The Writing Sample

There are those of you out there who have requested a "writing sample".   They are provided, below, at the following link.

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/search/label/writing%20sample

Reality vs Photography: The Case of the Flying Peacock

The following image was brought to my attention by Clark Anderson and has been making the rounds on the Internet.

 I looked at this image and immediately thought "fake", but after some research into it, I am pretty sure it is real, with some solid photographic help.

The peacock is the classic example in evolutionary circles of an out-of-control, positive-feedback loop in selection. Peahens like flashy peacocks and mate with them, resulting in more males with flash and more females who like males with flash. So it is believed.

It is also the case that the peafowl (as they are known to non-gender-biased zoologists) does not have many predators where they live, and the predators that they do have only eat them when they can not find anything else. Another helpful trait if you are going to have 2/3rds of your body mass invested in this huge dead weight on your ass.

But getting back to our photograph, what we have here is one in a series of photographs in India of a peacock who was jumping around that day in the presence of a persistent photographer who, with his trusty telephoto and probably image stabilized lens, was able to get a number of pictures when the peafowl was (very briefly) in flight.

So what I think you are seeing here is an unusual pose of the peacock in the process of leaping up, the foreshortening of the telephoto lens, and possibly the benefit of a camera that takes many photos as quickly as it can.   Either that or the photographer was remarkably quick and/or lucky to catch the pose that he or she did.   

Then, one of these photographs, which happened to catch a nearly full jump of the peacock, was cropped, color timed, and probably had contrast modified and some sharpening. Thus a very iconic and graphic image was created from an image of something that does exist in nature, although you are never likely to see it this way yourself, even if you lived near a flock of peacocks.  

Here is the original composition as photographed. 

Original image at http://i.imgur.com/q0ukH.jpg

It has never been the case, that photography simply recorded what was there in an objective and unmodified manner. Photographers have always added their own spin and point of view, but usually it results in something that is not quite so dramatically graphic.

Photorealism is a style of painting, not of photography.

Here is a photograph from the same series of photographs of our jumpy peacock as found on Wikipedia.

Here are nine pictures from the same series:

http://izismile.com/2011/10/24/beautiful_flying_peacock_9_pics.html

The Psychological Effects of Flare in Dr. Strangelove (1964)

One of my favorite things in the world is flare. I mean flare like you might find in photography, not "flair", which is also good, but something else. Flare is a lens aberration that comes from light reflecting off elements in a lens. I mean a REAL lens, not the fake lenses that one finds in computer animation or the fake lens flare programs people sell for photoshop. I mean the real flare that comes from real lenses, particularly older lenses, that comes from light being being deflected from where it should be going, to the emulsion or sensor, and instead bounces around inside the lens, willy nilly, going whereever it damn well pleases.

The type of flare I am talking about has several kinds of effects. One kind of effect is on the image (loss of contrast, washing out the blacks, causing halation or a glow around bright objects, etc). But it has another kind of effect as well, a wonderful effect. It has a cognitive effect, or if you prefer a psychological effect. We have learned that when you take a picture in bright sunlight, that the image will be washed out. We have learned that when you take a picture of a bright object, that there will be a distortion of some sort of the picture. We have learned to expect to see halos around lights in night photography. And because we have all learned this, and don't think about it anymore, we can use this to create in an image a different feeling or persuade you to think you see something that is not there.

So, if I am simulating a city at night, or an airplane at night with bright lights on it, then it is a standard approach to create a halo or some other artifact around each of the lights that are supposed to be bright. Back in the days when people did model photography, they would reshoot a scene with only the lights visible, everything else black, in order to get a "light pass" which could then be composited in. Think Bladerunner (1982) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). These kinds of effects are all throughout these two films. (The effects facility was the brilliant Entertainment Effects Group in the Marina, now long gone, and the work was supervised by Doug Trumbull and Richard Yuricich, both ASC.)

But there is one sequence of all that is my favorite use of flare. It is all through this sequence, a sequence that I consider one of the best in all of film, and no one ever notices. This is "the bomb run" from Dr. Strangelove which is six minutes long and is the last six minutes before the bomber drops an atomic bomb on a target in the former Soviet Union. It is the sequence where they run through the checklist for the bomb and try to get the bomb bay doors open. Among other things, it has a very young James Earl Jones in the role as bombadier ("Negative function, sir. Bomb bay doors do not open, sir").

