April 30, 2024
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Maybe it’s me, but even though I look forward to seeing this is it in the theatre, the notion that there is a Michael Jackson concert film that might earn between 40 and 50 million this week end and gross over 100 million domestic seems odd.
Would never have predicted that in a million years.
Issues aside, he was a talented artist and this might be the real wild card movie of the year. Even more than Paranormal Activity.
Nobody knows anything.
^ That thirty-second “clip” of “Transformers 3” would be a case in point. It’s hard to tell what’s more obnoxious, Bay’s style or Ebert’s Luddism, condescension, and contrariety. Opposites attract, I guess. They deserve each other.
On that note ^ I can’t say when the last time was that I was so confused by a billboard… I assume it’s a movie/tv movie/miniseries of some kind… but can anyone confirm what in god’s name “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief” is? No name of any actor, some cheesy lighting bolt think going on, and hey it’s opening President’s Day!! (when is that anyway? as a transplanted canadian that tell me nothing). The billboard of which i speak is on Highland just south of hollywood, and i pass by it everyday, and I know I can look it up on google but whatever, it’s such a lame title I thought I’d slag it.
It’s a flick based on another series of childrens fantasy novels.
^ I guess all those properties that were touted as being the next Potter a year or two ago are finally hitting the screen, except no one remembers now and it’s too late.
No comments from Dave on the new Avatar trailer?
Just incredible, hard not to be excited to see it!
Pretty easy for me, actually…
I don’t get the gushing for it, unless it’s only about the 3D aspect, and even then, it’s all heresay at the moment. Yeah he’s made some incredible films, and many were groundbreaking sure, but blue creatures flying on winged dinosaurs? Where’s our connection with that?
Ripley, Newt, Sarah, etc… I can connect with that, and the action surrounding it was kick-ass. This movie might have incredible action pieces, but none of it is real. The new Star Wars pics had great “Action” pieces too, but if everything is created on a computer it just doesn’t do it for me. No heft, no weight, all creatures and vehicles look “light”.
Not sure this folly was worth 300 million, and does that even include P&A?
First half of the trailer I connect with, looks great. Once they enter fairy tale land, I feel like I’m watching a Disney movie with lots of action.
Aris, I agree, but the prequels DID work for me. However, they probably would not have worked as well if they didn’t have the solid backstory/foreshadowing of 4-6 which the vast majority of the audience had seen.
“The new Star Wars pics had great ‘Action’ pieces too, but if everything is created on a computer it just doesn’t do it for me. No heft, no weight, all creatures and vehicles look ‘light’.”
I’ve always found this a curious, not to mention misleading and potentially fallacious, argument. Do they lack heft because they actually do, or because people have a preconceived notion about CG and assume that anything that is CG will automatically fit their preconceptions? How is CG more fake than rear screen projection, color separation overlay, miniatures, stop motion, what have you? Is it because of some uncanny valley effect, that is, CG is so much closer visually to reality that the short distance where it fails to close the gap becomes that more apparent? Is there some sort of aesthetic difference between one kind of artificiality and another? I certainly don’t perceive any sort of epistemological difference, which leads me to conclude that in a lot of cases it’s purely psychological. CG is X, movie Y has CG, ergo movie Y is X: fake, artificial, unnatural, whatever. The prequels had tons of miniature work done (as did LOTR), yet people assume they are seeing CG where it isn’t because they have conditioned themselves to believe it. The most I can come up with is that there is some sort of moral objection to CG, that it attains too great a level of realism and plausibility; it’s not the right kind of fake. That’s the only reason I can think of why one kind of trompe l’oeil is acceptable and another isn’t. One is real fake, the other is fake real. I’ll take fake real any day.
Fake Jabba (Ep 4 Special Edition) or real Jabba?
Jar Jar or any creature from Eps 4-6?
Alien in 1 or the swimmers in 4?
Space battles in Ep 2 or Jedi?
Real extras in battle scenes, or digital extras?
I’ll take miniatures, models, humans and costumes ANY DAY. Every single one of those first examples I mentioned looked 100% fake/computer generated, with NO heft, as you put it. Sometimes it works and I don’t notice (some scenes in LOTR, the new Star Trek for numerous reasons), but usually they just look “fake” to me. You may have a point about the psychological thing, but it’s not an automatic response. It just is like that for me.
I’m enjoying this debate between Blackcloud and Aris – frankly i can see both points of view. Joe Dante’s Explorers (which was made way before CGI became commonplace) has a funny joke on this topic, during the scene at the drive-in. “Now that there is called a ‘travelling matte’.” “How do you know?” “All of these movies use them, it’s standard.” “Ha! That looks so fake”.
“I’ll take miniatures, models, humans and costumes ANY DAY.”
