Authors' reviews

I liked this review of Goya's Ghosts at AICN by Drew McWeeny. It's the kind of review that looks at a film from the inside out, the way a writer or director might look at it (McWeeny is a writer for TV and film). The review is partly about "is this good?" but mostly about "how does it (or does it not) work?"

fx-house burn

According to my list I have just one more effects shot but I'm sure I'll find more. Today I finished the house burn shot. This shot is taken from the public domain cartoon Audrey in Dreamland which seems to be ubiquitous on PD compilations. I had to extend the burning fire and then get rid of the "school" text on the front of the house. I tried slowing down the burn but it didn't look good so I just made several loops, mixed them up and repeated them. To get rid of the school text, I exported the individual frames and painted over the text until the flames covered it. Sounds tedious but it really wasn't. I painted no more than 18 frames. It literally took just a few minutes. I was thinking that if I made an fx reel, it would be pretty funny because everything would look so simple.

Not-yet-crazy person's room

Clue-building scene from A Beautiful Mind.

A Streetcar Named Desire

I saw A Streetcar Named Desire at the library the other day so I picked it up. The only thing I know about Streetcar is Brando, "Stellaaa" and the Simpson's musical version of it. I'd never seen one of the early Brando films before so it was interesting watching his performance. It looked like Brando was doing two things—performing and playing games. The game was trying to see if he could perform through disruptions—eating, scratching, flexing. Then he goes and turns the disruptions into performances. There's a section where he's throwing Blanche's coats around and a feather drifts into the air. Brando studies it—a moment that seems to take forever—then continues with his rant. Brando's method seemed to be less about naturalism and more about performing through novel problems.

It reminded me of Ben in a way. First of all, Ben has an earthy, compact look that reminds me of Brando. Maybe it's just the T-shirts. Second, Ben is always playing little games during his performances. Sometimes he's pretending to be a method actor and working through an emotion. Sometimes he tries to have no idea of what's going on, on purpose. At other times he tries to be a technical actor seeing what he can get away with—like miming the heaviness of a box in one scene, or seeing if he can make himself look hot and tired in another. I never call him on anything so that's why he always teases me about my non-directing. I guess I either don't notice until later or it doesn't seem to matter. Some director.

I was surprised that Vivien Leigh let herself look so bad. She looked perfect for the part and had the "fading Southern dame" thing down. At the beginning the whole thing was so theatrical and talky. But after awhile, either you get used to it, or the nature of the film changes. I don't know which.

The typewriter ribbon

Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon getting a new typewriter ribbon for the prop typewriter. There is a small old office equipment store I see every day on the way to Sean's school so I stopped there. The place is incredible. It is filled to the ceiling with faded signs, old typewriters, calculators, videotapes and junk. It would make a great set. The proprietor was a funny guy named Eddie who could be Lou Jacobi's twin brother. He said the shop's been there for 38 years. To change the ribbon, he cut the old ribbon off, got the new ribbon and manually wound it on to the old reel. I helped him by holding the new ribbon reel with a screwdriver. We had a nice chat and he offered to sell me some selectric balls (I've been thinking of getting some). This is one of those places where you have no idea how they pay the rent. It's fun to know that they still exist.

Walking with Monsters and... oh no!—Apocalypto!

Some of you remember my ranting and raving about Apocalypto a few weeks back. My complaint was that the film used certain tropes and cinematographic techniques to confer a sense of authority on a wildly fictitious premise. If I could go on and on about that for three or four posts, you would think I could do the same for BBC's Walking with Monsters. This series, which I've been watching with Sean, uses all sorts of devices to convey a documentary, you-are-there feel. The beasts are continually splattering and even breaking the camera lenses. The night shots are night-vision green or extremely grainy. There's documentary-standard hand held camerawork and time-lapse photography. Of course this is all an illusion since the critters are CGI animations composited on to actual backgrounds.

One of the complaints about the series is that it is wildly conjectural and that the CGI and other techniques give these conjectures too much authority—a complaint very similar to the one I had about Apocalypto. Only Walking with Monsters doesn't bother me. I think it's because the series is so outlandish that it is hard to take seriously. Apocalypto wants to be a serious comment on the decline of a civilization. Walking with Monsters, with its non-stop anthropomorphization, is more like a Disney cartoon. After nearly being eaten, the amphibian looks back at the predator as if to say, "whew!" When a prehistoric spider attacks, it raises up on its hind legs like an attacking horse. A trapped lizard backs away from a spider only to be surprised from behind. Another lizard impales a giant centipede on a tree. Where Disney could use only narration to dramatize his documentaries, the BBC literally animates their creatures for dramatic effect. Add the suspenseful music and you get some very entertaining segments.

fx: speed ramp

As I write, the computer is rendering the speed ramp that occurs when the malevolent entity whishes past the spinner. This is the first time I used the AE 7.0 curves. They are SO much easier to use than the 6.5 curves. I'm also trying Pixel Motion for the first time. Pixel Motion is supposed to make slow motion look better than using the typical frame blending setting. I heard that it builds missing frames through a form of interpolation. I'm curious to see if it makes any difference. One thing it affects is rendering time. It's taking 35 minutes to render 6 seconds of footage! There are so many speed changes in my edit that I will probably use conventional frame blending for most of the master just to keep rendering times sane.

