Intelligent Artifice

Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky June 21, 2008

Here is an interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky from 1999. It’s fascinating - it helps if you like his work I guess. The Incal, written by Jodorowsky and illustrated by Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud is one of my favorite comics. I am sad that I will be in Paris but not at the right time to catch one of Jodorowsky’s lectures / psychoanalysis sessions.

(Please ignore the SHOUTING INTERVIEWER.)

He even has some things to say about games. Nothing mind-blowing, but interesting nevertheless:

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN DESIGNING VIDEO GAMES YOURSELF?
Yes. Last year I did in L.A. They’re doing that now. I went there and
proposed, I say, Listen, I want to make this type of story, are you
interested? They said, Yes, sure. I made two games of, and I am making a
game of the Meta-Baron, then they are doing. I think, “There is a new
artform.” Very interesting.

I don’t think that game ever came out. Pity.

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More on Pixar’s Wall-E June 19, 2008

Here is an interesting article about Wall-E, Pixar’s next animated movie:

Once Stanton began to visualise his low-tech robot – Pixar’s logo of the bouncing anglepoise lamp, Luxo, was another major inspiration – he decided Wall.E wouldn’t work with conventional dialogue. He wanted his film to hark back to the sense of wonder, the epic vistas and post-apocalyptic melancholy of classic sci-fi. The result is that Wall.E, in a first for Pixar and indeed most modern-day blockbusters, has very little dialogue. The love story between the robots is mostly told visually and with their ‘language’ of whirrs and electronic beeps.

I love the fact that Pixar has enough self-confidence and courage to do something fairly unconventional like this. The pressure of their previous successes, not to mention from their parent Disney, has to be enormous.

Wall.E is first and foremost a love letter to science fiction, though. Its epic, post-apocalypic vision of an uninhabited Earth set hundreds of years into the future, thick with dust and towering stacks of rubbish, looks wonderfully real. “We wanted it to have the feeling that it had actually been filmed,” says Morris. Using subtle details such as barrel distortion and lens flare, gave Wall.E the feel of the 70mm sci-fi films of the Seventies. For the first time Pixar also brought Academy Award-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and special-effects don Dennis Muren onboard. “We wanted to get the nuance of a live action film, and actually put mistakes in with zooms and framing to give it a more immediate feel.”

Nice, lens flares on steroids.

The article also describes how the ‘voices’ of the robots were made. It’s a good read.

(Via Kottke.)

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DreamWorks to make ‘Ghost in The Shell’ / James Cameron on 3D moviemaking April 17, 2008

According to Variety, DreamWorks is going to turn ‘Ghost In The Shell’ into a 3-D live-action movie. Steven Spielberg was involved in the deal. Presumably they’re adapting the movie by Mamoru Oshii, not the comic by Masamune Shirow.

I am a big GITS fan. I like the comic, the sequel of the comic, the movie, the sequel of the movie, the two TV series, even though they are all quite different. GITS was the first time that I really, really liked a movie adapted from a story that I really, really liked. The comic is cheerfully upbeat about the cruelty and inhumanity of the future, whereas the movie is much more serious and melancholic. Both Ghost In The Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface (the sequel to the comic) and Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence (the sequel to the movie) are less comprehensible than their predecessors, but both definitely have their charms. Man-Machine Interface is almost dreamlike in its opaqueness (and this is saying something when the original comic has footnotes from the author saying ‘I have no idea what is meant here’). I remember reading Man-Machine Interface for the first time, then having certain memories of the story and its events… then rereading it about a year later and finding a completely different story. It is highly impressive in that it is this close to becoming ridiculous - characters are constantly floating in cyberspace and saying things like ‘Activate defense barriers AX-4E on ports 5, 6 and 19 and seed the attack lines with viruses’ - for hundreds of pages. At least, that is how I currently remember the comic… who knows which story I will find next time I read it? In any case, given that I have enjoyed GITS in so many incarnations, I am not as anxious about a Hollywood adaptation as I might be if some other favorite story were involved. Which reminds me that Ghibli Studio’s Earthsee adaptation apparently went straight to DVD in Austria and Germany… I should have a look at that.

In related news, there was a fascinating interview, again in Variety, with James Cameron about HD and 3-D moviemaking.

