Fight Club, Richard Baily and the Subversion of Reality

It goes without saying that when a genuinely interesting movie comes out in America, that the film critics and media organizations will attack it and lie as hard as they can about what it is about in order to minimize the number of people who see it. That is the job of the media in our oppressive society. Whereas when we have a stupid movie like Avatar, everyone gets damp about it even though it has no content. So I heard for years that Fight Club (1999) glorified violence and so forth and so on and never had any desire to see it. Well I happened to see it the other day, and guess what, it has nothing whatsoever to do with what they said it did.

But we are not here to talk about content, or about the repression of truth, or about how shallow and superficial our civilization is. We are here to talk about something more important. Which is to say, visual effects.

What is the role of the artist? The role of the artist is to manufacture consumer products in order to maximize shareholder value of course. And it turns out that one artist that I knew quite well was the artist who blew up the buildings at the end of Fight Club. My friend Doctor Baily of Image Savant, under the direction of visual effects supervisor Kevin Haug and director David Fincher, blew up those buildings.

Richard "Dr" Baily of Image Savant

Furthermore, eschewing “photorealism”, that grossly abused and misunderstood term, the buildings blow up in a poetic and dreamlike fashion, thus contributing to the telling of the story. As we do not know if those buildings really did blow up, since by that time we are quite sure we do not know what is real and what is the perception of a disturbed individual.

And to do so a mere two years before the real buildings blew up at the World Trade Center! How wonderful for him, to have actually predicted and, symbolically at least, participated in the single event that has caused so much war and misery in our world.

Rarely does visual effects have such an impact.

Fight Club on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/

Lane Halley and Joseph Goldstone Married

draft

I am happy to report that my friend Joseph Goldstone has, in great secrecy, married his long time companion Lane Halley. Andy Kopra of Berlin officiated as Best Person.

Joseph and I have worked together many times and have been friends since about 1985 or so.

Announcement of marriage in NY Times Society Section

Joseph and Best Person Andy Kopra in NYC rest after shopping

Jim Shaw at the New Museum

        This world is mine, in time. You best of all of us, Gabriel, should understand ambition.

                                                                              Lucifer/Satan from Constantine (2005)

I am happy to report that an alumnus of degraf/Wahrman (dWi), Jim Shaw, is having a retrospective of his work exhibited at the New Museum in New York (see link below).

I have not one, not two, but at least five friends from the early days of computer animation who are recognized as successful contemporary fine artists to varying degrees. But all of the others are involved in the digital arts in one way or another.  Jim is the only one I know who has achieved his success through what we might call "old media", you know, painting and drawing, with no computers involved.

Of course there were many “artists” who helped found computer animation in the 1970s and 1980s and “art” is one of those culturally laden terms that mean different things to different communities.  Hollywood is particularly fond of giving its own meaning to the term "artist" as is discussed in this post:   What is Meant When it is Said Hollywood Needs Artists    Other types of artists in this world might include production designers, fashion designers, commercial art directors, graphic designers, visual effects supervisors, and so forth.

But we are not talking about that kind of artist, as difficult and competitive as some of those fields are. What we are talking about here is the varsity squad, an artist of the sense of museums, collectors, galleries in NY and London and notices in certain elite magazines.  This is what we might call the :"real" world of fine art.

What you may not be aware of is that this is the dream of so many artists, or at least of people who went to art school, and it is far from easy to achieve. Of 100 talented people who attend art school, how many become recognized artists? Of the people who attend film school, how many become noted directors of film?

But the really disturbing thing is not just that my friend, Jim Shaw, is successful at pretty much exactly what he wanted to achieve back when I knew him in 1980, the really disturbing thing is that he is to have a retrospective one person show.  Retrospective?  I just exchanged email with Jim and he is as always creating new pieces right and left.  Perhaps I am giving too much emphasis  to one meaning of the term "retrospective".

There is much more I could say about Jim Shaw, but I will just mention a few of them here. First, he never secretly aspired to be a commercial art director, or a visual effects supervisor, or anything else but what he did. Second, as long as I have known him, from when I believe he was an assistant art director at Robert Abel & Associates, he was producing his own work every day. Publishing his own books of his artwork. Putting on a Thrift Store Art exhibition. Third, and finally, we hired him at deGraf/Wahrman as an art director for various reasons, but the most important one to me was that it would help him make a living while he was building his career as a fine artist.

