I chuckled but I couldn’t forget about this little conversation. While her statement was not always true it still bears some truth. As the VFX keep getting bigger and better their underlying plots degenerate and become more one-dimensional than the comics most of them are loosely based on. The money of the production is mainly spent on stars and on post-production sweatshops facilities on the west coast. The companies make good money and so nobody ponders: Is it all worth the effort?

Techno Breed

Every couple of years there’s a new breakthrough in technology that the upcoming movies feature. Disney’s Dinosaur was prominent for the dinos having digital muscles under their displacement-mapped skins; Lord of the Rings was one of the major features to use sub-surface scattering on Gollum and Watchmen showcases that live-action tracking finally works. So what’s next?

Nowadays computing speed has more or less leveled out, you can’t get considerably faster than 3.5 GHz (by staying somewhat economic in your efforts), so for the last couple of years we experienced and still experience a shift towards multi-core CPUs. You won’t get more MHz for your buck, but more parallel processes. So instead of doing things faster and faster one after another, especially in real-time environments we do more and more computations simultaneously which imposes better programming on what’s already there. This may be one reason why there is nothing really groundbreaking going on in the visual department in the last few years except the usual “bigger” and “better”. Whereas bump-mapping, anti-aliasing or HDR rendering really were obvious to the occasional gamer, better physics, ambient occlusion or parallax mapping aren’t that much of a blast compared to what we’re already used to. I won’t go much deeper into the gaming sector because it is a topic of its own, yet film and game share the same efforts in making things look more real.

Photoreal Seductions

So can we get more photoreal? I bet. In games we’re already there. In movies, well, we’ve already arrived: Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 were trailblazers for VFX-flagships auch as Cloverfield, Watchmen and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Do we want to get more photoreal? What’s beyond photoreal?

Stylization — that’s what’s beyond and I see this as a big trend in the upcoming years and, frankly I can’t wait for it to happen if it is done with thought and consideration. Since anything’s possible in CGI, well, anything’s possible and filmmakers (as well as some game designers) aren’t inclined anymore to find creative ways around showing something that’s technically not possible. You don’t have your protagonists worry about how terrifying a monster is, you just show it. But is this really more terrifying?

Fig. 1: Typical blockbuster plot.

This trend has started around ten or twelve years ago when most films wrapped their plot around visual effects (consider Godzilla). I like good movies but I feel that this technology-driven way of film making opened the door for hollow shells, fancy CGI with a plot that lacks mostly of a plot (see fig. 1). Let’s face it: Transformers was just a CG-showreel with enormous budget and had a plot that insulted anybody with an age of more than one digit (or an I.Q. with more than two digits).

Of course, there are exceptions, but in general the more “groundbreaking” CGI is in a movie, the more holes has a plot. More than the antagonist after the final battle.

So am I proposing to ban CGI from movies and do it as Quentin does, edit your masterpiece on a Steenbeck and the only “optical effects” in it are titles and credits? Of course not.

Visual Storytelling

I am not the only one (and by no means the first one) to notice. So what is visually interesting enough to burn a bonfire of visual effects, yet still has something one can call a plot? Comics. It started with Spiderman, along came X-Men, Batman, a bomb of Superman, Iron Man, Hancock, Watchmen… and I am sure I missed some. Do you see a pattern there (apart from the Men ¹?)

There’s a lot of good will to adopt the comic style in films and some bold attempts do succeed. Just look at Sin City! In my opinion Frank Miller is not a really good comic author nor artist but, hey, it’s a step in the right direction. If you want to know who I feel is the best comic artist at the moment then read David Mack‘s Kabuki series. It is so good that I hope there will never be a movie.

CGI can do so much more than just enhance movie reality. It can create one. But why stop there? It doesn’t have to create anything realistic. Today’s audience grew up with television, movies and animé, they know about film language, have an instinct for how story arcs work (even without attending an overpriced Robert McKee lecture) and they are familiar with all kinds of crazy shit. They don’t need to be shown the devastation a hostile army can create ². They don’t need to be treated like idiots!

What are films about again?

