So the symbiont makes you Italian?

While rendering last night I watched Spiderman 3. It got bad reviews so I wasn't expecting much. I thought it was OK. Some nice relationship moments. A lot of unrealized potential. Some horrible dialogue ("I can change!"). That Topher Grace praying scene really was terrible. Even though it was shot it a church there is nothing redeemable about that sequence. I didn't mind the dancing scene that so many people hated, but I could have done without it. What seemed weird to me was the way that the Symbiont made Pete Parker channel Tony Manero. All in all an odd film. It had a kind of emotional presence that still lingers. Yet it was really uneven. The Mary Jane-shunning Peter stuff barely made sense. The ending scene in the sunset: too much, show a little taste! I didn't care for the monstrous Sand Man. I liked the human-size Sand Man featured in the comics. I have a reprint of the first appearance of the Sand Man (drawn by Steve Ditko). Spiderman saves the day by vacuuming him up!

Speaking of Tony Manero, I remember reading a story about John Travolta filming Saturday Night Fever. There's a scene where he's supposed to crawl out on a beam high above the ground to rescue a friend. But Travolta protested saying his character would never crawl. He wanted to walk on the beam. And Travolta refused to play it any other way.

It made me wonder if part of what constitutes good acting is knowing when to fight battles. It also seems to me that actors have much more clout than the production team because they can't be easily replaced. For example, if I refused to do a scene the way the director wanted it, I could be replaced easily. How would anyone know?

Bombs away

I'm currently rendering falling bombs for the play. It takes forever the way Cinema 4D does motion blur. It takes 17 passes to render each frame so just doing a 1 second render takes a lot longer than you'd expect. LIke most things, it works MUCH faster the sooner you can get into the 2d world so I'm rendering the 3D animations with alpha channels and compositing them in After Effects rather than working completely in 3D. 2.5 D, my friend. Ahhh. This is one of those learning-on-the-job projects. I had to learn how to adjust the F-curves (acceleration curves) and do a stretch in Cinema 4D. It wasn't that hard, but because I'm using an older version (8) and I don't have the docs (they didn't get installed on my machine for some reason), it's all trial and error. Plus, I don't know the software that well since I generally avoid working in 3D whenever possible.

I've been thinking about the seeming contradictions in my thinking about noise film. If you remember, one of the things that interested me in the project was the way it was based on a non-cinematic idea. And then, more recently, I've been recounting how we didn't force certain ideas to work when they didn't seem filmable. So which is it?

Theory vs. practice: more birds!

For the past few weeks I've been conceptualizing and prototyping the visual effects for the play. The projections are taking place on the ceiling. This is one of the most difficult aspects of creating the animations. Since the projection is on the ceiling, not on the wall, there are some unique problems involved. My thought was that I'd try to convert all of the animations into ones that would work specifically within this context. For example, the director wanted an animation of falling rain that then turned into falling bombs. I was afraid that an up-and-down orientation (drops falling from top of frame to bottom) would be confusing for both the character's orientation on stage and for the audience. So I changed the animation to a ceiling orientation. In my version, rain drops ripple outwards and then turn into bomb blasts. It's as if we're viewing everything from a top (or bottom) view. It doesn't matter where you're seated. An additional benefit of this in my thinking is that it made for better sound design possibilities. You can more easily sync a rain drop sound to ripples and an explosion sound to an explosion. Otherwise, you're left putting in washy rain and bomb sounds with no specific audio-video connection.

Well, the director didn't go for all that. He really wanted everything happening up-and-down, vertically. He also didn't like my take on the birds-into-planes sequence. He really wanted it as he specified... with the birds flying from the bottom of the frame up through the top of the frame instead of sort of stationary as I proposed.

So I spent most of yesterday and today trying to figure out how to make the animations work. The first thing was to understand the nature of the design problem which has to do with putting theory into practice. On Noise film, if there was anything that didn't work in prototype form, it didn't make it into the show; the shot got redesigned. That's what took so long to shoot that project.

But the animations I'm designing for this project are created theory-first. This approach approximates Hollywood feature-film practice. I was reading an interesting article about Robert Rodriguez. One of the reasons he serves as fx supervisor on his films is it enables him, as director, to change a shot if its fx cost is too expensive or unwieldy. in other words, there are often times when you can make a minor modification to a shot that makes it less costly to produce but doesn't affect the story. But in traditional Hollywood terms, an fx supervisor can't tell the director what to do. The hierarchy doesn't permit it.

This case is similar so I have to make the shot work as described. What the director's envisioning is something like the image at the top of this post. It's as if we're looking overhead seeing a bird flying. It then transitions into an airplane. The plane is about the same size as the bird because it's higher in the sky. It also has the same apparent speed because although it is traveling faster, it is so much farther away. The sequence needs to take place within 20 seconds.

The whole thing is much more complicated than it seems. First, there's the speed. If the bird flies too fast, it won't register and won't fill the 20 second timing. To make the bird fly more slowly, it has to be positioned higher in the sky. The problem now is that the bird is small since it is positioned farther away from the camera. The speed is right but the bird is hard to see! The other difficulty is one of convention. As some of my early tests indicate, it looks unusual to see a bird flying above us over a stationary camera. We see them fly and then our camera moves to follow them. They swerve or they swarm. But you don't often see birds flying in a relatively straight line overhead at a speed and size necessary for them to recognizably change to a different shape. This image is more of a conceptual, poetic image. It is an image that exists primarily in the mind.