I haven't talked to him for about 20 years but I recently exchanged email with him courtesy of John Nelson (I had had trouble tracking Jim down).   Not only is he doing well, but he has a life, apparently, and has been married for over 20 years.  Amazing.

Information about his show in New York is at

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/jim-shaw-the-end-is-here

His public statement from the Thrift Store Art exhibit is here:

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2013/01/statement-from-thrift-store-art.html

dWi Logo Courtesy of Jane Stephan and Greg Ercolano

Greg took this picture of the dWi logo that was on the black film bag that Jane kept the remainders of her fabulous film cartridge give aways.   I will at some point take pictures of the cartridge and film strip and post them here.   Until then, here is the logo.  Thanks Greg.  Thanks Jane.

Ladd McPartland 1951 - 2015

I am sorry to have to report that Ladd McPartland passed away last week. Apparently he died unexpectedly in his sleep from causes that are still being determined.

Ladd was one of the nicest human beings that I have ever met. He ran editorial at deGraf/Wahrman and then went on to the same thing at Sony Imageworks and ILM. He lived in Darwin, a ghost town in California that he and several other people occupied.

His brother Tim McPartland wrote the following obituary for Ladd:

Ladd McPartland was born on March 29, 1951 to John and Eleanor McPartland. He died peacefully in his sleep on December 20, 2014. Ladd was highly creative as a photographer, filmmaker and in the way he crafted his own life.

After graduating from Pacific Grove High School in 1969, he attended UCLA Film School where he earned his Bachelors Degree in 1973. Many years later, Ladd completed coursework and projects to earn his Masters Degree in Film. As an undergraduate, he directed, shot and edited a student film entitled “Stillborn” that was screened worldwide, including at the Cannes Film Festival. and earned him respect and recognition among the creative community.

Ladd also worked extensively in the film industry as an editor and visual effects artist. At Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Imageworks, he contributed to films including Star Trek: First Contact, Look Who’s Talking Now, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Jetsons: The Movie and many other theatrical features. Ladd was for many years the editor of the prestigious SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics. He later was videographer for the Institute of Noetic Science in Petaluma.

Ladd was beloved for his wry sense of humor and charmingly quirky approach to life. From early childhood, his uniquely creative sensibility astonished and amazed all who knew him and he remained true to his own vision of life until his untimely passing. Ladd is survived by his brothers Tam, Tip and Tor McPartland and his sister Jan. His ashes will be scattered in his adopted home, Sebastopol, California.

I am not sure when this picture was taken, but I would guess it might have been when he was attending UCLA.

Apparently the audio from the memorial service was recorded and can be found at: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nyvs1b62j0kvw4r/LaddMemorial.wav?dl=0

Darwin, Ca on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin,_California

Tippett Studios Disturbance in the Force

[being rewritten, awkward construction]

There has been another event in the long saga of visual effects employment in this country. (1)

This time it involves Phil Tippett and his Tippett Studios which has laid off about 40% of their staff, roughly 50 people. In an article in the Hollywood Reporter, Jules Roman, CEO and President, predicted that the work was going up north to Canada and that they had to get a project by the end of the year or, the implication was, that was the end of Tippett Studios.

See the article here:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tippett-studios-vfx-house-lays-431762#

For those who do not know Phil, he is a brilliant stop motion animator whose studio made the transition from traditional arts to 3D / Computer Animation.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when the first Star Wars came out, the film distinguished itself by showing rare enthusiasm in all its shots. A door would open with a bang. A spaceship was clearly an Empire Ship of the Line such as EE Doc Smith would conceive of it. A bad guy looked bad. A throwaway shot that most people remember is when Chewbacca is playing chess with R2D2 and a little chess piece destroys his opponent which was a stop-motion shot by Tippett.

Phil went up to Marin County to help set up the new ILM for Empire Strikes Back and then went off to run his own production company. Starship Troopers was their first big entry into computer animation and they did a spectacular job, imho.

Here is an interview with Phil from about the time he went up to ILM.

http://starwarsinterviews1.blogspot.com/2010/05/phil-tippett-interview-stop-motion.html

At deGraf/Wahrman we worked with Phil on Robocop II which was an odd film but a pleasure to work on. The screenplay was much better than the film itself for some reason.

