Stanley Kubrick and the Hotel in NY

I believe that as we live our pathetic lives in our corrupt society, that we are all of us under a moral obligation to enliven and otherwise entertain each other, so that we do not all collapse into a puddle of stress and unhappiness. Sadly not everyone holds to this moral principle.

Also sadly, some of the attempted entertainment items, jokes, gags, whatever, are better than others. “I have a million jokes as good as that one” always sounds like a threat to me. Nevertheless, every once in a while things come together and work out to everyone's benefit. The point of this post is to review the structure of such a gag first used in 1997 that those who are interested in continuing in this great tradition may do so. For reasons that will be obvious in a moment, this gag would have to be updated to modern times or it would take an entirely new, and darker, feeling.

There are several ideas incorporated in this gag and so lets review them here. 1. It works to build up the mythology of the designated target in front of his or her coworkers in entertaining ways, 2. It uses as a primary mechanism certain behaviors that have been noticed in a class of worker in our society in order to achieve our goals without being physically present, 3. It seeks to achieve its goals by exploiting a weakness, in this case, the unfortunate willingness to hold in high esteem members of the motion picture industry and to think that there is anything glamourous or exciting in that industry, 4. The gag uses modesty and indirection as a technique for achieving its goals, in this case one is not impersonating a famous person, one is impersonating an anonymous and lowly assistant to the famous person, 5. It goes further by suggesting that the target is in fact the important person, whereas the off screen celebrity is actually just nobody of any special interest.

The occasion for this event was the imminent arrival of a friend from the West Coast to NYC. I knew that my friend, from ILM, would arrive on a certain day and somehow knew what hotel he was staying at. He must have told me which hotel it was, but I have no memory of that. I knew that it was possible at most hotels to leave a message in advance of arrival of the guest if they had a reservation, and furthermore, that there was a good chance that the front desk would read any such message to the arriving guest. I also knew that it was procedure for such people to arrive in groups from the airport, so that it was likely that my friend and target would arrive and check in with his co-workers all around him.

There was always the risk that the front desk would not read any message aloud, but hand it to my friend on paper. It could go either way, this is a flaw in the approach. In this case, the events turned out the way I desired but it could have been different. Had my friend received the note on paper, it would still have been entertaining, but not as much.

Given this intelligence of the imminent arrival of the target, I waited until the day before arrival and called the hotel, asking to leave a message for a guest who had not yet arrived but whose arrival was expected. The front desk was happy to do so after looking up the guests' name, Josh Pines of Industrial Light and Magic, on their arrivals list.

Then I told the front desk, in the nicest and most innocent voice I could manage, that this was Mr. Kubrick's office calling, and if Josh had any free time during his trip to NY could he give Stanley a call at home whose number was 212 888 8888. There are several tricks to this message worth pointing out. I. the person who is leaving the message am nobody, I am just representing Mr. Kubrick's office. I assume that everyone knows who Kubrick is, and would know that Stanley refers to the top guy, and that Josh might not have Stanley's home number, so I give it. In reality, of course this number is my home number, something I figured Josh would realize after a moment's thought. Also, note that it is an affectation of the motion picture industry that everyone at the top is referred to in an aw-shucks manner and by their first name. If this had been Jeffrey Katzenberg, I would call him Jeffrey, etc. The implication of course was that it was Josh who was the busy one, and it was Stanley who would rearrange his schedule to fit in Josh whenever he might be available.

So, the trap having been set, all I could do is wait and see what happened. As it turned out, in this case, everything went our way.

A group from ILM arrived at the hotel and while they waited for each member to check into the hotel, the front desk read out to Josh in a loud voice that “A Mr. Kubrick's office had called, and could Josh call Stanley at home at the following number”. This got a suitable response from Mr. Pines colleagues, although Josh immediately saw through the ruse, and said it was “just” Michael Wahrman. Nevertheless, when Josh went up to his room, his electronic key did not work. Puzzled he went down to the front desk and discovered that he had been upgraded to a better room by the hotel.

