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.