Having all that eye candy surround you in every film it is hard to take a step back and see the big picture (pun intended): Films are about people. They are about emotions, feelings and relations. Consider Terminator 2: It’s not about the T-1000 being able to morph into anything it wants to, it is about John Connor who is terrified of this machine, yet he has to trust the T-800, another machine, the only person in his life that is more father-like than any human. This movie would work even without the CGI. Transformers on the other hand would just be silly. It already is silly.

Fig. 2: Still from Ryan, (2004)

But well placed CGI and visual effects may help to transport the feelings, emotions or perceptions. A good example I feel is Ryan (fig. 2). Just the opening shot tells so much more about the characters than dialogue ever could. The inner workings are visualized and are in interplay with the traditional film making techniques. And Ryan is not the only attempt into this direction. The more indie a film is, the more experimental it can be.

This way CGI shifts from being the silver coating of a turd ³ to becoming a wheel on the delicate cart where the plot is pushed along.

Yet we all know: As soon as a film has to accumulate money the producers lack the balls like a mule and rather please the 8 to 22 year old males who are prone to bring their sorry girlfriends along.

So?

Think beyond! Use your imagination! Feel! VFX are more than wire removals, rotoscoping or giant dancing robots. VFX are art and craft. VFX are a wonderful tool to create and reveal what can’t be captured by any other medium in the world.

Be indie! Be involved in pre-production. Find fellow artists who want to be more than roto-monkeys in the guts of some galley. For transforming VFX from just a finishing tool to a source for inspiration and art it is crucial that “post-production” should become “pan-production”.

And that’s tonight’s word.

Take an example: Are you a good singer? I am surely not. If I start singing then birds die and children get nightmares for years. While everybody (including me) hates the noises I produce, I wish I was a famous rock singer and on stage with Led Zeppelin or Kansas. Every now and then in the loneliness of my car with my music on the max, I attempt singing — and it is fun. But I keep it real and know that I will never ever be a rock singer and focus my life on what I am good at and is fun.

I guess it is the same with you. Let’s face it: You are not a good director and when you make a movie our dreams die and we all get nightmares from your way of “directing” and your “vision”. It is perfectly okay if you would get together with a couple of friends, have some beer and then put out the old Betamax camera on a tripod and shoot some silly horror splatter-movie loosely based on a videogame you guys enjoyed that afternoon. The next day you view it with your mates, you all share a good laugh and get back to your everyday life.

It is time for you to look deep inside your heart and realize that you are as much of a film director as I am a rock singer. It is not nice of you torturing people just to feed your ego. Yes, we all know that you *can* do it, make a movie, no matter what critics say — what do they know anyway, right? — or how to finance it via some dodgy investment fonds. But proving that all over and over again won’t make your films better, it makes them only bitter. I think you should really wake up at some point and realize that you are just a stubborn 8-year-old who insists on getting what he wants or else he’s pissed and lets it out on everybody else. And this kind of malign narcissism helps nobody, especially not your development as productive human being in society.

People say nasty things about your films, yes, and they tend to get very personal but the point is not to respond on an even lower level and jump other directors in a childish attempt to disguise your own shortcomings. No, the point is to accept their opinion, and if there are more than 300.000 people that signed a petition that should make you think. So why not let the midlife crisis kick in on you big time and try something totally different in your life like, a return to boxing or why not begin acting, rock-singing or politics? Or how about something that does not affect anybody apart from yourself such as collecting model trains, playing video games or breeding iguanas? Or write a book — after all you hold a doctorate in literature so at least you know about spelling and grammar way better than any of us.

Think about it. And take your time.

I hope I could raise some questions for your personal quest for your Meaning of Life. I feel you should take a break from all the hassle for a couple of months and reflect on your inner self in the solitude of a temple.

Get well soon!
Yours,
Phil

Marlboro, Magic and many ‘Mercials

It was my first night out watching a flick here in Berlin. I ordered the ticket online and once there I got myself all buzzing on salty popcorn, sugar and caffeine – thanks to the liter of coke which troubled me a little in the final act of the movie: I was ready for a nice evening with a good film.

Before getting into the movie itself I have to rant a little about today’s movie theaters and their way with advertisements. When paying for something today, you’re not really paying so much for the movie but for keeping the ads out of it. Interestingly this is not so much the case with films: If you download them for free (illegally, fair enough) there are no ads, but when you pay to see them in the theater you get half an hour of commercials. That’s right, half a frickin hour!.