Other than that, for digital 3-D, would you rather see energy going into moving from 2K to 4K, or into moving from 24 fps to 48 or 72 fps, and why?

4K is a concept born in fear. When the studios were looking at converting to digital cinemas, they were afraid of change, and searched for reasons not to do it. One reason they hit upon was that if people were buying HD monitors for the home, with 1080×1920 resolution, and that was virtually the same as the 2K standard being proposed, then why would people go to the cinema? Which ignores the fact that the social situation is entirely different, and that the cinema screen is 100 times larger in area. So they somehow hit on 4K, which people should remember is not twice the amount of picture data, it is four times the data. Meaning servers need to be four times the capacity, as does the delivery pipe to the theater, etc.

But 4K doesn’t solve the curse of 24 frames per second. In fact it tends to stand in the way of the solutions to that more fundamental problem. The NBA execs made a bold decision to do the All Star Game 3-D simulcast at 60 frames per second, because they didn’t like the judder. The effect of the high-frame-rate 3-D was visually astonishing, a huge crowdpleaser.

And much more interesting stuf.

(James Cameron interview via Boing Boing.)

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Chef Owners Who Work The Line April 11, 2008

First a dance video, now a cooking story? Yes.

Here is Shuna Fish Lydon, in her own inimitable style, telling a story about a day at work, ten years ago, cooking at the French Laundry.

Finally Eric says something that makes us all look up from our minute, detail oriented tasks. “You heard me, get off the line, all of you, I’m going to show you how to cook.”

[…]

“Stand over here, I’m going to show you how to put out this table, I’m going to show you how to cook, how to work like a team, how to put out just one ticket.”

And then he did. He cooked every single course, by himself, with not another soul on the line touching sauce pots or spatulas or garnishes. He jumped this way and that, gracefully, using every part of his body, talking, admonishing, telling, teaching, showing, explaining as he went.

It was the most amazing thing I ever saw in a kitchen.

There’s more. It’s a good read (lol @ “I didn’t know what I was doing, I was drunk when I opened that restaurant”). A meal at the French Laundry looks like this - she’s not talking about frying some schnitzels here.

Does this have anything to do with games? Of course it does. I recognize many things. You may see other ones. If you don’t see any correspondence, you’re not thinking hard enough about what you are doing.

I previously linked to Shuna’s blog here and mentioned Thomas Keller here.

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Today is the Day March 9, 2008

Today is the Day.

(Via Surfer Girl.)

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An interview with Pixar storyboard artist Enrico Casarosa about Studio Ghibli March 1, 2008

There’s an interesting interview on GhibliWorld with Pixar storyboard artist Enrico Casarosa, who worked on Ratatouille and now on the upcoming movie Up. I found in interesting to read about the differences in the storyboarding process at Pixar and at Studio Ghibli.

Casarosa tells me a bit about his diverse job as a Ratatouille storyboard artist.“As far as Ratatouille goes, I am glad to hear you enjoyed it. I storyboarded on it for almost 4 years. The job shortly put entails helping making the director’s vision come to fruition. It can vary quite a bit in spectrum… ranging from visualizing already scripted pages to brainstorming gags or exploring certain beats or action scenes. Ultimately we wreck our brain together with the Director to try and tell the best, heartfelt story possible and to tell it in the best way possible. Typically here at Pixar what that means is going through several screenings in which we put up the film on reels and look at it still in storyboard form (roughly drawn but with temp voice, sound and music). We call that an animatic or a storyboard reel (like Miyazaki’s e-conte drawings in film version). That gives us a chance to sit back and look at the whole movie. What works, what doesn’t, what can be better? After one of those screening we regroup, sort through the feedback here in the Studio and get back to the drawing board to try and make the movie better. That’s how storyboarding works in most Studios in the US. It’s a gradual and teamwork oriented process. Very different from Japan’s studios.”Talking about the differences between Pixar and Studio Ghibli, we end up discussing Casarosa’s fortunate position of having been able to visit Studio Ghibli. In one of his related blog posts he mentions* he and Miyazaki were discussing story and the different ways in which Pixar and Ghibli find their stories to tell.“Well, as I was just saying, the process here is very much one of doing and redoing, making things better step by step. It involves a willingness to pick apart the movie and its themes. This constant editing and refining can be frustrating at times. The huge difference is that at Ghibli storyboards are done by the director and they are followed without exception. So you find a very different way of doing things there, the studio and its artists are following the leader’s vision without deliberation, editing or feedback necessary. Incidentally it sounds like Suzuki-san might be the only person at Ghibli able to have a discussion with Miyazaki-san regarding the story or characters of the movie they’re producing. In this setting though Miyazaki is free to go on his own journey finding the movie he wants to tell, bit by bit. The result are stories that are more fully personal and hold an authenticity and uniqueness which is close to impossible to achieve in the US, where a story, in the best case scenario, is well crafted by several gifted people while in the worse case scenario is made by committee. I think that’s what is great about many projects coming from Japan, with their own merits or faults, they possess an unwavering will to stick to their director’s vision. The stories are allowed to be more idiosyncratic that way and that is what I personally find inspiring and refreshing.The whole reality of making animated movies in the US seems quite different. These films are expensive and thus need to appeal to a wide audience. That in itself tends to make many studios and their managers tense up. That is the unfortunate catch 22, the bigger the budget the more the results need to appease a huge audience and usually have a blander the flavor. Pixar overall is a wonderful exception within those terms but it still works with high stakes at hand.

