Fraulein Usage in Modern German and Its Effect on Cinema and Special Effects

[Global Wahrman has had an admittedly ambiguous policy towards comments, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, having its origins with so many spam comments in the early days.  But in a stunning reversal of policy, we wish to encourage user comments on this topic: are these pictures sexist and does it relate to the term "fraulein"?]

There are few more important things to people than what they are called. One person's diminutive is another person's mortal insult. And there are many rules here, culturally specific rules. Eddie Murphy can use the "N-word" but under no circumstances may I use the "N-word", for example.

So fair warning for those of you who are not up on your contemporary German: "fraulein" is a word that is strongly discouraged these days, through a German social process that is the equivalent of our "Mrs/Miss/Ms" dialectic.

When I first heard this, I was not all that impressed.  But I just did a test and it occurs to me that there may be some subtle issues here (sarcasm, sorry).    Just do the following experiment.  Go to Google, type in "fraulein" and then go to images, then stand back.  Holy moly!  See for example:

Is there something sexist about this image?

From a latex couture magazine, yikes, fraulein, please, put some clothes on!

What could be sexist about this?

Click here for the Google image search.

So, to be clear, to the best of my knowledge one may still use "fraulein" in a way that is not insulting when addressing a very young girl, either sternly or genially (e.g. humorously, perhaps, just guessing, one might say "perhaps the fraulein would be so good as to clean up her room" when addressing a six year old gal, perhaps, and that might still be OK). But otherwise, one uses the term "frau" so far as I can tell.

Now I have a few friends who are far more knowledgeable about both feminism and modern German, so they will enlighten us all, I hope, but in the meantime, a word to the wise is hopefully sufficient.

Now does this mean that we should go back and change all our World War II movies and television shows? That is a question with no single answer, I think. If one were going for authenticity in the movie/show, then the answer would be no, it would still be correct to use "fraulein" in that time period. But if one were doing a new show, today, about the period, then one might think about using the modern usage if one did not intend to provoke a reaction. It could go either way, depending on what you wanted to achieve.

Now to get to our final topic: the potential effect this language change will have on the practice and art of special visual effects.  To the best of our knowledge, this change will have absolutely no effect on special effects, now or in the future.   Just wanted to reassure those of you who may have been concerned.

For a wild screaming match on the topic, see the Wikipedia discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFr%C3%A4ulein

For a more balanced discussion and presentation of the issue(s), see:

http://german.stackexchange.com/questions/966/why-is-fraulein-considered-offensive-as-opposed-to-frau

The Importance of a Classical Education for Writing Renderman Shaders

[NB: Scott Anderson supervised the visual effects of Starship Troopers for Paul Verhoeven, and many facilities participated, including Sony Imageworks, ILM, Tippet and MASS ILLUSIONS.  The pictures below are just to illustrate the movie and, in a few cases the types of elements involved, e.g. thrusters.   I have no idea who did these particular shots, with the possible exception of the one of the escape pod, which was probably done at MASS ILLUSION.  People are very touchy about their credits and who can blame them?]

Through this story I hope to demonstrate the importance of knowing Latin, or of at least having a classical education, when writing Renderman Shaders. It is also a story about what a small world the world of visual effects is.

In 1997 or so, I had been hired by MASS ILLUSION to help them finish their work on Starship Troopers (1997) and get it out the door. They had two other projects that were about to start, What Dreams May Come (1998) and The Matrix (1999), and people needed to segue from Starship onto the new projects. MASS ILLUSON won two academy awards for these latter two projects, an amazing achievement. (1)

If you look closely at the lower picture, the thrust exhaust has a detailed structure which animates slightly

So new talent was needed to help finish the project so that the regulars could move on, and I was available, on the East Coast, and actually like to help finish projects. Often bringing in new people near the end of a long complicated project can be a help, because the new people in many ways are, frankly, unaware of the history and can just look at things with fresh eyes, and they are not yet tired of the project, so they can be energetic. Its not unrelated to some of the tactics of replacements in sports.