Here are some images from this sequence.

There is flare in every one, and a lot more in the sequence itself. It is completely subliminal and I promise you that it is not accidental. I say that with such assurance because before Stanley Kubrick was a director he was a professional photographer in NYC. And no photographer is unaware of flare. Not a chance. This was deliberate and I think it adds to the atmosphere of the world inside the bomber.

What a shame that lens designers work so hard to remove flare from modern lenses. Progress, I guess.

There is an ok copy of the bomb run at the following link. The particular sequence I am referring to is from 3:00 into the clip to the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTo-iFBu14U&feature=related

Zeiss explains their T* anti-reflection coating in this youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtmQgoOZ3cw

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

Reality vs Visual Effects: The Case of the F-15 Over Afghanistan

I regularly stumble across pictures from the real world that look fake to me.   I believe that if this picture was used in a movie, that is if there was a scene that looked like this, people would complain about the bad and obviously fake visual effects.

Here is a picture of a fighter being refueled at night over Afghanistan.

Examine the picture (click on it to enlarge it) and then read my notes below.   These are the notes that I would give the technical director of the shot to help him or her understand what some of the problems are.

An F-15E Strike Eagle from the 391st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, refuels Dec. 12 during a combat mission. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon)

1. The camera seems to be in an improbable position.  But it isn't, this is a camera on the refueling aircraft, completely normal.

2. The background (terrain) looks overly simple, it needs more detail.   That's how a lot of Afghanistan looks in winter at night.

3. The motion blur looks wrong.   But it isn't, the background is blurred because we are travelling fast over the ground, the airplane is not blurred because it has matched our speed.  The camera is at an oblique angle and the ground closer to the bottom of the picture is travelling "faster", e.g. more screen distance vertically, than the terrain in the upper part of the picture, hence the motion blur in the bottom of the picture is visibly more than the blur near the top, and this is correct.

4. You can see inside the cockpit.  That is correct, very high visibility these cockpits. And lots of illumination from the refueling boom.

5. The fighter itself is too low detail.  It looks like a model.   But it isn't.  F15s look like that from this point of view.  If you got up close you would see more detail, but it is deliberately supposed to be a sortof even grey from a distance (its a form of camouflage).

6. There appears to be a matte line around the front of the aircraft.   Yes there does appear to be a matte line, but it isn't.  It is the dark sky reflecting in the metal of the nose as it curves down.   It just looks like it has been outlined.

7. The lighting looks weird.   Its not your imagination, the lighting is weird.  We have a refueling boom with some sort of really bright (sodium?) light on it, a very bright moon illuminating everything with a blue-white light, reflections from the moon off the ground, illumination inside the fighter.  This is weird lighting.   That's just the way it is, or was, that night over Afghanistan.

In fact, it is a picture of a fighter at night over Afghanistan in winter being refueled.  It looks like that.   I think this is very amusing.

The original picture is at
http://www.strategypage.com/military_photos/military_photos_20121106215639.aspx

Some Modest Suggestions in Light of the Disney Acquisition of ILM

I have hesitated to comment on the Lucasarts / ILM acquisition and what it may imply for the future of ILM because, oddly, I did not want to annoy people. Besides, how would I know, or what would I know that could possibly contribute? Other than the history of the field, and the history of various studios when it comes to visual effects facilities and how the studios think about such things, that is.

In a future post I will review some of the structural reasons why it is so hard to have a facility like ILM at a studio like Disney, but first, I am going to review some ideas that may be useful. I am pretty sure that my friends at ILM know these already, but there are others who are interested who may not. And it doesn't hurt to discuss these things a little bit, as far as I know.

Suggestion #1. Do not lose money.

Of course it is better to make a lot of money, but if you do not lose money then you are not obviously a perceived drag on the profits of the company. Its more complicated than that, a lot more complicated, but making a dollar is a much better position to be in than losing a dollar. But whatever you do, do not lose a million dollars on some project and expect them to want to pick it up.

Suggestion #2. Be low maintenance.

Manage yourself so well, that keeping you around seems effortless to Disney management. No big horrible scandals, no personnel disputes that become newsworthy, only positive modest press releases that help you get more work but does not interfere with anything that Disney is doing. Fly low, avoid enemy fighters. Avoid controversy.

Suggestion #3. Find a way to deal with Disney producers.

