b/w examples for grain

Top to bottom: automatons (super 8), pi (16mm), Roger Corman's Undead (probably 16mm)

kalinin k7

The Kalinin k7 puts the ekranoplan to shame. A 144 scale model is available from anigrand.

Singing the noisy blues

My latest take on Noise film is to make it black and white. I've been looking at some b/w films for comparison. Automatons was shot on super-8. It's way grundgier than noise film. Pi was shot on 16mm. I don't think 16mm has to look that grainy. Noise is somewhere between the two. My conceit is that I'm doing it at 2.35:1 unlike 16mm's 4 x 3. One problem with Noise film is that I shot it with the histogram way too left-leaning. So any attempts to make a shot brighter makes the noise evident. I was looking at the channel information and found that the blue channel is incredibly noisy. So I'm just substituting the green channel for the blue and it looks fine. I'm now doing the color in AE. The popcorn FCP to AE script works incredibly well. Only one small section didn't come out.

EHRE [honor]

Here's an easier-to-shoot version of the story. Only three easy-to-get locations.

We see the face of a 10 year old boy as he looks admiringly at a poster on a brick wall. There are the sounds of bombs in the background. German-sounding media fill the air. The poster says EHRE and shows a V-2 style rocket with a porthole. In the porthole is a heart. The image is romantic as the rocket shoots off into space.

Cut to a photograph of the same poster. Then more photos of aircraft and rockets but looking overdesigned and overbuilt, some with dozens of wings and engines. The photos have a strange, pixellated look to them. We see that a woman is looking at them. French. She is in a dark room. Newspapers cover the windows. The room is lined with all sorts of old electronics. We hear French newscasts dimly in the background. She looks at her watch (or clock). Then, as if on schedule, the sound of beeping morse code fills the air. She begins writing numbers into a grid left to right, top to bottom. We dissolve to see her painting in the numbers in gray and then finally, we her standing before a large, poster size image. The image is composed of the black and white squares she was drawing. It appears to be some kind of metal apparatus with tubes and holes. Very abstract. Fade to black.

Title: 5 years later. We fade up on a medical scene. Very close up with shallow DOF. Muffled voices. Heart monitors and equipment beeping. We see tubes being injected, fluids flowing out of bandages. Chaotic imagery and then the woomph of a vacuum seal. It's inordinately bright and we can barely see a face through a series of wires and tubes. More electronic chatter. Then everything starts to shake violently. We hear the roar of rockets. The mouth filled with tubes contorts into a smile.

THE END

Pools of light

Stylized hallway from "Who's been sleeping in my bed?"

Erstaunt

I just got a new camera--a Nikon d3100 so I was thinking of shooting a short. A really short. Something easy to shoot. I started mish moshing some of my old ideas and looking at my available talent and resources. Here's what I came up with.

Exterior late noon old world brick wall. We see a poster on the wall. A young child is staring at it. In the poster, there is a rocket with a porthole and in the porthole, a heart. There are bold letters reading "erstaunt." The child turns as if being called then runs away. A woman's face enters the frame. She crosses the street as we see the child running down the side walk. We see the woman's face again. She is looking very intently. There is a door. A man in a dark suit and hat bursts through the door in a hurry. The woman glides into the door unnoticed.

The woman walks briskly down a dark hallway. As she walks, she reaches into her hair and pulls out a bobby pin. She seems to know exactly where she's going. She stops. Voices in the distance. We're tight on the woman's face now. She's looking down, but her eyes see everything. She then goes to a door, spends a few seconds working the lock then enters the room. A filing cabinet slides open. With a flashlight she rifles through folders then opens one. In it she finds various designs. Medical looking charts with numbers. Exaggerated photos of super planes that look like they would never fly. Then, she sees what she is looking for. A photo and plans of a small round chrome device with wires and tubes. On it, is stamped a heart. We slowly transition to time lapse clouds.

We're in a white room now with beeping medical noises. We see a series of wires being connected to a body. More wires. Then we barely see a mouth and face through a series of wires and tubes with fluids running through them. The image starts shaking as we hear the sound of a rocket taking off. Lips curl into a smile.

The End.

Fault tolerance, idiomatic performance, etc.

Here are some concepts that came up during various discussions this semester.

Fault tolerance

I've realized that one reason why narrative filmmaking is so hard is because it's fault intolerant. If you're missing a shot it causes big problems. There are four ways to handle fault intolerance:

1. Redundancy (e.g., shoot coverage)
2. Iteration (reshoot/pickups)
3. Substitution (fill the hole with another shot like a cutaway)
4. Improvise.

Idiomatic performance

If you have a beeping noise and play it metronomically it will sound like a beep. Play it in chords like a marimba and the beep will sound like a musical instrument. The negative is also true. Play a string sound like a piano and the strings will sound piano-y, not like strings. Learning to play idiomatically is a big part of making a synth sound like a particular instrument.