I haven’t been in a bigger theater watching a movie quite a while so the first images that popped up on the big screen where breathtaking to me: A very strong score, beautiful helicopter shots of wild horses running in the prairie, the Death Valley, cowboys, more horses, more cowboys, more helicopter shots — and after a minute: “Marlboro” followed by a short “Smoking can kill you” plate. I don’t smoke, neither did anyone in the ad. But I discovered my love for the big screen again. Then there was a stupid German beer commercial and some more really shitty ones I luckily forgot about. But Marlboro was one of the most cinematic ads I’ve ever seen. My recommendation!

In between the ads there was a call for watching movies in the theater rather than one a tiny screen at home or, god forbid, on your iPhone. Yes, this clip really tried to convince us, the people already sitting in front of the silver screen, paying money for it and fed up with watching shitty commercials, to visit the cinema more often: “Don’t watch movies on your tiny screen at home while ironing!”. This ad was a waste of money and time. Especially mine. And the next ad was for a mail-order video rental service: “Watch all of your favorite movies at home while ironing!”.

After the commercials the lights went on again. The audience shared some puzzled “wtf?!” remarks with each other until the lights faded out again after a minute and the trailers-reel was shown. And one of the first ones was for Far Cry, another ratfucking of computergame-based films by German director Uwe Boll. But when I saw the trailer suddenly it was magic to me. Ooooh! — I can hear your “wtf?!” remarks now but it meant something different to me than watching Till Schweiger in a Hawaii shirt: Once at work I opened accidentally a project of an effects-shot from another movie rise had been working on, Far Cry. And I think there even was a five frame long sequence of that shot in the trailer. Seeing on the big screen what I only knew from the small computer screen, even for a tiny amount of time, made me realize that some of this immensely tedious work I do on the computer will eventually become unleashed. “One day”, I thought, “one day some of my works could end up on a big screen in a big theater with a big score as well…” That thought brought back the magic into my work-life at an instant. “One day…”

When the Italians next to me already shared a loud conversation about when the movie would “fucking roll already!” it finally did so. And what did I hear? A clipping in the front right speaker, it was getting old and you could hear it, which was quite a nuisance once you kept thinking about it. At least it wasn’t as worse as the Ursty screening in Salzburg!

But you did see the movie, right?

Yes! And first of all hats off to Heath Ledger, who played the Joker so frightingly crazy yet so real that I was really scared of his presence. The Joker was his best movie role and it’s a tragedy that such a tremendous actor is no more. He was among a very talented and well directed ensemble of strong character actors: The first half minute I saw Cristian Bale as Batman in action it was like “That’s what Batman should be like!”, any memories of the feeble and pathetic 60′s Batman were gone, as well as Robin’s character in the movie. A very good decision. Maggie Gyllenhaal just keeps getting better and better with every movie and is like a strong colored flower in the dark and gloomy world of Gotham City. Actors Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhard appear along the movie veterans Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, and everything fits so well together, that The Dark Knight would’ve been no less recommendable if there were no action sequences in it, which wouldn’t bother me much personally. Director/writer Christopher Nolan did another great job and can be considered not only a superb director but also a tremendous writer. In the 152 minutes (plus a random ten-minute break after the first hour) there hasn’t been a single time when I felt the urge to check the time or think of something different. And I easily get bored or distracted by thoughts like “If he really fell from a height like this and would catch his fall by hanging on to a ledge like that, then there would be one million pascal pressure on his fingertips…”

Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister kept the camera as free as a bat, flying over Gotham City, sometimes nearly jumping from high buildings with the actors, circling around the actors in some scenes. Gotham City is not as stylized as I would have liked to see it, still the city is always present and becomes an actor of its own. Nearly all the apartments, offices and other locations display the city through long and mostly seamless windows. Everybody is part of that city.

Sometimes I couldn’t help from watching the actors’ edges against a computer generated background closely for some glitches or problems that might occur with thin hairs comparable to my work at rise at the time. But, of course, Double Negative, Framestore CFC and BUF Compangie don’t make any mistakes. And you wouldn’t see them in a scaled down negative of the IMAX version. Although I couldn’t pay much attention to that because the story sucked me in, although it sometimes got a little puzzling.

So I should watch it, right?

Absolutely! The Dark Knight is a great movie even if you’re like me and not into all that super hero movies that flood the theaters with the same story arc of injustice, vigilante justice and oh-so-predictable ending. No, The Dark Knight offers some interesting twists, a real plot with interestingly developing characters and a dense atmosphere. The high rating (currently 9.1 out of 10) on IMdB is justified in my opinion. It is an stereotypical hero-story masterfully enhanced and populated with multidimensional characters and the mandatory action sequences. I recommend to go and see it at least once — on a big screen!

What I have learned today:

• That I don’t have to stand in line when retrieving a pre-paid ticket.
• That I hate hate HATE commercials that keep you waiting for the main feature more than five minutes.
• That one liter coke and a movie longer than two hours don’t go well together.
• That when strong lights are blurred by a defocused lens, the flare’s rays are still sharp.
• How much evolution within an genre like this is possible.
• That I still feel the magic when watching a movie in the theater.

Don’t worry! No spoilers ahead!

This film is the most Lynch-esque movie out there, it’s like a combination of Mulholland Drive mixed with Lost Highway and Blue Velvet, as pure Lynch as possible so to speak. And it starts off surreal — just as anticipated: The weird prologue consists of a Polish hooker (there are lots of them later on!), scraps of conversation reveal one of Lynch’s most dearest symbols in his movies: Doors, passages and gates, that lead you through time, space and even into different personalities. Other typical themes observed in this film are

• The voyeur.
• Close-ups of silently crying women.
• The gun.
• A rather brutal paternal character.
• Telephones and phone calls.
• Flats in the style of Lost Highway.
• The lesbian kiss.
• The point where you are certain that “this time I almost know what this movie is about!”…
• …closely followed by the point where everything stops making sense.

Then follows a sitcom-situation starring three rabbits with random laughs from the audience and one hare-character in an noble environment, a short dialog in Polish about a certain “entrance” one is looking for. Fade out.

Axx°Nn

After this disturbing prologue the Hollywood-Lynch directs: Time and people behave (rather) logical and there are only a few jumps in time. Most enthralling are the dialogs in the first part of the movie, strange, yes, but terrific and exciting. Listen closely and pay attention because it will help you deciphering (a bit) of the movie later on. Jeremy Irons as the director is doing a great job, actually that’s the kinda guy you like having on a set, very dear and very authentic.

David ♥ Dogma

David Lynch is like Picasso: After mastering the realistic and “beautiful” he turns more and more to the abstract and ugly, MiniDV in the case of INLAND EMPIRE. Learning about that after a few minutes made our decision to sit in the second row rather painful: Blurry and grainy, shaky and low-res. Mixed media (DV and film) would’ve fit better I think. Now it is just painful observing 35mm Panavision cameras in the film that are filmed with a low res DV cam.

Dogma is the way: Sometimes the camera-lens nearly touches the sweating, dirty, wrinkly, imperfect faces of the actors, so close that it’s not even possible to focus on them. Terrible light situations, especially in Poland or on the Hollywood Bld/Vine Str. intersection. But why not? It’s not the reality, it’s a movie.

On one hand it looks more realistic hence to the media, on the other hand less realistic because the DV footage screams “I am a video, not any reality!”; just the way Chris Marker experimented with analogue image samplers in Sans Soleil in 1981.

The film INLAND EMPIRE and the film that the characters are shooting become closer and closer until you can’t tell what is what. A little hint to keep them apart: Pay attention to the camera: If its focus is not where it usually should be thanks to technical limitations then the scene is probably no part of the film within the film. But if the scene looks just like you’re used to, and the music is as kitschy as it gets, then you’re most likely observing a scene from the film in the film.

To sum it up:

Great movie, especially for Lynch aficionados, but after the break to the completely surreal and twisted world that exists in David Lynch’s head (after about half the film) it sometimes gets a little hard, especially when the actors and actresses take their time discovering things that you didn’t dare to think of. The total running time of 180 minutes is a little hard to sit through.

