy idea interesting. First, I wonder if I'm somehow mischaracterizing this conception of stored energy. Just the sound of it conjures the idea of Bestand. Maybe it's the wording.

Second, this idea suggests a particular way to think about production. If the energy-within-frame idea is a valid one then we have no way of competing against something like Episode III. How can our tiny efforts compare to the efforts of the thousands of people who worked on that film? Can three people working on a film come up with something that has the aesthetic "weight?" of a mainstream feature film? In one sense, our efforts cannot compare. Episode III contains a level of technological expertise that we will never equal. And yet, there is a difference between a technological mastery and meaningful energy. A huge part of the work of Episode III went into creating its world. And there is a lot of energy that we can find for free. The garage we use as a set, for example, has lots of stored energy in the weird spray paint, the weathering, the dust. Our film also carries the weight of years of thought, years of collecting and years of experience. I guess there are different ways to conceive of "production value." On the one hand, we can think of production value as the amount of human and physical capital seen on screen which creates a certain kind of authority. What the stored-energy idea may lead us to is the idea that energy can potentially replace capital and that energy can be found instead of generated.

SO easy...

Worked on the exposition video last night and today. It is SO easy compared to shooting. You just sit on your butt and mouse away. No scheduling, no cast, no lights, no weather, no reshoots. I'm about 70-80% done already. Just a few more clips and glitches and then I'm all but finished.

Biggest holes

This is a note to myself about the biggest holes in the film.

>desert clue
>final exposition video

Sin City, Stars, Burning Twine, Spiderman 3, The hair arc,

There's nothing certain except death and taxes and that the DVD extra you watch will talk about how great the director is. I watched a bit of the loaded Sin City DVD. Lots of interesting extras including a 10 minute segment in which you can see Quentin Tarantino directing ("you're trying to be cool.. just BE cool").... great, what kind of direction is that? Then last night I shot the falling stars by myself and tonight I shot the microscope stars. Having better lighting makes the stars look a lot better (and hopefully, a little less like Christmas decorations). I better get used to working by msyelf. Once I really get into post it will be ALL me. I really don't think posting will be all that hard, but my ability to calculate schedules leaves something to be desired. The fun thing will be showing the work in progress to the guys, but they weren't particularly impressed with the it-took-an-hour-to-shoot spinner flythrough shot. All I got was "where's the satelllite?" (In the pre vis there was a satellite, but I could never find the sputnik model I wanted at a price I could afford.) Ben also said that the speed change should be a ramp and not a cut. Sharp eyes there Ben. Next time don't look so close.

Burning twine refers to Wednesday's shoot. I forgot to write about our semi-dramatic event. Ben, if you're reading, skip to the next paragraph. We tried to mount the 500 watt Omni from the ceiling using string. But the string burned through. Fortunately, the light was attached well enough so that the unit didn't fall. Spiderman 3 refers to the newest trailer that starts with Topher Grace in the church. What's up with that church scene? I just didn't get the tone... was Grace being serious or what?

We're planning on shooting some of Ben's last pickups/B roll on Friday which reminds me I have to send him photos for hair continuity. If you watch the Star Wars ep. III DVD, they're always talking about hair continuity. After working with Ben, I'm wondering if they mean beard continuity? Having to keep both head hair and facial hair in continuity is not as easy as it seems. Right now we have a sort-of "hair arc" in which Ben is clean cut at the beginning and more bedraggled at the end.

Wed

For some reason my last post didn't take. Shot Wed. nite with Erik for 3 hours, 10:30 to 1:30am. The first hour was devoted to our big drama shot where the camera flies past the world globe and the spinner. It's a weird shot because it actually looks like a strange visual effect or a composite. The rest of the evening just shot pickups and boring stuff. It was quick and easy except when the spinner was involved. We are hoping, nay praying, that we never have to set the spinner spinning again.

Shot the bouncy rubber stars that I got from the 99 cent store. They didn't look as good as I had hoped. They were just too stubby. Ben's narration is "stars...." but you will see transparent stubs. So I think I'll go back to the Christmas decorations. Thanks goodness, in a way. The Christmas decorations cost me $24 which is exorbitant, but they're exactly what I wanted. I should do a slide show of the various stars I tried—homemade, ice, candy, rubber...