We tend to reduce things to physics; sound is a waveform, an image is a series of pixels. But resemblance goes beyond capture data. It is related to an idiomatic understanding of performance. This is similar to the phenomenological idea that we hear words and voices--not waveforms.

A performance, therefore, is a way of restoring this understanding to technology.

Angle of greatest movement

This is a way of making a Vokrapich-ean construct more explicit. "Angle of greatest movement refers to the amount the camera has to move to capture a gesture while shooting tight. Choose the angle that allows for the maximum or minimum movement depending on your needs.

The man who heard voices & noise film

The Man Who Heard Voices--the story of the making of Lady in the Water--is a surprisingly good book on filmmaking. I thought it was going to be a post-mortem on M. Night Shyamalan's career but it was filled with astute observations about the filmmaking process. Also, contrary to what others have said, I thought the book painted a flattering portrait of Night. Sure he has an ego, but he also comes across as dedicated, willing to take chances, even admirable. Actually I relate to this portrait of him a lot.

Lady in the Water itself has an essential problem: it wants to be about belief and yet it doesn't require any belief from its audience. Once we see the scrunt (the grass-haired wolf) we know that we're entering into a supernatural space. No belief is required. And yet, I'm sure M. Night was trying to avoid the tired "is it real or is it not?" take on the subject. There are two formal problems at work:

1. How do you create a film with an ambiguous sense of reality without making another tired statement on simulation (e.g., The Matrix, Truman Show, etc.) or psychology (e.g., Basic Instinct, Gas Light, Occurrence at Owl Creek, etc.).

2. How do you deal with the tough problem of showing characters enter into belief? If the characters take too long to believe in the story elements (that we know they must believe in) we get annoyed. And yet, if they believe too quickly, their lack of skepticism seems unrealistic.

Curiously, both of these problems are ones I was working on in noise film. For us, the floating spinner is the "scrunt." It's supposed to look magical enough to evoke belief. And yet, unlike the scrunt, it's supposed to look like something that could possibly exist in reality.

The principal arc of noise film is Ben falling deeper and deeper into manic belief. The end itself is my take creating a satisfactory ending while still retaining a sense of ambiguity. In Lady, as in most commercial film, the end of the film tells us what is real. In the typical art film (e.g., a David Lynch film) we never know what is real. Noise film tries to end up somewhere in the middle.

avatar & v

I've been watching V, the abc mini series although it seems to get slower and less interesting every week. Slowness occurs when the anticipations take too long to be fulfilled or even worse, when we don't know what we're supposed to be anticipating. In this case, we're eight or so episodes into the thing and we still don't know what the Vs want or what the resistance is trying to do.

The original V was a metaphor for World War II. The current V is like the flip side of Avatar. Avatar tells the story of the colonization of a planet from the perspective of the colonizers. V is the story of what it is like to be colonized. The Vs are technologically advanced, god-like. But we know they want something from us. The experience of being colonized is interesting and could make for a good story arc but the current V doesn't know exactly what it wants to be.

Lady in the Water [notes]

> Cindy Cheung is essentially an exposition bot.

> The one scene where Yoong Soon is interpreting her mom's Korean just seems poorly directed. Yoong is not listening to her mom.

> Why show the creatures so clearly at the end? Shouldn't they be more mysterious?

> The ending creatures scene--shot in such pedestrian fashion. Seems almost anti-climactic.

> The one big arm guy should have been cut out. He serves no purpose, is rarely seen again and makes me think this is going to be one of those indy films with quirky characters.

> Some nice details in the story--the grass hides the scrunts, the thing with the mirrors.

> Maybe I'm just too close to Korean culture, but why superimpose a fictitious story onto a pre-existing culture?

> Why does everyone seem to believe the story so readily?

> Bryce Dallas Howard is great at performing nymph, but her body doesn't (she was an athlete in high school). It was hard for me to get past this discrepancy.

> The first scrunt attack scene: I just don't get it. The direction seemed really clumsy.

> Shooting the end from in the pool is a nice way to prevent the thing from looking too literal.

> The scrunts: great practical effect.

> I just don't seem to get fantasy that seems random. Like A Wrinkle in Time. Lots of weird names and places. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus also.

I'm so stylish

I never thought about it before, but noise film fits pretty squarely within schoolhouse style chic. Apartment Therapy calls the style "an eclectic mash of vintage and industrial with a bit of geek chic that is easy to incorporate into a home with inhabitants of any age." I wonder what's in the air creating this confluence of imagery that is found simultaneously at Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Anthropologie, Wisteria and dozens of sites.

Hating the Like button

Today Facebook introduced an SDK that enables your Facebook friends' "likes" to appear throughout the web. Like most things on the web we become defined by taste. The problem is that this reinforces an inflated value of opinion in which our subjectivity is defined by aesthetic preference. We are worthwhile because of our subjectivity. But that's just my opinion.

