The Brunch Table

Justina and I took advantage of the holiday to go through our video collection and get rid of all the old VHS tapes that we’d never watch again. VHS really has a horrible bulk-to-quality ratio! However, I did unearth a few gems that I thought I’d lost.

First up, Tayna tretey planety, a Russian animated sci-fi movie from the early 80’s. It has a wonderfully psychedelic synth soundtrack, and the visual style is foreign, somewhat weary and depressed. My copy is dubbed in French since it was taped off of Radio-Canada in the late 80s, but there are apparently several budget English-dubbed DVD releases of varying quality.

Next, Earth*Star Voyager. This was shown as a two-part Disney Sunday movie in the late 80’s, though it was apparently shot as a pilot for a full series that never happened. In the end, it’s pretty laughable (in the late 21st century of this film, they still use the dorky 80’s computer font on all their signage and UIs), but in that era the sci-fi pickings were pretty slim, so I have some fond childhood memories of this. Seems I’m not alone–it’s at least popular enough to warrant torrents of fan-made DVD versions (since Disney will likely never bother to release this on video).

Speaking of Disney, I’ve recently come across some great Ward Kimball animations from Disney’s earlier TV shows:

This segment from Mars & Beyond is mostly an excuse to create wonderfully whimsical creature animations.

Magic Highway USA has been making the blog rounds lately, and it’s easy to see why. It alternates between sensible and prescient predictions (in-dash GPS) and loopy petrocolonial fever dreams (electric hovercars driving by the sphinx in air-conditioned glass highway tubes!), set to a swinging jazz soundtrack. If you like the style, Paleo-Future has rounded up a great set of publicity stills from the collection of Kevin Kidney.

No one knows for sure who he was, that Middle Eastern man in an American flag shirt and a cowboy hat who was supposed to sing the national anthem at a rodeo Friday night in the Salem Civic Center…

In the course of trying to prove that the rodeo scene in Borat takes place in Virginia, not Texas, I found this–an apparently authentic report on “Boraq’s” appearance by the Roanoke Times. You’ve got to respect the integrity of the folks who left this up on the website long after the truth came out.

Here’s a collection of shorts by Maya Deren, an influential ’40s filmmaker. She took the kind of narrative techniques that were just getting to a mature state in the commercial features of the day and applied them to her art films. Emotionally-affecting conventions that movie audiences had become sophisticated enough to expect–like “limited third-person perspective,” where the camera is restricted only to items of interest to one character–were still a startling novelty in the art world.

(Tangent: limited third-person perspective is so ubiquitous in films today that it’s better to illustrate it with an example of its absence. Part of The Phantom Menace’s lack of emotional affect is rooted in its mysterious reliance on “omniscient,” and not limited, third-person perspective, where the camera takes the viewpoint of an outside observer.

When Natalie Portman enters the Galactic Senate, most living filmmakers would, somehow or other, contrive to show us her face together with a view of the chamber from where she’s standing. We see a thing, we see an actress looking at the thing, and we read her for clues as to how we should respond to the thing emotionally. Instead of this, we get a wide shot of the chamber alone, like something out of Metropolis. Omniscient third-person perspective was a common tactic in the silent era, and it’s a key reason why modern lay audiences watching a silent film sometimes have trouble caring too much about what’s going to happen next. )

It’s perhaps a bit more difficult to appreciate Deren’s originality these days, when there’s a broad public understanding that Eisenstein’s rules aren’t for “the movies” alone, but can be deployed to whatever weird ends you like. (To get a better idea of her impact, consider that she influenced Kenneth Anger, generally credited as the inventor of the music video.) “Meshes of the Afternoon” is her most famous film, but I’ve always liked “At Land” best. Oh, and according to Wikipedia, the rumor that she died in a voodoo ritual gone horribly wrong is not true.

“I Wanna Be Famous” with Portuguese subtitles:

(direct link)

“Metronome“, by Daniel Cockburn.

