BleepCast / Phil´s Blog » Games

F-Zero & Too Much Free Time

Phil Strahl — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:55:52 +0000

Today was National Day in Austria and I had some free time on my hands. That’s why I tried hard not to get some work done today. “I’ll be messing around with my Super Nintendo,” I told Conny. And she said “Alright. Have fun with it.” And I did. But in a totally unexpected way. Read on if you want to learn about F-Zero and a little about the making of its music…

Today I really wanted to indulge my mind in some mindless gaming after having watched a couple of Street Fighter 2 Ending scenes, but there was a tiny little thing I wanted to try first: I had an inspiration of it a couple of days ago and now I finally had the time to try it out.

The Backstory

Recently I had the opportunity to create some SNES-styled music for a game of my friend Jot, the Game Designer. I already had some Super-Nintendo-game-soundfonts but all of them were more than ten years old and had lots and lots of missing samples or just bad samples in it. So gathering all the sweet SNES instruments I wanted to use in my composition was rather exhausting and the result sounded a bit patchy as well to me.

The Idea

So what did I think of? Well, I wanted to create a soundfont myself from a couple of SNES music files I had lying around in my extensive chipmusic archive. “How hard can it be?” I thought with a smirk to myself, “Maybe I’ll do three or four games in the next hour or so,” I thought. “Because this can’t take long; an hour tops,” I thought. This was eight hours ago.

The Realization

Part One: Research

Ages ago I ripped some sound samples from Jurassic Park for a remix I did back then, but ended up never using them. I remember using a command-line program that would harvest the samples from the game-ROM. That I was looking for.

But, alas, software from ten years ago is hard to find and I gave it up when I learned that I was helplessly living in the past, because today everything comes with a user interfaces and features: The SPCTool v0.7 (download) from 2004 was a bit buggy but otherwise just marvelously up to today’s task: It highlights used samples in a song, lets you preview the samples (with loop-points!) and batch-export selected samples either as compressed SNES-wave files or — yay! — standard Windows PCM WAV files. I loaded up my favorite F-Zero SPC file, Big Blue and hit play. It was great, I could see which sample was used in which channel while listening to the song. So I selected all the samples and hit Export.

I only needed an editor to create my soundfont with. Ten years ago I was busy with the Vienna Soundfont Studio but couldn’t find a working version for my operating system anymore. Time flies by… Yet again I stumbled across a superior alternative, namely Viena. What the program was lacking in n-letters in its name, it made up for with an incredibly feature-rich and easy to navigate interface. I was delighted once again!

Troubles?

Importing the WAVs I had exported from the SPCTool was a little troublesome. Either that or I had no clue what I was doing. In any case I figured that it might be a problem that the exported files had an odd sample-rate, something just below 22,050 Hz. So I now was in need of something that would help me batch-convert my ancient Japanese sample-files to 44,100 Hz.

Since I am a proficient Googler I found what I was looking for in no-time, the r8brain Sample Converter, free of charge and despite the fugly UI quite useful.

Getting to grips with it

The estimated hour I thought I would be spending with it was almost over and I didn’t even have a single sample ready. I looked at the clock again and it wasn’t that late. I had plenty of time to play around and get a closer look at how the folks at Nintendo set up their compositions. Yes, I felt like Indiana Jones, digging up some treasure from the past…

Learning from the Japanese Masters

Memory was tight back in the days and F-Zero was a launch title of the Super Nintendo, so it had to look and sound good without breaking the mold of the memory. I guess nobody would have thought back in 1990 how much data you could stuff into a SNES game-pak. So what did Yumiko Kameya and Naoto Ishida, F-Zero‘s sound-designers and composers do — apart from an incredibly good job? They tried to use as little memory for music samples as possible. In fact, all the samples in their original SNES data-format where just a bit over 100 kb. In today’s world that’s almost nothing. Even back in the days all the music-samples of the game would fit onto a 3.25″ floppy disk no less than thirteen times!