We caused the financial crisis

In the financial crisis institutions and brokers made money not by being productive but by packaging and repackaging financial instruments. It was a form of fiscal bricolage that fused economic politics with marketing. In a lot of ways, it's not so different from what we do in certain art classes. When we get away from observation and understanding, we teach students how to manipulate and leverage cultural capital in new ways.

School is people too

All of us are good problem solvers, better or worse depending on the circumstances. Learning how to read a face, for example, requires tremendous judgement. The problem is that the digital generation seems to create too neat a line between analog and digital environments. For example, students (Sean included) seem to treat school like a video game, a situation that ought to have highly circumscribed parameters. For me, school is more like reading faces—students are supposed to be making judgments about what's required and what should be done since an instructor's curriculum is often not what's stated on a syllabus.

I figured out what "the box" is

As Sean clicked away on his Nintendo this morning I realized that "the box," as in "thinking outside the box" isn't just a metaphor, it's a literal image of a game machine, computer or TV. Thinking outside the box means knowing how to think in non-video terms.

Video games teach you certain things—

• Goals don't change

• Goals are hierarchical

• All of the answers can be found within the game itself

This structures thinking in a certain way that is good for procedural tasks but leads to poor problem-solving abilities. The ability to problem solve means knowing how to function in an environment in which goals are constantly changing and being redefined. It means looking for answers "outside the box"—outside the given parameters. Add to this the nature of cinema as an emotional medium. Film works not by logic but by following the emotional arcs of characters. We reason not by critique, but through emotional identification.

Most students are about the same age as the Game Boy (or younger). All of their lives they have been carrying boxes. The digital generation's desire to think outside the box stems from an apparent desire to transcend their own upbringing.

The ubiquitous twist zoom

In the CGI Mars landing sequence in Disney's Roving Mars video there is a zoom that simulates the look of quickly twisting the barrel of a zoom lens. It's very effective and brings a journalistic sense of reality to the sequence. I noticed a twist zoom or two in Avatar also used to good effect. Then last night I saw The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009). There are about eight of these twist zooms in there. The twist zoom has become a part of the vocabulary of the hand held shot telling us that we witnessing something happening right now—even if it isn't.

Kung Fu paint chips

Ben and I were at the paint store yesterday choosing a color for the house exterior. We seem to have settled on 'lunar landing' which is a medium greenish gray (Siwaraya are you happy now?) I was throwing paint chips like shuriken stars into Ben's throat and got the idea that it would be a nice film sequence. This would be less like Gambit or Thurston (the magician who was said to be able to throw a card from the stage to the back of an auditorium) and more about color. Different color combinations would lead to different results—sort of like combat synethesia. So there would be a showdown between the guy who throws RGB primaries, the guy who throws CMY primaries and the guy who throws Bauhaus red/yellow/blue primaries. Who would win?

All the fun of following instructions

Sean is on spring break and is kind of bored so I took him to the hobby store and bought him a Snap Tite model. The plastic model world has changed a lot since I was buying all those models for kit bashing just a few years ago. At that time you had to scrounge around for retro models, but today the store was stocked with reissues from Revell, Monogram and Moebius—cool stuff, like the vehicles from Lost in Space, the Universal Monsters, Tom Daniels creations like Rommel's Rod and the Red Baron. I bought a small Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea flying sub that included an accessory mini sub and observation sphere. It might look nice grafted on to the Lockheed jet bomber I found last year.

Plastic models pretty much exist only for nostalgia's sake now. Everyone I knew built them when we were kids and blew them up with firecrackers at New Year's. But today kids build Lego models. It's really strange to watch the change toward hyperreal aesthetics I think we would have found Lego figures too juvenile looking.

I'm trying to figure out the economics of models. I remember that when I was a kid models cost about $2.50 which was pocket change even back then. Now, a model costs about $17. I think the price difference is a lot higher than the cost of inflation. Maybe it's licensing fees. The dollars-to-complete time ratio also seems to be higher (inversely). Back then a $2.50 model would take maybe a few days to build. Now, a $20 model can be finished in an hour or two. So not only are models more expensive, they provide less entertainment value (e.g. keeping child occupied value) for the money. Talk about keeping kids occupied—I was thinking about the balsa wood and tissue paper airplane kits my neighbor's brothers would put together. The balsa wood cross sections imitated the actual structure of the airplane. The final step was to glue a tissue paper skin onto the frame. Then you'd throw the model into the air (they were aerodynamic) and it would usually crash land puncturing the tissue paper and snapping the balsa wood spars.

Today's models are more expensive, easier to build, more hyperreal (e.g., juvenile-looking) and more forgiving (even a Snap Tite is unforgiving compared to Lego). In models, as with everything else, the past generation thinks that the current generation has things too easy.