I accidentally started this BBC documentary on the history of Al Qaeda:

at the same time as this adorable Spanish kids’ cartoon:

“…could corrode the very bonds that hold society [quack! quack! quack!] together…” Both, by the way, are pretty good.

A few Mystery Science Theater 3000 alums have finally figured out the perfect way to capitalize on the skills that they honed in their years on the show. They’ve launched RiffTrax, a site that sells MST3K-style audio commentary tracks to modern movies for three bucks a pop. Justina and I tried their commentary for The Matrix tonight, and I’m happy to report that it was fully up to snuff. In fact, it was good enough to make me willing to rent some of the other movies that they’ve riffed on. (Fortunately, they’ve provided a sample video clip for each movie that they’ve covered.)

The strength of their approach is that you’re buying a vanilla MP3, which means it works with everything, and which allows them to lampoon any movie they want without rights hassles. The downside is that you have to sync up the movie and the soundtrack yourself, Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon style. Fortunately, they’ve worked hard to make this easy—they tell you exactly when to start playing the commentary track. They also have a “robot” that exactly mimics the on-screen dialogue every once in a while, so that you can verify that you’re still in sync. Finally, the commentary track (at least the one we bought) comes with text file telling you where in the commentary each DVD chapter starts, in case you want to pick up from the middle.

All in all, I’m overjoyed to be able to hear the guys back doing what they do best, for movies that we know and love (to hate), without having to wade through any of the skits that were getting increasingly grating in MST3K’s final days. Here’s hoping that it proves to be a rewarding business model for them!

Incidentally, the guys will be performing a live riff of a movie during the San Francisco Sketchfest next month—and we’ll be there!

I’m in a position now where I’ve got to learn 3D, quick, to stay employable. I’ve tried to learn Maya (In ‘99, I took a year of classes in version 1.0 at CMU), but always found it infuriatingly imprecise–and it’s considered the best of the consumer 3D programs as far as interface goes. (One general problem with consumer-level 3D, I’ve learned, is that a lone animator has wrestle with three or four diverse areas of human knowledge. On a big production, each of the other major tasks in CG, besides animating, can be handled by dedicated artists–sculptors model the characters, programmers decide the physics, etc.)

When I was at CalArts, I took a crack at Maya again…version 5 this time. There had been a lot of improvement, of course–modelling was now much closer to sculpting out of blocks of clay, and not so much like gluing spheres and cones together. And you could paint right on your model, too, which helped a lot. But getting around in it still felt awkward to me. Mondi Anyango, another student at CalArts, is in the business of creating custom interfaces for his 3D work, including one made with a freeware motion-capture program called EyesWeb. But that sort of thing is pretty well beyond me. (And also, I guess, the Polar Express folks–take a look at this animator’s opinion on what they did wrong, complete with photo examples.)

…so recently I downloaded the demo of version 6, ready to grit my teeth and try again…and I got a wonderful surprise. Version 6 has full integration with a Wacom tablet. They’ve let you paint and sculpt with the tablet for a while now, but you still needed a mouse to get around the 3D space. Now you don’t. The difference is amazing. Something in my brain just sort of clicks into place.

And now, the best part–they’re starting to make Tablet PCs that run Maya.

Overheard on the radio, a bluegrass-style chorus:

“Oh anything can happen
On any particular day
There ain’t much you can do
When the Force is not with you
The world burns down around us and we walk away.”

The Force is not with you. Wow.

After the oil runs out and the Library of Congress is run by rats and pigeons, I bet itinerant actors in covered wagons will be doing the story with wooden lightsabers. (And fortunately, since very few smallpox-vaccinated people were ever exposed to the New Trilogy, its memory will be erased entirely.)

Interview with Bill Kroyer, Director of Animation for Tron. The most interesting part is where he talks about the film’s computer elements being rendered on a Cray mainframe–which meant that rendering anything meant dealing with the Cray company technicians, who were the only ones allowed to touch it. That never occurred to me before…suddenly the very ’80s Kraftwerkish “scary computer” makes a lot more emotional sense.