fx: more tales of tedium to amaze and astound you

Ben finds a lot of what I do incredibly tedious so to drive him nuts I thought I'd write about tonight's venture into tedium. I'm working on two bursts of static now—one for the end of the Rube Goldberg segment and one for the end of the tape rewinding segment. My source for static is a VHS tape I made (eventually digitized) when I happened to see some crazy noise while doing a tape transfer at school in the 90's. However, there are some segments in the noise that look blocky and digital (see above). So tonight I spit out the static as individual frames and deleted all the frames with the blocky look. I then reimported the frames back into a movie and then displaced imagery as needed. I also spent some time adding additional noise to the static and color correcting it. This stuff isn't fun to do but it isn't awful either. It's something to do at night when you don't want to think too hard.

fx: trash removal & multiplane

Ben thinks that I sound most like a director when I talk about visual effects. I'm not sure where that comes from. The other day I built a multi-plane to do the push in to the morning workroom exterior from still images. It's OK. I may try another location I just found. In the future when photogrammetry becomes easy and widespread, this kind of thing will be a snap.

I also did the desert trash removal shot. That was as easy as expected and looks great. In After Effects I drew masks to delete the offending trash. Then I put a duplicate layer of the footage underneath the masked layer and moved it over. The brush is so busy and dense you just cannot see the effect. Plus, because I'm using the same layer, the color and movement match well.

More on Hillary Duff

Some of you remember my Hillary Duff post. I found the promo I was referring to on youtube (posted above).

The mother of all crazy people's rooms films

When I started watching The Number 23, a wave of concern rippled through me. For the first 45 minutes the film comes off as a decent conspiracy-noir art flick—maybe a little boring and maybe a bit flimsy, but not Rottentomatoes 8% bad. Plus, art-DP Matthew Libatique's photography is all-out gorgeous. I was thinking that if people don't like this film, then how will audiences respond to our primitive effort?

Then it starts to get bad. And then it gets worse. And by the end it's a Jim Carrey comedy with Jim Carrey as the straight man. This is one of those yank-you-around films in the vein of The Illusionist. My main question now is why The Illusionist was so well received. Both films have a lot in common including decades-long third act expositions.

There are two problems with the film: the script and an absence of taste. The basic premise, while a little far-fetched, is not that bad. The problem is that the questions raised by the story are handled poorly and with a clumsy sense of proportion. Then, there's the matter of taste. The film shows a lot of things that simply shouldn't be shown. Editing out huge chunks of the last 30 minutes would make the film a lot better. That dog has just got to go.

The film isn't a total loss. I might get a cheap copy just for the cinematography. It really is beautiful. I love the way Libatique uses mixed temperature light sources and achieves rich, sumptuous color. Plus, there are the crazy peoples' rooms. Folks, this is the motherlode. You won't find more or crazier rooms anywhere. And yes, the red crazy room features a light bulb. I thought the performances were good considering what the actors were asked to do. Jim Carrey is fine until the end when he's asked to play crazy. I don't think crazy is playable. The closest I've seen that works is Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. Virginia Madsen is a little annoying to watch because of her botoxed forehead which has a weird ripply appearance when she frowns. Christine Taylor's forehead has the same look too (opinion only, don't sue!). It got me thinking that computer fx makeup has gotten so advanced that actors will have to start rethinking plastic surgery. Maybe in the future, actors will bring personal fx artists along with their own makeup artists.

I've been looking forward to seeing this film for a long time. Not quite as instructive as I'd hoped, but worth seeing nonetheless.

More shots...

Did three more shots today. Gas leak, notebook pick up and shrine interior. The gas pipe was easy to nail through contrary to our expectations. But the way the shot came out, I could have drawn on the thing with a magic marker. About ten more shots remain. I had a dream last night that I got the Destination Infinity print back and I messed up the file so it came out wrong. I've been working on this too long.

Productivity

I'm pretty close to moving the project into After Effects for mastering. So I've been fixing bugs in the film trying to just get it done. I got rid of two shots in the shot list today—

Ben caresses the spinner in the shrine
Open door with jacket on

I just corrected the caressing scene to make it look better and cut out the part with Ben's shirt. Done. I also just got rid of the CU shot where Ben opens the door and used the establishing shot instead. Done.

This morning I spent a few hours readying Destination Infinity for printing. I then sent it out to Winkflash, my favorite vendor for this kind of stuff. Cards, posters, no minimum print runs and great quality. Then I spent a few hours going through the old master tapes looking for some missing shots.

The hard part of doing all of this is feeling productive. It all has to be done but it's time consuming and I don't feel like I'm getting much accomplished.