I had some credentials for this because I have supervised lots and lots of shots and projects and happen to be very good at rendering, having a Scitech award for writing a renderer, and very good at using Renderman (2), having helped bring it into production in its earliest form at deGraf/Wahrman and enjoyed using it.

MASS ILLUSION was a pioneer in attempting to do visual effects projects remotely from Los Angeles, in this case Western Massachusetts, and not all the bugs were worked out yet, and there was friction which I attributed in part to the problem of communicating 3,000 or so miles away, as well as other complications having to do with a very complicated project and a famously demanding director.

One of the ongoing and unresolved issues was matching the thrusters, or exhaust, of the starships. The exhaust in the starships done at Imageworks had a specific look and we were not close enough to that look for the starships we were doing. But it wasn't clear what Sony had done to make their thrusters, though, because as is so often the case, the people who had done the work at Sony had moved onto other projects, and possibly also because they had used a consultant who was no longer with them to write the primary Renderman shader for the thrusters.

Escape pod thruster detail 

They were hesitant to give us the shader and when I got on the project this was one of the long standing issues between the facilities. But obviously, given that we were having trouble matching the look, having the specific shader would be a big help, and communicate to us in no uncertain terms what was going on here. We thought that they might have some proprietary technology in the shader, but that was probably not the concern. It may have been nothing more than caution, or concern that they would be asked how the shader worked, or didn't know where it was, or who knows.

The shader was called "ROSASRF" for some reason.

Finally, after some effort, I had a success and many, many months after MASS ILLUSION had first asked, we got the source to the shader after a particularly colorful telephone conference call in which I quoted a famous biblical prophecy of what would happen if they did not give us the shader. (3)

Now, I have to backup a little. I have read and written hundreds, perhaps thousands, of shaders, about half of which are written by other people and about half of which were written by myself. Of those which are written by others, if you find a single comment in their shader its a miracle from Jesus himself. Shader writers do not often write comments, it seems, perhaps they believe that it is all self-explanatory.

But ROSASRF which was a very dense and complicated shader was not only well-commented, but one of those comments was highlighted with the cryptic two letters: NB.

NB?

I started laughing. I hardly ever read shaders with Latin abbreviations, in fact it had never happened before. NB, of course, is Latin for "Nota Bene" or "note well", its a convention used by mathematicians of the old school and classical scholars of all types. It basically means "pay attention".  Its the sort of thing one would expect to find when reading a scholarly treatise about St. Augustine's City of God (de Civitate Dei) or perhaps the notes of a 17th century alchemist. Or a mathematical proof.

So whoever Rosa was, as by that time I had determined that ROSASRF was named for the consultant, someone named Rosa, clearly she had a classical education and was not one of the "repurposed garage mechanics" we normally get in visual effects. The shader was very well written, well commented, and indeed, without it, it would have been very hard to figure out how to solve the problem. So we were happy.

But I was even happier to discover that I already knew Rosa, that in fact this was my old friend Rosa Farre, whom I had met a decade before in Barcelona at a company called Animatica, and who had married my friend Darnell Williams of Symbolics. I had never seen her work before, I just knew her as this very pleasant person from Barcelona, but now I had seen her work, and clearly she was not only good at what she did, but most important of all, had a classical education and was comfortable with her Latin abbreviations.

I hope that everyone reading this will take away the final thought that they should study Latin and incorporate Latin abbreviations in all their shaders.

Thank you.

_______________________________________

Notes:

1. By the time these two projects were done, the company had gone through at least one and possibly two different reorganizations, and may or may not have been called MASS ILLUSION by then. However, the people were the same for the most part and the same spirit and sense of excellence existed, so far as I can tell. Also, a facility does not win an Academy Award, only people do. But they had been the primary facility on those two films (What Dreams and The Matrix).

2. Technically, Renderman is the standard and the actual renderer was called Photo Realistic Renderman or PRman. The name may have changed a few times since then.

3. I dont actually remember exactly what was said during the call, but I vaguely recall telling them that we really, really wanted the shader and for them to remember the prophecy "The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood when the great and terrible (day) of the Lord shall come", which in Medieval Latin, by the way, is SOL TENEBRAS ET LUNA IN SANGUINEM MAGNUS ET HORRIBILIS DEI VENIET, which I think has a nice feel to it. Anyway, they gave us the shader.

