Two VFX Examples From The Bourne Identity (2002)

This post will showcase two very elegant visual effects shots/sequences in the movie The Bourne Identity (2002).

Sadly none of the case studies today feature giant robots or things that explode loudly.   This is because of the filmmakers' failure to understand that giant robots and exploding things seasoned with an occasional space battle or cute furry aliens are the most important elements when crafting a significant visual effects project.  Instead what we have here is an odd little film with a few likable characters and a lot of violence, but very few explosions.  Even so, we can use this project as a modest example of how visual effects can improve a film or lower the cost of shooting something without an explosion per se.

There is a well-known aphorism from film editing that goes something like "Good film editing should not be noticed by the audience."  The editing should be subliminal, you should not (consciously) notice it.  In a similar way, if the audience thinks "wow, what a great visual effect!" that is not the desired result. They should think it is real.  Of course there has to be some level of suspension of disbelief for that to work in many cases when, for example, one is showing a giant robot eating an alien world or some other subject not drawn from day-to-day experience.

But in the case of a film that takes place in a contemporary setting and in which there are not overtly fantastical elements, then hopefully the viewer will just be involved in watching the film and not think that he or she has just witnessed a visual effect. There are some surprisingly effective and useful visual effects that are completely unnoticable unless someone points them out to you.

To illustrate this, I am going to showcase, as best I can, two shots/sequences from the first Bourne movie: The Bourne Identity (2002). I think that both of these sequences work very well and both of them are implemented in a remarkably simple manner.   In both cases, digital technology made the shots easier to execute.  In the second case, the shot could not have been done without a digital technique.

Sequence 1: The train at night

In this sequence, Jason Bourne, who is suffering from amnesia and does not know who he is, has very little money, is travelling on a train from France to Switzerland.

The shots break down as follows (times are approximate):

1. A five second shot of a modern train going into a tunnel,

2. A twelve second shot with a slowly moving camera of Bourne looking out a window of a train, either looking at the tunnel moving outside the window or at his own reflection,

3. A three second shot of Bourne's hand fiddling with a plot device,

4. A thirteen second shot of Bourne at his destination outside the train looking lost.

One of the unusual things about this sequence is that it moves very slowly.  In general, we do not like people to have the time to study the effect, as they can usually see through it if we give them more than a few seconds.  But in this case, we stare right at the effect for 12 seconds and it works fine.

In the second shot, the one with the moving camera, the original element was shot in a train that was not moving, with the window blacked out (the reflection of his face and seat are there, but it is black otherwise with no sensation of movement). There is a light on the set illuminating Bourne's face intermittantly to simulate the idea that the train is passing something that is giving off light, such as a signal, but there was nothing beyond the window but black in the principle photography.  The camera was tracked in 3D using some early tracking software and a 3D element of some abstract, dark, tunnel-like textures rendered moving past the camera at high speed (e.g. with a lot of motion blur) and rendered with the tracking camera move. This was then composited against the original shot using a simple hold out matte generated of the outline of the window. The element was basically just overlayed on top of the shot in the area of the window, you did not mind that the textures were visible "under" the reflection of Bourne.

The end result of this is that you completely buy that Bourne is on a train moving at night. One 3D track, one simple 3D element, one travelling hold out matte, and a simple additive composite within the hold out area. I think it works perfectly and it was very inexpensive to execute.  Without it, I don't think the sequence would have been as believable (in other words, had Bourne been looking at his reflection against a black background without any sensation of motion). Had it been shot in reality, e.g. a train moving at night, it would have been much more expensive.

Alternatively, one could have used rear projection to do a similar shot, but you would not have been able to move the camera that far off axis in a rear projection situation.   One could have done a similar shot with a moving camera and traditional techniques, I think, but it would have been more difficult.  Using traditional techniques, I would have shot the principle photography using a motion control or motion tracked camera and then reused that move to control a motion control camera to shoot additional elements, in particular to  rephotograph rear projection art work which had previously been created with a suitable blur of movement (for the movement of the train past the window, not the movement of the camera).   Either I would have shot blue/green screen outside the window of the train in the principle photography, or if I was using motion control to shoot the plate, repeated the movement with a green screen in order to get a hold out of the window.  Then I would have optically composited and it all would have worked.  Here the digital techniques really do make this shot straightforward, however, and less costly to execute.

Here is the sequence online.
http://youtu.be/qyAcJEU4xco

Sequence 2: The incident in the park

After Bourne arrives in Zurich, we have one establishing shot of him alone, at night, in Zurich with snow falling which is about 7 seconds long. We cut to Bourne sleeping in the snow on a bench. Two police officers wake him up, ask to see his ID, and tell him he can not sleep there. One of them gestures with his nightstick, and Jason grabs it. The two police officers are standing above him, he is sitting on the bench, unarmed.