You realize, of course, there are more of those things in any one of the prequels than in the whole of the first three combined? (Well, maybe not costumes.) Perhaps you should explain what you mean by heft. I suppose you mean that those objects don’t obey the laws of physics the way real fake things do, but that ignores the fact that with CG and physics modeling you can approximate and manipulate gravity and motion to a degree impossible with props.
As for them looking 100% fake/computer generated, well, duh. You know they are, so of course they will look it. Once you’re looking for an illusion you will find it, especially once you know it’s there. Or even if you don’t. Once you know there’s a man behind a curtain, you’ll keep looking for them both. There are some arguments to be made for the old ways of doing things. But the arguments against the new ways are not very credible. Filmmakers need the freedom to use whatever tools necessary to bring their vision to life. Sometimes that’s CG, sometimes that’s old school FX. Neither is inherently morally to the other, a point the acolytes of the latter routinely forget. Which is why I think, again, that it boils down to the fact that the verisimilitude offered by CG offends the moral sensibilities of some people. What that is an argument against I don’t know, but it’s not one against CG.
There is also an interesting discussion to be had regarding the extent to which criticism of the prequels is pervaded by nostalgia for the originals and is, therefore, inherently compromised. But that’s a discussion for another day.
I understand exactly what Aris is saying and it’s always been my main beef with CG: there’s no “there” there. It might just be a matter of physics but the Giger Alien crawling from the wall panel is really happening and the CG Alien swimming underwater lacks weight, even surreality. When CG works it’s marvellous as Peter Jackson and Spielberg have shown. But today’s CG is tomorrow’s travelling matte. So an effect with an intimate personal touch ala Harryhausen or Rick Baker is more appealing to me. Both can work well together, but some work better than others. I’d like see maestros like Jim Danforth back in business.
Sometimes I wonder if people just prefer the effects that were prevalent in their formative years?
Look at the difference between the robots in, say Terminator vs. Terminator 3. The more advanced effects probably do look closer to what we’ll see in reality when robots visit us from the future to kill our mothers. But I saw the first Terminator when I was young and that robot at the end was terrifying, and it still affects me now more than any CGI I’ve seen.
I think the eye can tell, probably subconsciously, when an model or a suit has been photographically captured vs. when it’s been rendered and composited and all that type of thing. I don’t think that even the best CGI has managed to capture true subtleties of light and shadow and texture on creatures and ships in outer space yet.
i think blackcloud makes a good point about compositing: half the time people don’t even know what they are looking at, assuming a shot is cg when in fact it’s a live-action in-camera set/models/miniatures composited with computer graphic imagery; unless you’ve actually seen how the shot is set up and composited, it can be nigh on impossible to differentiate; further, photography techniques with limited depth of field can also make real in-camera elements look ‘fake’ or cg (speed racer is an example of this), making it that much harder to judge.
mo-cap helps a good deal towards rendering more realistic dimensional characters by providing real world points of reference for musculature, proportion, perspective, movement, etc. but at the end of the day real people/things and in-camera live action sets and special effects (vs. post p visual effects) actually exist in 3 dimensions and consist of real materials with real shadows etc., whereas computer graphics are inescapably 2 dimensional endeavouring to create the illusion of real world depth of field, detail and nuance; so whether or not it is even possible to re-create that ‘third dimension’ and realism via the two dimensional plane – so that the human eye actually can’t discern any difference – is debatable and remains to be seen.
(‘avatar’ is the next step in the evolution of such ‘photo-real’ cg imagery esp. with the aid of effective 3-d viewed on the 2-d plane, but in spite of its overwhelming achievement and stunning beauty the graphics still aren’t completely ‘photo-real’)
“Not sure this folly was worth 300 million, and does that even include P&A?”
wrong. don’t just blindly believe what you read somewhere
(i should have mentioned somewhere ‘photo-real’ as defined by the viewer’s inability to differentiate between the image of some real object existing in 3 dimensions captured on film, and the image of that same object/whathaveyou created by an artist in the confines of the dimensional plane)
bugger, “2 dimensional plane”
Jeffm said “I think the eye can tell, probably subconsciously, when an model or a suit has been photographically captured vs. when it’s been rendered and composited and all that type of thing. I don’t think that even the best CGI has managed to capture true subtleties of light and shadow and texture on creatures and ships in outer space yet.”
I don’t know if I truly agree with that. Jurassic Park was to me a watershed moment in CG. When Laura Dern’s character came across the sick dino, the action scene in the kitchen, the pivotal scene where the first encounter the raptors, all of it somehow captured the ‘weight’ that seemed missing in other CG movies.
I did not get the ‘weight’ of the cars in Dave’s fave SPEED RACER, and felt it was a missing component. I don’t know if that ‘un-realism’ was what they were going for but it did not work for me.
Also the T2 has always felt like an amazing piece of work to me. It felt like actual pressure was being applied to the ground when he walked.