Oh, one last reason to watch the movie if you can’t make up your mind: Did I mention the tits?

But yesterday I managed to visit Foto Köberl in Graz and bought five rolls of the Acros along with an Ilfosol-S devloper. Bad choice because the only thing I found so far on the combination of Across and Ilfosol-S was in the archives of photo.net where Suzuki-san wrote on the day of my 22nd birthday the following:

Ryuji Suzuki , sep 06, 2005; 02:25 a.m.
I suggest Acros 100 at EI 32 for 7.0 min, and EI 80 for 8.5 min in Ilfosol-S 1+14 at 20C. I don’t recommend Acros 100 at EI 100. (To advanced darkroom workers: developer DS-2 and DS-12 work very similarly to Ilfosol-S in terms of development time. Use DS-2 or DS-12 at 2+1 strength for this film. That is, two parts developer plus one part water.)

Okay – so overexpose the film 1/3f-stop. But I didn’t know about this when I was strolling down Herrengasse to Foto Ehmann (link defunct) while taking pictures with the Acros. There I bought a Fuji Provia 400F, a positive color film that is said to be pushable up to 3600 ASA (!) with good results for 9.50 € – expensive! One roll of Acros 100 was with 4.00 € even cheaper than an Ilford Delta 100 which costs 4.40 € to 4.20 € (Foto Mayrhofer or Foto Kücher in Salzburg).

Anyhow I am eager to develop the 4 rolls of film I shot the past couple of days. Results will follow!

So the first thing I did the next day was to take Lisa for a ride, visit the ATM and drove to downtown Salzburg where Foto Mayrhofer is located, a stone’s throw away from my favorite café in Salzburg, the Café Fingerlos.

We went in and asked for the Kiev — it was already sold to Germany. I was crushed but then I was told that there was a second Kiev BiG-six with the same equipment — and the same price. I was happy again and while thoroughly examining the dusty camera I realized that it was in very good shape. While chatting with the shop-owner I was surprised how competent he was — he even knew about the Kiev 800′s flaw of being equipped with brass parts inside the body, resulting in bad reflections on the film.

He told me that the camera’s previous owner was an old man who loved to photograph but mustn’t carry heavy things, such as the Kiev, which weighs with equipment nearly 4kg.

I was so happy about the price of mere 290 € that I bought a bunch of Ilford Delta 100 films with it and went with Lisa straight to the Café Fingerlos where I wanted to load a film in one of the magazines. But there already was a film loaded! Some kind of Fujicolor 100 ASA film, probably the last slide film of the old man. Quickly I put it back and exposed it completely and took it out. Maybe I will have it developed and give the photos by the old man back to him as a gift. In the other magazine there still is another film, 400 ASA. Color too, I suppose.

Back home I cleaned the camera and it’s parts for two hours — now it looks brand new.

Unbelievable how much I got for my money. This type of Kiev with all the equipment costs about 850 € at Brenner. The equipment shown on the picture includes:

• 1 x Kiev B.i.G.-six camera body
• 1 x 80/2.8 lens
• 2 x type 120 magazine (6×6)
• 1 x UV filter
• 1 x yellow filter
• 1 x rubber lens screen
• 1 x winding crank
• 1 x TTL viewfinder with exposure meter
• 1 x viewfinder + lens

• 2 x Exposed films
• 2 x Ilford Delta 400

What is not shown on the picture but was also included:

• 1 x carrying strap
• 1 x bag
• 1 x German manual
• 1 x viewfinder + lens (not working properly)

I can’t wait for the first developed films but on the other hand I don’t want to just point and shoot at anything just to have the film exposed.

I still have to getting used to this type of medium format camera which feels more like a Mamiya RB67 than a Kowa Six MM which I also like for its easy handling. With the BiG-six every once in a while I forget setting the correct f-stop on the lens resulting in an incorrect exposure. Although I think of me being quite skilled when it comes to loading film I had some major struggles at first and it took me about an hour and I dumped one film until it worked properly. The first film is exposed until frame 4. Totally exposed. And from then on it is completely dark. Luckily I bought four films on Friday for the weekend.
Despite all my struggles working with the BiG-six really is fun and a lot of Russian passion flows from the camera back to me. Big time!