The prequels

In a confluence of Star Wars-related events and bad parenting, I watched the redlettermedia review of Episode II last week while letting Sean watch Episode III this week. While the redlettermedia reviews are wonderful, I think it's less productive to compare the prequels to the original trilogy than to think of them as a fusion of narrative and modernist abstraction. The wonder of the prequels is that they make abstract film watchable.

The redlettermedia review does a good job of picking apart the logic errors in Episode II but I'm not sure that matters a lot. I've seen all of the prequels more than once, but I only have a vague recollection of what happened—political maneuvering, light saber battles, flying things, Anakin becoming Darth Vader for some vague reason having to do with power. These films resist understanding—to watch them is to put oneself in a mindset in which experience counts more than logic. In the prequels, Lucas has gone beyond the thrill ride movies he and Spielberg pioneered in the 80's. Here, he puts his own original trilogy into the cultural blender creating a collage of associations and emotional textures that speed by along with the visual imagery. Making full use of the painting metaphor he frequently employs, Lucas stands at a distance dabbing and collaging his films into existence. The objectified quality of the characters is a natural result of a process in which Lucas treats actors, CG characters, culture, sets and effects as ontological equals. Spacecraft fly, Dooku leaps, Obiwan jumps without cuts in a swirling abstraction come to life.

Hand made sexy air brushed robots

I was watching Lost in La Mancha the other day—the documentary on Terry Gilliam's doomed film—and it reminded me a lot of working on the Jasmine theater project. In theater, you're bringing dozens of people together to work for one thing: opening night. You can feel the energy of everyone working toward a single moment. Terry Gilliam's La Mancha project was similar. Unlike virtual movies which are made in the editing, Terry Gilliam works old school. You watch as he tries to bring together a cast, crew, and production team in real time. It's like opening night is day one of production.

It got me wondering whether and how film depends on this kind of collaborative energy. If you've seen my tests on youtube, you know that I'm experimenting with simulating modernist abstraction. This kind of abstraction is based, among other things, on the control of abstract light and the precision of the machine. And yet my tests, while evocative of the mid and late 20th century, have a certain look to them. Compare the Xanadu of my mind with the actual Xanadu movie, for instance. What makes Xanadu look like Xanadu is that its imagery is based on hand-painted imitations of machine effects, a look you also see in the logo for Saturday Night Fever, the illustration of Doug Johnson, Sorayama's Sexy Robot illustrations, Steve Martin's Pennies from Heaven and Gilliam's own Brazil. Back then, the Xanadu logo looked like a glossy, machine-made take on yesteryear. Today, accustomed as we are to CGI, the logo seems to have more in common with its hand crafted deco inspirations than with technology.

As heir to the light and gloss look of the eighties Speed Racer (2008) involved hundreds of people carefully crafting light effects on the computer. The hand disappears from sight but becomes present within dozens of hand crafted surface mapping, particle and bokeh effects. For us as low-budget, independent filmmakers, the question is this: how much of the attraction of cinema relies on harnessing the collaborative energy of large groups of skilled craftspeople? Trapcode's After Effects plug ins will give you as much spit and shine as you can handle. But rendering alone is not the equivalent of bringing together a group of artists to perform on opening night.

better blacks

This approach (see last post) also seems to give you better blacks though I'm not sure it's doing anything different than crushing the blacks/whites. Original on left, b/w version of bleach bypass look on right.

bleach bypass look variation

Thought of an obvious variation on the bleach bypass effect that looks nice to my eye. On the left is the original. In the middle is the original bleach bypass effect which is created by using two layers--the top layer has the Overlay blend mode applied and the bottom is b/w. The variation on the right is the same except the bottom layer is colorized blue.

Editing video with the video scratcher

Here's a test of the video scratcher used to edit video.
The procedure....

Put guide lines at the edits.
Define the 'shots' by dragging at a 'normal' speed as closely as possible
Speed up past the things I want edited out
Slow down where appropriate

This is very similar to an audio project I worked on. I like media where the timeline is done gesturally, almost as if it's hand-cranked. It gives everything a kind of weird fluidity. I also really like the bubbly audio.

More video tests

I'm excited about the tests we're doing for future iterations of video classes. You can see them here. I'm especially liking the video scratcher that Craig and I have been working on. The idea is to establish various spatial relationships then have the video 'create itself.' It's like a blend of interactivity and video. In our test version, a marker represents travel among three LA cities. When the marker hits a certain position, info about that city pops up.

The original video scratcher is shown below. It enables After Effects to create motion scrub type animations using motion sketch data which is then used to control the timing of a jpg sequence....

Laserium lives and other tests

Been doing a lot of tests with various techniques in After Effects for future iterations of video classes. This one takes me back to the 70's. I also think this one is neat...

Languages, languages

I tend to get calls for elemental effects so I've been trying out a ton of languages/aps to find something for that kind of work. Plus I'm looking for something that has a richer scripting environment that AE.

Some results of my experimenting and research so far....