My Dad wanted to see the film last night so I showed it to him. He found it hard to follow in terms of the story line (duh, especially in its current state). He had the good observation that it reminded him of The da Vinci code. He also thought Ben was "impressive." We have a temp voice over in there now so I didn't get the "where's the dialogue?" comment.

Kristen Wiig & cinematography

This idea is really half-baked, more of a note to myself. I've been thinking about SNL's Kristen Wiig and how she's a good model for filmmaking aesthetics. I think she's really attractive... it's something about the way she looks plus the way she comes across. It's like there's a kind of "discoverability" about her, like maybe you're the only one in your group that really likes her. To me, that's why she doesn't come across as well when she plays sexy (green leotard in video above)—she loses her discoverability. (This is the point where my old friend Veronica would say very seriously, "Ron, she's married.") At any rate, I think that's the problem with some of those all-CGI films like Mirror Mask. They don't want to be discoverable. They want to be all-out beautiful. They demand your attention and don't allow you to give it. I wonder if this comes from the way that 2D imagery works. In a sense, a painting or illustration has to call out to you because it's competing for attention. It just sits there in a crowd of other voices. But a film already has your attention. Plus it's moving. A film doesn't need to shout at you. It just needs to keep you engaged and intrigued.

The breakfast club

Today I dropped by Ben's house to pick up some props. We talked a bit about La Vie en Rose which he saw the other night. He thought it was device-y in the way it jumps back and forth throughout time. All I knew about it was that it was shot on Fuji film (I think) from an article in American Cinematographer. Then we talked about performance and how the kind of "document performance" I'm doing is so different from "acting performance." We both seem to find each other's area painfully tedious. He can't imagine thinking about documents at the level of detail that seems normal to me and I can't imagine doing what actors do (memorizing lines, doing relaxation exercises, figuring out beats, research). Yuck. We also talked about eroticism in cinema and a distinction between thinking about the erotic as intimacy vs. power and position. I then stopped by the hardware store to buy a gas hose so I could punch a hole in it for our dramatic gas leak scene. I was annoyed by the fact that it cost $22. I should have thought of something cheaper! What am I going to do with an old gas hose with a hole in it? Plus, Ben says gas hoses are tough to puncture so I don't even know how I'm going to create the puncture—blown outwards no less.

I've been realizing lately that my lifestyle must be apparent by reading this blog. It sounds like Ben, Erik and I are always eating and talking about stuff or I'm dropping by Ben's house or we're shooting. And it's true that my time with them is like a big blurry mix of events that flows from socializing to filmmaking and then back again. I don't know if it sounds fun, but it is actually.

I heard from Dan tonight as well (via email). He liked the Destination Infinity clue idea so that was reassuring. He suggested making the connection between the lobby card and the spinner idea really clear which is a good idea. He also mentioned that he liked the name "Kurt von Stroud." It's funny that people pick up on that. But then, he is a dreamboat.

Kurt von Stroud: dreamboat

Here's an answer to David's question about the Destination Infinity lobby card names.

A lot of times filmmakers will use fun references for fictitious names. Example: in Monsters Inc., the sushi restaurant is named Harryhausen's after renowned fx animator Ray Harryhausen. It's not that I really mind this sort of thing, but I have to admit I spent a few seconds pondering how that name makes sense for a sushi restaurant. Another strategy would be to create satirical names like they do in The Simpsons—for example, Try-N-Save or Bloodbath and Beyond. Interestingly, in The Simpsons, quite a few names are "peformed" names and are not overtly satirical—for example, Kwik-E-Mart, or the Android's Dungeon.

My preference is for the names to be part of the performance. The names in the lobby card all had a sort of fifties sound to me. Dwight, for example, is one of those names you don't hear much any more. I'm sure that one came from Dwight Eisenhower. Surely too obvious a choice and in that way, a poor "performance." Anna Klein and Kurt von Stroud were supposed to be immigrants. The idea here was that b-movie producers might try to emulate the imported success of Garbo and Bergman. So they cast Kurt, "the Dutch Dreamboat" von Stroud as a lead. Now that I think about it that's probably a German name. Anna Klein was supposed to be German. Corda Delaney was supposed to be one of those names that brings absolutely no image to mind. There always seems to be a name like that in a cast where you can't tell whether it's a man or a woman, a matron or an ingenue, a star or a bit player. I had the idea that the above-the-line positions were all filled by waspish types, hence, Gordon Devane and Harvey Plame. Of course the producer B. George MacArthur would have the most waspish name of all with an added initial, Cecil B. Demille-like. Now that I think about it, MacArthur probably comes from Douglas MacArthur. Another too-obvious choice, the naming performance equivalent of biting your knuckles. "William Stout" is one of those names that sounds pejorative but just sticks. Somehow, I think of the fifties as a time when you could have a name like "Stout" and people would just accept it and not think you're fat. Or maybe it had to do with the fact that the word stout is just seldom used today.