The standard problem in this situation is that a company like Disney Studios which makes movies, will encourage their producers to use an in-house facility, which ILM now is. But the producers are interested in saving money, and will want ILM to give them a deal. This always happens, that is the good side of the situation. The bad side is what happens when people don't love each other anymore, when they do not like the deal, when they do not like being charged for adding a billion shots at the last minute, when they do not like being charged because they went to the lowest bidder they could find then call on ILM to save their stupid ass at the last minute. Then people get unhappy and they take their unhappiness out on ILM.  You see, the producers have access to the top management at Disney and they are not shy about complaining about being charged for the work.

Suggestion #4. Find a way to deal with the fact that you work with the competition.

ILM makes its money by doing excellent visual effects as a work-for-hire production service facility for a fee.  The point is, ILM does work for whatever studio is willing to hire them. But the Walt Disney Company competes with these other studios and they may have a film coming out that competes with a film you worked on for another studio, and the producers and executives at Disney may not like that. I have no idea what you do about this situation, it is not reasonable to expect the producers at Disney to be mature on this topic. I suppose that one thing you can do is to be low profile and not try to get the normal publicity that a successful visual effects film often generates.

I predict that if you are able to do these things, that you will be able to continue the remarkable track record that ILM has generated thus far. There are major institutional reasons why a company like Disney does not normally have a facility like ILM as part of their company and those reasons are all still operative (the subject of a later post). But I am hopeful that you can find a path through this jungle and that the (somewhat obvious) ideas above may be of modest use.

Introducing the Female Lead with Visual Effects: Three Case Studies

Even though we acknowledge the central importance of conflict between giant robots, the choreography of spaceship battles, and the sheer awe inspiring triumph of the hordes of zombies at the end of humanity, it does not diminish these vitally important tasks to suggest that there are other, perhaps peripheral, roles for visual effects which nevertheless can contribute to the film.  

To that end, we will present three examples here of visual effects used to introduce the female lead.

I can just see my reader's lips curl in disgust. The female lead? A girl? In a movie with giant robots or zombie hordes?    Yes, in spite of Hollywood's best efforts to diminish the role of women in film, they do linger on, if for no other reason than to provide a cheesy lust object for the adolescent male audience, as well as other, minor dramatic roles from time to time.  Thus it is reasonable to consider how special photographic effects might be used to help facilitate such story points as introduction of the character, death of the character, and so forth.

Just as in a musical, where a song must contribute to the story, in a visual effects film we would hope that there might be a way to use the same ideas that are featured in the dramatic sections of the film to introduce major or minor characters of the narrative.    If we have a film about giant robots, then perhaps the lead female can be born from the forehead of a giant robot, perhaps Optimus Prime, as Minerva was born from the forehead of Zeus. Or in a sensitive drama about zombies, we might first meet our female lead eating brains at lunch and worried about keeping her girlish figure.

Here are three examples where the female lead is introduced to the audience in a way that is (a) spectacular, (b) tells us something about the character, and (c) communicates something to us that will be useful in developing the story, or in the third example, to the (somewhat) surprising climax of the story.

The three case studies are from Roger Rabbit (1988), The Matrix (1999) and Shaolin Soccer (2001).

In Roger Rabbit (1998), our protagonist, a private detective, Eddie Valiant, is hired to see if Jessica Rabbit is involved with another rabbit, or person, as the rumors suggest. As part of his investigation, Valiant goes to see Ms. Rabbit perform at a fancy nightclub where he learns she is not a cartoon rabbit, but a cartoon femme fatale. This is a famous scene so I am sure you know all about the tone mattes and optical compositing done at ILM.  One could not ask for a better introduction of this character. The song also advances the story, helping to establish Jessica as a sex goddess who breaks the hearts of both men and rabbits.

Why does Valiant keep his overcoat on in this scene?   It feels inappropriate to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5THitqPBw

In our second example, we have everyone's favorite polyethelyne poster child, Carrie Anne Moss, known as Trinity in her landmark film The Matrix because she perfectly expresses the three values of sex, violence and shiny catsuits in women. We meet this woman typing happily on her laptop in a decrepit room of some sort, when suddenly she is the target of a police raid. There are several interesting things in this scene beyond the first use of so-called "bullet time", which is an extension of the Brigham morphing technology of years ago. First, we learn that she can take on two "units" of policemen without too much trouble (a unit is probably either 3 or 4 policemen). Second, we learn, when this is all done, that this incredible woman is terrified to hear that there are "agents" in the area, thus telling us something about the world we are in. Third, we learn that properly applying traditional analog techniques of lighting can bring out the best of Ms. Moss in a tight jumpsuit. Notice the subtle use of lighting below, which carefully accents her formidable attributes as perceived by many adolescents.