[Josh tells me that he never referred to "just" Michael Wahrman, but in fact informed Ellen Poon, a member of that party, after the fact and outside the lobby, who was behind the  gag.  He also reports that the people most impressed with the gag were behind the counter, which does not surprise me at all, and in fact is part of the reason I hoped that they would read the message out loud.  In other words, they would read it out loud and make a slightly bigger scene of it all because the workers at the hotel thought it was exciting, not because Josh's colleagues did.  Anyway, Josh does report that he got a better room and it was very nice.  That of course was an unexpected result].

If we were to try and repeat this gag exactly today, we would want to designate a different celebrity director, as Mr. Kubrick is no longer with us, which is a shame.

In fact, the person most amused by this stunt was and still is myself.  I was really delighted and still am.   Probably would not work a second time (at least not at the same hotel).

In this manner, we endeavor to entertain our friends and try to alleviate the endless boredom and misery of their everyday lives. If only some of them would reciprocate, that my life would also be enlivened. But I wait in vain for that happy day.

The Heavens Have Foretold Your Doom

At one time or another, many computer animation people have worked to create an illusion of the night sky from earth or of its cousin, a “star field”, which is an imaginary view of the stars from space. Whether this was for their own amusement, for visual effects purposes, or for scientific visualization, these innocents would approach the problem with the assumption that it was going to be easy. How hard could it be, its just a bunch of random white dots, after all. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that doing excellent starfields is far from trivial.

A classic traditional technique to create starfields is to create a cyc, or curved screen, painted black and with very small holes punched in it. Then behind this screen was a curved light source, usually florescent tubes. The camera would be at the center of the implied sphere of the screen and when the room was darkened and the backlight illuminated, you had a curved space of very bright, very small light sources which could be photographed with long exposures when the camera was moving. The result was excellent motion blurred, perfectly antialiased, very high contrast star fields. But ultimately there were certain moves that the motion control camera could not easily do, such as tumble end over end for example, so there was a need to synthetically generate these elements.

Another time honored technique which looked excellent was the painting on glass. Most of the times you saw stars in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) you were seeing an optical composite of a live action element or motion control shot with a matte painting on glass.

Since everyone seems to have to go through the same learning curve, I am providing notes here for what some of the issues facing 3D technical directors as they produce their first starfield and I have written it as a letter to my younger self.

September 19, 1983

Oh, unwary traveler, so proud of your 3D knowledge, your knowledge of geometric modeling, or of animation whether scripted or procedural, and of global illumination; do you think to encompass the heavens with these pathetic tools? Fool, your doom is assured. There are more things in heaven and on earth than are encompassed in your philosophy, or so I have heard, and when you approach the field of scientific visualization you must unlearn what you have learned and embrace the esoteric wisdom. You must open your eyes in order to see the light.

What perils await the unwary, the arrogant, the unlettered?

The first peril is the vast expanse of space. There is the scale of mortal man, then the scale of the solar system, then the scale of one single galaxy, and then beyond. These differences in scales are way beyond what most software packages can handle, so using the 3D positions of everything in a naive fashion is unlikely to work.

And that renderer you are so proud of.  Does it do all its calculations of space in 64 bit floating point or even higher precision?   Most renderers, with a few notable exceptions,  do the majority of their work using single precision floating point which may be adequate for a giant robot or two, but falls apart in the vast distances of space.  

The second peril involves the issue of filtering of what is very untypical samples.  Most scenes render surfaces with various lighting applied.   But a great deal of what you wish to render are stars but what are stars? Stars are huge things, but they are (for all practical purposes) infinitely bright and infinitely small (on the screen). The amount of energy concentrated in a single pixel may be immense, but the pixel next to it may have very little or no energy at all. And what happens under those circumstances when you move the camera? Well, it aliases, of course, terribly. Furthermore, if one has modeled stars very far away and you are using point sampling of one form or another to simulate area sampling, then if you are not careful, some of your samples will miss and you will have aliasing again.