Regalscape comes from the naming conventions of the time when companies generally tried to sound big, monolithic and imperial. So you'd get something like "Royal International Pictures" or "A King-Universal production." Being postmodern, we no longer have names like that. That's how you end up with Pinkberry. Regalvision is of course a nod to the various cinematic strategies used at the time to differentiate movies from TV. Back then, everything really did seem to be a kind of "-vision" or "-scope" or "-rama." I guess Regalvision was Regalscape's proprietary, but soon forgotten anamorphic format. Or maybe it was a cheap way of trying to make b/w films look more colorful. I remember in the seventies, I bought this plastic sheet that you put on your TV screen to make a b/w TV image look like color. I dimly remember that it gave everything a prism-like effect. Speaking of plastic sheets, some of you may remember Winky-Dink, a b/w cartoon where at a certain point in the story, you were supposed to cover your TV with a plastic sheet and then draw on it to help the character get out of trouble.

If the lobby card prop got more screen time, I might have put more care into the names. Actually, I'm still mostly bothered by the type. If I had more energy I'd fix the "o" in Destination which is poorly drawn in the font. Also notice how the "A" is poorly weighted. But that stuff takes too long. I should at least fix the letter spacing since the "N" and "A" are smashed together. The type in the body of the card still isn't great. But part of the art is knowing when to stop.

What I'm watching

You may have noticed that I haven't posted anything about movies lately. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, there don't seem to be many July releases for items I'm following. So my Netflix cue has been filled with stuff for other people (e.g., Spongebob). The next films I'm looking forward to seeing are 300 and The Number 23. I guess this is number month.

Second, since I'm doing post-production grunt work, I don't need to look at any movies for reference. Probably the last thing I saw was Walking with Monsters by the BBC with Sean. I thought the CG was incredible except for the animation. Then I found out that all the stuff I thought was so impressive was actually real: landscapes and practical model closeups. In other words, the only CG was the creature animation which wasn't that great.

One thing I might watch soon is K. Gordon Murray's Santa Claus which is sitting on my desk. It looks positively freaky.

Friday's shoot

Yesterday, for about two hours we shot a bunch of pickups/reshoots in the workroom. This had to be really boring for Erik and Ben since these were just short unrelated bits—e.g., the spinner falls, or Ben clicks on the hand clicker, or Ben stands there in front of the spinner. Despite their simplicity, some of the shots took awhile. Just getting a good clicker shot was tough. Ben handles the tedium by acting like a nightmare actor. It's like directing Chad Palomino.

The Ben standing shot worked great. I finally figured how to achieve that look I was going for. It's all in the setup, not the shot. You build some tension before the shot and then—boom! Ben is just standing there. And the spinner is broken. I like the way it came out.

The one thing that we have to do again is the jib shot of Ben reaching into the shrine. First, the lighting is too off. It just won't pass for outside (we shot it in the garage). Two, you can't read "ex nihilo." Three, Ben is wearing the wrong color shirt.

It's interesting what Ben cares about. He has lots of comments on some storypoints and the way certain things look. He has incredibly sharp eyes for some things. Then, there are things he just accepts. Like why he has to be typing on a typewriter instead of a computer. Or that the clue is embedded in a lobby card. "You're the director," he says.

Performance

This morning we had breakfast at Erik's. While eating I was pondering his casual dining area ceiling which I can touch with my hand. I forgot to ask Ben if Altadena is more lax about ceiling heights than Pasadena. Anyway, before I stole a big hunk of Erik's Toblerone, we had a long discussion about the nature of performance. I used the Destination Infinity document as a visual aid to talk about a couple of ideas. The few people who have seen it think it looks very authentic. My Dad, for example, thought it was an actual ad I had laying around. This case of mistaken identity reminded me of this quote in Michael Caine's book on acting:

...rehearsing can be a good test of your spontaneity: if you're running lines with an other actor and the assistant director comes up and says, "Sorry to interrupt your rehearsal," you've failed. If he comes up and says, "Sorry to interrupt your chat," then you're on the right course. Your lines should sound like spontaneous conversation, not like acting at all. And that comes from actively listening (pg. 69).

Similarly, you don't want someone talking about your "prop." You want someone talking about your perpetual motion device, or lobby card, or whatever. But while the Destination Infinity document apparently looks authentic, I don't believe that it would fool a specialist. There is probably something about the layout or the particular combination of images that wouldn't ring true. I'm not talking about knowing that the images come from the film Phantom Planet. It would be more along the lines of knowing that certain kinds of layouts or marketing appeals weren't used back then.

Note that I don't see this as a liability. Performance is not about fooling people. It is not about making a perfect counterfeit. Rather, it is a kind of embodied understanding. One observes carefully and then impersonates someone or something else but without losing a sense of oneself. The performance is the intersection between one's own understanding and the material expressed publicly. While there may be things to rehearse or research, the performance is made lively not by trying to be correct, but by the fullness and depth of one's knowledge and experience. It is as if one is swept away by a tide of understanding.