One question though, is the technique used to create Gollum also called CG, and if it is, it was absolutely stunning CG as well. That’s my 2 cents.
bulldog, just quickly before i dash: ‘gollum’ was motion-capture (mo-cap) animated from the actor andy serkis, who was also mo-capped as ‘kong’
much of the dino work in jurassic park is animatronic and compositing (combining live action animatronic dinos and cg imagery done in post production), but JP has some brilliant pioneering shots of completely cgi beasties
many of the car shots in ‘speed racer’ use real cars but look ‘fake’ do to the flat photography i mentioned above
sorry, “due to the flat photography”, i don’t know what’s with me today i can’t write for shit
Bulldog, the ‘sick dino’ and the shots of the raptors’ feet walking on the countertops in Jurassic Park were accomlished with models/puppets, not CGI (what Leah said).
apparently the animatronic T-REX winston built for JP is one of the eighth wonders of the world and scary as shit (like 7 metres tall and weighing a few trillion kilos or something like that). i’d like to see that puppy in action in person before i kick the bucket
halloween beckons, i’m off to save newt, blow the alien queen out into space and live happily ever after with hicks
“Fake Jabba (Ep 4 Special Edition) or real Jabba?
Jar Jar or any creature from Eps 4-6?
Alien in 1 or the swimmers in 4?
Space battles in Ep 2 or Jedi?”
Some of these are slightly unfairly skewed.
Fake Jabba in Episode 4 special edition was terrible, but fake Jabba in Episode I was fine.
Jar Jar wasn’t the most amazing fake creature ever (he was groundbreaking, but not polished), but General Grievous in Episode 3 was outstanding, and yes, arguably better than any creature in previous installments.
Alien in 1 beats the swimmers in 4, but in terms of strict visuals minus any story concerns, the aliens in the AVP movies look best of all.
Space battles in Episode 2 or Jedi? How about the space battle in the beginning of Sith beats both.
In short…I wholeheartedly agree that some of the first steps in CG were not as good as very polished models. But now we are getting there.
^ I can’t speak to the aliens in AVP, but I concur on all the SW stuff.
Also, are there space battles in Clones? There’s Jango chasing Obi-Wan, but that’s all I can think of. Maybe he meant TPM or Sith?
From a mathematical perspective there’s no difference between the 3D rendering environments of Maya or Lightwave and the three spatial dimensions we perceive in the real world. Both Tom Cruise and the giraffe in Madagascar have depth — it’s tactility that distinguishes them (well, a few other things too). The 2D plane only comes into play because the finished product will be a 2D image(s). CG artists are arguably constrained by the need to create 3D spaces using a 2D plane (a monitor), but this isn’t the key problem. Depth of field (as opposed to depth per se) is a problem, but that’s because DOF is a matter of optics and the lighting models used in most CG work are basically ugly hacks, developed because realistic ones are too computationally taxing.
But even if we had real-time, full-scene ray-tracing that perfectly mimics how light works in the real world, you obviously need something for the light to interact with, and that involves complex modeling of a lot of stuff we take for granted — the translucence of skin, how hair clumps together, how wood splinters, how fluids move, ad nauseam. It’s not really about 2D vs. 3D.
Left off my intended closer:
It’s not really about 2D vs. 3D, except to the extent that these things may be simpler to model in two dimensions rather than three. (And CG artists still go for plain 2D rendering whenever they can get away with it.)
We can quibble till the cows come home about the design and implementation of the Na’vi in AVATAR, but those CG environments are pretty amazing. I’m betting more than a few people assume that at least some of the jungle footage was shot in Hawaii or Central America or something.
“The 2D plane only comes into play because the finished product will be a 2D image(s). CG artists are arguably constrained by the need to create 3D spaces using a 2D plane (a monitor), but this isn’t the key problem. Depth of field (as opposed to depth per se) is a problem, but that’s because DOF is a matter of optics”
“not really about 2D vs. 3D.”
bobV, i’m not exactly sure what you’re saying here or if i even disagree entirely, but further to your thoughts and my comment somewhere above, i would argue it is actually all about the 2 dimensional plane and the inherent limitations and challenges therein, because in essence a flat ‘sheet of paper’ is the medium to which cgi animators are confined in the pursuit of creating photo-realistic animated environs.