The overall tone of the article is a bit keynote-addressey, but it’s these little hints of a bygone production process that are amazing to read:

The Cray was a cool computer, able to do six billion computations a second. It was engineered to such a high level of performance, that it was actually designed to crash three or four times a day. And the only people who could start it back up again were people from Cray. So, when you bought a Cray, they sent people who would live with it, called Crayons, in a trailer in the parking lot…

If you watch the credits, you’ll see a couple hundred Chinese characters at the end: those are the names of the artists who painted mattes in Taiwan. A year later, that was totally obsolete. Computers could do all that. That’s how fast it changed…

When we did FernGully: The Last Rainforest, which we ink-and-painted using traditional methods, we used 4 tons of paint and produced 16 tons of finished art just to make one film. Now it’s on a few tapes or disks.

Okay, I wrote this up yesterday as preparation for a short video I wanna do of it…yeah, I know it’s been done to death, but although a google prior-art check turned up plenty of alternative versions, as Schwarzenegger once said, “All of them were bad.” Especially unforgiveable are the ones that get their theology all screwed up, and have the Rabbi arguing for Original Sin (which isn’t part of Jewish doctrine) instead of the Pope. I found an actor (he doesn’t know I’ve found him yet) who has the perfect booming voice…the spitting image (aural image, anyway) of my departed uncle who loved corny jokes just like this:

–………………………………………………………–

One gray, rainy day, the Pope wakes up in a really bad mood. “Today,” he announces to nobody in particular, “I’m going to expel all the Jews from Rome.” He gets up, his servants bring him breakfast. “You know what I’m going to do today?” he asks the guy pouring his coffee. “I’m going to expel all the Jews from Rome.”

They dress him up, he climbs onto his throne. His court assembles for the morning’s business. “First off, you there,” says the Pope, pointing to the closest cardinal, “find me the top Jew in Rome. I want him here by noon at the latest.”

“What for, Your Excellency?” asks the cardinal.

“This morning, I decided, I’ll kick all the Jews out of here.” explains the Pope. “My mind’s pretty much made up. I just want to give him fair warning.”

The cardinal heads off on his mission, and the day drags on. It’s mid-afternoon by the time he returns to the court, bringing a guest with him, a little old man with a long gray beard, dressed all in black.

“Who’s this?” asks the Pope.

The cardinal looks a little embarrassed. “Er…we’re not sure, Your Excellency.”

“What, you don’t know?”

“Oh no,” answers the cardinal quickly, “everyone we asked, they said he’s the wisest man in the ghetto.”

The Pope frowns. “So he’s the one in charge?”

“Well, for miles and miles around people come to see him. Who owns that stray goat? Whose bastard child is that? Problems in philosophy, the natural sciences, riddles that have no answers, he’s the one they talk to.”

“Why doesn’t this fountain of wisdom speak up for himself?”

“Well…” stammers the cardinal.

Still the old Rabbi is silent.

“I’m getting irritated,” snaps the Pope.

“But, Your Excellency, he doesn’t speak Latin.”

“Greek?”

“I don’t think so.”

“French? Turkish?”

“He’s a very holy man, they told us. So he can’t speak any common language, you see, only–”

The Pope holds up his hands. “Silence!” The Pope lurches to his feet and stalks down from his throne. He stares at the Rabbi. And the Rabbi stares back.

The court watches and waits.

The Pope extends his right arm and points straight out the door.

The Rabbi looks hard at the Pope, then slowly points down at the ground.

Shock flashes across the Pope’s face. He thumps his chest, once, twice.

The Rabbi’s eyes narrow. He points up at the ceiling.

The Pope snorts in anger, and grabs a communion wafer and a chalice of wine from the nearby altar. He shakes them furiously at the Rabbi. The audience trembles in excitement…

…but the Rabbi shakes his head again and smiles. He reaches into his robe and produces a shiny red apple. He takes a big bite.