What this means is that as in certain kinds of actors' performances, one's consciousness is not set on various effects but on completing a hypothetical task. The liveliness and richness of the performance seeps out the edges of the task; it is not indicated. For instance, now that I look at the Destination Infinity document, I notice all sorts of things that I hadn't before. It is as if I unknowingly adopted the Freudian consciousness of the time. The rocket in the background is a sexual allusion. The tagline ("Do you dare make the journey") highlights an adolescent conflict between sexual longing and a fear of the unknown. If I had tried to put these elements in consciously they would have looked forced.

Therefore, when people comment on the authenticity of the lobby card, I think they are really commenting on several things. First, there is a certain amount of technical accuracy gained from research and training. I know from training that the type—Univers—was mid-century (1957). The images come from the public domain Phantom Planet released in 1961. The design/color of the card was derived from lobby card images I found on the web including 1957's Back From the Dead and 1963's Invasion of the Star Creatures.

The piece also embodies a lot of my own experience. I remember seeing lobby cards in theaters—the ones that looked like b/w photos. I also drew from my background in old-school graphics techniques. The woman's hair is cutout roughly partly because I was lazy, but also because that's what it looked like when you cut rubylith overlays—back then there were no bluescreens or bezier curves. I framed the small photos using lines slightly thicker than a point on purpose. I remember once, long ago, I got lightly reprimanded by a printer because I specified the insertion of a photo within a hairline frame: the tolerance was too tight. So the Infinity piece has a heavy, simple, opaque look. This appearance comes from designing with larger tolerances and a manually assembled plate in mind.

But beyond all this, is the sense of performance. For me, performance is not a loss of identity, but a presentation of identity. It is an analysis in which the result is not a typology of features but a kind of anthropology embodied within an artistic form.

Sketch

I'm posting this sketch for my records. This is one of several sketches I did to work out the Destination Infinity clue. It's remarkably unartistic.

Destination Infinity final

Here's how the lobby card clue turned out. My note to Dan about the sequence:

As you can see, I went slightly goofy with it, so the currently melodramatic sting in the temp track is way overboard. I guess the trick will be to create something that embraces the dramatic, the nostalgic and the silly all at once. Or maybe it quotes some of the classic SCI-FI electronic scores but with a detached sense of irony. I guess the trick is to be good silly and not stupid silly.

The way I expect this to work....

Ben is moving boxes in the green room. THen looks at the item he's printed. Something arrests his eye. He goes back to printing. As he prints, we see the following text flash, as if he's thinking about it: NON STOP ACTION / A SECRET REVEALED / DO YOU DARE MAKE THE JOURNEY? We go back to see the the lobby card. Then we see a closeup of the joshua tree photo at the right middle. Dissolve to a real joshua tree in the desert. Dissolve to the wide horizon shot of the truck coming in from the horizon. Ben gets out of the truck. He looks at a tiny stack of papers. The first one is a clipping from "A SECRET REVEALED" from the sci fi lobby card. Only this one has writing on it--his guess as to the mountain range in the background. YUCCA BREVIFOLIA (scientific name of joshua tree). Some possible coordinates. Then he flips to the next clipping in his stack. It says NON STOP ACTION. He flips a map transparency down over the astronaut image. The stars align with several features on the map. He's circled where the rocket ship star goes. That's his destination. Then Ben goes off into the desert.

D'oh, I've gone viral

At simpsonizeme.com, you can upload a photo of yourself and the site will generate a Simpsons cartoon version of you. This is how I turned out. Maybe they should call it caucasionizeme.com.

Destination: Infinity #4

Looks like the lobby card will look something like this. The red represents Ben's notes which tell him where to go in the desert.

Destination: Infinity #3

Yet another version. It's easy to get the map OR the lobby card to work. It's hard to get both.

Destination: Infinity #2

Still working with this idea. I think I like the other one better.

Destination: Infinity

The clue that tells Ben how to get to the desert was originally a simple map with the text "Infinite Motion" on it. The idea was that there was a small place named "Infinite Motion" in Nevada. Here's my latest approach for this sequence. This idea, still in its very rough stages, comes from the phrase: non-stop action! It made sense to me that this phrase might be a found on movie advertising. It's also logical that Ben's print shop might be producing one or two-color lobby cards for a production company.

The idea is that Ben will piece together the desert map from the stars and some of the photos. This is a low-budget film so maybe the production company has joshua trees standing in for alien plants. This also gives us some text to flash on the screen. You have to imagine Ben thinking as he grinds away at the printing press and then the text "Do you dare make the voyage?" or "Non-stop action!" burns in from white. Well, I'll see how far I get with this approach. Still not happy with the headline type but that's what you get for free. The photos are from the public domain film The Phantom Planet.