Emphasis mine. Sounds familiar, no?

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Indie landing on Omaha Beach February 21, 2008

Kim has posted an excellent video of 3 guys making a video of the landing on Omaha Beach for a much, much smaller budget than what Steven Spielberg had in Saving Private Ryan.

We can quibble about whether this can be called ‘amateur’ or not, but I agree with Kim that:

[…] I stand by the sentiment that it’s not tied to Hollywood normal stranglehold, which is ‘control through funding’.

In the games business, it wouldn’t be whether a fourteen year old in his garage could build something of high quality, or whether two professionals living off credit cards could build it. Either way, if it’s not tied to “requires 10M in funding from EA”, then it significantly changes the business.

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Update on the Hobbit movies February 2, 2008

Those Hobbit movies I mentioned earlier? Guillermo Del Toro will direct. It somehow seems fitting.

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And now for some animation January 14, 2008

Here are some interesting links related to animation - not 3D animation in games: animation as a visual medium.

• Darkstrider.net has a great gallery of clips from Eastern European animation. I think most people are like me and may have heard of Jan Svankmajer (who is not even found on this page) or may have seen some strange cartoons as a child growing up in Western Europe. This is mind-blowing stuff, reminding me how artifical limitations on subject matter and visual style can be.

  Be sure to check out the clips from The Golem in the sidebar, which use a style I have never before seen.

• If you liked that, you may like the Quay Brothers. Here is one of their animations. If you’re old enough to have seen the first few years of MTV Europe, you will probably be familiar with their short films, as MTV used them as interstitials.

  Be sure to check out Institute Benjamenta, their first ‘live action’ movie, unless incomprehensibility offends you. I recommend watching it late at night. (I just noticed they did a sequence for ‘Frida’.)

• I quite liked “Moo!”, an animated movie by Cyriak. Slightly disturbing, but very zany.

• Someone has gone through the trouble of assembling the original illustrated catalog of ACME products. It reminds me of Cliff Hanger, a game released in 1986 by New Generation Software for the ZX Spectrum and other, lesser machines. Here is a video of the Commodore 64 version.

  When I was working on casual games at JoWooD Vienna in 2002, we seriously considered doing a remake of some sort. In the end we didn’t, but it did have some influence on Neighbors From Hell.

• Cartoon Modern is a blog and a book about the visual style and design in animation from the fifties. I love this style.

• Bruce Bickford. Mind-blowing. Goes well with marihuana. Here is the trailer for ‘Monster Road’, a documentary about his work and his life. Lots of videos can be found on YouTube, especially of his work with Frank Zappa. (Thanks to Michael B. for introducing me to Mr. Bickford’s work.)

(Some links via Boing Boing’s web zen.)

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Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III January 13, 2008

Keith Martin has written a cool essay for Star Wars geeks called “A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope”, which reconsiders Star Wars IV in the light of I-III and comes up with some amusing new conclusions.

(Via Kottke.)

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