Interestingly they tried to use as little “real-world” recordings from instruments as possible: Only

trumpet,
french horn,
alto saxophone,
Hammond organ,
Slap Bass

and five drum samples — that’s all. The rest are synth-sounds (yes, even the warm E-bass), and some of them sound awfully much like FM-synthesized sounds. Around 1990 FM-Synthesis was state of the art: Soundcards for personal computers (if they had any) would synthesize MIDI-instruments that way, the SEGA Genesis (released in 1988) was keen with it and even Konami developed at the time their VRC-7 chip for NES games. The chip would provide the composer (and gamer) with six additional FM-synth-channels to the standard NES sound. So the SNES was something totally cutting edge with its eight sample-fed channels when it launched. But back to the game. Have a listen to the samples and how frickin’ short they are:

F-Zero Sound Samples by sephcarissa

And yes, there were only five drum samples in the whole game:

A snare,
a rimshot (I have absolutely no idea where it was used, to be honest),
a closed hi-hat,
a semi-closed hi-hat,
and a medium tom.

If you’re into making music yourself, you might have noticed that one basic drum is missing — the bass drum. So how the hell did they get away with that in the game? As it turned out, they pitched the tom-sound down a couple of semi-tones and used the result as a feasible bass drum sound. Oh boy, sample-memory must have seemed really small 21 years ago!

But the most interesting sound was the noise of the wind in the track Death Wind. It is very creative: First they used a noise-sample that’s so short, it sounds more like a castanet-clap than anything else. At first I didn’t even rip that sample because I thought it was junk. I mean, listen to it above (it’s the one on the bottom of the play-list).
So they took that sample and pitched it down, down and even further down to the core of Earth itself so it transformed from almost nothing into an eerie, three-second long humm. But they didn’t stop there: On top of it loops an equally down-pitched and stretched sample; the semi-closed hi-hat sample.
Oh how do I bow before thee, Kameya-san and Ishida-san! And needless to say that I had my fun recreating this for my soundfont.

When I was trying to recreate the loop-points in Viena from the samples, I realized how tight they were, some even shorter than a the tenth of a second! And this meant trouble:
I don’t know how much you have worked with sound-samples yourself so let me tell you: If you loop a very short sound sample, it begins to change its pitch. The more so, the shorter your loop is. This becomes a problem when you only have a single sample for one note (usually C’) that you want the hardware to pitch up and down so that you can use it for all notes. This really was a problem and is also the reason why I didn’t quite get some slight off-key sounds out of my soundfont. Of course, I only realized this when I was testing my soundfont out after hours of key-mapping and creating ADSR envelopes off the top of my head.

Yes, this was another problem: To keep the file-size small, many samples were so short that it was hard to figure out where they belonged, i.e. for what instrument they were used for. And since they all were synthesized, it was even harder: It’s easy to distinguish a piano-tone from an organ, for example, even if your sample is just a quarter of a second long. But if you have a synthesized sound you’re lost. More so, if there is a number of them, all sounding very similar. Whew!

The only thing you can do is listen to the songs then in SPCTool, muting and solo-ing different channels during playback and keeping a close eye on the entry that tells you what sample-number is currently playing. So with that approach I figured out most instruments and ADSR-envelopes over the course of two or three hours or so.

The Field-Testing

From VGmusic.com, my favorite game-MIDI archive for over a decade now, I downloaded some artfully recreated music-tracks from the game as MIDI-sheet music and imported them into Reason. There I created some NN-XT sample players and fed them with my soundfont’s instruments to test them out. Holy cow, that was awful at first! No instrument was in proper key, some I had forgotten entirely and with others I messed up the envelopes because I took them for a different instrument than they actually were. It sounded like the devil himself took an AVGN-like diarrhea-dump onto those sacred compositions and was mocking me. So back to Viena for some envelope-tweaking, back to Audacity for some hand-tuning of the samples (Viena‘s correctional settings didn’t quite work with Reason) and back to SPCTool to listen to the originals over and over again.