DVD extras

I'm not sure what's happening to everyone but this past week, Erik went AWOL. Hopefully he will show up soon. Ben and I have been talking about DVD extras. The extras I think up are all educational. Ben's ideas all sound like mockumentaries. As soon as we're done shooting pickups/reshoots, he wants to shave his head so he has this idea that we should interview him on video then. I keep telling him about the extras for the Happiness of the Katakuris and how the behind-the-scenes documentary has a Hanna Barbera-esque rupture between screen image and interview personality. So I thought I'd better post some pictures for him. The above photo is the from the movie, a dark comedy in which a humble, frumpy middle class Japanese family is beset with obstacles as they try to run a bed and breakfast. Notice the grandfather and the mom (circled). Below is how they appear in their DVD interviews. I love the mom's feathers and the grandfather's Gregory Peck-esque style.

vfx: Mike's print shop

While driving through Alhambra today I noticed the now defunct Mike's Tailor Shop (bottom photo) and realized that it wouldn't be too difficult to jiggle the words around to create Mike's Print Shop. The only letter I had to build was "N" and it was easy to do that by manipulating the "M" in "Mike." Editing the sign was easy, changing all the buildings was hard. It took awhile to rebuild the surrounding buildings to simplify things. To do this, I used a couple of other pictures that I had of the other side of the street. I flipped the photos so that the lighting would be the same. I'm pretty satisfied with the Hopper-esque result. Of the three I like this one the best. One of the things that's fun about doing the movie is roaming around these places. I really like LA's mid-century look.

Note to Dan an audio parallelism

RE: the pretty-->scary structure.

I'm trying to make it so that in all three sequences, there are the followng 3 elements--

--something beautiful
--something sends out a 'signal' into 'outer space'
--something mysterious happens in response.

So for example, in the bouncing stars sequence:

We see the stars falling in slow motion and it's beautiful and mysterious and hypnotic. Then the bouncing noise seems to ring out into the sky, almost like a homing signal. In response, now, the evil entity returns to zap the spinner into three pieces!

In the touching spinner sequence:
We see ex nihilo, and hear the dangling crosses. It's beautiful and mysterious. Ben touches the spinner and we hear a metallic noise maybe that drifts out into space. Then things get myterious as we see the blood drips.

In the gas burning sequence:
Ben's watching the TV sequence where the 'new matter' is spinning around beautifull and wonderfully. This spinning noise seems to soar into space. The evil entity then 'sneaks up' behind Ben and drops into the floor causing the house to burn door.

By the way, the actual long cartoon house burn should be mysterious and pretty.

vfx: printshop 2

I found this print shop today on Duarte. I think it works only a bit better than the other one. The sign has the unfortunate quality of looking fake even though I only did extremely minor changes to it. The Printing and Graphics type is all real. I spent about an hour trying to delete a minivan that was parked on the right of the wall. I ended up sticking a building shadow in there to hide the funny coloring. Lame.

vfx: Night exterior

This is the first exterior that I'm pretty happy with. This represents Ben's workshop at night. I pass this house every day when I drop Sean off at school. I don't know if it's a house, a room or a garage, but it appears to be just one big cube. I finally took a picture of it this afternoon and fortunately from this view, there were no shadows. I found that doing these day-for-night shots works a lot better if there are no shadows (see bad test version below). The night sky is from morguefile and comes from Hawaii. I had to composite the telephone pole in to make the scene seem a little more realistic. To get the day-for-night effect I just used the photo filter.

Kerning & DOF

When desktop publishing was in its infancy in the 1980's, designers were obsessed with kerning (changing individual letter spacing) because you couldn't do it. The software just wasn't sophisticated enough. Then, as soon as DTP software like Xpress gained letterspacing controls, designers started kerning with abandon. Take a look at documents from the early 90's and you'll see that smashed-together headline look over and over.

The whole kerning episode reminds me a lot of depth of field in video. Videographers are obsessed with DOF because current image sensors are small making it difficult to blur out backgrounds. Redrock and other companies even offer quirky bigger-than-the-camera rigs that enable you to mount standard 35mm lenses on your camera to better control DOF. (One weird side effect: the viewfinder monitors upside down!). It seems odd to think that Greg Toland once gained acclaim for having everything in sharp focus. Anyway, once cameras make it easier to achieve DOF effects I suspect that we'll see rack focuses and blurry backgrounds in abundance. Then after a few years, things will go back to normal.

(written and posted at the car wash)

vfx: printshop exterior

One thing I always notice in movies is the bad practical pasted-on signs used to transform buildings from one type to another. In that sense, moviemakers have been photoshoppping signs long before Photoshop. This shot is a screen capture of a building edited in Photoshop with grain added later in After Effects. The shot is technically simple, but artistically difficult because I was trying to add something that wasn't there ("PRINTING"). It still doesn't look that great. I also removed a barricade and made the windows look like they were still in place. Dan said it would be nice if we could get Ben walking into the building. Yes, that would be nice. I'm going to see if I can find a better building. Dan thought the Mercury Printing was too nice. This one is probably too derelict.

vfx: sky rebuild

There's a clutziness to visual effects work that I find appealing. When you think about, some common techniques are downright crude and it's amazing that they work at all. I can't believe matchmoving/tracking works so well, for example. What an ugly way to solve a visual problem. The de-aging technique in X-Men was similarly crude. The technique is called "virtual skin grafting" and involves sampling skin from one part of the actor and tracking it to another part. The amazing part to me is that someone had the idea to do this in the first place. So when I'm thinking through these effects shots I've been unafraid to try simplistic or crude approaches.