Anyway, the producer, Jon Davison, had us collaborate with Phil's company on our 3D talking head of the bad guy, a scanned version of actor Tom Noonan. The computer animation was going to be played back a frame at a time on a laserdisk (thats how long ago this was), on a stop motion character that they were animating.   This would be a modern version of the idea of projecting an image inside a miniature, as one might find with King Kong (1933).

It can difficult sometimes for facilities to work with each other because of the traditional competitiveness of the industry and because so many people in this industry are immature. But not in this case. Everyone was great to work with.

For years now, Tippett Studios was one of the few other VFX companies in N. California besides ILM.

It is the nature of companies like this that they must grow and shrink to meet the production work that they have in-house. And they have survived now, even prospered, for many years, perhaps 20. Their excellence at character animation has always been a strong way for them to distinguish themselves and to get the work that was appropriate for their talents.

The point I am trying to make is this. Although it is normal for production companies to grow and shrink with the work, and even normal for production companies to go out of business after a time (they all do, eventually), losing Tippett would be a major loss of a company known for its excellent character animation, and a place of employment for animators.

Not all computer animation companies and vfx companies are the same. They have different styles, different bodies of work, different cultures. Tippett is a stop-motion animation culture in a computer graphics world. I would hate to lose them, and the vfx community would suffer a loss if they went away much bigger than the mere numbers of employed would indicate.

So lets ask the question. What exactly are the politicians in this state and the US Congress thinking while Canadian and UK subsidies and globalization wipe out the vfx community in this country?

My guess is that they don't care how many unemployed there are or whether the industry goes away as long as the Hollywood studios can save a buck.

Phil Tippett on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0864138/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

King Kong (1933) on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024216/

_____________________________________

1. Visual Effects now means computer animation or computer graphics, but it did not used to mean that, of course.

My Favorite Story About Bill Hanna from Jetsons The Movie (1990)

[updated 3/15/2013 to mention Al Gmuer and Jerry Mills]

Many years ago, our little production company, deGraf/Wahrman, inc (dWi) ended up doing two Hanna-Barbara Projects at once. How it happened is a little complicated, but they were essentially two completely different projects: a motion platform ride for Universal Studios Florida and about 40 or so shots for the first Jetson's Movie directly for Hanna Barbara.

Our client for the latter was Bill Hanna personally, and it was one of the most endearing and positive client relationships we, dWi, or I, personally, have ever had. I have a few anecdotes from that project that is the point of the post, but I think it will be helpful to return to yesteryear and explain what was going on.

At the time, about 1989 or so, computer animation was not used in motion picture or animation production.

You might want to reread the above sentence a few times in order to get what I am trying to tell you, and then add a very important phrase: except for a few brave souls who would every once in a while try computer animation and see if it would work for them.   But when you examine those projects, good or bad, you can see that Hollywood is actually in its way trying to find a way to use this new medium.

Bill Hanna and Hanna Barbera was one of those brave souls / companies.

They had after many years managed to get Universal to finance a feature film around the Jetson's property and we were going to be included. I was and am such a fan of the Jetson's I can not tell you how thrilled I was.

It is now necessary to set the way-back-machine, Sherman, to get into the right mood. (3) In 1989, you could not easily use PC's in production like you do now, you had to use much more expensive machines such as Silicon Graphics and Symbolics. We had access to a factory floor of Symbolics Machines in Chatsworth (1), and about a dozen of various types of machines in West Hollywood. If you needed to record to film you had to provide your own film recorder, no motion picture oriented services were available. (4)

This is a good dWi image because it is dark and ambiguous

Above, a very low resoulution screengrab of a smoggy day in the Jetson's neighborhood, and the inspiration for the sequence from Los Angeles

The project was to do about 40 shots that were going to be BG shots with 2D animation on top. In a few cases we would composite George Jetson into his Jetcar while it whizzed past. Animation included a flock of Jetcars in a traffic jam, a hero jet car elevating out of the traffic jam, the Jetson's towers elevating out of the smog, and so forth. Many people worked on that project at dWi, all of them with distinction. I don't want to get the names wrong, so I will provide the names at a later date. (2)

Now for the anecdotes. The first one is minor, the second one will be hard to understand if you have not been in this or a related business.

