Live blogging Unknown [spoilers]

I was chatting with Siwaraya. She had to put me on hold so I started live blogging Unknown. This would be a good way to think about how an audience engages with a film. Maybe a good assignment. You can see the questions and assumptions one makes when watching a film.

* * *

Starting from about a third of the way in....

haven't decided whether this sucks or not

Where is this thing going?

 You go Liam

What is he carrying?

Sick of shaky cam

Is this the same movie as Taken?

Yeah, just follow the clues

If he's really dead I'm going to scream

They wouldn't do that would they?

How much cash does this guy carry around?

Of course the cab driver looks like a movie star

She looks like Natalie POrtman

Why her? Why the loose end?

Doesn't make sense

Terrible accent, who is this actress? [found out later she actually speaks German]

Yeah, as if that's youtube

Nosy, very nosy

She's a goner

 OK, if you didn't know that was going to happen...

What this movie needs is mor rack focuses

Yeah, but you know in Taken...

He was supposed to be an ex CIA operative

Great, now it's a buddy film

Next they're going to be kissing

that scene in the hopsital was important...

At least we know he's not dead

Car chase--fills time

You sure this isn't Date Night?

Destroyed cars means high production values

She really looks like Natalie POrtman right?

At a certain point you might think he'd stay away from cars…

Now entering German disco circa 1996

People only dance like that in movies… with their arms waving in the air

code = lame

Yeah, so she was a plant….

Yeahh….

"but i really fell in love with you…."

Oh puh leeze

Yea, like it's still going to be there

Oh oh…. BOOM!

The tick tock music lets you know

That's Carl Reiner

Now's the time for your drug

No, not Carl Reiner

Edward Platt? (joke)

The end for him

Yeah that's love...

and all that crap

Mr. Rack Focus is back.

Go Natalie

Yeah, that's always a good idea

Remember what happened last time you drove

Who said the academic life is dull?

I should have known when he called himself "Dr"

Oh that explains it

How Total Recall

I thought I recognized the black guy

You know, with the alien hand.

If this wre Inception that truck would…

Oh forget it

Simple test: tell us about biotechnology

They all look like Jaylo

an unkempt Pierce Brosnan

Yeah, the blinky lights...

Because secret things need to blink to work

That's the slowest copying OS I've ever seen

Yay! Sugar for all!

Green wire? What green wire?

How old is this guy anyway?

You thought quals was hard

That is the worst effect I've ever seen

Monsanto, they're talking about you

OK, but they're getting together right?

All in all, really dumb

Idea for "vampire' film

Actually, this is not so much about the vampires, but about the 'non' vampires.

Typical future earth serum creates vampire like creatures who feed on blood and shun the sun. The story is about a man who flies in a plane to live in perpetual daylight to avoid them.

Low-budget Twilight zone version
Man flies in luxury plane, always aloft, always in the sun. He's very rich. The plane is refueled in air. The rich man argues with one of his traveling companions. "What kind of life is this? You can't stay aloft forever?" "Yes I can rich guy argues back. At the end, the men fight and rich guy kills other guy and he keeps on flying.

B-movie version
Rich man flies in luxury plane always aloft, always in the sun. He keeps flying then needs to be put down to make repairs. They take off. They soar higher and higher---much higher than normal. New flight attendant turns around and says "in space, it's always night." Of course she's a vampire. The end.

Good movie version--a life without stars
Rich man flies in luxury plane putting down only in daytime destinations, a life of unending, sunny, luxurious ennui. It's like life without death. Like living forever. An endless, deathless life.

TV looking films

Two films I saw on Netflix that looked like TV:

Queen of the Damned
Imposter

Unsurprisingly, both directors ended up working in television. It would be interesting to go back and analyze why these films looked as they did. One problem with Imposter: inability to handle the altered states of consciousness sequences well.

The ridiculous moment

The place in the movie (usually the third act) in which the compounding of coincidental difficulties makes the movie ridiculous.

Die hard 3: the bomb is at the same place as Samuel Jackson's sons

From Paris with Love: Lead's girlfriend sees him with a prostitute while on a mission

Stealth: Jessica Biel bails out in…. North Korea

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.