Part of the solution is to use a good filter and lots of samples and in the choice of filter lurks another threat since as we know a "good" filter, perhaps a 7x7 sinc for example, is likely to have negative lobes, and instead of throwing those values out, you should keep them until the end and even then you should not throw them away. What then to do with them is a mystery left as an exercise for the reader.  The best solution of course would be to have a display that could absorb light as well as emit it, but we wait in vain for the display manufacturers to come to our aid.

And what about those overly bright stars? Will you generate glows and other artifacts? After all we are not just trying to simulate realistic stars, we are often trying to simulate realistic stars as the audience has seen them, and expects to see them.

Although the sky is filled with stars, that is not the only thing that there is. There are also great fuzzy areas known as nebulae and sometimes other galaxies. It turns out that if there is any data for that, it is likely to be volume data. But even if there is no data and you create your own, volume rendering is the best way to render a nebula one might argue. Does your renderer of choice do volume rendering?

Review the following image of the earthling's galaxy.

Do you notice the great areas of darkness? That of course is the infamous "space dust", the so-called Interstellar Media or ISM which must surely exist to hide from us the center of our galaxy where no doubt an entity of great evil exists. Surely you do not think it a coincidence that the space dust would hide what is arguably the most spectacular sight in our little neighborhood? Since most star catalogs do not have the ISM modeled, you may wish to develop a model of ISM in your spare time. If not, the galaxy will not look right unless you simply leave out the stars that are in those areas (which may or may not be be in the catalog anyway as they are impossible to view from earth, at least in the visible bands).

Because you are rendering stars, no doubt you have studied scotopic vision.  It goes without saying that whenever the biped mammals have watched the stars they have, generally, been night adapted. And yet they see color sometimes, perhaps they see Angry Red Planet Mars or Betelgeuse and they perceive the color red.   How then are they seeing color? It may help the seeker of knowledge to realize that “scotopic” is named for the Skoptsy sect of religious devotees whose most notable doctrine is of male castration.  (see link below)

Of course I am sure when you move the camera you will motion blur everything. Oh yes, what do you plan to do with the speed of light issue? I am sure you will come up with something.

So, foolish mortal, you have been warned.

These are just the first of the issues you must address for a proper starfield.

Fools may go where wise people fear to tread.

Sincerely,
A Friend.

___________________________________________________________

Scotopic Vision

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

The Skoptsy

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

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075860/

The Mighty Sphere

About two years ago, I decided to learn NVIDIA's GPU programming environment, CUDA. I wrote a volume renderer in it which can render anything you want as long as it is a sphere.

The problem of course with volume rendering is getting data to render. Volume datasets are usually associated with scientific visualization and when you can get them at all they are not trivial to process. They are real data about real things and it requires serious work to make something of them.

So, for my tests I used normal 3D objects but made every vertex a sphere. It turned out pretty well. Here are two test images, one with glowy spheres and one with spheres that were more hardedged.

You get extra credit if you can figure out what they were originally.

Give up?  The one on the bottom is an upside down SR-71.   The one on top is something with a backbone, you can see the vertebrae clearly.  Dont remember what it was, though.

Mary Poppins Remix by Pogo (Nick Bertke)

An electronic musician named Nick Bertke (aka Pogo) creates remixes of well-known films using sounds and images from the film with some rhythm added.

Check out his Mary Poppins remix "What I Likes".

Julie Andrews is pretty spectacular even if she is vocalizing syllables and not complete words in this version.   Notice the sense of relief when it actually drops into some Mary Poppins music about 2/3rds of the way through (when they are cleaning the children's room).  

But most of all, notice the amazing backgrounds and paintings (were these done by Peter Ellenshaw?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5w6XI5lfdg

Photograph Demonstrating the Permanence of High School

New York Magazine has an excellent essay on the subject of whether or not we ever really leave High School.   Its a topic of great interest to most of us, but may be slightly misdirected, as it seems that so many of our peers have the emotional maturity of someone stuck in Jr. High School, not High School.