A careful use of key lights can add specular highlights to shiny contours

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtk7mweahY

In our final scene, we have a film that is well known in the far east, but got very little distribution in North America to the best of my knowledge, Shaolin Soccer (2001). In this intellectual drama, good is pitted against evil in the form of a soccer contest, and good is enhanced through the power of the secret techniques from the Shaolin monastery of China. This movie makes extensive use of the rather obvious in retrospect idea that some of the most important things in sports can be made trivial through using CG to create the soccer balls (or whatever the sport in question uses, ping pongs, basketballs, etc) and just having the actors / players mime performing the sport. But in this scene, our hero spies his future love, the poor and acne challenged Mui making bread. If you havent seen this scene before you should watch it, it is pretty great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBebT-rKeM\

Roger Rabbit on imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096438/

Shaolin Soccer on imdb

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

The Matrix on imdb

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

The Josh Pines Job Interview Technique

Today when one applies for a job you are rejected out of hand either by a computer, or in some cases, by a human resources person who is no where close to being qualified to evaluate your suitability for the job. The old system of working through colleagues and recommendations and then interviewing the human in person (or at least by telephone) is a practice that was abandoned long ago in America, never to return.

But in 1989, when my partner and I were trying to build a new production company in Los Angeles, we had the naive belief that it was important to find out who was right for the job and to interview them in person.   This was usually easy to do because most everyone we wanted to hire lived in LA or SF.  But there were two exceptions, and both worked at R/Greenberg in NYC.   

This is the story of the interview of one of them, Josh Pines.  The story has become for me the iconic job interview, the one by which all others are measured.   I tell the story of this interview to potential employers (the very few that bother to talk to me, that is, before rejecting me) to see how they react. 

deGraf/Wahrman (dWi) had been in business about a year, maybe a little longer, and with a lot of difficulty we were being considered for the very few entertainment projects that planned to use computer animation in their production.  It may be hard to believe or relate to, but in 1989 computer animation was far from an accepted technique in motion picture or other entertainment industries (e.g. theme parks).   There were very few projects, and we got awarded not one, but two of them, and so we had to grow and we had to get film capability in place.

Back then, film recording of computer imagery for motion picture use was rarely done.  There was hardware you could buy if you could live with the record times, but everyone who had ever successfully used that hardware for this purpose, and there were three companies in the world that had, had written all the software from scratch.   If one was starting from the raw hardware, I estimated that it would take at least six months before one could start recording film reliably and with the kinds of control we needed. 

I am also a film snob, which means that I believed (and still believe) that most computer people know nothing about film and unfortunately (back then at least) most film people knew nothing about computers.   But there were a few people who I felt knew film the way a film person did, yet also knew computers.   One of them, who might be available as the others were not, was the person who had made the film recording work at R/Greenberg, and he was the person we invited to come set up high quality film recording at dWi.

So we flew him out to Los Angeles from NYC and he spent the day with us.  I forget why it took all day, but probably because we had to fly him all the way out here, we thought it was right for him to have a chance to hang with us and see if he felt good about it.   

dWi had just recently moved to their second location, behind the Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood (what is popularly known as the Norma Talmadge barn, although I don't think that Norma Talmadge had ever actually owned it).  It was a big wooden barn with a back patio with offices on two sides of a courtyard.  One side had a second story, on that second story was a hair salon.  dWi moved into the bottom floors of both sides of the courtyard.

The courtyard behind the Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood, where deGraf/Wahrman was located.  My office was on the left, the hair salon was upstairs on the right.

So Josh shows up suitably scruffy, like a good anarchist from New York City should look, and we talk to him.   Then people go away for lunch, and we had another meeting scheduled with him later in the afternoon.   When he showed up at that meeting, he looked completely different.  During lunch time, he had gone upstairs to the hair salon and had his dark and scruffy hair chopped into a crew cut and dyed platinum blonde.

I thought it was very amusing.  This is our kind of guy, I said to myself.    I think it was also a way for him to communicate to us that if we hired him, that he was going to do things like this; things that many people would never consider doing.  My interpretation was that he wanted to give us "fair warning".   