in attempting to artificially recreate and capture the elusive depth of field and movement of the real 3 dimensional world (i don’t mean anything to do with 3-D photography, which is an added layer in the endeavour towards animated photo-realism) on a 2-D plane, animators must trick the human eye into depth perception, which is incredibly difficult because it involves so many factors coming together in perfect synergy, all which have to be created from nothing (we can easily film a ball bouncing away from us across the floor, but animating such a thing so perfectly that it fools the human eye into thinking it’s ‘real’ with accurate depiction of depth of field, loss of momentum, surface contact and perspective, etc., isn’t easy, mo-cap is hugely helpful in this regard)
the depth of field issue is one of optics and the complex interaction of light upon objects, which requires incredibly detailed animation, but it’s also a matter of accurately depicting changing spacial orientation and deadly accurate perspective in relation to movement/moving objects against complex surfaces and backgrounds (again mo-cap provides accurate recreation of movement to help with animation that rings true to the eye, but it only solves part of the problem. just in general, rendering animated characters on the 2 dimensional plane that look and feel like they are realistically moving through space, touching the ground and objects around them, etc, requires so much nuance and complexity, and thus animating time and expense, i don’t think we’ve got there yet but certainly getting close)
i’m i bit knackered so i hope i managed to express what i’m trying to say rather than babble
I think our differences are more about terminology than anything else. What you’re talking about here is 3D projection and that’s dependent on both the observer and the scene being observed, specifically how light behaves within that scene. If it were possible to put an actual 35mm camera in a 3D CG render, the problem of the observer would be solved (as the camera’s optics would project the scene the same way they would in the real world), but the perspective, depth of field etc. would still look out of whack to our eyes, because CG lighting is at best a weak approximation of the real-world kind. Here on earth, 3D modelers/programmers are also obliged to simulate optics via some sort of virtual camera, which is a complicated problem but on a different level than creating real-time lighting that can transparently mimic the one nature provided for us — to say nothing of the objects that lighting intersects.
bobV, i’m having a bit of trouble following some of your ideas, so addressing each specific point is probably futile (that’s not to say you don’t make sense, just i’m not following some of it). i’m not a cg animator myself but i work on the same projects with and know a lot of talented cg artists, so my knowledge of the medium isn’t professional but i have a fairly good understanding of the current tech just from observation and osmosis.
i will say that while i agree that naturalistic lighting design for cg cinematography poses a unique challenge and has yet to be perfected, i disagree that “CG lighting is at best a weak approximation of the real-world kind”; the current cutting-edge lighting software/systems are capable of highly realistic rendering with fast interaction, mind-bogging complexity and effective results (results quite dependant on how much time and $ can be spent achieving the most realistic lighting possible), not nearly as bad as you’re making it out to be. and ongoing innovation from the likes of w digital and pixar is driving the tech toward engines capable of real-time light, which will be huge. also, while i certainly agree that naturalistic lighting design is crucial to achieving true photo-realistic cgi, there are a host of other important factors involved
The dominant paradigm in CGI production is still rasterization, which looks “good enough” for many purposes but hits walls at certain levels of complexity. Pixar didn’t bother much with raytracing until they got to Cars and found that rasterization weren’t “good enough” for the reflections and refractions they wanted. So they shoehorned a raytracer into Renderman to achieve the desired result, and that for a movie which wasn’t even meant to be “photorealistic” (fortunately enough, since their raytracer isn’t all that hot anyway). In any case raytracing on significantly larger scales is still too computationally taxing to be of much use; stuff that is more or less obligatory with film CGI (depth of field, displacement, motion blur) is horrifically expensive if you’re using raytracing for your primary renderer, even if raytracing can theoretically handle these things more elegantly and more realistically.
The currently standard techniques are a collection of kludges that can get the job done; for example, perspective issues can be finessed by manually cheating shadows and such to seem correct. But transparently photorealistic, full-scene, motion picture CGI will be a primarily raytraced solution, with the big question being when (as in when the processing power will be available) and not so much if. If it were possible to achieve that with rasterization then I doubt anyone would complain, but the outlook is limited.
bobV, i’m not sure where you’re getting rasterisation from, which is pretty much only used for video game/pc graphics requiring real-time interaction (i’ve heard that real-time ray tracing for video games may be close at hand, but i’m not a gamer at all so i don’t know the details, but i would think gamers would be stoked)
ray tracing for high-end film cgi is already the default, relighting engines such as lpics that allow for fast interactive rendering have brought down rendering times with complex shaders significantly. and like i already said, it’s the time and money spent that largely determines the degree of photo-realism of the final product (ray tracing tech has raised the bar but issues such as realistic depth of field and perspective in relation to moving objects, complex surfaces and backgrounds, and the realistic movement of living things, are issues beyond just the rendering of naturalistic light/ray tracing)
also, ray tracing isn’t the final solution to photo-realism, because as an application it isn’t photo-realistic in and of itself, it has inherent failings and requires a great deal of engine power. the newer tech such as photon mapping that mimics the play of light between objects and refraction (ray tracing does not support refraction) and the ‘scattering’ of light beneath surfaces, making it very useful for rendering skin for example, has already replaced ray tracing for some applications.
oops, my bad, traditional ray tracing does include refraction, photon mapping is just a more effective method for rendering