The Pope blinks once, twice, and then slowly nods in agreement. “The man is right,” he breathes softly. “It pleases me to change my mind,” he says to the Rabbi. “The Jews may stay. Now get out of my sight.”

And the Rabbi is grabbed and hauled out of the room. The Pope sighs deeply and climbs the stairs to his throne again. “Let me tell you what happened,” he says to the court:

He extends his arm and points. “I said, ‘Your people have turned away from God.’” He points down at the ground. “And he said, ‘No, God is here with us.’” He thumps his chest. “I said, ‘I, the Pope, say God has abandoned you.’” He points at the ceiling. “And he said, ‘Who can say? God is above us all.’” He mimes shaking the wine and wafer. “And I said, ‘But you have sinned, you have rejected Christ!’ Then he said, ‘Are we not all sinners?’” He mimes biting the apple. “It’s true.”

It’s still raining, and the sun is setting at the ghetto gates by the time the Rabbi returns. He shows his papers to the guards, and is allowed to enter. Despite the weather, people gather all around him in the street, worried and eager for the story.

“Rabbi, what happened?” “Were you frightened?” “What’s the Pope like?” “What did he say?”

The Rabbi raises his hands for quiet.

“What a conversation I had,” he begins.

“It doesn’t start out well.” He points away. “‘The Jews are gonna get out,’ says the Pope.” Points down. “‘No, we’re gonna stay here,’ I say. Does this make him angry!” Thumps his chest. “‘I, the Pope, say you’re out.’ Finger in the air. “And then, I’m sorry to tell it, I lose my temper. ‘Up yours, my friend!’ That’s what I say.”

The crowd gasps, hanging on his words. “Yes?” “Then what?”

The Rabbi shrugs his shoulders. “He’s a very strange man, but not so bad after all. He just said, all right, forget the whole thing, break for lunch.” He pulls the apple core out of his robe and tosses it into the gutter. The rain washes it away.

AIVF has got an extensive listing of independent video distributors, with a profile on each:

This sobering observation pops up in an interview with Video Data Bank:

…the loss of federal and foundation dollars has had a devastating effect. It’s a very holistic field, and we are all suffering now. Only eight percent of our business is domestic exhibition. Lots of business has shifted to Europe, where video is still very popular.

Take a look at this… hactivist.com/flashpoint

It’s a diagram for turning a disposable camera into a portable slide projector–apparently, a little soldering will make the flash fire continuously, and it’ll keep going for several days. Would anybody like to take a crack at building one of these? The website says you can even pick up large quantities of the cameras for free at photo labs…saves them the hassle of recycling them….

*****SPAM***** Massive amounts of Women

That subject line was part of my morning email-checking experience, and I felt like sharing it with everyone. Doesn’t it have a cozy, “All Your Base” sort of vibe?

It made me think a bit about TV standards (shows you where my head is at). Some countries use the older American NTSC standard, and some use Germany’s improved PAL standard. Nowadays, most video gear sold around the world will play either NTSC or PAL, no problem…

…except in the United States. Our government actively discourages the sale of dual-system gear. Effectively, that keeps us NTSC-only. And, not content with that barrier, we also require the DVD players sold here to use “region coding”–meaning that they refuse to play DVDs from outside the U.S. and Canada. How did this happen?

Well, I think it’s useful to look at the experiment France tried in the the 1960s. To reduce commercial competition from foreign TV, their government added a proprietary tweak to the PAL standard and renamed it SECAM, effectively granting monopoly control to French broadcasters. (The scheme was thwarted by video gear manufacturers, who didn’t want to have to make whole separate product lines for the Francophone world. Eventually, they figured out the SECAM tweak and made sure their regular PAL products could undo it. Poof–the monopoly was gone.)

Now, our own video isolation wasn’t deliberately planned from the start, but our government’s decision to maintain it accomplishes the same purpose. It costs money for media companies to convert from one format to another, cutting into the profit they could make from selling a video in another country. If we had video players that could handle stuff from anywhere in the world, Chinese- and Spanish-language movies would quickly pop up on Blockbuster shelves in big cities across the U.S.–the customer base there would be too large to ignore.