The next six or seven shots (depending on how you count) are each very short and appear almost continuous, even though they are not.   In these shots,  Jason disarms both men and knocks them both unconscious as well as taking one of the police officers revolver.  When he is done, Bourne stands puzzled over the two unconscious men and seems to wonder what happened.

It looks completely natural and Jason does not even appear to be working very hard.

It reminded me, as it was intended to, of when I have watched a dancer or gymnast perform: it looks as if what they are doing is easy even though you realize that what they are doing is impossible.

What they did is as follows. First, a martial artist working for the production choreographed the actions of Bourne and the two officers moving very slowly. As shot, the actors moved at a comfortable speed and did not try to maintain a constant rate.  The camera changes position during the shot so presumably it was shot several times from different positions.   You will also notice that Jason appears to move in what seems like clean, deliberate motions with brief pauses between them. The speed of the performers was not constant, to get the effect of the police officer on the right being knocked to the ground, for example, the (presumably) stand in had to basically throw himself onto the snow so it would react properly.  

Then the effects supervisor, Peter Donen,  took the shot(s) and digitally retimed them, varying the apparent speed continuously through the shot(s). There is also some very good film editing going on.  The sequence that results looks flawless to me, and as I have mentioned, almost appears continuous, even though in actuality there are several cuts.  In this case, digital retiming which makes use of a variety of image processing technologies involving motion analysis (image flow) between frames enabled this approach.  Previous to this digital technique, the traditional techniques could do retiming but only in specific increments of the frame rate, e.g. one could skip frames and double the speed of the shot, but that would not have been sufficiently flexible and continuous (e.g. moving at fractional speeds).  Keep in mind also that this retiming technique could only work in this situation as long as one keeps to very short cuts because we have snow falling.  Assuming that this is real snow (and it very well might be, or practical snow on the set) then it will appear to change speed if we do retiming on longer sequences and just allow that to be viewed.  So this technique has to be used in very short segments or elements like the snow have to be added later.

Here is the sequence online.
http://youtu.be/kl1uGvPAJEQ

So here we have two examples of visual effects used to serve the story that were both elegant and inexpensive to do. The second sequence is an example of making something that is inherently fantastical look natural and realistic.  We can forgive the lack of a cute furry alien or a giant robot since the filmmakers have executed their inferior robot-less vision with such skill. 

The effects supervisor and my friend, Peter Donen, passed away about four years after these sequences were done, tragically of a heart attack in his mid-50s. What was especially sad was that his career was just taking off after decades of struggle. He had the misfortune of being the son of a very famous man, the director Stanley Donen.

Tom Swift and His Amazing Underground Conspiracy Theory

When researching my posts on "Do Mysterious Booms Indicate a Secret Aerospace Project?" for this blog, I started to delve into the beliefs on the Internet regarding secret underground facilities, to broaden the piece beyond its limitation to secret aerospace projects. The origins of many of the recorded mysterious booms are almost certainly underground, not showing the signs of sonic booms, hence the research into subterranean construction. But I recoiled in horror and quickly turned away.

My impression was that the "underground conspiracy" theory people are really nutty. Of course, I must recognize that some of this perceived nuttiness is in the eyes of the beholder. How do we differentiate "wackiness" from "scary nutty"?  I will now compare and contrast a UFO theory with an underground theory by way of example.

Some of the UFO people believe that "the CIA is reverse engineering the alien anti-gravity drive from the spaceship that they recovered at the end of WWII from the Nazi secret laboratory where they had been working on it since the spaceship had crash-landed in the 1930s." This has a certain ring of fabulous imagination to me, for some reason, even if it is a little, just a little, unbelievable.

But many of the "underground" people believe (so I read on their web sites) that "Giant tunnels underneath the USA, from coast to coast, connecting secret and huge underground bases, built by atomic tunnel creation machines that can create a massive tunnel at a rate of 7 miles per day and leave absolutely no residue (the mass displaced is somehow coated onto the side of the tunnel making it perfectly smooth and robust, instantaneously). No radiation, no waste, just instant tunnels. And why is our govenment secretly building these tunnels? Why to destroy civil liberty of course. And they are all in it, all of them, all of those people building these secret tunnels to destroy liberty are keeping this dark secret and those who dare to talk about these tunnels, and the secret bases, and the vast conspiracy are silenced! Except of course those on the internet who talk about it, I guess they are not silenced. But they will be! Just you wait and see! And somehow this is all linked in with the Chemtrails conspiracy and some others that I did not completely follow, something about making us all impotent, I think.