Maya-Essentially, a program without an interface, just a bunch of dialogs connected to an engine. Great dynamics and effects but everything is 3x harder than it needs to be.

Cinema 4D-easy to use, nice, but restrictive academic licensing and dynamics modules are extra.

3D Studio Max-this looks great, but is Windows only. Might try running this on my Intel machine.

Motion--some nice, simple dynamics, but overall, more like a toy.

Quartz Composer--I love the node-based real-time interface, but it needs just a big more refinement in terms of the quality of output.

Nodebox 2-Output is a little too sparse.

Processing-You can do some nice stuff with this. Dynamics requires linking libraries. Still thinking about this one.

Lightwave-capable, but weird interface + a dongle!

Strata--seems unchanged since I used it 20 years ago.

Blender-Highly capable but where is that interface from? Still, highly capable dynamics. Still thinking about this one.

RevMedia with Derbrill plug-in-I love hypertalk, but a bit too sparse.

Scratch

Alice

Various flavors Logo

contextfreeart.org

Unity game engine

dim3 game engine

panda3d

Show player code for revMedia

Pretty straightforward. I was in a rush so it's inefficient and unoptimized. Plus I hardcoded the file names.

--MAKE SCREEN BLACK, INITIALIZE VARIABLES

on openstack

global videopos

put "1200,400" into videopos

hide menubar

set the width of this stack to 2000

set the height of this stack to 900

set the location of this stack to 300,400

set the lockerrordialogs to true

end openstack

--PRESS ESC TO EDIT

on escapekey

show menubar

end escapekey

--PRESS TAB TO INITIALIZE

on tabkey

openstack

end tabkey

--PAUSE VIDEO

on returnkey

global thevideo

if there is a videoclip thevideo then

if the paused of videoclip thevideo is true then

set the paused of videoclip thevideo to false

else

set the paused of videoclip thevideo to true

end if

end if

end returnkey

--MAIN SHOW CONTROL

on keydown thekey

global thevideo, videopos

--JASMINE CUES LEFT

if thekey is "1" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/1-flowerL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "2" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/2-juniperL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "3" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/3-UNL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "4" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/4-fallingL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "a" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/a-airportLEFT.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "b" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/b-channelchangeL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "c" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/c-rewindL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "d" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/d-fastforwardL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

else if thekey is "e" then

checkvideo

put "/Users/faculty/Desktop/show/e-skyL.mov" into thevideo

play videoclip thevideo at videopos

--FADE

else if thekey is "0" then

lock screen

if there is a videoclip thevideo then stop playing videoclip thevideo

unlock screen with visual dissolve

end if

end keydown

--CLEAR ANY EXISTING VIDEO IF PLAYING

on checkvideo

global thevideo

if movie() ≠ "done" then

lock screen

stop playing videoclip thevideo

unlock screen with visual dissolve

end if

end checkvideo

Building the system pt. 2

The difficult part of working in small theater video projection is that you have to be a software and hardware person. You're analogous to the lighting designer who, besides designing lighting, is up there on tall ladders hanging lights. On most of the previous shows I've worked on, I've had to use my feminine wiles to get someone to do that stuff for me. That's one of the reasons I stopped working on shows for awhile. I have no idea how to hang projectors from the ceiling. Remember, I'm the person who tried to mount a 500 watt light for my movie using string (which promptly burned off). I also set a sheet on fire by putting my bed sheet scrim too close to a light. Cabling, fine. Mounting hardware, no.

So it's not surprising that the way I addressed the system problem was to turn back to software. Most show running software requires fast computers. But I was hoping to use two of the spare old G4s we had in the art department. So I turned to revMedia. revMedia is the free version of a suite of products including revStudio, and revEnterprise. revMedia is a clone of HyperCard, a high level programming language written by Bill Atkinson for the Mac over twenty years ago. I feel very comfortable with the syntax, like it's a second language. Not only is revMedia free, it's cross platform so it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. Plus, it's not a resource hog. I've used it on a couple of small projects in the past few years.

It took about four hours to get a working system going. Everything is cued by the keyboard. You press 1 on the keyboard, video cue 1 pops up. You want to fade something out you press 0. Press return to pause/unpause. It works great I think. Still waiting for the show report. But in rehearsal it went fine. There's still no dowser/curtain on the monitors so we're working without a net. But at least we're working on a Mac system in which it's easier to control error messages. Plus on revMedia, you can lock out application-specific error dialogs. Break a leg.

Building the system pt. 1

There are three vital components to doing theatrical projections: creating the videos, rendering the videos and building the show system. Creating the videos is usually the easy and fun part. Rendering is a time-consuming inevitability. Building the system is almost always painful.