One of the first things I did to make the shot work better is put some particle clouds in the shot moving against the bird. This helps because it creates a rationale for slowing down the bird: the bird is flying into the wind. Therefore I'm able to make the bird bigger. The other thing I did was slow down the clip. Rather than actually add frames to the cycle, I time stretched it. The idea was to create something that looks like a bird flying in slow motion. (I'm using the great flocking birds tutorial for AE at Creative Cow BTW.)

The other concern is one of approach. I did one version of the animation that was relatively photorealistic. But it just didn't fit in with the other animations which are more stylized. So now I'm trying a version with very stylized birds, almost like bird icons. This also helps in that it fits with the conceptual nature of the image since what we're seeing on screen is visual language instantiated within space.

What makes the whole thing really interesting to me is thinking about how certain approaches affect the visual appearance of things. It is almost as if what makes a Hollywood film look like a Hollywood film is the way its images stem from writing. From script to director and then to fx supervisor, the image follows a trajectory in which the idea precedes practice. This is what gives many fx films their certain look. The Star Wars prequels, for example, all have that theory-in-practice look although I'm not sure exactly what characterizes this look! The giant battle of the titans scene in Matrx 3 also has that appearance. It has something to do with the way with the physics of that scene works: two giant forces meeting in battle but propelled by flight. These are scenes in which ideas are visualized, theory turned into practice.

Theater and visual effects

I had a nice talk with Dan the other day. In terms of the film I told him that the only motivational strategy I had was guilt. He's trying to carve out some time to work on the sound but he's super busy with a conference and a major publication in the works. I'm really hoping he can give us something in January. We'll see.

In the meantime I took on a short two-week project. I'm doing some video transitions for a play. Here's what I love about the theater—

>It's not photorealistic. Although I often get asked to do visual effects-type stuff, there's a good match with my own sensibility. It's kind of fun to play around with pyro and other effects. I just don't like it when the end result has to be absolutely photorealistic.

>Theater is inherently modernist-looking, a good match for the way my art looks (flat).

>The role of the designer. What I really like about the theater is the way that the designers work with directors. It's really different from other client-designer relationships (like in graphic design). In this case you're working with someone who comes from an arts perspective. Being a designer is like being a supporting cast member in an ensemble.

>There's something fun about working in the background where you're not the one always responsible for carrying the show.

>For whatever, the subject matter of the shows I've worked on seem to address the kinds of issues I find interesting (in a broad way).

Fires and the tiny Starship Troopers 2

I was rather proud of myself that it wasn't until I saw this photo in the LA Times that I thought to myself, "hey, I wonder if I know anyone with a burned down house that I can shoot?"

I watched part of Starship Troopers 2 the other day. I was reading a Phil Tippet interview about the film and I was curious to see how he handled the miniscule budget and short shooting schedule. To his credit, on the DVD commentaries, Tippet and company don't take the film too seriously. At the same time, though, I see the film as a good example of first-time director bad decisions.

Faced with the tiny budget, Tippet and his writer decided to go with a "monster in the house" approach ala Ridley Scott's Alien. Not a great idea to start with. But the main problem is that whole thing looks tiny, miniscule. Tippet flooded the sets with fog because he thought that otherwise HD looked terrible. But fog always looks cheap, like Roger Corman's Undead. It looks like it's there to obscure the lack of a set. There was some money spent on creature effects and lots of aliens. But they should have spent some of it on some digital set extensions or mattes. Give us the feeling that we're going somewhere. Instead, we spend the whole movie in a dusty, dreary night environment. They also shot really tight, like our film. I never before realized how obvious a dodge that is. It feels like everyone is framed huge so you don't see the light stands just out of frame.

Mi Familia

I started watching Robert Rodriguez' Planet Terror the other day, but didn't even bother to fast forward to the end. It felt like Rodriguez equivocated through the whole thing. Sometimes he ventured into grindhouse satire mode. At other times, he reverted to his own film vocabulary. I also remember watching one shot that didn't make any sense. The camera cranes up while a car drives into frame, but the crane shot just keeps going and doesn't end anywhere. Plus Rose McGowan's acting wasn't very good. It got me wondering if Rodriguez was wearing too many hats. He's writer, director, DP, editor and composer on this one. He probably helped duplicate the DVDs in his spare time.

Then today I found out that Rodriguez is divorcing his wife of 16 years and is now engaged to McGowan. Now it makes sense. He was in love with his actress! That's why he wasn't thinking straight. It's like Irreconcilable Differences, where Ryan O'Neal's film director character dumps Shelley Long for the ingenue played by Sharon Stone. And O'Neal goes off the deep end financing and directing Stone in a musical Civil War pic (based loosely on the Heaven's Gate debacle) which turns into a disaster.