One day while we were in a story board meeting with Bill Hanna, I got up the courage to ask him why they did not do more Jetsons and Flintstones, telling him honestly what a big fan I was of them. I could not understand how there could only be one season of The Jetsons and the Flintstones, one each.  He just laughed at me, and said, "We loved the Jetsons and Flintstones too.   But we never got the ratings. On the other hand, Scooby Doo is in its 13th season and we are happy to be working".

13 seasons of Scooby Doo but only one of The Jetsons?  No justice, clearly no justice in this world.

So after a rocky start having to do with the other project, the one administered by Universal Studios Florida, the project from hell, we start delivering lots of shots for the movie. And things are going along and, this is so amazing I can't believe it, one day I got a phone call from Bill Hanna.

And he said "Michael, you know those shots you just delivered?" I said, "Yes". "Well, it turns out that they are what it is we asked for, and of course we will pay you for them. But we think we would want some changes, and we wanted to know if you had the time to do some extra shots and if we could perhaps get a discount given that these shots will be very similar to the ones you just did" I was speechless for a few seconds and then either I, or possibly the producer, said "we would love to".

But what you may not appreciate is how unusual this is: He was not trying to get something for free.  He was not trying to blame us (believe me, we were not perfect). He was thanking us for our work, asking us if we had some more time, and wondered if he might have a discount.

It was such a change from the unbelievably evil project and people on the other side of the house that I had to sit down. Wait, a client saying "thank you"?   It does happen, that people say thank you in that business, but it is not all that common.   

We loved working for Hanna Barbera and for Bill.  I am sorry he is gone.

While I am on the subject, I do not remember all our friends at Hanna Barbera by name, but two names in particular stand out beyond Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, and that was Al Gmuer (sp?) and Jerry Mills.  Just wanted you guys to know how helpful I thought you were and what a pleasure it was to work with you.  (I am spacing out on the name of a third person, who I think was the senior Art Director there, but I can do some research and find it).  

William Hanna (1910 - 2001)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hanna

Jetsons The Movie (1990)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099878/

_______________________________________

1. Because the factory was in Chatsworth, and Chatsworth was where the farms were when I lived in Granada Hills as a kid, I called it the Render Farm. Years later, everyone was calling their render farm a render farm, but I doubt it was because of me. I think this is just a coincidence, I hope.

2. I think the people on the project included Jim Hillin, Phil Zucco, Ken Brain, Jay Sloat, Ken Cope, Michelle Porter, Allen Battino, Craig Newman, of course Brad and myself, and the usual crew of people who helped out on all our projects like Liz Ralston, our office manager and later producer, Anne Marie, Carter and Ladd McPartland. Who am I forgetting?   Did Greg Ercolano and J Walt Adamczyk work on this project?  How about Tom Betts (Did I get his name right, it has been a long time).  Did Steve Segal and Tuck Tucker work on this project?

3. This is of course a reference to Sherman and Peabody from Jay Ward.

4. The more I think about this, the more I realize that this could not be true.  It is true that excellent scanning and recording was not easily available the way it is today, as a commodity service.  But probably had we wanted we would have found someone who provided a film recording service on a CELCO or DICOMED or other device.   Nevertheless, we felt we had to do it ourselves.

Ancient Computer Animation History on Facebook

A Facebook discussion brought up some technology that we developed at dWi, deGraf/Wahrman, Inc, and it sequed into a discussion of some of the talent and impact that we had. That was then, this is now. Nevertheless, it was a good opportunity to mention the following, repeated here, as Facebook is even more ephemeral than a blog.

Because there was so much misunderstanding in the aftermath of dWi, it is possible that the following was not made clear.  

I think that this is a good opportunity to thank everyone who was associated with deGraf/Wahrman for all their hard work. As far as I can tell, everyone who worked at dWi was amazingly talented and did incredible work under very difficult circumstances. Its hard to believe that we worked that hard in order to establish computer animation as useful for the entertainment industry, god only knows why we cared so much or why we thought we had to do our best work for clients who were, shall we say, not always appreciative of our genius. I am sorry we put people under so much pressure at the time, it was not intentional, it turned out that way. Perhaps things were a "little" out of control. You may not have been aware of how much pressure Brad and I were under.