So I always tell this story to potential employers to see if they understand the reason I am telling them this story.  Its something of an intelligence test.   In my own way, I am also giving them fair warning.

The Ghost in Florence

This post is about the time I thought I had seen a ghost.

This is the only time in my life when I have sincerely, completely and without any doubt believed I had seen a ghost even though I do not particularly believe in ghosts.  I do admit to reading a lot of ghost stories from time to time. Whatever I may or may not believe to be true about ghosts, I was completely convinced I had seen one that morning.

The events in this story happened in the early 1990s, probably about 1993. I don't remember the exact year, but it doesn't matter. It was the year that I was invited to speak at Mediatech in Milan by my friend Maria Grazia Mattei. This is back when I was famous and was invited to speak at such events.   It was all too brief a trip which is normal for these conferences.  

In those days, you had to book your departure and return flights well in advance to get the best price, and changes were expensive, and with some classes of tickets, impossible.  Although I could not spend much time in Italy, I could spend a few extra days and see one other city. So I picked Florence (not sure why Florence over Venice or Rome, but it probably had to do with my comfort level for being able to take a train to and from Milan). The deal was, that I had two and a half days to be a tourist in Italy but I absolutely had to be back on the third day at Milan airport by 10 AM to catch a noon flight back to Los Angeles.

I take the train to Florence and check into a nice small hotel. The hotel is either old or the building it is in is old, but most buildings in Europe seem ancient to someone from California. I run around Florence for 48 hours and see as much medieval and renaissance art as I can. I drink too much very strong Italian coffee, I am suffering from sleep deprivation and I am completely exhausted.  I know I have to get to bed as early as I can and get up at a very early hour, check out of the hotel, catch a train back to Milan and then to the airport.

I set the alarm clock to 4 AM, turn out the lights, and fall asleep immediately.

She was standing at the foot of the bed. It was dark outside and dark in my room, but I could see her clearly. She was very old and she was wearing a beautiful dress, a dress like I have never seen, a dress from another time, complicated and faded, it seemed to glitter in the dim light.  Somehow I knew it was her favorite dress. It was the one she had been buried in.

She stood at the foot of the bed and she said "Wake up. It is time for you to wake up. You have to wake up now. Wake up."

I looked at the clock to see what time it was. It was 3:59 AM. It was time for me to get up.

The Strange Case of the Bye Bye Birdie (1963) Blue Screen Photography

[This post should be rewritten, there are two different  topics.  The first topic is how digital has increased the volume of visual effects by increasing the range within which the effects can be used, and a second post about what happens when things dont work and a classic example of using the shot anyway.]

[As an addendum to this little note, I want to remind my readers that we are talking about 1963 here, or more likely, 1962.   When I talk about blonde hair and moving cameras and pulling mattes, please recall that there is no tracking technology at the time (that I am aware of) and none of the work that has been done since then to electronically or digitally pull a matte from blonde hair.  I will do a later post on this topic,]

The coming of digital visual effects and the use of computer animation at the expense of the traditional arts may not have eliminated poverty or improved society dramatically, but it has had a notable impact on the filmmaking production process. It has done so in a number of ways, but mostly by greatly increasing the volume of work that can be done with these techniques by lowering the skill level required to execute them. Ironically, using computers has not reduced the cost of these techniques, using computers always increases costs, but it did dramatically increase the volume of shots that could use these techniques and in many cases eased the restrictions with which these techniques had to be used.

When First Secretary Joseph Stalin spoke at SIGGRAPH he said, "Quantity has a quality all its own" referring not to tank production, as some believe, but to volume production of digital visual effects. 

In the bad old days, a film was greatly restricted in its use of special optical technologies and other techniques in their production process. All films would use optical techniques for opening titles, end credits, and fades and dissolves. It used to be that the film editor acted as the visual effects supervisor, in a certain way, for a film, or most films. On top of these seemingly mundane but actually extremely important uses, a few films would make use of exotic technologies such as optical compositing, rear screen projection, and paintings on glass and other such special processes if the story and the studio permitted. A very few films and even fewer filmmakers would make these technologies part of their oeuvre, and then we might have a Hitchcock or a Disney, and films like North by Northwest, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Forbidden Planet or Mary Poppins.

Just wanted to say goodbye !