For some reason, I find this much more disturbing than the theory that the CIA is reverse engineering the anti-gravity drive, but maybe it's just me.

Nevertheless, I want to propose to you a theory for where some of these arguably insane belief systems come from. To the best of my knowledge, this theory has not been presented before and so I am out on a limb here as my evidence is circumstantial at best. But maybe someone with more resources, time and credibility can take this idea and develop it sufficiently in the proper venues. If it is perceived to have merit, that is.

It occurred to me that in order to have many of these beliefs, one must be really disconnected from any sort of understanding of physical realities. Gravity is still gravity, even if you have an anti-gravity drive. Matter is still matter, and hot matter has to cool, even if you have a magical tunnel boring machine. Heat, you know, energy, neither created nor destroyed, you know? Just calling something atomic doesn't mean much in this day and age, and hasn't meant something all that special since the 1960s or so. Maybe even the early 1960s at that. Flying saucers from outer space will still make sonic booms in our atmosphere unless they can change their shape during the boom, perhaps, but they will have to do something. They are not exempt because they have a "mysterious" energy source.

Where could these crazy science magic ideas have come from?

Well I do know one potential source. As a child, I had read a series of fake-science adventure stories, where just calling something Atomic did mean that it had magical powers, and where a small number of "brilliant young scientists" could build devices in no time at all that could do amazing things, work the first time, never kill anyone, save the world from the Brungarians (1) and yet everyone could be home in time for dinner. Mom, I have to test the atomic rocketship! Tom, you just be home for dinner, I have been cooking all day! Oh, ok, Mom.

Yes, Tom Swift, Jr.

I read all 33 of these books and even then, 10 years old, I did not think they were plausible. Nothing in our world works the first time, but every one of their amazing inventions did. Never over budget. Never any problems that a good screwdriver and a wrench couldn't fix. And never any lack of money. No US government or local city government to come in and say what are you doing building rockets in your back yard? No problems at all.

So here is my theory. That somehow there are people out there who read Tom Swift Jr but did not realize that this is not the way the world works. They believe that people can actually build the Repelatron Skyway, the Ultrasonic Cycloplane, the G-Force Inverter, the Diving Seacopter, the Atomic Earth Blaster, and yes even the Giant Robot and the Flying Laboratory.

You and I might not be able to, but Tom Swift, Jr could.

And be home in time for his home-cooked, American dinner.   

So maybe these sad, conspiracy theorists are actually just manifesting reflections of a pulp fiction dream, the American inventor who can do anything, for whom no problem is too hard, for whom money is not a limitation, and where the family supports him. All gone wrong of course, and twisted into an evil conspiracy, but a reflection nevertheless of this dream, now long abandoned and never to return.

_____________________________________________________

1. In the Tom Swift world, the bad guys were almost always the "Brungarian", which seems to be some conflation of "Bulgarian" with "Hungarian", both of which were at the time these novels were written behind the Iron Curtain.

The Deeper Meaning of the La Brea Tar Pits

Its easy to look at the surface of Los Angeles and miss a lot of, indeed, most of, its nuance and subtlety. To understand this city, you must dig beneath the surface, and when you do, you will probably find petroleum byproducts.

Petroleum is all over Los Angeles, it is at the center of a lot of the secret history of the town. One place to see Los Angeles' relationship to oil, at least symbolically, is at the La Brea Tar Pits.

The La Brea Tar Pits was part of the Rancho La Brea land grant and became Hancock Park in Los Angeles before the turn of the century. The name comes from the Spanish: la brea means "the tar" so "The La Brea Tar Pits" means "The The Tar Tar Pits".

Discovery of fossils happened in 1901 with more formal excavations in 1913-1915. Intermittent excavations have happened since then, most recently in the last few years as they excavated for a new parking facility for LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) but other than that they have been mostly inactive for decades. In these excavations they have found the fossilized remains of bison, mammoth, sloth, bears, lions, tigers, saber-tooth tigers, vultures, eagles, deer, falcons, a huge number of dire wolves and one human, a Chumash lady, killed by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument and pushed into the pit many thousands of years ago.

Image by Charles Knight for the American Museum of Natural History in NY.

They built a nice museum to hold the remains of the bison, wolves and Chumash lady, the Page Museum, and its the best place I know to buy your Giant Sloth hand puppets. The Chumash lady is no longer on exhibit because the Chumash quite reasonably felt it wasn't very dignified. She is still there if you know where to look, however.