Two shows ago I ran Gaul's video using QLab. The unreliability and overall kludginess of that software left me looking for another solution so for Pugilist we went with Quicktime movies. It worked great. We just had one quicktime movie on screen which we paused and played using the computer keyboard. We accomplished fades using a projector dowser constructed by a stage hand. Operated remotely by a string, the dowser was a piece of wood that slid up and down to cover the projector lens. Simple, yet effective. (The pic above shows a fancy automatic dowser sitting on the projector).

Hardware dowsing is actually very important for theater. First, it allows for true "blackout." In theater the stage goes black for transitions, like a fade in film. If your projector or monitors are on, they will visibly light the stage since video black is projected black, not true black. Second, a dowser provides a safety net. If the computer crashes or otherwise screws up, a dowser lets you turn off the screen quickly and reliably. Without a dowser or curtain, you're working without a net. Third, a dowser makes it easy to fade out cues. Let's say you're playing a video and it goes longer than the scene. You just dowse the video and it appears to fade out gracefully. This means you don't have to program any fades into the video and yet, you can time the fades perfectly. When you're projecting, always fight for a hardware dowser.

Since this system worked so well I thought I'd try it again for Jasmine and Prodigal. But then the problems started. First, KCC has a terrific high output projector that they use for showing films. But it's really noisy and made it difficult to hear the actors. So that was out. After roaming around KCC we found two large screen monitors. We talked to the the stage designer about working those into the set as a focal point.

So here's the problem. How do you dowse two on screen monitors? We talked for a while about putting up a black curtain that would reveal and hide the TVs. But unlike the makeshift dowser built for Pugilist, this one would have to look good as part of the set. So I decided to bake the fades into the video and go without the dowser. Working without a net.

Version one of our system was supposed to work like this. Each of the monitors was hardwired to an old XP computer mounted directly below on a stand. We planned on extending the keyboards using USB cables so we could operate the computers off stage. Problem: the computers were so old that they had old keyboard-type ports, not USB ports. Our tech said it's hard to find extensions for those.

Version two. We borrowed two old XP laptops from KCC and ran long VGA cables to the monitors. The laptops had player software called GOMplayer that worked well enough to show the mp4 videos full screen and at full frame rate. Problems: First, we found that GOMplayer doesn't play audio from mp4s which was important for one video that had sync sound. Second, even the tech couldn't get XP in a show-ready state. One of the problems of using computers is that messages are always popping up on screen. When getting a computer ready for a show it's important to turn off screen savers, software updaters and disable power-saving settings that allow the disk drive to sleep [also turn off Expose settings & the annoying Adobe Updater]. But during one rehearsal, we had a message pop up on screen. That's XP.... Finally, and perhaps the last straw, the movie player technique wasn't working. Without hardware dowsing, it was impossible to get the videos timed correctly. The videos would go too short or they would go way way too long and there was no way to fade them out. Rehearsals were a pain because it was so difficult to reset the videos to the correct cue. Clearly, the system wasn't working.

Extravagant memory

There are lots of live performance ideas I'd like to work on but I'm always stopped by the inefficiency of theater. Both of the current shows required months of rehearsal with five actors and the director. Plus there were the efforts of live musicians, a featured singer, video designer, a lighting designer, stage designer, sound designer, stage manager, two crew people, a producer, a site liason, site tech, and site sound man. All this for just four shows. And yet, theater—and live performance—lingers. In the end, unlike video, we're left with an inefficient, extravagant memory.

No news is good news

Last night was the premiere of the two shows. I didn't get any last minute calls yesterday afternoon which is good. Last minute calls would have meant the video system wasn't working. Now I'm waiting for the show report for last night. If it went fine, there will be no notes for me. No notes is good notes. There are still three more shows to go.

Flight board

The director wanted a flight board but this still might change. I was going to shoot it but realized that it's hard to get a nice shot and I needed the flexibility to change the arrival places and times. Here's my half-done After Effects version. The font is an animated flipping font from Motion. It's really ugly but after turning it black and white (it's actually red) it looks a lot better.

The problems of video projection

When you're doing projection design you have to get used to being somewhat of an afterthought. Every theater project must have a scenic designer, lighting designer, costume designer and sound designer. But in LA small theater, a video projection designer is always optional. The thing I dislike the most about the job is dealing with the hardware. It's always different, it's never set up, and I'm usually expected to install it. You have to deal with projectors, going video or computer, running lines, installing projectors, rigging dowsers (or trying to convince someone to do these things). And then you have to make sure that the system actually works. This job would work best split into two parts with one person handling the software and one person handling the hardware.

The interesting part of being an oddity is figuring out how to interface with other people. It's sort of fun figuring how to get a screen into a set design or figuring out what the lighting designer is going to do. On this show I've had the most interaction ever with the other designers. It's also the first time I'm doing video (two large screens) as opposed to projection. I'll lose scale, but I'll gain resolution and presence. Interesting to see how that will turn out.