_______________________________________

References:

Starship Troopers on Imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/

City of God (De Civitate Dei) by St. Augustine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(book)

Latin Abbreviations on Wikipedia

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

White House Rejects Death Star Petition

In a stunning reversal, the White House has turned its back on the popular petition to build a Death Star, citing administration policy not to blow up planets and budgetary concerns.

Darth Vader appeals to Congress not to abandon the Death Star

See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/01/12/white-house-rejects-death-star-petittion/?tid=pm_pop

2013 VFX Nominations

The visual effects nominees are: Life of Pi, Prometheus, Snow White, Avengers, and Hobbit. My unnamed academy award winning source got four of the five right; he had picked Dark Knight over Prometheus.

Run away!

See here for an editorial about why I think Life of Pi is important for computer animation. 

Lets talk about what these nominations mean. There are five films and four people per film or a total of 20 nominations. Each of those individuals, and to a large extent the company they work for, receive a certain credibility and what I think of as gravity (e.g. mass) because of the nomination. Its a very good thing. It has a half life of about 5 years, I think. Thus the value declines by 50% in five years, by 75% in 10 years and so forth. The same is true for an academy award, but of course they start with a higher mass.

Also, do not confuse the Technical Academy Awards with these awards. I am very fond of the Scitech awards and believe that they have a lot of merit, and I am certainly grateful for the one I have. But do not confuse the chess club with the varsity football squad. Its a lot rougher on the football field.

If you, or someone you knew, who was talented and technical, and they wanted to get a Scitech award, then with a lot of hard work you can probably achieve that.  Maybe not, but you might be able to.  But you can work in the effects business all your life and still not be nominated for an academy award.  Its a whole other kettle of fish.

I think that Life of Pi is or should be the favorite, and that would be very good for Rhythm and Hues.

This all reminds me that I have to write up my John Hughes and Mary Lambert story at Robert Abel & Associates.

Some Points to Consider Before Starting a War

[Revised 1-12-2013]

I wrote this silly essay not because I am a genius who knows everything, but because it sounds to me that people around me (and people in Washington) do not know much about this very complicated and emotional topic: what it is you should expect if you start a war.  Since I think I know a lot of what you can know about the subject from reading history, and because I keep getting irritated by some of the things I hear and read which sounds appallingly naive, I have written down a short list of things that I think everyone should know, more or less, before advocating a military solution (e.g. attacking Iran, Syria, etc).  In other words, if the things I describe below do not happen, you should be pleased.  But if they do happen, you should not be surprised.

Why can't war be fun, like on television?

1. Wars are generally easier to start than to stop.

History is filled with examples where some nation (or kingdom, whatever) was able to start a war, but having started it, discovered many reasons why it was a mistake, but could not disengage. Things had spun out of control.   

2. Wars are very expensive.

Very expensive indeed.  In all the ways we might define the term "expensive", e.g. money, lives, civic discord, etc.   Historically, nations have underestimated these costs, sometimes willfully, sometimes because they are hard to predict, and other reasons.  But at the end of the day, when a nation reviews a war after it is over, rarely do they say that it came in under budget. And these costs continue long after the fighting stops.

3. People die and get hurt in a war.

Well, golly, you may say, that's pretty obvious.  But I swear that there are people who do not know this.  They think they can have a war in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever and somehow people won't be killed.   But that's what happens in war.  You throw a lot of munitions around and they explode and kill people. Some of those people are in uniform, and some are not in uniform, and some of the latter are civilians and some are not.     You try to mostly kill soldiers and kill as few civilians as possible. Sometimes you end up killing your own people by mistake or carelessness. It happens all the time.