I also think that judging by results, our alumni are without doubt very talented and did very well. Hopefully you will all continue to do well. Each of you has unique talents, remember who you are.

 I think that Jwalt's joke was a very good one, it would have been all that much better if we were actually that much more talented and collaborative that we thought that gag up as a deliberate comedy routine, that would have been truly impressive. People are so sensitive, you know.

I plan to document all of your contributions on my Blog, over the next few years, if all goes well.

Anyway, thanks again.

The Facebook discussion is here. I have no idea if you will be able to see it or not.

http://www.facebook.com/michael.wahrman/posts/283994975061964?comment_id=1233232

My 15 Seconds of Fame: Interviewed on Intel Blog about UI Design

[This post has wildly screwed up the blogspot GUI and it will need to be completely reformatted, yikes!  Not to mention typographical and grammatical errors which I can not see because blogspot made the type the same color as the background.   Hmm, it must be karma.  I say nasty things about GUI design and look what happens!]

Every once in a while, someone does something nice for you and its very confusing. What is their real motivation? Why are they doing something nice?

Anyway, for some reason my friend Audri Phillips, a pioneer of computer animation, and a veteran of Robert Abel & Associates, who is among other things, an artist and a writer for corporate giant Intel, interviewed me on the subject of user interfaces. I am very opinionated on user interfaces, having been victimized by them most of my life.

User interface design and implementation is an easy target, because they are so badly done most of the time. Abomoniably and inexcusably done. Unfortunately, there are many plausible reasons why this can happen, most of them variations on a generic "constraints on the project that we know nothing about and aren't apparent from using the device but were very important during development", such as "you have to use this software package" or "this company is going to do this, we only get to do that", that sort of thing.

Once you have the device in hand, and without any knowledge of what happened behind the scenes, it is easy and even somewhat emotionally satisfying to strike back at being victimized by the bad result, we can only judge what we see. Nevertheless, it seems that only Apple can do a product with a good user interface (a slight exaggeration).

Here is Audri's article on the Intel blog, please click on it to give her page hits which no doubt her management tracks.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/26/interfaces-an-interview-with-michael-wahrman-1

Audri's blog on artistic matters is at:
http://cultureandscience.blogspot.com/

The Museum of Forrest J. Ackerman

[Colleagues have asked, where is a picture of Wendy Wahrman?  When I get a suitable picture of Wendy I will post it]. 

Once upon a time I had met most of the working west coast writers of science fiction, or at least the ones who came to the Westercon, the west coast science fiction convention.  This was no big deal, pretty much anyone who attended Westercon could meet them, they were very approachable.  This included such authors as Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson and Jerry Pournelle, just to name a few. Someone I knew about, but had never met, was Forrest J. Ackerman.

"Forry", as he was known, was quite famous in that world. He was a pioneer and contemporary of Robert Heinlein and people of that generation, and had made a living as a writer, an editor, a publisher and a literary agent all in the area of science fiction.   Science fiction is to literature as puppetry is to theatre, it doesn't get much respect.   And it is very difficult to make a living as a writer of fiction no matter what genre the writer works in.   He published none other than "Famous Monsters" magazine.  He probably wrote the first ever story for Vampirella.

This is Vampirella in her pre-sex goddess form.  No kinky leather jumpsuit at this time.

Forrest was also famous in this world of science fiction for his vast collection of all kinds of memorabilia from the worlds of horror, science fiction, and fantasy.  Such items as Bela Lugosi's cape from Dracula, and the mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon. He collected with the passion and obsession of all great collectors and kept everything in a great old mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

To give you an idea of what we are dealing with here, consider this link, which has a scan of a letter from a 14 year old Forry to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the reply from Mr. Burroughs.     

One day a good friend of mine, a pioneer of the ARPANET who lived in Palo Alto, and a fan of science fiction, asked me to arrange a tour of Forrest's mansion for him.  The idea was that I was a local, and he wasn't, so I should do this.    As it happened, I knew Mr. Ackerman's phone number, because everyone who knew science fiction knew his phone number.  It was (213) MOON FAN.

 So I gathered up my courage and out of the blue one afternoon, I gave him a call.