But there is a deeper meaning to the Tar Pits, a darker meaning: one that is not appropriate for the Page Museum.

Some people believe that the La Brea Tar Pits are a metaphor for life in Los Angeles.

To see this, imagine life 10,000 or so years ago. We are in the arid valley that one day will be Los Angeles. It is not a desert but it is very dry.  Arroyo might be the more appropriate term.  There appear to be some pools of water.

Notice the oil wells discreetly in the background of this picture of the Tar Pits

A little deer comes to the edge of what she thinks is a pond to drink. Her mother is nearby. Delicately stepping to the pond, the deer discovers that her foot is stuck in the tar and she can not get out. This is not a pond, of course, this is the La Brea tar pits. She calls for her mother who tries to help her, but in doing so, also gets caught in the tar. All their struggling just makes it worse: they sink deeper into the wretched tar. Now they look closer and see the bodies of other animals that have gotten trapped by the fake pond and who have died and are half-buried in the muck all around them. A dire wolf hears their struggles and comes loping over, sensing an easy dinner. They struggle but they are no match for the vicious dire wolf, but now, ironically the wolf is also caught in the tar and desperately struggles to get free.  A sabre-tooth tiger seeing their dead and rotting bodies comes to scavenge but gets trapped as well. Later the same thing happens to a vulture and other scavengers.

Driven by greed to exploit the innocent victims of a cruel and sticky trap, the opportunistic predators are themselves trapped, and the predators of the predators as well. They become a horrifying, rotting, collage of death, some dying in the act of trying to devour the others and, covered with the filth of petroleum byproducts, they sink into the bottomless pit, forever lost from sight, destroyed by their greed.

Very little has changed in Los Angeles since then.

Revised 1/15/2013
Revised 10/11/2013

Transcendence in Visual Effects: The Flying Bus in Speed (1994)

All too often visual effects is called upon to create the illusion of something "real" in a literal sense of that overused word. So, for example, when visual effects creates a giant robot beating the shit out of another robot, the intent of that sequence is nothing more than to show the protagonist literally hitting the bad robot with a giant metal stick, or whatever that particular action-filled moment may call for. But there are other uses of visual effects that are possible even though they are rarely used and it is our intent to showcase some of them here on this blog.

Unfortunately, these unusual and non-conformist uses of visual effects can also be misunderstood by an audience who has been fed a steady diet of literalism as we will also show.

The particular sequence we discuss in this post is the flight of the bus at a key moment in Jan DeBont's underrecognized masterpiece, Speed (1994). In this highly intellectual film, good and evil struggle for the lives of the passengers of a Los Angeles public transit vehicle, the lowly bus. These lives are held at risk and if the bus is slowed to below a certain speed, the bus will explode. At one point in this drama it appears as though there is no hope as the bus is travelling at high speed towards an uncompleted freeway, can not turn around, can not stop and hurtles towards the precipice and certain death. But our protagonist encourages the passenger / driver / love interest to accelerate as fast as she can and the bus hits the ramp at the end of the freeway and in a moment of triumph leaps over the precipice onto the continuation of the freeway beyond.

Fly, Bus! Fly!

Movie audiences were thrilled by this unexpected escape from certain death, but of course there are always those who are critical and, predictably, some small-minded critics laughed at this apparent physical impossibility. The internet forums are filled with endless discussions of mass, angles, inertia, stunt drivers, and other irrelevant matters. What completely went over their head is that the bus flying is an example of "self-transcendence" as the bus, who is of course a character in this film, strives to transcend, to leave behind, its worldly, wheels-on-the-ground existence and, wishing to fly, by using all its energy and will does so and, in doing so, defeats evil.

I suspect that it was Jan deBont's intent for all of us to be inspired by the bus's achievement and for us to also strive to transcend our daily existence and limitations just as our noble bus has.

Speed at Imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111257/

[NOTE: I think the shot above was done by VIFX but I am still confirming this.]

Los Angeles Urban Design and the Location of the County Museum of Art

[Note: Tom Duff points out that methane is odourless, and that I probably smelt sulfur dioxide around the museum.  So I have changed this post to reflect that except in the case of the exploding methane detectors, where I am sure it was methane that was referenced.]

Many people who are not from Southern California do not understand Los Angeles (aka El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles). They look at it with unpracticed eyes and see a rotting heap of garbage, smog, corruption, greed, racism, oppression of the poor, a failed public education system, unplanned and impossible traffic, a failed transit system, pot holes, drug dealers, crime, cheap and bad architecture and very shallow people.