In the shot where Ben first sees the spinner he missed his mark so he's off to the side. To re-center Ben I had to fill in some missing sky. I thought that I would be able to stretch out some of the existing sky to fill up the space. But that didn't look too good. The grain looked stretched and became really noticeable. I tried blurring the stretched grain and then used AE's grain tool to put grain back in, but it still didn't look right. I tried a bunch of other things too—I reassembled the sky out of tiny sections of existing sky but that didn't look any better. Rotoscoping didn't work either. What finally worked was thinking of the sky as a giant bluescreen. Keylight didn't work at all, but somehow Color Difference Key worked great. I actually don't know how to use it, but I randomly tried some things I remember from doing blue screens a long time ago. So Ben and the bushes are basically keyed over a blue Photoshop sky with some garbage mattes to keep out some pesky bushes. One note: it would have probably been faster to just shoot a real blue sky and composite Ben on top of that. Putting film grain onto the blue Photoshop background added 20 minutes to the otherwise 10 minute render.

Photo at top: what good is pulling a key if you don't put in some weird background?

They're heeerrreee.....

Dan's daughter's acting career has been taking off. Besides a recent role in a Nickleodeon kid's sitcom, Olivia just finished playing a ghost in a direct-to-DVD horror offering. In this role she wears lots of ghastly makeup and gets a lot of screen time.

The green typewriter

I knew I'd have to get a typewriter sooner or later. Since it looks like we're going with Ben typing for the final scene, I picked this one up from Ebay for $50 including shipping. At first I was thinking of getting one of those black ones like an old Royal, but I felt that look was a little stereotypical. This one was cute and fits somewhere between retro and mod (but after vintage and definitely before old school). Plus I love the minty color.

vfx: house removal + microscope + wire removal

House removal--remove houses from desert horizon as truck passes in front of them

This shot came out well and was pretty easy. I just rotoscoped the truck more carefully than last time and then put in a still image in which I had deleted the houses. Technically speaking, I guess I should have added some grain to the still image but it's such a tiny slice on the horizon that I don't think anyone will notice.

Microscope--Add round matte to create microscope eyepiece effect

This shot was supposed to be easy but for some reason it's not. All I do in this shot is reduce the side of the stars and put a fuzzy round mask on top of them to simulate looking in a microscope. For some reason it still doesn't look quite right, but I say good enough for now.

Wire removal--remove towers and wires from desert background

Last time I tried doing the wire removal using track mattes. But those didn't work... there was just too much movement in the vegetation. This time I tried doing some roto work but that didn't look good either. The problem is that you can see the wires between the moving brush. I had the idea that doing this shot would be like doing a z-plasty—a plastic surgery technique in which scars are visually deemphasized by creating a new scar in a zig zag pattern. My thought was that breaking up the wires here and there would cause them to disappear from the viewer's attention in the same way that camouflage makes something "disappear." The result wasn't too bad but it still didn't look quite right. I have to rethink this.

Impressions of today

Today's talks with Dan and Ben were rewarding because it seems like we're all on the same page. Everything Dan brought up made sense as did everything Ben mentioned. Also, Ben apparently went on a short trip last week which is why he disappeared.

I suspect the video will read as planned. The average viewer will probably not know exactly what's going on, but shouldn't find it painful to watch. I think they might get pleasure by watching the buzzy animations and knowing that there is some kind of structure and logic to the thing. I think you can turn off your mind and just experience the piece in a sensual way. People used to watching these sorts of videos may pick up some of the general themes. I like the fact that viewers can gain a fuller understanding of the movie via careful rewinding and viewing though I don't expect anyone to do this. There's a real density to the piece.

I'm feeling like we're on the home stretch. Dan asked for a copy of the current version as well as some AIFFs to use as audio assets. He's going to try to sketch out some things in the next couple of weeks.

Dan and Ben on Noise-33

Met with Dan for awhile today to go over version 33. Dan didn't have any major structural things so we fine tuned a bit. His comments:

>First line of narration should have more data/technical points

>Leave Rube Goldberg into in limbo as it is now. Dan calls this the "Star Wars crawl."

>Bring Gracie in earlier so her appearance at the end isn't too much of a surprise.

>Can emphasize connection between Ben putting items together in red room and the tape by intercutting words with the tape.

>Make the completion of the tape obvious. Highlight its thingness.

>Set up bridge scene by putting maybe books spilling out of a satchel. Pages reiterating "ex nihilo."

>Ending we came up with: We see burned and charred items. Raindrops start to fall. Ping. Ping. Now we're indoors. We hear more pinging. We see some of the crazy flyers that Ben is writing. Now we see Ben typing. He types out his last line.

>Consider the parallels in the structure. Wonder always turns to fear.

>The temp pads aren't bad considering. The main problem is that they saturate the mood leaving nowhere to go. By reducing/thinning out in final product, it will allow Dan to emphasize the 'scary' parts. Right now, everything sounds mysterious.