Micro shorts & experimentation

Talking to Ben today about doing micro-shorts. I've been thinking how a lot of my work is genuinely experimental--not in the aesthetic sense, but in the fact that it always involves experimentation, as in I'm trying to figure something out. Ben's idea was to make really short films, like a minute long which suits short experiments. The trick is to get something that goes beyond the typical camera workout or "subway short"--short films that look more like technical tests or are just simple fight scenes.

Barriers to entry

I was thinking about how barriers to entry are potentially a good thing. One of the things that differentiates music from film is that in music, the barriers to entry are very low. All you need is is the idea that you can write and sing something (which seems to be everyone, especially with auto-tune). But film requires a significant investment of time and energy if not money.

I think that's one of the things that's bothering my rapper second cousin who works on beats. When the barrier to entry is low there are thousands and thousands of other artists working out there; there is a lot of 'noise.' And to cut through you have to be a good marketer (my second cousin hates marketing despite the fact that he has a degree in it.) In film it's not quite as difficult to get out there because the barrier to entry is higher. So to a certain extent, the marketing demands are not quite as high depending on your aspirations.

Current approach

This is the direction that the director and producer are liking so far. The projections are like animated educational slides that are light in tone and comment on the monologues that they underscore.

Reference video--Pink Floyd - "Time"

This is what I was given as reference video by the producer several weeks ago.

Jasmine test for Helen Keller speech--satirical version

Projection design examples from Mesmer

Tests of things in water

FIrst series is about 6 inches deep. Leo is about an inch deep.

My 6 cues

These are the cues I'm underscoring with video/animation.

CUE 10 --watery images

My father told us with a smile. To me and your mother—we were just married then. (Putting tea inside the kettle.) The tea requires-first and foremost-good water. Water in California where we live is not good. So we use purified water, but it isn’t good either. There was a village in Korea where they planted a juniper tree beside a well to make the water taste fragrant. It was the pride of the village. People believed your well, or the taste of the water from it, could help you see the future of a family or the village that owned it. The story goes that when a mother gave birth to a baby, the mother’s family fetched water from a well where a large juniper tree stood. They probably cooked sea weed soup with the water from the well to feed the mother. The water in Korea was excellent. (Pours tea and gives it to his son and the daughter-in-law, and pours some in his cup.) Isn’t this tea fragrant? To tell you the truth, I didn’t know how to enjoy tea at that time. But, when my father asked me how the tea tasted, I used to say, “Yes, it is wonderful.” How do you like the tea?
YOUNG MAN. I don’t know.
WOMAN. . . . . . .

CUE 20 -falling leaves

OLD MAN. I see you can’t say, “Yes” when you don’t know the taste. I earned my father’s trust because of the “Yes,” I gave him. (Pours the tea into the cup for his son.) My father talked about tea while drinking it. The tea is made of the leaves. But not all tea leaves are suitable. Only the tiny leaves on the branches that sprout in the early Spring are made into tea. Those light green young leaves that sprouted newly into the world after a long winter hiatus are what I’m talking about. They were soft and pretty like the swallow’s tongue; thus, given the name, “Chaksol.” People classified the tea quality by the size of the leaves and called them, “Fine Tongue,” “Semi-fine Tongue,” “Middle Tongue,” and “Large Tongue.” In Korean weather, they could harvest the best tea leaves near “Kok-wu” season, which is the end of April. They regarded the best of the best tea leaves harvested before Kok-wu. Do you understand what I’m saying?

CUE 30 -orbiting planets, SUN.

OLD MAN. (After a laugh.) From now on, it is up to you whether you do this as a ceremony or a ritual. I’ve done this ritual of feeding the clock every morning for forty years. Without missing a single day, I’ve performed this ritual early in the morning when the sun breaks. The clock is a symbol of time, isn’t it? Life is about every second you have. No one knows only one second later I may not be able to see this world. “Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Thus, glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which you couldn’t see before”—this is what Helen Keller said. While listening to the sound of this clock, I received my doctorate degree and became a professor as a Korean at a world class University, and won all kinds of awards the society has to offer. Because of my keen awareness of the time limit, I have lived a successful life; even if I leave this world, my scholarly achievement imbued with my spirit will live on to the next generation.
YOUNG MAN. Certainly, father, you have lived a successful life. Many people respect you. I too respect and love you.