What's interesting to me now is how this will affect Rodriguez' writing. His work has often been about family, one of the central themes in the Spy Kids series. He took the idea so seriously that he got his kids to help him write Shark Boy and Lava Girl (it screens like it was written by children). Publicly, Rodriguez and his ex-wife are on good terms and she is still slated to produce some of his upcoming films. But still, there must be some kind of repercussion from the breakup of a long marriage with five children. I wonder how it will all play out in Rodriguez' films? I can imagine that one of his next pictures might be titled, "Geez, look at her, can you blame me?"

Not with a bang, Ice Age 2 and Jack Kirby

Last week Ben started work on the downstairs of his house so he returned the remaining red room and green room props. Then today I decided to clean out the garage so most of the garage set is down now. It was fun seeing all the old props and devices... the spinner controller and video stabilizer that Ben built, the jury-rigged wiring that Erik and I did... and lots and lots of props. The old school telephone. The Ward Airline TV. The unused shrine prop. So much time and effort invested in what is now a bunch of MiniDV tapes sitting in a plastic shoebox. This is the way the film ends, not with a bang but a whimper—sets slowly being taken down and at a certain point, no going back for reshoots.

Sean's watching Ice Age 2 today which is really terrible, one of those characterization-by-talking movies. The writers try to advance the story through dialogue then put in action interludes. A lot like Cars. And of course, don't forget the golden rule of bad films—if you want someone to fall in love with you, save their life!

It got me thinking about comic book artist Jack Kirby. Stan Lee said that even without words you can look at a Kirby layout and it makes sense. And it's really true. Kirby's layouts are less like looking at storyboards and more like looking at screen captures of an animation taken at 3 second intervals. There's lots and lots of repeated information. It's funny. In my mind, Kirby is about flying fists and dozens of people flying around and weird power auras and bombastic action and things moving quickly. But when you look at those panels, everything is actually spelled out very deliberately. You hear so much about "story telling" in comics. I wonder if this just means filling in all the logistical blanks—like understanding the difference between painting and film, and between montage and continuity.

The dialogue in those Lee/Kirby comics has to work only well enough to keep the viewer engaged while looking through highly continuous illustration. Take a look at the page above. You know exactly what's happening—that the Hulk is "transporting" to another place. Yet, it takes an entire page to move at the speed of light, talk about continuity. The dialogue is almost like filler—in this case literally when the caption reads, "the scientific principle is too complicated to explain!" So maybe part of the success of the Marvel Silver Age is use of visuals, not dialogue, to drive the story, a result of the unusual Marvel development methodology and Kirby's high-continuity sensibility.

CQ: Director, direct the audience!

Still waiting on Dan before continuing work on our film. On a side note, I checked out Photoshop CS3/After Effects CS3. What Adobe calls the perspective grid is actually a form of photogrammetry which could prove very useful for our project. You can take a photo, input perspective information then you can do some simple camera moves on the now 2.5D photo in After Effects. Very nice for exteriors.

Tonight I watched the beginning of Roman Coppola's CQ, which is about the making of a Barbarella-esque go go spy film. I watched the first 20 minutes or so and it seemed like it was going to be one of those indy-vibed, pining from afar, work-simulates-life-simulates-work things. So I just stopped watching it. I realized that a director has to control an audience's expectations. Coppola set me up so I believed I knew exactly where the film was going and how it was going to end. So there was nothing to do but turn it off. Whether I was right or wrong is immaterial. The point is I really thought I knew where it was going.

This contrasts with Zhang Yimou's Hero. One of the things I love about the film is the way that Yimou sets you up to believe that the film is going in one direction. Then he takes it in a totally different direction. Once he does that, he's got me. I'll sit through the whole thing because he proved that he's my master.

Buzz Light Year of Star Command: the adventure begins & another birth!

The other day I asked Erik if he missed working on the movie. He said yeah. He also said he missed reading the blog. I asked him why and he said, "it was something to look at." Not a ringing endorsement, but I know what he means. I have a lot of blogs that I look at just because they're something to follow.

Sean's been watching the Buzz Lightyear traditionally-animated movie. Pretty primitive. I remember the other month I speculated that one of the qualities of a B-movie is that it doesn't have any "moments." If that's true, then Buzz Lightyear is definitely all-B. Somehow I had it in my mind that in animation you can do anything. If you can draw it you can do it. But after thinking about it, I realized that this isn't true. You can set your story in any place you like. But the more animation you have the more it costs and the more backgrounds you have the more it costs. Like those other B-movies, Buzz Lightyear's direction is more about connecting the dots than anything else. You can follow the story, but most of the (surprisingly decent) jokes get swallowed and no moments are ever created. I think I realized this in the ship crash landing scene. Instead of actually seeing the landing, the ship disappears into the distance. Then we see the ship already crashed with smoke coming out. That's the way you would have directed it if you were shooting live to save money. But this is animation! You would think they could have animated the crash. That would have been what—48 frames? But I guess not. So the film has an overall flatness and cheapness about it. It would be a good exercise to think about how certain scenes could be reshot to make them more momentous.

In other news, Gracie just gave birth to a son (I think)! So in the time we've been shooting she had time to get pregnant and have a baby. I think our goal should be to finish the film before Ben's next baby arrives.