Pickup/insert/reshoot list

"FIRST Unit"

MORNING
>actual day
TOP VIEW: Ben staring at broken spinner, smooke wafting
looks at day clicker, looks at camera
>same action, new angle

CUSTOM
>CU shrine reach in gets cut
>CU looking at portable memex
>clue assembly
>Redroom CU swollen finger

OUTDOORS
>Looking at hand
>Hand CU with blood


"SECOND Unit"

SUNSET
>Sunset books
>Sunset perpetual motion pix
>Sunset beauty shots spinner

NIGHT SPOTLIGHT
>Globe shot to spinner night /spotlight lighting
>CU spinner drops
>Small camera POV shadow

CUSTOM
>Wide shot stars falling in dark
>Stars bouncing

Editing

Spent a couple of hours tonight editing everything together. The blood-for-bird stuff works pretty well although the black bood reaction/transition seems rough. Plus, now everything is more subtle so the transition from Ben normal to Ben crazy seems a little fast. I'm sure I can figure out something easy to do to stretch out the area between scary Gene and the red room. The picture above shows the actual truck shot the sky replacement in progress. More HD headaches—at the vanishing point you can see some really tiny cars in the distance. I'm going to have to After Effects them out. Right now, I'm trying hard to resist the temptation to composite some lightning in distance.

Desert 2.5 and the end of photography

The title of this post sounds like one of those pretentious artist-written articles from the late 70's—The End of Photography! Actually, it just means that we concluded principal photography yesterday except for the ending scene which I want to save for last.

Shot Gene in the morning at Eaton Canyon. The weather was overcast so everything has a soft look. I actually like hard light better. Then we went out to the desert and shot the truck driving off into the oncoming storm. We just drove around intuitively getting off the I-15 near Sierra avenue. That way we didn't have to go up the hill which is a truck-killer. We found a new subdivision in progress then drove north and struck cinematic gold—a great street with a big sky + some incredible-looking coffee shops for future use. WIth all the development in the area I suspect the coffee shops will be gone soon. We then headed back to LA where we had lunch at Masa's in Pasadena. Masa's used to be one of those old Japanese family restaurants with leatherette booths, dingy lighting and good tempura. So we were shocked to find that it has been nouvelle-ized and is now ultra-modern with worse food and higher prices. Well, the worse food and higher prices weren't surprising. Here is my joke from lunch. Ben asked if he could order the expensive sushi and I said yes, if he gave me a little extra emotion in the the scenes planned for that afternoon.

Later on we went to the park by my house and shot the car interiors. The park is good because it's easy to get sky and it's usually empty. However toward the end of the shoot a little league game was starting and it got crowded. Curiously, when a car drove by while we were shooting, it didn't look odd. Because of motion paradox, it just looks like the car is overtaking Ben. I was a little worried about these shots but there was no other way to do it; the pick up truck is so small that I have to shoot with the passenger door open. Erik was the official car mover and shaker. I think the shots came out OK though.

I've been thinking about the idea that "you get one gimme." I forget where I read about this, probably in Josh Becker's book. BTW, I saw part of Becker's Alien Apocalypse the other day. It looks exactly like a Hercules or Xena episode with Bruce Campbell instead of Xena along with ant-like aliens. It's really really bad, but quite interesting. When watching it I realized that what makes something look like a TV show is not only the way that it's shot, but also the plottiness of the thing. It's like you're always trying to get from point A to B and it doesn't matter how you get there as long as you get there. Reminds me a lot of the TV William Shatner did. You know, Kirk dispatches an alien with a quick karate chop. The aliens of the week are always easy to sneak up on because you have to get from point B to point C quickly. Or on TJ Hooker, the car sneaks up on the bad guys by driving to an overlooking hill about 10 yards away. Maybe it's the "sneaking up" that's not good in these things. ANYWAY, Becker says you get one gimme. That means you can put one outlandish thing in your film and people will give you that. But if you put any more, they won't go along with the ride. So I was wondering about the car scene, worried that the use of the portable Memex would look too outlandish. Now that I see it, it looks OK I think.

I edited everything together last night. The footage itself is mundane looking which is fine. You don't want everything to be too pretty.