4. Mistakes happen during a war.

Wars are barely controlled chaos with real opposition and all sides using what are essentially dangerous prototypes and throwing bombs at each other.   Ever watch any of those videos on youtube from aircraft talking to people on the ground?  Notice how often they are yelling?   They're not yelling to be heard (well, maybe they are yelling to be heard), but they are also yelling because it is really stressful where they are.  People make choices and make mistakes.   People go the wrong way, people get the wrong coordinates, some people did not get the word, people got excited when other people were shooting at them. Mistakes happen.

Sometimes they are not mistakes, sometimes they are only mistakes after the fact.  Oh you blew up a wedding where a lot of the bad guys were going to be?   I see.  Maybe that was an intentional mistake, or maybe it wasn't.

But nothing makes me laugh harder than the civilian quarterbacking after the fact.  Why didn't they do this?  Why didn't they do that?  That sure was stupid.  Easy for you to say.

5. The laws of war are more guidelines than laws.

Not all cultures agree with the so-called laws of war. Not all nations have signed the Geneva Conventions. Even those that have signed them have a lot of leeway on how those laws or conventions are applied on a case-by-case basis.  So don't go throwing around words like "war crimes" without spending a lot of time figuring out what it is that people mean by this today, because you will just sound like an asshole, which you may very well be. 

6. When the war is over, the war isn't over.

Win or lose, someone has to clean up the mess. And someone has to pay for it. Win or lose, if you get into a war it is likely that you will have some obligations or costs going forward however it turns out.  

7. People care passionately about what happens in war both during and afterwards.

I use the story of the Smithsonian exhibit on the Enola Gay to explain what I mean by "strong opinions".  As far as I can tell, by far most soldiers in uniform at the time the nuclear bombs were dropped believe/believed that those bombs saved their lives by causing Japan to surrender.  Now it turns out that maybe that is true and maybe that is not true.  People will be debating that for a very long time and we may never have a definitive answer that makes everyone happy.   But the people who were in uniform at the time, of which very few are still alive, have strong opinions on the topic.  And when the Smithsonian tried to do an exhibit which was so-politically-correct about whether or not the bombs caused Japan to surrender, they were torn to pieces by the veterans.   That's what I mean by "strong opinions".

Therefore do not start a war unless you are willing to have people around afterwards who have very strong opinions on the topic that you may or may not agree with.

8. Do not have a war unless it is OK with you that people will hate each other.

One of the most irritating recent issues regarding the war in Afghanistan was the investigation to find out if one of our soldiers had urinated (e.g. pissed) on a dead enemy to show his disrespect.  How could that be!  That's not very civilized!  War is not very civilized, either.  War is about killing people and being killed, about people being betrayed and dying. And about hate. Therefore do not go into a war and expect that people are going to be completely dispassionate. No offense or anything, but that would be extremely unrealistic.

9. Some people do not appreciate our good intentions.

Its hard to believe, but some people do not want Americans to come in and "show them how its done". They do not care that having a base in the desert saves us a lot of money. They don't trust us. If something happens that they don't like or don't understand, they are very likely going to think that we are doing something evil, or that we planned it, or otherwise take the worst possible point of view on the topic because, as I said, they don't trust us.

And other nations, watching what is going on somewhere else, maybe also doubt our intentions and maybe fear us because we went to war in order to "fix things" and they may wonder if they are the next to be "fixed". 

10. Some people have longer memories than you do.

America as a culture has a selective and self-serving amnesia and tends to disregard other people's history, or history in general, as unimportant.

Americans may have neither known nor cared that the French were in Vietnam before we were, but the Vietnamese certainly did.  I know many of my fellow citizens who neither know nor care that Israel exists because of events in Europe over two millennia, but the Jews who live in Israel know this very well.  Most people I know may not know or care that the Grand Army of the Republic raped, murdered and burned its way through the South (1), but the people who live in the South do. 

Other people know their history, whether or not you care to know their history.  Maybe you don't agree with that history, maybe you think they got it wrong.  That doesn't really matter, what matters is what they think their history is.

11. Do not get involved in someone else's problems without thinking twice.

I think this one should be self-explanatory but obviously not.  If you break it, you buy it.  I am not sure we were much responsible for Iraq being a nightmare of problems before we got there, but we sure are involved now.   Afghanistan is an amazingly complex, historically rich area (note, not country, area) and we did have something to do with making it what it was before 2001, but not as much as some people think (2).  But the Sunni and the Shiites in Iraq are at each other's throats, again, and that is not going to stop anytime soon.  The people who live in the place we call Afghanistan are never going to stop growing and selling opium as long as there is a demand for it. And they are never going to stop being corrupt in our eyes, because in a deep and fundamental way they don't see it as corruption or they don't care what we think.   And the rich of Kandahar will famously "keep" little boys for sex as they have for a long time and you wont stop them unless you kill them all. And I don't think we should kill them all, personally.

12. Be careful what you ask for and think about what happens next.

Saddam Hussein ruthlessly suppressed his Shiite majority in Iraq, I hear.  Those Shiites are the cousins of the Shiites that rule Iran with an oppressive, women-hating, Jew-hating, Sunni-hating theocratic dictatorship.  You get rid of Hussein, the Shiites who are a majority in Iraq come into power, and wish to ally with and maybe imitate that lovely theocratic Iran next door.  Good move, boys.

13. Wars do not always go the way you want or expect.

Many Americans are used to believing that a war will go their way, that they will be victorious in some sense of that word.   This is sheer delusion and ignorance.  First, Americans have not always won wars but many wars end with ambiguous results.   Second, you can win and lose a war at the same time.  Third, you can win every battle and still lose the war.   Fourth, wars have a life of their own, and unexpected things happen.  A small war may become a big war and a big war may become an annoying small war.   You will not know for sure going in.

Therefore and in conclusion, if a war is discretionary, and not all wars are, think real hard before you start it. All of the points above apply now and in the future. And if somehow one or two of them do not apply, then consider yourself lucky.

Now, are you really, really sure you need to start that war?

__________________________

1. Sherman's "March to the Sea".

2. Read Steven Coll's "Ghost Wars" about our involvement in Afghanistan after the Soviet Invasion.  We did support the resistance against the Soviet Union, but our involvement was always with the Pakistani's and the Saudi Arabians, and they have had much more to do with what transpired than we did, in spite of our self-image as being all powerful.   We were one of many players in that episode.
http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669

The Noble But Futile Gesture of Paul Rand

As part of our passive aggressive effort here at Global Wahrman to educate youth, we feature today one of the greatest American graphic designers, Paul Rand (1914-1996). You have seen his work all your life.

In 1992, Paul Rand, resigned from the faculty of Yale University as part of a protest against postmodernist theory. Exactly what good his resignation could possibly accomplish is a mystery to me, but no doubt it was a noble gesture.   When he resigned, he wrote an essay, "Chaos and Confusion: The Seduction of Comtemporary Graphic Design". (See http://www.paul-rand.com/foundation/thoughts_confusionChaos/#.UO0TS-Sw-Gk)

Complaining about postmodern criticism, which is truly worst case academic drivel, is like complaining that we live in a shallow society: of course we do.   In the case of postmodern criticism we just have that manifestation of shallowness that comes from a self-entitled community of elitist shallow people in contrast to the other types.  And this particular type of shallow people have the career imperative to publish, and furthermore to publish in journals that encourage that kind of shallowness.  Its a positive feedback loop, some would argue, the arts criticism equivalent of the peacocks tail feathers leading to preferential selection by sex-crazed peahens leading to an even more flamboyant set of tail feathers in the next generation.   One day it may disappear in a puff of smoke and itself become the topic of PhD thesis trying to explain the phenomenon.

Since we at Global Wahrman wish to honor the noble and futile sacrifice of one's career in order to make an ethical stand, here is a paragraph or two from this essay.

The Perception of Time and Historical Events

I am fascinated by how we perceive the passage of time and how this effects our perception of history. These perceptions are probably also affected by the region that we grew up in. America is famously said to pay very little attention to history, their own or anyone else's.

I use the following story to illustrate how events that we consider to be very distant in the past were actually not very long ago at all. Growing up as I did in Virginia, the story involves the American Civil War.

My father also grew up in Virginia and when he was ten years old, his elementary school brought a man to speak who had been Gen. Robert E. Lee's personal assistant and valet from before and during the war. He was a black man, probably in his 70s, and he had started working for Lee as a very young man. He stayed with Lee after the war and was with him when Lee passed away in 1870. 

The man my father heard speak was probably the Rev. Wm. Mack Lee.  Mack Lee was well known in Virginia, helped to build many churches after the war, and spoke very highly about Lee.

A short biography of William Mack Lee is here:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/leewilliam/summary.html

The electronic edition of his autobiography is here:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/leewilliam/lee.html

Since my father was ten years old in 1920 and the Civil War ended in 1865, that means that the Civil War had been over for about 55 years. What I find fascinating about that is that World War II, which was one of the defining events of my father's generation, has been over for longer than that (almost 70 years).

In other words, we think of the Civil War as being impossibly long ago. But for our parents, it was more recent than World War II is for our 20 somethings that we work with.

Many of the issues that we have in this country today are in many ways a result of those two wars. They were just the day before yesterday in the bigger scheme of things.

________________________________________

For those who are interested in such things, Mack Lee, who has the same last name as R.E. Lee was a slave originally for the Lee family, and stayed with Lee when he was freed in the course of the war.   What I find amusing is the southern tradition of keeping the same last name, e.g. if you were a slave for the Lee family, you were also a Lee.   I have many friends who are part of the Carter family (e.g. Carter Burwell, Carter Emmart, Jimmy Carter, etc) and they report that there are a lot of African American Carters around.  Well, maybe I should say this is interesting, not amusing, given what we are talking about here.

The Shocking Truth about Roman Architecture in France

[Revised 1/7/2012]

This is the story of the first time I actually saw a Roman ruin. I think it is very funny for what it says about me, and maybe, just a little, about how some of us perceive various cultures and periods, perhaps without realizing it.

My high school had a fabulous Latin teacher (1) and I took advantage of the situation, taking many years of Latin and learning a lot of Roman history.   I may have been somewhat influenced by the fact that my high school combined the advanced Latin classes between the Boys and Girls school, so you had to go to the Girls school to study Latin.   Such were the lofty motivations of my youth.  I read Roman and Aegean history and related topics even now and I assure you the past isn't over, it isn't even past yet.

If you never studied Latin, to give you a feel for how nouns are declined and verbs conjugated, see this sequence from Life of Brian (1974) in which anti-Roman activist Brian is trying to write "Romans Go Home" and is corrected by a Roman Centurion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI

But, to my chagrin, I have never been to Rome. We were not of that economic class that could afford such things when I was growing up, and when I was productively employed as a young adult, I had not arranged a trip. Then I got involved in computer animation and of course my life went to hell and I still haven't been there, except of course in books.

But like so many others of my generation of computer animation, I was invited to speak at various European conferences during the late 1980s, which provided an opportunity to see at least some of Europe. So, after one of these conferences, Imagina, I arranged for a friend of mine to meet me in Monaco and we would sight see for a few days in the south of France.

So my friend, Paul Cross (2), met me at the conference and we rented a car and started driving through Nice on our way to Nimes. As we stopped in Nice, I pointed to a building and said, "Look, Paul, someone has built a building and made it look Roman."

I am still looking for a suitable picture.  This one has some of the right feel, but it is not integrated into a major current building on a busy street, like the building this post is about.

Paul looked at it and said, "No, Michael, it is Roman".

I thought that was a weird thing for him to say, so I repeated myself and tried to explain, see, someone has built a building and made it look really old and Roman. Isnt that nice?

In Los Angeles, you see, we regularly theme various venues based on classic European and other civilizations, including our own. We might have a Chinatown, for example. Disneyland would have a Fantasyland including a notable synthesis of many medieval castles at the center of the park. The little tourist town of Solvang in Southern California has a Danish theme, complete with windmills. Our Japanese restaurants such as Benihana entertain guests with a performance that is alledgedly at least somewhat Japanese in origin. Santa Barbara is zoned for a traditional Hispanic style.  Although most studio backlots have been repurposed as real estate development, a few still exist with their various themes: a New York street, an Old West street with its saloon, a small town America main street, and so forth. Theming is a major design concept in use in our local commercial architecture and culture.

So clearly, what we had here was a modern building that had been designed using Roman antiquity as a theme. I thought it looked good, although perhaps they went overboard on some of the "ancient" aspects of it, as the Roman section clearly had seen better days.   

My friend just kept explaining to me that no, they were not pretending to be Roman, that Nice was in part an ancient Roman city, and it actually was Roman.  That's interesting, I thought, it had never occurred to me that it might not be fake.

_____________________________

1. His name was Anthony Ruffa, I think.   Before taking an exam, some of us would say to ourselves, "AVE RUFFA MORITURI TE SALUTANT"  ("Hail Ruffa!  We who are about to die, salute you!")

2. Paul Cross is a very amusing person, and an alumnus of Symbolics.  He moved to Taos, New Mexico and helped set up one of the internet not-for-profit web sites for the Taos Pueblo.   He has disappeared, and is hopefully doing well wherever he is.

Visual Effects Bake Off 2013, Part 2

I find the Bake Off to be extremely valuable and always regret missing it, even when I can not stand it anymore and have to walk out to the lobby. (Procedural note: since I am not a member of the Academy VFX Subsection, I can not vote, so I am not required to watch the whole thing).

Among the positive attributes are running into friends and colleagues whom I rarely if ever see at any other time of the year. One of my favorite people, Dennis Muren, I *never* see except at the Bakeoff. Last year he said one of the best things I have heard about the current state of visual effects:

"The problem with special effects is that they are not special anymore."

And there is value in seeing the current state of the art from many different projects projected in an excellent screening room one right after the other. Its amusing to try to guess what the theme of the year will be in advance: space battles? giant robots? hordes of zombies?

Notice the reflections on the bottom of the martian attack vehicle

One of the annoying downsides of watching these 10 minute sequences back-to-back (with some gap between them for the introduction of the next one) is the sheer volume of noise involved. You see, visual effects are occassionally used for those gentle and romantic moments, but not all that often, actually. Usually they are used when the director feels the need to blow up a city, or drop a spaceship on a bridge, or have one giant robot sensitively punch another giant robot in the nose, and these are loud, generally speaking, even in a vacuum in outer space. I remember once being in the lobby of the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood (on the telephone of course) while an unnamed very successful effects film was screening, and noting that I could always tell when there was a major effects moment because they were usually synchronized with the subwoofers in the theatre, which from the outside, sounded like a big truck slamming into a wall at 90 mph. About every 30 seconds or so, another truck would slam into a wall, it was sort of amusing. But at the Bakeoff, it may be more like every 15 seconds or less, and it is not muffled. The first 100 or 200 times that happens it can be entertaining, but after a while it starts to get old.

The Academy Visual Effects Bake Off, Part 1

This is the boring part of the post in which I explain the background of the Bakeoff to those who do not know. The fun stuff is all in the second part, if I write it.

The Bakeoff is tonight which is why I can not attend. It used to be the second or third week in Februrary but it has been moving up earlier and earlier. Now it is Jan 3. And instead of 7 excruciating and boring films to see sections of, you now get to watch 10 boring films.

If you have never attended this event and you are the least bit interested in visual effects, then you should make a point of trying to attend one year. The way it works is that the general public is welcome on an available seating basis. You are not permitted to vote, of course, nor are you permitted to ask questions, or sit in the reserved seating.

We're here for the bakeoff! 

1. Here is how a film gets nominated for visual effects. A smoke filled room of "worthies" meet and choose some number of films that are called the "long list". These films have to fulfill certain rules about how and when the film was screened to be eligible, and the producers of the film have to nominate it in this category, listing four people, generally as the people who will be nominated or win, should they be so lucky. The smoke filled room reviews this list and in a completely impartial manner (ha!) chooses the films that will be considered. You can be quite sure that there are no politics in this choice, as we will discuss at some point. (The politics are not too bad, generally there are always a few questions about which films get on the long list, but the major contenders are always there).