But that is not all that there is to LA, not at all. I believe that Los Angeles is pure and unspoiled and completely true to its values. I believe that a city is created by thousands or hundreds of thousands of decisions made by its people over many, many years. And that these decisons made by these different people in different roles at different times create a kind of gestalt, a framework in which to fit the individual pieces. When you understand this, then one can see the patterns and beliefs that shaped a decision and so bring order to what may otherwise appear to be chaos.

In other words, Los Angeles is exactly the way that the people who live here want it to be. It represents their morals, their desires, their beliefs and their values. It represents who they are honestly and in a straightforward fashion for all to see.

So now I am going apply this thesis of urban design theory in order to explain a specific decision: the location of one of my favorite places in Los Angeles: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or LACMA.

Why is it where it is? Why isn't it in scummy downtown Los Angeles, or in the crime-invested park next to USC? What is it doing conveniently located to people who live on the west side, people who live in Hancock Park, people who live in the Valley, people who live in the beach cities? Why is it located where the air is often clean and crime is low and parking is convenient yet where real estate is certainly not cheap? How did "they" let this happen?

LACMA is an anomaly in many ways. It is an institution esteemed across generations in Los Angeles and it has affected many people's lives in a very positive way. I used to attend film programs there in the Bing Theatre and that is where I have seen many notable screenings of animation of various types on film projected from pristine prints from the UCLA Collection. The plaza in the center of the common area of LACMA is the closest thing that the region has to something that feels like NY City: people hang out outside in a well-designed space, listen to music, talk about art, watch people and have a soda. Although the collection is uneven, it certainly is not the Metropolitan, it has its strong areas and it has curated some important exhibitions over the years which have toured the country and probably the world.

Notice the probable Hasselblad square format.  I saw some originals from this or a similar photoshoot in the cafe of the Bing theatre and they were all in this square, probable 6x6 format.

When I was very young my mother used to take me to art classes there. I smile when I remember the Calder mobiles, the smell of petroleum byproducts, visiting my grandmother, having lunch above the Folk and Craft Art museum at The Egg and I.

The smell of petroleum byproducts?

Yes, you see LACMA is located right next to, and actually on top of, the La Brea Tar Pits. Tar and various other petroleum byproducts ooze, bubble and outgas all around the park. There used to be moats, shallow sidewalk shaped pools of water, around the main buildings of the art museum, on the ground floor, where the art classes were, and you could watch the sulfur dioxide, or whatever it was, bubble up through the water. I loved it. You had to be careful not to walk with bare feet on the grass because of the tar that oozed up, but otherwise it was great fun if you were a kid.

Mommy!  Look!  Elephants playing in the Tar Pits!

In fact, most of the area around the Tar Pits can only be developed with special restrictions and with special monitoring and controls because of this geology. The Fairfax district, right next door, used to be a neighborhood for many elderly jewish men and women. And every few years a few of them would blow up, because, unfortunately, the methane detectors in the basement of their apartment buildings would sometimes fail, the methane would accumulate, and then BOOM, another few old people would explode. Everyone felt bad about it, but we all understood, growing up here, that methane detectors are expensive and it would not be economical to expect them to be working all the time. 

When a major and ugly development a few blocks away was built it required a major amount of special zoning exemptions to get permission to build where they did because of the special restrictions and requirements of building on what is essentially a low grade oil field.

So I am suggesting that the answer to the riddle of how it is that LACMA came to be where it is has its origins in the restrictions on commercial use of that site.  They would not be permitted to put commercial buildings there, not at the epicenter, not right on top of the Tar Pits themselves, so they just made it a park and put the art museum there.

And that, I propose to you, is how it happened. If they could have put another cheap, shitty mini-mall there they would have, but they couldn't.

True to their values.  Pure and Unspoiled.   

Today, whenever I smell petroleum byproducts, I think of my childhood and of my mother taking me to the art museum for classes and it reminds me of happier times.

____________________________________
See the following for a discussion of the deeper meaning of the La Brea Tar Pits
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-deeper-meaning-of-la-brea-tar-pits.html

Predicting the Future of 3D Printing: Sex, Killing People and Stealing

Predicting the future can be straightforward if you follow certain rules.   They are more guidelines than rules, actually, as I will expound upon later when we get to discussing one of the pioneers in this field of prognostication, that well-known 16th century writer of entertainment fiction, Nostradamus.  One approach to this art of prediction is to apply certain constants in human nature to otherwise unrelated trends.  Whatever it is, you can be pretty sure that people will find a way to apply it to the themes of sex, killing people and stealing.  Its almost guaranteed.   Airplanes? Internet? Automobiles?  It doesn't matter, people will use them for sex, killing and stealing.

So lets apply this approach to the emerging field of 3D printing.