But nevertheless, its an interesting article and it can be found here.

But the real reason I am mentioning it is because I thought that they introduced their article with a truly great picture.

Does the "Happy Face" button and haircuts identify the year of the original photograph?

Notice the attention to detail.   They are wearing very similar clothes, if not identical ones, and are trying to duplicate their facial expressions, slumping body positions, the sense of a group of friends on the loose in New York City (presumably), etc.   Its the same t-shirt that the guy 2nd from the left is wearing, or an amazing replica.   Notice the vacant grin on the guy sitting down.   Its beautiful.

What makes it great is not the technique: the goal of the technique was to duplicate the cheesy feel of the original.   Technique is important in anything, but it is not the only thing.  These pictures could be out of focus and they would still be great.

Rocket Launch Attempts and Their Many Uses

This post will review various space program "launch attempts" (e.g. rocket failures) in the context of the study of animation techniques, the history of the cold war, and as a short term anti-depressant.

A real test of a visual effects studio is its ability to both animate and light things like explosions, dust clouds and water, the classic effects animation topics.  There are a variety of reasons for this, and one of them is talent.  These types of phenomena come under the purview of the effects animator, a rare and usually undervalued skill.  The way to get around the talent problem, I have always found, is to use computational fluid dynamics to simulate the effect and thus substitute technology for talent.   For excellent real world examples of CFD animation and lighting, look no further than the space program launch attempts.  They are complicated, robust, generally show very interesting lighting (including internal lighting), happen in both night and day, and are well documented from several points of view simultaneously.   And best of all they are free, or almost free.

I have selected several sequences from a collection of such things that I bought years ago on DVD, an excellent collection of launch successes and failures from different points of view, with narration done by a member of a rocket club who seems to be knowledgeable about these launches.  Unfortunately, I can not remember the name of this rocket club that produced this collection, and I can not find them online, yet.  But when I do, I will post a link so that hopefully you can order your own copy should you wish to do so.

Continuing on the theme of animation technique, these launch attempts are excellent examples from the real world of both anticipation and follow-through.   We know that something bad is going to happen, we have to wait for it, and then when an explosion finally happens there is almost always a pause, then another explosion, bigger than the first, often flying debris, or a sense of falling, then another explosion.  This is part of what makes it interesting.  Compare and contrast this with a normal explosion as seen in a stupid movie (oops, I meant to say movie, not stupid movie, how silly of me) when an explosion just happens once, bang.   No, no, no.  What you want is an initial explosion, then another, then another, that sort of thing.  Second, notice the complexity and the additional layering of debris, often with very different momentum and physical characteristics than the initial or primary explosion.  E.g. the pieces that fly off a rocket and fall at their own rate.  This complexity adds authenticity.

A variety of launch attempts have been uploaded to Youtube and a few more are on the way.

Atlas Centaur Launch Attempt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUsUwn5awkE&feature=youtu.be

Juno 2 Launch Attempt:
http://youtu.be/MOBCT6AIvX8

Titan 1 Launch Attempt:
http://youtu.be/T0gofrDOWh0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEeSxJ6dXdc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q47VhdmJwv8

Moving on we now discuss the two related topics of the history of the cold war and of non-traditional anti-depressant technique.

During the cold war the Soviet Union was so presumptious as to attack our civilian space program, accusing it of being a transparent front for our military space program.  Years have passed and I have examined this charge and find that it is only 99% or so accurate: in fact our civilian space program was transparently a front for our military space program.  Our space program had several different purposes, of course, but first and foremost it was a deliberate way to take the high road on the competition for the hearts and minds of the people of the world in the context of the cold war between the two "civilizations".

Finally, in the larger context of finding ways to relieve the vast ennui and despair that afflicts so many of my friends (not me, of course), I find that watching rockets explode many times in a row is good for stress relief, similar to popping a lot of bubble wrap, for some unknown reason.   Its a short term relief, but it does seem to work both for me and for a few people I have tried it on.  Unfortunately to do that well, I have to get more examples online, and I will gradually do so.   (This is a continuation of a theme on non-traditional anti-depressant technology, which I first started in this post).