CUE 40 --Clock build

OLD MAN. Thank you. I love you too and that’s why I wanted to make sure to do this. When I turn the spring to feed the clock, I can hear the clockwork move inside it. At first it was impossible. If I did it as a ceremony, it would have been entirely impossible. Through a ceremony, one cannot channel through the object. But if you do it as a ritual, it is possible even to talk to the object that you are channeling with. That’s why ritual is the mysterious birthplace . These days, people like ceremony over ritual. That means, there’s no inner exchange of feelings. It means dreariness. While I perform the ritual, the living soul of the clock spoke to me. Neither challenge Time, nor fight it, but be friends with Time. Then it will present you with a gift of miracle that turns every human dream possible. Your grandfather realized that early on and asked me again and again to perform the ritual, not the ceremony. Your grandfather said, on the day of my wedding, “I’d like to see you turn the spring for the wall clock with your own hands.” I didn’t understand the meaning of his words. Still, I answered, “Yes, I shall do it, father.” I gave him an easy answer but I was not really interested in the wall clock.” I should have given it to you earlier. I didn’t know you wouldn’t marry someone till you turned nearly 40 years age. (The OLD MAN briefly controls his breathing and continues with his talk.) Now you are married and have received this wall clock—it’s done. That wall clock is now a priceless antique piece. You may not hear it right now. Someday you will hear the sound of the clockwork, charrruk, charrruk. (In a very frail voice.) Don’t forget to bow each time you turn the spring three times. (The OLD MAN’s last sentence is so weak that it is barely audible.)

CUE 50--BODY< Dense stuff

WOMAN. What about ruining my health from insomnia? The tick tock sound carries nervousness in it. I can see the despair that [you may not come] and the fear of separation looks as though it will crash the bud of hope. How about the fear of death those tick tock sounds bring to us? It stretches your nerve too tight to sleep. (The YOUNG MAN, unable to speak, looks down at the golden spring [in his hand].) I found out on the internet: that the clock is just a device that measures time. I agree with that statement. Long time ago, people used to tell time with the Sundial, stars, water or even sand, using the positioning of the Sun and the stars. You know—the first clock is a stick set straight above the ground. People called it “gnomon.” But this Sundial wouldn’t work on cloudy or rainy days. (The YOUNG MAN looks at his father in the wheelchair.) In Korea, record shows they used the Sundial and water clock during the Three Kingdom’s period. The Great King Sejong used the water clock, “chagyokru,” that had an automatic alarm system. (The YOUNG MAN kneels down over the wheelchair, crying. The WOMAN looks at him with sympathy.) People say that it was during the 14th Century when machine clocks were invented. It became fashionable for all the major European cities to build clock towers that told time for the people. The spring clocks were made from the 16th Century on. By the 18th Century the electronic watches were invented and wristwatches with an automatic spring that moves by simply shaking it came out. Next came the electronic watches and today digital watches tell time accurately without any noise. It was in the 18th Century that the system of 24 hours a day began. Now what type of clock will come? Who knows if a clock divides a day into 25 hours instead of 24? On the internet yesterday, I read about 200 manufacturers produce over 80 million watches annually in Korea. And over 950 million watches are being transacted worldwide every year. (The WOMAN helps the YOUNG MAN rise slowly. Grabbing his hand,) Do you know why jasmine turns counterclockwise? Most plants grow turning counterclockwise. They defy the Coriolis effect. It’s in our DNA to disobey the natural order. What if we perform the ritual of love every morning at dawn like we honor the machine clock?
YOUNG MAN. Ritual of love?

CUE 60--rotate Jasmine

WOMAN. Very solemnly, with utmost sincerity. . . We should light the candles, prepare fragrant tea and flowers. . . (The WOMAN takes the golden spring out of the YOUNG MAN’s hand and puts it inside the red pouch that looks like heart hanging in the middle of the stage. The two embrace each other holding the shoulders and exit, pushing the OLD MAN’s wheelchair. Intense light focuses on the red pouch and fades.)

Concepts

One thing you'll find with a lot of playwrights/screenwriters is that their sense of imagery is different from an artist's. It tends to be more literary (duh) and abstract. I'm working on a section now that talks about the difference between different kinds of waters.. It's hard to make an image of just water. You have to put it into something. So I'm thinking of putting water into cups.

KCC test videos

There is a scene in which the lead character is reminiscing about tea. Here are some of my tests for that video in which tea or tea leaves are drifting through water or space. To use our class language, this is elemental motion using particle systems made surrealist by slowing everything down. The video is supposed to be a bit dreamy. I found that it's useful to have some basic 3D skills for doing theater work. Directors seem to like elemental effects and visual effects type imagery. This is done in Cinema 4D which is pretty easy to use. One problem is that this version doesn't handle particle collisions well. Notice that in some videos the leaves slice into each other. Maybe I'll just do this old school--put some leaves in water.

KCC project

I'm working on a project for the Korean Cultural Center right now, working on some animations/videos for a theater project. The play is called Why the Jasmine Turns Counter Clockwise. It will debut in March. You can all come see it.

scale

Scale is not created by geography but by performance concerns. We are used to seeing cameras flying through space and zooming in to a particular location on earth. Yet, these shots rarely seem to have a sense of scale; they read simply as an effect. Scale comes from the way in which things are shot. One of the reason that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009) looks small despite its big budget sets is that its shots are over-controlled. We never catch inadvertant glimpses of the locations—nothing looks improvisational. We feel locked within a set that seems to exist solely for the sake of the film and never discloses anything beyond it.