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.