The Atlas rocket family on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(rocket_family)

The Atlas-Centaur on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas-Centaur

Transcendence in Visual Effects: Expressing the Inexpressible in Shaolin Soccer (2001)

As we have previously discussed, visual effects can be used for purposes beyond mere reality, but can be used to express an emotion, or the inner life of a protagonist, or in this case the experience of attaining spiritual enlightenment.

When seen in this light, most visual effects are revealed to be the empty shells that they are: communicating nothing of value, the mere posturing of one giant robot to another, of another wall that explodes, a car that crashes or the actions of a zombie going through the motions of being a human but empty of genuine human thought or emotion. It is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

But when the purpose and talent of the filmmaker uses visual effects for a higher, more noble purpose, then visual effects can add tremendous value to a film.

In this example, from Steven Chow's Shaolin Soccer (2001), visual effects is used to show the triumphant return to enlightenment of the former and debased monks, who through the discipline of soccer and the humiliation of being defeated through the deceit and immorality of the practice team, achieve enlightenment on the soccer field. Thus the fire that appears behind them when they open their eyes, is the fire that is experienced by the soul when it attains this spiritual state. And the practice of playing soccer is a metaphor for how the secret techniques of the monks of Shaolin can lead to a better and more actualized life in the so-called real world.

The sequence is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFTP4Xj9Q-s

It is not clear which school of Buddhism is being presented, it may be an esoteric form of practice. But I have no doubt that the practice exists or should exist as the seriousness of purpose of the filmmakers comes through in every frame of their film.

A better use of the technique of a modified "bullet time" does not exist and many doubt it could exist, so perfect is its use here.

The Wikipedia page:

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

The IMDB page:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286112/

Favorite Mistakes in Computer Animation 1

As everyone who has done computer animation knows, some of our favorite images are not intentional.  In fact, they were so not intentional that they are actually mistakes.

Even worse, you have to be very careful not to show mistakes to a client, because they might like it, and then you might really be in trouble because you might now know how to get that look again or to control it.  One of the worst things that can happen is for a client to like a mistake but want 10% more of whatever it is that you did not intend to do.

Here is a recent mistake that I like a lot.  Its an early attempt at volume rendering of a protein molecule, with an effort to visualize the nucleus (protons, neutrons) and the electron clouds of the atoms.  Clearly something has gone very wrong... You can see what looks like circles off on the perimeter: those are the individual electron clouds where there are few enough that you can make out individual clouds.

Obviously, in the center, things get out of hand.

I think it looks like a good early effort at a galactic explosion of some sort.

Portrait of Nicki K at the VES Awards

There are several issues that are demonstrated with this picture of my friend, Nicki K, at the VES awards many years ago.

The first issue is that I am attempting to capture some sense of the subject's personality or psychology in these images.  Towards that end, such matters as focus or bright illumination are not terribly relevant.

The second issue is the overwhelming question of what is the proper place of photo-modification, sometimes called "photoshopping" and sometimes known as "wire removal", and sometimes by other terms in visual effects.

I think that there is a value in capturing these images in camera, e,g. with the qualities of such things as f-stop, exposure times, the decisive moment (e.g. when you take the picture) and so forth.  This image has not been modified in any form from its scan from the negative, not even for color correction.

It has been reduced in resolution to make it easier to view on the web.

In other words, the blur is naturally part of the picture.

Photo-Realism and Nausea

Of all the phrases that made me sick to my stomach, a client asking for "photorealism" was one of the most potent nausea producers.   Why ?  Because photo realism is a style of painting, and not particularly applicable to a judgment about whether an image looks real or not.  An image looks real (when created with artificial means, e.g. crayons, computers, spit, etc) when it is art directed and integrated into its medium to look real, not because of any inherent "photo realism".

Here is one of my favorite images made with Photorealistic Renderman, hopefully it does not look even the least bit "photoreal" to you.