3D printing is hot, it is not only in our future, it is in our present. People are printing out parts for their vintage cars already.  As always it helps to have a lot of money because then you can have access to printers that can print stuff that is really hard and very precise, but even the cheaper printers are fun.

So, first sex, then killing, and finally stealing.

In the area of sex and 3D printing an obvious approach is to consider the impact on sex toys.  I know very little about sex toys I admit, but I once employed an animator who was very involved in collecting items made in Bakelite (the classic original plastic) and other plastic items on Ebay.  She was particularly fond of Hello Kitty sex toys.  If she had a 3D printer today, she could print her own and possibly reveal a whole  new dimension to her already formidable creativity.  So it is easy to predict new and creative forms of sex toys unleashed with 3D printing, no problem.

Notice adorable Japanese color choices of their Hello Kitty sex toys.  Why are they all in the "on" position?

How about using 3D printers to print semi-automatic weapons?   Again, no problem, it is already being done.  See this excellent link to a hardworking pioneer in the field and his discussion of how the topic is regulated on various 3D printing sites.

As a technical addendum to this example, I should point out that the history of modern weapons since before WWI has been to design a very reliable, accurate and functional weapon that can be produced in quantity.  The standard infantry weapon of most modern armies can be made out of a remarkably few pieces of stamped metal.   The author of the post referenced below, as a student of firearms, was well aware of this.  

"Gunsmithing with a 3D Printer, Part 1" on haveblue.org
http://haveblue.org/?p=1041

AR-15 rifle, minus barrel and stock, with .22 magazine attached

Finally, how do we use 3D printers to steal money?   One way of course is to use the weapon you just printed to rob a grocery store.   Simple, clean, and yet very stupid.   After armed robbery the first approach that comes to mind is the low-quantity counterfeiting of valuable art objects, collector's items of one type or another, including objects from antiquity.  The feasibility of this depends on how the choice of materials evolves with 3D printers and how clever people can be with emulating the characteristics of objects made of other natural materials as well as how clever they can be in emulating that feeling of antiquity at the surface of the object.  Of course none of this would fool an expert, we are just talking about fraudulent items on Ebay in this scenario, I think.  It would take a very precise "printer" indeed to sculpt out of metal a simulation of a rare Roman coin, perhaps a counterfeit Sumerian cone would be more amenable, though less valuable on the current market.     But whatever the future of art fraud is with this technology, I have no doubt that the biped mammals will make me proud and find ways to use this technology to steal.

Only time will tell if I am right or not, but I am optimistic about this.

The Run-on Sentence and Charles Dickens

You will have noticed by now that I am fond of run-on sentences and use them all the time, often with a sense of barely repressed glee. You have no idea how it used to irritate me to have my sentences corrected back in the day when anyone cared enough to try and correct me. Now they know better.

But I do realize, I mean, I am aware, that there are many out there in Internet-land who believe that this style of writing is wrong, also very wrong, and some people believe that it is also extremely and definitely very wrong.

Well, I just don't agree and for support I am going to call upon my friend the well-known writer Charles Dickens. This is from an essay he wrote in 1852 about the "Ragged Schools" movement in England of the time. I am sure you will agree with me that Mr. Dickens knows how to write English and that we should strive to emulate him in our own work.

I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of The Daily News to an effort which has been making for some three years and a half, and which is making now, to introduce among the most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of the commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their recognition as immortal human creatures, before the Gaol Chaplain becomes their only schoolmaster; to suggest to Society that its duty to this wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment, rightfully begins at some distance from the police office; and that the careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails: is horrible to contemplate.

Now that is a run-on sentence to be proud of.  I have a ways to go before I reach Mr. Dickens' level of excellence in this area.  But I will try.

If you don't know about the Ragged Schools, its a great story, and here is the Wikipedia page:

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

The above quote is from an article written by Charles Dickens for The Daily News, published in 1852. See http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/dickens_ragged_schools.htm for the complete essay.

TRW Commercials, Robert Abel & Associates and the Origins of Computer Animation

[Updated 3/6/2013   I am now quite sure that other companies also did TRW commercials, I remember explicitly one that Digital Productions worked on.  It did seem as though RA&A did get a lot of them, however]

The origin of computer animation lies in part in the very high end advertising production that was done by such companies as Robert Abel & Associates, R/Greenberg, Digital Productions, MAGI and so forth. Among these, highly prized were the very expensive and generally quite abstract  TRW commercials.

TRW was a major defense contractor, originally created to be the project lead on the secret space program of the United States after Sputnik. Their commercials were more about raising awareness of their name among the public and associating the name with cool technology than it was about selling product.  We would recognize their goals today using terms like "brand identification and management".