"Mr. Ackerman," I said, "my name is Michael Wahrman, but you don't know me, but we of course know of you and of your famous collection and a friend and I wanted to know if there was a time when people could come see this collection. Perhaps you might have an open house one day a year or something like that. If you do have a way for people to tour your collection, we would very much like to do so."

I can not begin to write in a way that expresses how Forrest Ackerman used to speak. I want you to imagine in your mind that his lines are being spoken by Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932).

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then he said "What is your name again?"

"Well, my name is Michael Wahrman, but I am pretty sure you have never heard of me".

"How do you spell that", he asked.

"Well, its spelled W-A-H-R-M-A-N, why do you ask?"

After a pause he said, mysteriously,  "You may come by, whenever you wish."

Well, that's odd, I thought.   But I made an appointment and my friend came to town and we went to this fabulous house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills and we were received by Forrest, shown around, and introduced to his lovely wife, the former Wendy Wahrman.   She greeted me with a fabulous Hungarian or perhaps eastern European accent saying "Ah, Wahrman.   An old family name.  From Hungary".

It is almost certain that Wendy and I were related. Its a very unusual name. Associated with a specific intellectual (jewish) elite of Europe. Only a few black sheep with that name came to this country, most of them were killed in the Holocaust, a few went to Israel, so you do not find many Wahrman's on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am looking for a suitable picture for Wendy Wahrman Ackerman, but haven't found one yet.

I will always remember Mr Ackerman, now dead these many years, and his amazing hospitality to a total stranger, and with this fabulous voice, doing a perfect horror movie rendition: "You may come by, whenever you wish".

Wikipedia page for Forrest Ackerman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_J_Ackerman

A link to a first edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, signed by Forry, Christopher Lee, and many others.
http://turhansbeycompany.tumblr.com/post/33611652054/hotmonsters-panicbeats-forrest-j-ackermans

Sing-A-Long Sound of Music

One more time I have evidence that I am deeply embedded into the collective unconsciousness of popular culture without realizing it.   I think something is completely obscure and then it turns out that it is no less than the very topic of a mass movement.

A friend has posted on facebook a picture he took at the recent "Sing-A-Long Sound of Music" in which 18,000 people went to the Hollywood Bowl to sing along with Maria and Captain v. Trapp.

Could this just be a coincidence, that I would write my post about The Sound of Music and its relationship to submarine history and that then this event would happen?    Is this more proof of the lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world?

Although I do have other situations that do strongly indicate the apparent presence of the lattice of causality, I doubt very much if any of the participants at the Sing-A-Long were aware of Captain v. Trapp's immense importance to the history of submarines.  But maybe that doesn't matter, it occurs to me, maybe his importance to submarine history influenced their behavior without their conscious knowledge?

[An aside: the Hollywood Bowl claims that their screen is the largest outdoor motion picture screen in the world.   A few years ago I saw a sequence from the Sound of Music at the Academy that was projected in 70MM from the original 70mm negative.   It was completely amazing and much better, read my lips, much better by an order of magnitude than the best digital projection I have seen.   Obviously progress is not about making things better.]

Here is the link to Jim Hillin's picture on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151187914489312&set=a.462289734311.253257.573349311&type=1&comment_id=7932189

And the Hollywood Bowl event:
http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tickets/sing-long-sound-of-music/2011-09-24

Jim Hillin's picture from the event itself:

My original post about Maria, the Captain and the submarine is at:
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-baron-novititate-and-submarine-in.html

Enthiran (2010)

As we all know, a lot of visual effects has been outsourced or offshored to India.  But here we have an example of a film made in India, which, according to Brian Jennings, had its effects done in this country.  In order to appreciate this film you have to watch most if not all of these 10 minutes.   Michael Bay would be filled with envy.  There are even Giant Robots that figure prominently in it, so it must be an important film.

The film is called Enthiran, and it is in the Tamil language.

At about 4:10 or so in the excerpt, if you look at the helicopters, you will see a good example of why you should not use Viewpoint (or possibly "group sourced") models very close up.  A distant shot would probably have been ok.

I am pretty sure that it was Steve Speer in NYC that first made me aware of this fabulous cross-cultural triumph of visual effects filmmaking.

Excerpt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yysbbPStfWw

Wikipedia Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthiran