Digital Preservation

BoingBoing covers digital preservation at the Library of Congress with an extremely long post, heaps of pictures, and clips.

The part on film and video preservation is especially impressive. Vaults to store the 100 000 - 150 000 items they receive every year (film, sound, and apparently what is likely the largest collection of the most violent video games on the planet!). They even have formats I have never heard of (RCA Selectavision?).

Fascinating. But who has time to watch any of it?

South by Southwest

Back from this phenomenal festival. As a first-timer for the biggest iteration yet of this long running conglomeration of interactive, film, and music, I have to say that SXSW exceeded my expectations.











I don't know if these are dangerous or not

Highlights of the festival in general.

The good.

1. The Volunteers. Best volunteers I have ever seen at a festival.










Screenburn Into The Pixel Artwork

2. Free. Free everywhere. Free food, free drinks, free parties, free music. Free wireless in the convention hall. Free music samples from all artists. Free street performances.











Legos in The Screenburn arcade


3. IFC Crossroads. What a great hangout. Free food and drinks. Live bands. Live interviews with filmmakers. Free wireless.











IFC Crossroads

4. The films. A great selection of both narrative and documentary films. I love the fact that I keep hearing from others about the one best film to see, many of which I missed. This festival has such depth and breadth that it would be impossible to see them all. The festival director said they had over 700 documentary feature submissions alone.

5. The venues. The Alamo Lamar and Ritz are great comfortable theaters with wait service and a full menu. Fantastic! The Paramount was more uncomfortable, but was of the classic old design with > 1000 people. Great fun for premieres.











Austin 6th Street At Night

The bad.

1. Size. I have unconfirmed rumors that the total attendance was 50 000 people for all three components. That is far too many for the small size of the facilities to handle.

2. Everyone has their face buried in a a cell/smart phone. Face to face contact no longer is necessary. Might as well do the whole thing virtually.

3. They were not kidding about infections running rampant. Illnesses abound.

4. Pedicabs? Walk already.

5. Predators' First Look. Why bother taking up a cinema spot? Just fill a convention hall, They would have gotten the same effect, and could pack up to 1000 people.











Infestations of musicians

The ugly.

1. The size noted above means there were lines everywhere. Lines to register. Lines to see the panels. Lines to see the films. Standing in line for an hour to see a film only to be turned away is ridiculous. Growing pains, pshaw! SXSW is obese and needs some changes. Spending half your day in the cinema, and the other half in a line is a pain.

2. Shuttle between the film venues:

Regular travel back and forth over an established, often short route by a vehicle.

That's what it's supposed to mean. Apparently to SXSW it does not.


Films

Narrative:

Kick Ass!











Premiere for Kick Ass!

This is decent superhero movie where a teenager decides one day to become a superhero (no superpowers to speak of) and what happens after. Extremely violent and needs some editing work and about 20 minutes cut.

MacGruber
Based on the SNL skit. I wasn't expecting much, and expectations were exceeded. Decently funny.

Animated Shorts
The animated shorts are where I continuously find the most innovative and cutting edge takes on cinema. Great collection.

Get Low
Oscar bait for Duvall's performance of a man who wishes to have a funeral and invites half the town to his final confessional.











Get Low, Bill Murray, Aron Schneider (director), Sissy Spacek, Robert Duvall

Cargo
A very low budget sci fi that attempts some comment on human trafficking. Unfortunately it does not work.

Futurestates
A set of shorts that was supposed to be some sort of commentary on the future of civilization. Largely lacking in imagination.

Documentary:

Life 2.0













Life 2.0 Poster


This documentary is better than the Second Skin doc I posted about earlier and has some surprisingly dark twists and some information I had not seen.

Camp Victory, Afghanistan
One of the top generals in Afghanistan and how US commanders interacted with him.

The People vs. George Lucas
People hating on GL for what he did to their childhood memories. Mostly humurous.

Richard Garriott - Man On A Mission











Richard Garriot - The Man Who Invented Ultima - And He Went To Space Too
This is my second favorite doc of the festival about Lord British's rise from computer nerd, Ultima creation, lots of money, and spearheading efforts for space tourists and becoming one himself, and the first father son astronauts in the U.S. (his father worked for NASA). Very cool.

Saturday Night
What goes into making a Saturday Nigh live show (the one with John Malkovich) as shot by James Franco. A lot of work, apparently, and some interesting moments (cutting skits at the last minute), but the whole thing really needed a more thorough look at the whole SNL phenomenon.

Beijing Taxi
How the changes in Beijing leading up to the 2008 Olympic games affected some residents. Not very good.

Marwencol
Hands down one of the most phenomenal documentaries I have seen in a while. A man, brutally attacked late at night by a group of men, rebuilds his lost former life and memories by constructing a miniature WWII Belgian town that he calls Marwencol and populating it with figurines and stories that are really his therapeutic output. Absolutely riveting and I am glad I got in to see this.

SX Global Shorts
Some interesting shorts. Others were not.

Panels:

How To Rock
Koreans drinking, early in the day, fascinating.

Directing the Dead: Genre Directors










Directing The Dead Panel - Ti West (Dir. House of the Devil), Neil Marshall (Dir. The Descent), Scott Weinberg (moderator, Cinematical and Fear.Net), Robert Rodriguez (duh), Ruben Fleischer (Dir. Zombieland), Matt Reeves (Cloverfield)

This panel had some interesting things to say about genre movies.

A Conversation With Michel Gondry
A great talk with Gondry, who is one of the most imaginative filmmakers out there. Only, he shouldn't complain about people leaving early when the panel did not even start till 30 minutes past the stated start time.

Floating Heads are Dead - Why Traditional Posters Suck
Not that good.

Cinematography for Improvised Films
This was a decent panel on how to get great looking images out of improvised or spontaneous moments (with some fascinating examples).

How to Defuse a Bomb - Life Lessons From The Cast of MacGruber










MacGruber Panel - Akiva Schaffer (SNL and Lonely Planet, moderator), Jorma Taccone (SNL and Lonely Planet, director), Will Forte (SNL and MacGruber star), Kirsten Wiig (SNL and MacGruber star), Val Kilmer (MacGruber bad guy Dieter Von Cunth ), Ryan Phillippe

Mostly just funny, including Seth Meyers recount of the Boner Ghost.

Special Events:

Predators First Look











Predators on the side of a hotel
Cool, but why not do it in the convention center.

IFC Film Party
Fun. Great DJ. I swear I saw Jason Reitman at this.

Augmented Reality And Filmmaking

The Living Sasquatch site makes me laugh.

It also makes me think how AR can be applied to filmmaking.

1. No longer do you need to do compositing! Now everything can be done in-camera, old school style.

2. Actors having trouble acting against a green screen? You could use AR to show them what they are acting against, in, or with.

3. Can't stand the actor? Just replace them in-screen. Forget puppets, do a full find and replace in your footage.

Digital Puppetry

Managed to catch a demonstration of digital puppetry from Brian Henson (the son of Jim Henson). He talked for about two hours about the history of puppetry (The Muppets), the history of animatronics as they used it in film (The Dark Crystal, Dinosaurs), with up to five puppeteers being required per character, the evolution to more sophisticated puppet controls, and eventually on to digital puppetry. The final demo was of a new Henson show called Sid The Science Kid on PBS that is fantastic for two reasons:

• it is an attempt to get kids interested in science at an early age (4-6) which anyone should applaud
  
• the show is produced using digital puppetry which results in a more organic feel to the characters with the side benefit of the process being far more efficient than traditional CGI
  

Demo of simple traditional hand puppet in front of a camera.
Of course I was most interested in the digital puppets. As Brian is a puppeteer he mentioned that he was more apt to tackling characters by having an inside to outside control of the character's emotions. This is apparently much more difficult when using motion capture on actors to capture the emotion outside to inside (not very effective). I think the puppetry stuff works very well for cartoony, fantastic, magical, or science fiction elements (ring a bell?). Not so much for real world style animation with human characters. The puppeteers were shown with elaborate rigs while controlling the digital characters and it was impressive to see how much control they could actually exert. The action is 'captured' using something like a three camera setup that would be similar to that used for a sitcom and then edited. They were doing something like 2-2.5 episodes a week and had forty episodes ready to go.

A couple of other interesting tidbits

• In general terms Hollywood really likes post production heavy films now because even though it costs more, it means the studios have far more control than when a movie is preproduction heavy (cited Spike Jones upcoming movie Where The Wild Things Are).
• That the CG feel is disappearing as both the technical limitations continue to fall and that distinctive cold and mechanical look will disappear as the hardware and software improve, and also as Hollywood becomes tired of it and moves away from using it exclusively.
• That Eastern European puppetry was often the last media that was censored by the state (cool trivia) and could be a refuge of commentary.
  
• UNCONFIRMED RUMOR - that a new Dark Crystal is in the works.
• Is Pixar interested in digital puppetry? Maybe. But their characters are already such great characters that it might not be necessary. That is because Pixar takes the time to craft great characters.
  

New Sid the Science Kid series - all 'animated' characters are actually digital puppets controled by a Henson company puppeteer.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this impacts animation in the future, and whether or not I can get one of those rigs myself.

Voices!

"Voices" premiered both on The Machiniplex and in Second Life at Hathead's fantastic machinima emporium yesterday.

NOTE to future me: check the damn time fool. Also, check that the in-world time matches that posted on teh interwebs!

Voices is a surreal and very hip video created using almost every piece of 3D filmmaking software that currently exists (Moviestorm, iClone, and ZenCub3d) from Pineapple Pictures. If you have not seen it, then check it out on The Machiniplex (I wish I could link to it directly).








Voices panel
The panel discussion was well attended and there was a lot of questions and some great answers from the co-creators, Kate Fosk and Michael Joyce (and the voice of the narrator - Doug Foss).



















List of those using voice chat. Get it! At the Voices premiere!
Unfortunately I may have missed the answer to my question (what is their previous filmmaking experience? - I was under the impression that Michael at least had a long history in the film/TV industry).






The audience is listening
There were numerous questions asked by the audience over the following hour or so, including the 3D software used, time it took to produce (about 3 months), the genesis of the project, the surreal and stylistic use of color, etc. The difficult thing about using voice chat is the lack of a complete transcript (perhaps someone should record these for posterity's sake? - and the voice and text chat would need to be combined somehow). Someone else will probably have some other comments to note.



















Zach is back! I am black!
It was a great event. I stuck around with the stragglers again. Zach showed up, but no catastrophe ensued.










Robots attack!
Then some unobtrusive new people showed up and pointed out the discrepancy in the time posted in-world for the event and the time posted on the blog (I had also made a mistake so I blame nobody).

The tail end of this party is always interesting. At the last one that I attended, for Clockwork, the creator of The Monad (Sam Goldwater) showed up and sent us a link to that just released film, which turned out to be a fairly interesting piece of filmmaking.

Which just goes to show you, don't be afraid of strangers bearing virtual celluloid.

Machinima Info Barf #8

Today's post is brought to you by the word 'Gush'. Stand up and say it loud 10 times. Isn't that a fun word. Then after your family and friends look at you strangely settle back into your comfortable chair and peruse this enormous collection of links.

Previous Info Barfs (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7).

Away for a week.

====

eSports:

The World Cyber Games are taking place this weekend. Coverage at GotFrag.
The Escapist covers fraggers.

Video Game News:

Bungie and Microsoft broke up (more at Law of the Game) from 8bitjoystick. You can send sympathy flowers.
Koster talks about the current game industry (Gamasutra).
Top 10 most influential AI games (via AIgamedev.net). Please, why is Black and White at #1?
In-game ads using discussing historical Monopoly, Monopoly today, and social commentary games like Disaffected (via Gamasutra).
Top 21 Linux Games (from LinuxGames).
The Guardian talks about in-game advertising.
BBspot has a flowchart for those who can't decide to stop playing video games.
McDonald's video game, social commentary? (via Play This Thing). Any game where you pay to corrupt politicians has to be fun?
Minerva single-player mod episode 3 for Half Life 2 released.
Writer's Guild announces video game writing award.
The next 25 years of video games on Cracked.com. Likely to be oh so wrong.

Virtual World News:

Habbo Hotel manager discusses the enormous popularity of this free retro virtual world (via Gamespot).
More on Habbo's development (via Gamasutra).
Habbo's mobile version has 110 000 users (via Virtual World News).
Some strange virtual worlds like The Endless Forest (via Clickable Culture).
Metaversed discusses MTV's 6 virtual worlds.
MellaniuM showcases Skype broadcasting of Second Life. I recently had a chance to talk to Joe Rigby about this, and he used Skype to show some virtual worlds they were creating (using Unreal Engine - see previous post and comments). Fascinating stuff.
Virtual world numbers from virtual world news.
Virtual world venture captial from Cnet.

Contests/Festivals:

Bitfilm voting is over. All machinima nominees are listed here.
Hellgate London is having a contest. Machinima accepted (via What Providence).
Machinima will be shown at U of Wisc.
Machinima Europe is next weekend. Who's going?

Machinima News:

Paraworld movie game for kids.
Blizzard introduces WoW machinima page, recognizing the importance of machinima and coupled with their recent announcements on machinima usage, this is great news (WoWInsider).
Machinima mailing list and wiki for Second Life. Linden labs also realizes the importance of machinima.
Plopp moves sculpted prims into Second Life.

Machinima/Video Clips:

Artist almost drawing dirty pictures and then transforming them into something else (NSFW - WebTVHub).
Burning man time lapse (via O'reilley Radar).
Richard Kelly's Southland Tales trailer shows that the movie certainly looks to raise the bar on the weirdness from his first movie, Donnie Darko. Brazil meets Inland Empire, meets Donnie Darko?
Virtual Guatanamo in Second Life.
NewTeeVee has a list of Nintendo Odes.
When Cell Phones Attack (ad from Argentinian Leandro Fuez).
23 Things We've Learned From Movies (metacafe). Hilarious slide show (the pics are brilliant). There should be a contest to parody all of them in a single movie.
MachinimaCam demo for SL (via SecondLifeInsider).
Game Probe explores video game narratives (Thinking Cinematic, ie. Lucifer Jones, ie. Mike Jones). He also does Motion Sketches which is very impressive.
I'm sick of Halo3, but the Believe ad is well made. Production info on Motionographer.
Wired covered The Sex Life of Robots. Then YouTube pulled the video.
Lego Half Life episode one and two. Remaking HL stories using stop motion lego.
Club Elona hi-res Guild Wars machinima (via Mike Abundo).
More Guild Wars machinima listed here (from Max Damage).
Pirates in Saskatchewan using Everquest (Captain Tractor song).
IdeaWorld documentary on early days of Second Life.
iCloneTV covers Second Life Convention. Isn't that a little strange?
Greek tragedy Oresteia in the Sims2.
Elk Cloner student animation is impressive (via Cartoon Brew).
Terrible video game endings (so 8 bit - via Videosift).
Grouchobeer is back with his bizarre political commentary - Strange Interregnum.

Digital Online Video/Cinema/Imaging:

Some interesting notes on interactive cinema from the 1967 Montreal Expo from Czechoslovakia's entry the Kinoautomat (via Radio Praha).
NewTeeVee lists some new internet video startups. Scenecaster looks interesting (sharing 3D spaces with people?).
Graspr (more how-to videos).
Blade Runner to be released again this December. (Wired, NYT). One of my all time favorite movies, no matter what you think about the ending, the voiceover, or the ambiguity (or apparently not) about Deckard's humanity.
A comparison chart of 3D applications (extremely useful, but damn is 3DS expensive - via TDT 3D).
Flip Animation online magazine.
Digital puppetry (site, video).
David Cronenberg at the Washington Post
BoingBoingTV vs. Wired Science. Fight!
Dataisnature talks about live cinema. Interesting, and Indonesian shadow theater. Cool. (Solu).

Misc:

These images of the reimagining of books are fascinating (book autopsies - from Centripetal Notion). I wonder if it could be done with the world's longest book (million page books? - via
The Millions).

New Line - 40th Anniversary

A fascinating interview with the current co-CEOs of New Line, Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne on Charlie Rose tonight. Discussions on the future of cinema (all digital), franchises, New Line has an impressive lineup (Nightmare on Elm Street, Rush Hour, Lord of the Rings, Austin Powers), the foundation of the company, and big failures (The Last Mimsy, Snakes on a Plane).

Interesting that they reiterated a common theme among successful people, and that is passion for what they do.

Wikipedia entry.

Digital Avant-Garde

Film Comment this month has a short article on Ubu, a digital depository for avant-garde films, writing, and resources. What a fantastic find! It includes over 300 films, interviews and readings (collection of William S. Burroughs mp3s), music, poetry, articles from a number of resources, all of them stretching quite far back in time. I could get lost in here for months.

My only question would be, why is this not yet part of the Internet Archive (warning, this site has problems right now)?

Machinima Info Barf #7

Been busy and have not done one of these in awhile, so the links accumulated.

Time to purge.

Welcome to the future. Grab some popcorn, this one is long.

Previous Info Barfs (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6).

====

Robots:

There seemed to be a lot of news about robots recently.
Artificial boy built.
According to defensetech.org, the first armed drone in Iraq has killed (the MQ-9 "Reaper").
More ED209 news from Iraq.
Is Iraq to be the playground for the military industrial complex R&D divisions?

eSports:

Shocking news, the WSVG is cancelled. I guess they could not compete with CGS.
CGS to give out $1 million in prizes.

Contests:

Amazon and Microsoft team up to allow up to 1000 indie film developers the ability to get their film pressed on to HD-DVD and available from Amazon.

Machinima news:

Oxhorn talks about advertising.
Anthony Bailey posts about the origins of the word machinima.
Adobe is entering real time 3D animation at least as a research project (and ray-tracing). I always wondered when some of the big players would start to enter this turf.
Shaping Youth talks about machinima.
Casual WoW lists some machinima guides.

Machinima/Video Clips:

Thes two clips mentioned at Frames Per Second magazine from the 2006 Japan Media Arts Festival are fascinating. The first is Oh Hisse is by Hikaru Yamakawa and is either a celebration of rigidity, conformity, and the human machine, or is maybe a rejection of it, I haven't decided yet. Very Japanese. The second is Mix a Miniascape by Tomonori Hayase which has a cityscape constantly disassembling and reassembling as the viewer passes through it. Very cool (and must have taken a lot of work).
Speaking of lockstep, this human powered animation video is impressive.
Rubberdada episode #2 is released (rubberdada.com). This is just BIZARRE and sure to cause controversy. Juvenile, violent, immature, and yet strangely fascinating as it deals with topics like racism (episode #1 mentioned here). Think of South Park. They definitely seem to hate clowns.
More from the CRC Machinima Collection shot in SL. #1, #2.
This video of a system that allows users to create shadow puppets wherein extra animations are added in real time is very cool.
More Shadow Puppets.
Basho is a very impressive thirteen minute Japanese machinima (with English subtitles) made in Second Life with classic ninjas, shoguns, and the fate of a kingdom in hand at SL-machinima.com. Nice to see some hand-to-hand combat (English translated site; Metacafe trailer).
Someone liked the new GTAIV trailer so much, they remade it using GTAIII San Andreas (too bad the game is delayed till next year).
There's an epic machinima made in Halo called Trinity. I have not watched all of it.
Does what happen in Facebook stay in Facebook? Beware your personal bitstream and who's reading it.
Hallow3en is back with another musical machinima using U2's Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me.
OneJovialSim's Bjork based machinima Akin.
Someone's trying to escape their world. Do they succeed? Infiltrator.
Afonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein's trailer for The Shock Doctrine.
Animation Ramblings lists some iClone examples.
List of Siggraph shorts.

Video Games:

Remember when the specs for Microsoft's Xbox360, Sony's PS3, and the Nintendo Wii were released. Remember how everyone said Nintendo didn't know what it was doing and that it obviously couldn't compete in the high tech arena. Guess who's laughing now as the Wii outsells both the Xbox360 and the PS3, even after being released a year after the Xbox360. Never underestimate the company behind the plumber power Mario.
Neuromatrix is an educational video game where you enter a neuroscience facility and track down the nanobots invading the brains of the scientists within. Made by Morphonix. Check out the video introduction.
There was a report from the Eve Online economist and an interview on Slashdot. It would be nice to see reports from Second Life, WoW, and other MMOGs.
Artificial worlds to be artificial intelligence incubators. Now if only they can obey directions like "no, say it with more emotion".
Artificial worlds are the future of commerce.
The marines are using virtual worlds as training simulators.
VastPark is a virtual world content creation system. Site.
Next week, virtual worlds will do my laundry and wash the windows.

Digital Online Video/Cinema/Imaging:

Steam is a digital content delivery platform developed by Valve. Not only are a wide variety of games available, but apparently steammovies.com has been registered by Valve. If you've seen the recent videos Valve has made for Team Fortress 2 you will realize that high quality video can be delivered via Steam, either for free or after paying (via credit card).
Overman lists some free filmmaking tools. Other freeware/shareware lists specifically for Mac and more general tools here. More DIY list from The Workbook Project.
Revver has paid out $1 million to content creators to at least 25 000 people (the winners are the Diet Coke and Mentos people at $50 000). It may not be MySpace, which just seems to keep picking up new shows, but it is definitely a site to consider.
Speaking of which, NewTeeVee discusses what makes an online hit.
Brand Worlds 3D production for Flash and the web.
3D holographic display developed. Now when can I play Tank War Europa on it.
More 3D image creation using plasma balls.
SciVee brings science to the world of internet video.
IndyMogul talks about Reverse Shot, a film quarterly that goes into detail about film and cinema. Check out this extensive article on "the cut".

Re-Tronned

Twenty-five years after that Disney movie with ground-breaking special effects (and a lack lustre story), Tron is going to come to the big screen again. It sounds like it will be a sequel.

1982. So long ago. There was still a cold war on, Reagan was president, and I was playing on an Atari 2600, or maybe a Colecovision, or more likely, playing Donkey Kong (the first time Mario ever appeared!) in the arcade. The Commodore64 came out.

Basically, how are they going to redo this story (or make a sequel) now that we have virtual worlds, gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry, eSports is catching on, machinima is everywhere and the idea of entering a computer is sort of ho-hum (The Matrix Trilogy, eXistenZ, The Truman Show, etc.) is a question I have to ask.

Bigger fancier effects? Light cycles in 3 dimensions? Enormous grid bugs?

The director (Kosinski) has also apparently signed on to redo Logan's Run? Hmmm...but David Fincher was the one who noticed him.

I guess I'll take a wait and see approach.

Sound - The Last Digital Frontier

I have been listening to the excellent musings of Mike Jones at Digital Basin who has some very interesting things to say about games, cinema, machinima, and the digital age (addition to Machinifeed noted by Overman). I was especially struck by the three part series on sound and space. Fascinating observations on how sound has transformed cinema over time, how important sound is to the filmgoing experience. That, in conjunction with the recent update of Microsoft's game content usage rules (see Hugh's post), specifically regarding sounds has led to this.

This made me think of two points: 1. why is it that sound is so important, and 2. why is sound production still so damn analog?

The first appears to come from the fact that since we are such visual creatures our visual processing centers in the brain are so powerful that we can neatly fill in the gaps in both moving and static images. So powerful that we tend to see things when there is nothing there (look up at the clouds in the sky, what do you see?). When it comes to sound humans are not very capable at filling in the gaps (maybe dogs are?). Perhaps our audio processing is so degraded because of the preponderance of visual processing. I posted before about how you can see a sentence of scrambled words and still make sense of it:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

You can read that. It basically makes the internet readable, which is filled with loads of l33t speak. But if someone spoke that sentence to you it would not make a bit of sense.

As an aside, I'm often reminded of how bad sound is done in the YouTube age, and I've often stopped watching many clips due to bad sound, or stopped listening to a podcast because someone can't be bothered to buy a decent microphone.

I am not really interested in exploring how important sound is to cinema, how the music, sounds, and dialog add to the moving image as many others have covered those points. Suffice to say that sound is important and it has to be very close to perfect so that we are not ejected from the virtual by jarring differences in our expectations and what we actually hear. What really interests me is how sound production, in comparison to image production, still consists of capturing analog sounds and then editing them. Which brings me to the second point.

We can now produce all of the visual elements of a film in a computer (animation, machinima, etc.). Sound, however, is not quite there yet. Music of course has been synthesized for quite some time, although whether synthesized sound can ever measure up to a real orchestral score is debatable. But what about sound effects? It still seems you have to capture analog sound (either the real sound or a facsimile) to mimic the sound effects you would expect to see in a film. And dialog? Real spoken words by real actors still seems the way to go. Why is that? Besides the speak and spell voices you sometimes hear, I know of no digitally synthesized voices that could replace the spoken words of a real actor. Am I wrong? Is there something out there I've missed? Could there ever be digitally produced dialog that would be capable of an academy award winning performance? Could the nuances of a tear-jerking dialog ever be replicated in ones and zeros? How soon before an entire normal film (not a silent visual montage) be created entirely in a computer? How long before that virtual world springs solely from a director's imagination, where the characters, how they look, the words they speak, the sound effects that occur, the swelling music that tells us what to feel emotionally, are all created by one person using a CPU? Could a virtual actor ever digitally say with real conviction "here's looking at you kid"?

We use machinima to capture real-time rendering of virtual worlds using a game engine (or more generally, a rendering engine), and yet there is nothing similar for sound. No virtual audio scape where one could create the sound of a bird singing, or a tank rolling across the plains, or a busy train station in Europe, or a newspaper office at crunch time, or any of these.

Am I wrong? Is there something out there that I've missed, or something coming over the horizon that will do these things? Some software company that's exploiting this gaping black hole? Or are we forever doomed to drag actor's into sound proof booths, to pay someone to clap two pieces of metal together in front of a microphone, or to shove a boom mic practically into someone's face so that last bit of emotional subtext that the lead actor reveals is captured for all to hear?

Give Me A Break

GameDaily BIZ reports that that venerable arcade co-op coin classic Joust will be made into a movie. Of all the games that should be remade (as a game) but not a movie, Joust is near the top. I don't know whether this a joke or not. It's not April 1st. It's not even Uwe Boll.

What's next, Space Invaders starring Bruce Willis, Asteroids with Ben Affleck, Dig Dug with Steve Buscemi?

Brilliant scraping of old IP for film or does the vision of vultures picking over an old carcass seem appropriate?

Color

UPDATE:

Have just discovered this brief interview in New Scientist with Annie Mollard-Desfour, a linguist who has written "Dictionnaire des mots et expressions de couleur : Le Rose" (unfortunately in French) which describes the language of color. Fascinating examples of how different cultures emphsize hue versus brightness, and the different color meanings (bleu means 'novice' in French - green in English, white is mourning in China whereas it means purity (virginal) in western cultures. (Only Dead Fish posts about it here).

----------

I just finished a short book on Kandinsky, the abstractionist painter. What fantastic use of color! Phenomenal work backed up by some real insight into art. Reminds me of Leonardo for some reason (although the conclusions are almost opposite).

For some reason a number of color-containing posts crossed my path, so I present them here:

• Use of color in movie posters - interesting how predominantly dark they are (via Speak Up).
• Two articles on color - the first on color legends and how various colors became associated with various topics like red for 'stop' and the second as a follow up to the fist (via Colour Lovers).

Interesting how some color usage is culture specific (like green for envy). Might be something to consider when using color in any film or video game.

Which brings me to a few movies I've watched recently, Hero, and Curse of the Golden Flower. Color is used extensively in these movies, CotGF with an almost overabundance of color, and Hero with selective use of color in the various sections. Of course there is the classic color differentiation in The Matrix (green for the Matrix, blue for the real world) and other movies like Titus, or black and white classics like Cascablanca. It's amazing how you can control emotions with the use of color. Some of these were shot in their raw color format while others had color tweaked in post production (Lord of the Rings, Sin City, 300 are other examples).

And then we have the overabundance of green in many music videos (along with hyper editing). Something that I can't really stand as it's far too derivative.

Are there any other movies that make selective use of the color palette for meaning? With today's digital editing and digital film is there too much use of color? Too much play with color spectrum? Is the subtlety now lost?

Thunderous Thursday

ABC will produce "Masters of Science Fiction" miniseries bringing four episodes narrated by Stephen Hawking. Bizarre.

Fling Films introduces Moviestorm to GTA in "Play It Again Carl".

Incarcarex Drug Policy Film.

See if you can do this math test on YouTube. Pay attention!

This Halo movie "Be Human" won a Judges' Choice award in the recent HaloBungio.org Zune contest. Very well done.

Futurecasting on NewTeeVee (or SciFi as it used to be called). Googlezon in 2014 launches EPIC vs. Linden Labs launching Spirit in 2027? Psshaw. I welcome the coming disinformation wars. If bits can easily be created, copied, and destroyed, they can also be easily manipulated. If you introduce noise into the bitstream and only you know it's there, how it was made, and how it can be subtracted, then you win.

Wednesday - WTF Is Wednesday For?

Wonderland has an interview with Brent Friedman from Afterworld.TV. Fascinating how no one except Sony wanted to work with them but equally fascinating is how they set out from the get go to build this for today's digital audience (also how they still manage to control the rights).

Some Jovial machinima from Koinup. What's Koinup?

Koinup is the first social network to share virtual lives, screenshots, machinima and virtual stories.

Social networking for machinima and virtual lives? How is this different than say machinima.com or mprem.com?

Sculpting data in Second Life (via NWN). Pushing ever closer to the 3D web.

Quakecon to feature all four versions of Quake in the Quad Damage tourney. Sort of like the decathlon of eSports.

This replica of a Japanese castle painstakingly recreated by an obsessive (fan? modeler? hobbyist? weirdo?) is absolutely fascinating. Maybe he should have done this in SL, it would have been quicker.

I will be a judge for the 2008 OMFF (Online Machinima Film Festival). I am now accepting bribes in large bundles of unmarked bills or gold bullion (the last is a joke for the humor-impaired).

Tuesday Titillations

Eve Online gets TV show? This post (albeit referring to events two years old) suggests there needs to be a movie made (Eve TV - seems to require micropayments?).

Ubisoft Assassin's Creed film contest. Grand prize winner gets $10 K.

RvB Episode 100 coming tomorrow. When is the movie getting made?

ESRB will rate game trailers?

An entire issue of The Escapist devoted MMOGs. Julian Dibbel wrote an article in NYT on gold farming in WoW.

All I know is I am addicted to Desktop Tower Defense like everyone else.

Monday Mutterings

A few Monday morning (didn't finish it till now) mutterings and musings:

A short note from Wired on "Four Eyed Monsters", the first feature length film available on YouTube. The part where the filmmakers connect with their audience and ask them where they are, what cities they occupy, and what movie theaters they think would show the film is the most interesting. The Workbook Project had a podcast with the creators earlier this year.

The twenty-fifty anniversary of Blade Runner and the groundbreaking special effects that are still impressive today is noted at Popular Mechanics. Unfortunately, they don't mention Philip K Dick, and they also don't mention Ridley Scott's Alien (which also had phenomenal effects that stand the test of time). For shame. The Director's Cut Special Super Turbo Edition of Blade Runner is supposedly coming out for a theatrical release and DVD this fall. Awesome!

The iClone vs. Moviestorm wars continues. iClone can now take Google SketchUp models as props or backgrounds. Can Moviestorm do this yet? If the entire planet gets realized in Google Earth, will you then have the entire planet at your beck and call? Now onto Mars? Look out for the wormholes (or portals).

Top DVDs And Into The Pixel

Two short info tablets for Saturday:

Following on the top 100 movies (from AFI - see previous post) comes the top 50 DVDs you must own (ignoring all of the ones you should already own like Star Wars and some of Hitchcock's flicks) from PopMatters. They've broken the list into five categories and have an interesting selection of classics as well as challenging films. It's always fun to look at a list like this to find out what I haven't seen yet.

Into The Pixel announces the 16 works and artists selected for 2007. Only one video (City 17), but some nice images derived from video games are on the list.

Production Tips

A few production tips and tricks.

First up is how to compress videos for YouTube so that the quality stays high with a selection of video tutorials and examples (on where else but YT) and some tips on Squidoo (via RuleTheWeb).

Next is the new Production School on Metacafe (via CinemaTech).

Millions Of Us Looking For Filmmakers

For presentations at their Globe Theater in Second Life although the films need not be machinima. The only requirement is that they be in Quicktime format so that they can be streamed.