A typical TRW commercial might have a computer screen with CAD program, the wireframe design of a butterfly which then comes to life and flies off the screen with a voice over that says "A company called TRW". They were always hits at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre back when that event, the so-called film show, was important.

These commercials seemed to be done at Robert Abel & Associates exclusively as far as I could tell.  If there were other high-end TRW spots done by other companies, I probably was just not aware of them.  I thought it was amusing, sort of, that my peers at RA&A did not have a clue what TRW did whereas I, coming from the RAND Corporation, had a pretty good idea what their business was: spy satellites and related technologies.

So I wrote a fake TRW commercial in my head and now, many years later, I present it to you here.

The logo for TRW itself was slit-scanned, but I have not found an image or copy of it yet, so for now the basic artwork will have to suffice.

The Mighty Mitochondria

When Star Wars / George Lucas started to explain the force by inventing the back story of the Midi Chlorians, a microscopic life form that is in symbiosis with all life, many of my friends in the glamourous and rewarding visual effects industry thought it was the stupidist thing they had ever heard. Which is impressive, given the number of stupid things they have heard or have said in their line of business.

One of the leads at ILM for The Phantom Menace told me that when he read the script in preproduction that he thought the idea was so wacky that it had to have been deliberately created and added to the script as part of the LucasArts technique to help identify who leaked the script should the script get leaked. (People who were allowed to read the script for the Phantom Premise, I mean the Phantom Menace, before the movie came out were given carefully modified scripts with unique plot points so that any leaks, which are common with such movies, could be traced.  They kept an access list of who read which version of the script and could narrow down the possible suspects).  My friend thought that the idea of the Midi Chlorians was so obviously a bad idea that it could not possibly be a part of the real script.

Well I don't think it was or is stupid. I thought it was obvious that "George" was making a reference to the Mighty Mitochondria, which are really, really important and in fact is in ancient symbiosis with all life, or at least all multi-cellular life.

Pretty much any animal or plant that has more than one cell is called Eukarotic, and it consists of cells with a nucleus and a lot of these little buggers, the mighty mitochondria, inside. These mitochondria have an eerie resemblence to bacteria, and in fact they probably were bacteria once. Not only that, but according to one theory they are probably or were probably methanogens and I will let you look up why that is funny.  (OK, I will tell you.  Methanogens are the anaerobic bacteria in cows and in swamps that generate methane, the active ingredient in flatulence and they are our ancestors, some think. )

You simply can not get more important than the Mighty Mitochondria: they power our cells, they are probably very much involved in aging, and the more you know the more interesting they are. Of course, since I am concerned about the mitochondria, perhaps even worried about them, I am probably a mitochondriac.

But if you do not know what I am talking about, and/or if you have not read Nick Lane's fabulous book "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life", you should do so at once. You can get started online on Amazon.com by searching inside the book, but you should really order your own copy. The anti-oxident theory of aging comes from the Mitochondria and by reading this book you can understand why merely taking more anti-oxidents is not going to work. It will be your first step into a larger world, as Obi Wan would say, only in this case into a smaller world.

Here are some stained mitochondria that I found on the Internet.

It must be hard to make attractive pictures of devolved bacteria / pond scum, don't you think?

The book is at:

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning/dp/0199205647

The Jedi explain the Midi Chorlians here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfDmu4f8l8I

The Wikipedia page is here.

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

The Firesign Theatre, The "President Ride" & Unemployment

[This post was modified and extended on 9/23/2012]

In the Firesign Theatre's radio play, "I Think we Are All Bozo's on this Bus", there is a theme park and in that theme park is "the president ride" where you can ask a question of "the president".  So someone goes up and says:  "Mr President, where can I get a job?",  and the President ride responds: "Many busy executives have asked, what about the job displacement program? ... " and of course completely avoids answering the question.   Just like the real presidents.   The Firesign Theatre was remarkably prescient.

Both the Democrats and Republicans studiously avoid talking about the unemployed, and the many issues related to it.   There is a good reason for this and that is because they have caused this situation with their policies and their failures to create policy and they have done so in an unintentionally bipartisan way.  They have no intention of changing their policies because they are working just fine and doing what they were intended to do.   Their goals were to make large corporations richer, impoverish the middle class, and destroy worker's rights.  If these were not the goals of their policies then our elected officials must be very incompetent indeed because that is what they achieved.

Yes, yes, I know, you think this sounds paranoid or unfair.  I will explain what I mean by this in more detail below and it is a little more subtle than it sounds at first glance.  No, of course they did not vote to impoverish Americans, not exactly, but if their actions or inactions have the same result, then I think it is fair to hold them responsible.