As it is, small media companies in other countries find the expense of conversion daunting. Format conversion becomes a kind of “media tariff,” a barrier that keeps out foreign competitors. And that’s exactly how Jack Valenti (R.I.P.) and co. like it.

For a bit of proof, just look at the foreign videos that do make it into our Blockbusters. The enormous popularity of Japanese film and TV over here just wouldn’t be possible without a shared format–Japan and the U.S. are both on NTSC. Any little media company there can release its video in the U.S., on the cheap. And it’s that saturation that really causes a cultural exchange to get going in earnest.

So…this is just a really roundabout way of saying, the phrase “Massive amounts of women” sounds very, very anime. And a common television standard is the reason why I can think that thought today.

“…right here. Right where we’re standing now.”

The Cat with Hands is a beautiful animated short, by Robert Morgan. I don’t want to say another word, or I’ll ruin the surprise….

…and Frodo (Elijah Wood) finally destroys the titular piece of bling in the…

That’s all. As you were.

Triplets of Belleville (in theaters 11/21) I was stunned when I saw the trailer for this francophone-produced animated feature earlier tonight.

Avalon (on DVD 12/16) This one’s a lushly photographed live-action/CG film from Ghost in the Shell’s Mamoru Oshii. I’m not as convinced that this one is actually a good film, but it’s got a unique look that its trailer shows off well.

Innocence: Ghost in the Shell (in theaters spring 2004?) Speaking of Ghost, a sequel is scheduled for next spring–I read somewhere that it will arrive on our shores soon after opening in Japan.

Palm Pictures Directors Label (on DVD Tuesday) I wrote about them before, but these collections of works by music video directors Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze are finally hitting shelves this week. What do these guys have in common? They’ve all done great videos for Bjork.

I just won a grant from Kodak for film stock. I’m not going to be shooting anything on film anytime soon, but I want to output a five-minute short on 35mm, which’ll cost just shy of $2,000. So the grant is cool.

Except, about six hours after getting the award letter, they told me that I was going to get disqualified because my project was “computer-generated.” (It’s not; it’s hand-drawn on a Wacom tablet.) Just to be silly, I asked, what if I print out the drawings on paper and rephotograph them with a camera? They said, hmmm, maybe that would work. They’ll get back to me.

I bet the Lumiéres confused a lot of people back in the day, trying to explain what they were doing without drawing a diagram or something.

From Fernand Braudel’s 1963 A History of Civilizations:

“But the immortality sought by the [early] Taoists was not only the salvation of the soul: it was also physical immortality, thanks to a series of recipes for long life…above all cinnabar (red mercuric sulphide) when it had nine times been transformed into mercury and back again so as to make ‘the red pill of immortality’…which carries the adept, now immortal, to the abode of the gods. To avoid troubling the world of the living, he pretends to die…leaving behind him a stick or a sword which he has made look exactly like a corpse.”

Nothing yet about a blue pill.

Just read today that animator Pedro Lopes is creating a computer simulation of a famous early animation device, Alexeieff and Parker’s Pinscreen. The original was basically a giant version of the little pinscreens you can stick your hand into a at a Spencer’s Gifts (or your local equivalent). You used brushes, sticks, and other tools to coax the pins into position, and then snapped a frame of film.

The pinscreen was too expensive and too complex to be widely adopted, but Alexeieff and Parker produced some amazing work on the device at Canada’s Film Board, including an adaptation of Gogol’s “The Nose” (it’s a pity that there don’t seem to be any stills on the net).

But, as Lopes points out, a much-overlooked value of the machine is that, in the 1930s, it caused its users to start thinking of graphics in terms of pixels. (As far as I can tell, his pinscreen emulator isn’t merely an array of one-bit dots, but a 3D physical simulation, taking into account light sources, shadows, and the inevitable nudging of nearby pins.)