>Extend print shop exterior shot.

>Make sure Gracie walks out of the red room.

>Bring devils into the codex video.

>my note: emphasize "medieval period breaking down"

Reminder to Dan: make sure off-screen spinner crash matches the video rewind segment.

Dan and Ben both reinforced my idea that the connection between the tape assembly and the final exposition video needs to be stronger.

Ben didn't have too many comments besides that. He had the good idea that one way to bring Gracie in earlier is to have Ben talking to her on the phone and looking at her picture. Maybe she's on a trip or something.

vfx: rewinding surveillance video

If there's one thing I think I'm good at, it's artistically distorting video. In this shot, Ben is viewing and rewinding a highly distorted surveillance video over and over to try to figure out what caused the spinner to break. To create this effect I started out by splitting the video image into separate R, G and B channels, then used the wiggler to shake the layer positions. Over that I comped some video grundge that I always keep handy. It seems obvious, but in order to make a grundge layer look good you have to use a displacement map so that the grundge interacts with the video layer. Without this interaction, the grundge looks like it's floating on top of the other layer and it looks really bad. Still, I see that done all the time. Anyway, the shot came out nicely I thought. I'm not sure if I'm going to show it as is, or play it on a TV and shoot it again.

I keep forgetting how to get that bad vertical hold look so I'll describe it here as a reminder. I use the Pete's Plugin (free) filter called Slide. Unfortunately, it only slides horizontally so you have to rotate the image to roll vertically. Pete's Plugins also has a video pixel filter which looks pretty nice, but I wanted to avoid the scan line look for this video.

vfx: hand removal + sky replacement

Today I finished two effects shots. The first was a hand removal. It's a shot where the voltometer needle looks like it's jumping. I achieved the effect by moving a powerful magnet behind the meter with my hand. Because I planned the shot, it was easy to mask out the hand since it was in the shadow.

The second shot was the sky replacement. In actuality, it was more of a sky add on. I just multiplied the sky right over the truck as it drives off into a blank gray sky. It was easy and looks fine. The clouds are from a photo taken over the Mediterranean found on morguefile.com.

The other stuff hasn't been quite so easy. Even putting a blurry circular mask on the microscope shot involved some thought. In the first version, the stars looked too big so I have to redo the shot. I also tried some of the more complex rotoscoping shots. Rotoscoping an interlaced frame is hard because you don't know where your edge is. I'm going to have to pull out my Scott Christiansen book and see what he recommends. There's also the judgement factor involved: how good is good enough? I have one version where the house removal looks fine if you don't know the effect is there. But if someone points it out, you can easily see the flickery edge at the horizon line. Is it worth getting rid of that? The more complex effects shots involve more judgement and interpretation. The simulated video should be fun. I'm going to try to use that flickery out-of-focus RGB gun approach. Convention dictates that you put in/emphasize horizontal scan lines. But for this kind of thing, I think it's important to rethink visual convention. When shooting the TV for the Bridge section shoot, I realized that I never got scan lines. I either got a moire pattern or a soft look when I went slightly out of focus.

NOISE-31

I previewed another rough cut today, version NOISE-31. It's nice seeing the film in full 853 x 480 resolution. It's so much clearer than the 500 x 280 size I normally use. My sister said it doesn't look like it took three years to make. She also said it looks like an art film because it doesn't have dialogue. Gene said it has a good emotional quality but he was unable to hear the whispery VO because his hearing aid amplifies sibilance. Sylvia said she didn't know what it's about but liked it. Ben wasn't here today. He just disappeared without notice. I hope he shows up sometime because he has one more scene to shoot. I'm still in the process of making the film a little more understandable. For me, the information-heavy parts of the film are the most interesting—the beginning and the end. The middle part with the "everyday life" and desert scene is kind of boring. It's purposefully so, but I'm wondering if the middle is too boring. I think I still need to put some thinking space in the film for people to reflect on the dense, information-heavy areas.

I'm still thinking about how to show Ben's bloody hand. I spent some time looking through the CDC Image Database but wasn't able to find anything useful. Maybe I'll take some b/w stills of Ben's hand in various stages of decomposition using makeup effects. Strangely, we were talking about diseases and disfiguration today because Sean is in a stage where he wants me to paint and fix all the tiny blemishes on his toys.

Some progress

The perfect storm of hot weather, visiting relatives, and Sean attending a new school have conspired to make the past week's progress slow. I've been working on the codex video which Ben thinks is an enormously tedious project. He's right in the sense that animation as a craft is tedious by nature. But it becomes a not-so-bad mindless activity once you get into it. One of my grad students used to work at Disney for years as an effects animator. She drew the waves cresting and flowing in Fantasia 2000. She said that it sounds tedious but after awhile you don't mind it. Actually, I think it's this painstaking quality that gives animation its energy and charm. In the nineties I spent lots of time trying to figure out shortcuts for animation using various forms of computer interpolation. But the results were unsatisfactory lacking the dynamism of working frame by frame.