With great power comes great responsibility.    That is the deal.  When one becomes President, or a senator, or a member of the House of Representatives, then not only is one given a salary in the top 5% of all Americans, but one is also given access to vast resources: money, intelligence, raw military power, and support of many kinds.  In return, you are expected to keep the country out of war when you can, to fight a war successfully when we must, and to see that the people that you represent are free and prosperous.   If you fail through your actions or your inactions, as an individual or as a group, then you should be held accountable.   "The Buck Stops Here."  Perhaps someone else would have had the brilliance, wisdom and charisma to have led us through those troubled waters successfully when you did not.

In the US Navy, a captain of a ship is held responsible for whatever happens to that ship and he is judged by the rules and laws that pertain to the responsibilities inherent in being captain of a military vessel.  If a ship runs aground, even if it does so because of an unexpected event of natural causes, such as a storm, then the captain of that ship is held accountable and his behavior and decisions are reviewed by a court martial (literally, a military court).   And during the time of this procedure he is relieved of his command, and he may only be restored if he is completely exonerated.

There is somewhere between a 15% to 22% unemployment rate in this country.  Our elected representatives have done such a bad job that it is not even possible to get the real number.   There is vast misery and inequality, ageism and racism, and a massive deficit where before there was a massive surplus.  Maybe "globalism" is the cause and maybe it isn't.   But even if it is, we are not a passive victim of globalization, more than any other country in the world we helped to create it.  So if globalism is the storm, then you are the captain that navigated right into it.   However the Great Depression happened, it was FDR and the New Deal who got us out of it.   You guys kicked the can down the road too many times and the 800-lb chickens have come home to roost, so to speak.

As a world class practitioner of passive aggressive behavior, I can testify to you today that failure to act is a form of action.   Failure to have  a coherent policy is a form of policy.   You are our elected representatives and we hold you responsible.

Here is an article I stumbled upon that talks about some of these issues, unemployment and worker's rights in particular.   It is s short and I think it has some good information in it.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/18/the-job-crisis-the-unemployable-and-the-fiscal-cliff/

Does Star Wars Have a Line of Dialog With a Double Meaning?

With this post we now broach a topic of central importance to all of us: the role of ambiguity in cinematic Space Opera.

Near the end of the final Star Wars film, Obi-Wan says something that set me back a moment and made me think. Is it possible that a character in a Star Wars film said something that was layered with meaning? Actually having one meaning on the surface and another at a different level? Could this be?

Arguably there is one other potential case of a double meaning in Star Wars, that being the sequence where Obi-Wan famously tells Luke something about his father, but certainly not everything.   He says that his father was a good friend, a great pilot, fought in the clone wars but had been "murdered and betrayed by Darth Vader", failing to mention that Luke's father and Darth were the same person. Now maybe that qualifies as a double meaning, or maybe its just plain old lying by omission, and that is not quite the same thing.

The case I am referring to is different. It takes place during the the climactic fight between Obi-Wan and his former pupil, Anakin, the proto-Darth. They are fighting over a lava field and of course have time to have a discussion while they try to kill each other.

So Obi-Wan and Anakin are fighting and talking, and they say things like this

Anakin: If you are not with me, then you are my enemy.

Obi-Wan: Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.

Anakin: You will try.

They fight for a few minutes, then Obi-Wan says

Obi-Wan: I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.

Anakin: I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over.

Obi-Wan: Anakin! Chancellor Palpatine is evil!

Anakin: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

Obi-Wan: Well then you are lost!
Anakin: This is the end for you, my master.

Then they fight some more when suddenly Obi-Wan jumps to a nearby ridge, looks down at Anakin and says ...

Obi-Wan: It's over, Anakin!  I have the high ground.

You see, it seems to me that Obi-Wan is actually saying something here that is both literally true and metaphorically true. He has the high ground, standing on a ridge and all, but he also has the high moral ground. Is this possible, could it be that a Star Wars character would say such a thing?

Well, if it is true, it doesn't last very long.   The next lines of dialog are:

Anakin: You underestimate my power!

Obi-Wan: Don't try it.

But of course, Anakin does try it, and for the first time in the history of the cinema, someone who does a stupid move in a sword fight (like spinning around or jumping over someone) is rewarded as they should be rewarded: they are cut off at the knees. Or worse.

Of course, I can't be sure that I am right about Obi-Wan and his high moral ground but nevertheless I wanted to alert you to this exciting possibility.

The scene itself is located on Youtube at the following location.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwy412nttI