If you examine these films I suspect you will be surprised by the very small number of visual effects shots that are actually in those films. You may also be surprised by the way the limitations of the art and craft of visual effects informed some of the creative decisions. We will showcase some of these brilliant uses of this technology back in the day when you had to know something to use them successfully and couldn't just do whatever the fuck all you wanted and expect someone to fix it later.

Here are two examples of the kinds of restrictions that I am referring to: (a) the camera should not move during certain kinds of shots, or should move only in a very constrained way, because you are going to have to create other elements and those elements will also have to track with the camera and that will be annoying, difficult and expensive and (b) do not put someone with blonde or red hair in front of a blue screen because it is extremely hard, and often impossible, to pull a good, partial density (e.g. the matte is semi transparent) matte for it using the chemical blue screen process.

But whatever you do, do not put a blonde or red head in front of a blue screen while moving the camera. That would be a really crazy thing to do.

So what happened when someone ignored these guidelines and the shot didn't work?

There are three approaches and only three as far as I know: (1) cut the shot from the movie, (2) spend a lot of money trying to fix it and edit as best you can around it, or (3) use it anyway and pretend you always meant to do that.

It was in reference to this third approach that Georges Danton advised the Assemblee Legislative in 1792 saying "Il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!", which means something like "What we need is audacity, then more audacity, always audacity!"

Consider by way of example of this third approach the fascinating and not completely understood case of the opening of Bye Bye Birdie (1963).

This film is an early 60s repurposing of a Broadway musical that fictionally transforms the real-life draft of Elvis Presley into the US Army into a parable about how one can spin any adversity into a cheap publicity stunt. The film has a number of entertaining songs and a spectacular performance by the 22 year old Ann-Margret as the teenage love interest and ingenue.

The film opens with Ann-Margret in classic 1950s High School drag attacking the camera and belting out the title song with all the energy and enthusiasm you could ask for.  She sings those immortal words:

         Bye bye Birdie! I'm gonna miss you so.
         Bye bye Birdie. Why'd you have to go?
         No more sunshine! Its followed you away.
         I'll cry, Birdie, till you're home to stay!

        I'll miss the way you smile, as always just for me
        And each and every night, I'll write you faithfully!
        Bye bye Birdie, its awful hard to bear,
        Bye bye Birdie! Guess I'll always care!

        Guess I'll always care !
        Guess I'll always care !

(See the sequence on youtube.  You want the first 1:15 seconds only.   The rest is from the end of the movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t3cBTb3xPc)

It may not be Shakespeare but Ann-Margret is so completely drop dead gorgeous and talented and wonderful and I think the sequence is very entertaining.  I can just imagine the director filled with enthusiasm saying: "Oh I have an idea, while we are doing this shot, how about adding a fan offstage to blow her hair around a little, and lets make sure she turns around facing away from the camera to show her hair off, oh yes, and Ann?  Could you shake your head around a lot so we can see your fabulous hair?  Thanks thats great!"

Just try to pull a matte for this hair, you idiots!

Do you notice something odd about this shot?  Something about the background color?  Its rather blue, don't you think?

The story that is reported is that the director, George Sidney, was so taken by Ann-Margret, who was not at the time a well-known star, that he proposed to the studio that they write a song for her and use it at the front and end of the movie. The studio declined so Sidney paid for the shoot himself, spending a reported 60,000 $US. When the movie opened and Ann-Margret was famous, the studio reimbursed Sidney. The song used the music of another song from the play that was not used in the movie version, with new lyrics written for the purpose of opening and closing the movie. 

The unconfirmed story is that Sidney planned to composite her against more newspaper / news footage of Birdie going into the army so he shot against blue screen.  But, so the story goes,  he gave up the idea of compositing the sequence since it would have been too expensive (and I doubt he would have been very happy with the results).   I have a vision in my mind of the effects people called in to review the scene and looking at it on the movieola and smiling grimly every time Ms. Margret shakes her head at the camera and her hair flies around, thinking to themselves, who is going to tell the director the bad news?

So I am guessing that the director said something like: "Fuck it, no one will be looking at the background anyway, they will be looking at Ann-Margret.   Just cut it in and no one will notice."

And I think that was the right decision. 

As far as I know, this is the only major bluescreen sequence in a movie that just uses the bluescreen photography as is as if they meant to shoot it that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Bye_Birdie_(film)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056891/

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Revised 1-15-2013

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.

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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.

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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