Engaged and analytic listening of your favorite music for hours really separates the wheat from the chaff: If you still can listen to the tracks the next day without your eardrums vomiting, then you truly are listening to outstanding music.

During that back and forth between three applications (which don’t quite enjoy each others presence and demand of sole reign over the soundcard) really was exhausting and quite often I spotted errors in the MIDI files I used as framework. Since I am a merciless perfectionist I spent also quite some time ironing out those inconsistencies as good as I could.

The Presentation

“So what does it sound like?!” I hear you asking. Fear not: Below is the playlist just for you. All the tracks in it are recreations from my bitterly crafted soundfont and the rigorously corrected MIDI files from VGmusic.com.

My F-Zero Soundfont by sephcarissa

If you want to compare these to the originals (provided those aren’t etched into your mind), I suggest you get started with this playlist where you will find it all.

The Acquirement

And if you want to play around with the soundfont on your own, I am happy to release it on this very blog under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License:

	Click the Image to download my SNES F-Zero Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

♫ My Friend, the Game Designer

Phil Strahl — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 07:47:08 +0000

A good friend of mine is a game designer who designs actual games, and recently he asked me for one little favor which made me feel honored at first but also a little clueless on second thought, stressed in the process and eventually set me under creative pressure. But in the end everything turned out well…

Creating Games Back Then

So Jot is a game designer, isn’t that great? We had a little chat about how it all began and he was raving about an ancient program by Europress Software called Klik & Play. And boy, how well and dear do I remember that program! I got it as limited shareware with one of the first PC magazines with CD-ROMs, actually from one titled “PC Spiel mit CD-ROM” that literally translates to “PC-Game with CD-ROM” (I even blogged about it!). With this software you could create simple games across various screens, with your own animations, your own game mechanics and your own story. It was like Mario Paint on meth. To me as a 12-year old it was creative heaven.
The limitation of the demo was only in content, you didn’t have as many pre-animated sprites and backgrounds to choose from and your games were limited to only two or three screens¹. But the successive issues of PC-Spiel mit CD-ROM supplied me with games by other homebrew-creators: There was a real-time Worms clone, a game where you had to break out of prison and escape the police or a medieval fighting game. Best of all: I could open those games in K&P and, voilà, I dodged the screen count limitation of the shareware version. As a kid I obviously was pretty handy levering out that kinda stuff. I even went through the hassle to rework some of the original games with better graphics, sounds and animations. As a kid I was also an obvious smart-ass. But it was fun. Like Mario Paint on meth.

The successor of Klik & Play was the Games Factory and ultimately Multiumedia Fusion, the software that Jot is currently using to make his many games.

Pitiri or the importance of being obsessed

About two years ago Jot started working more or less alone on his awesome retro-styled jump ‘n’ run called Pitiri; although ‘retro’ in the sense of 1970′s hairdo and music, not so much ‘retro’ in the sense of chunky pixels in stunning three colors. No, Pitiri is different, yet so comfortably familiar.

When I visited Jot his room’s walls were plastered with designs of levels and enemies and the game-flow itself, hell, they still *are*! It took him many months and hundreds of hours to create the world and narrative of Pitiri. Apart from the intro, some sounds and graphic assets he did everything himself, occasionally having a fistful of friends as unpaid beta-testers. I was lucky and honored to be among them and gave poor Jot a hell of a time with my many pages of bug-reports for a simple single level. I’m a smartass, at least that’s what people keep telling me. Jot also composed and performed every musical piece in the game and, until I learned about that, I could swear I heard some old but good Neil Young song in the beginning.

The game still isn’t finished but what I have seen and experienced so far from Eli’s quest for his abducted brother I can assure you it’s gonna be great! I mean I talked with a robot, traveled in space and could turn myself into fire! Even at the same time, if I wanted to!

The requests

I am a big fan of independent artists, regardless of their medium. So I like to help out Jot occasionally with my ruthless selflessness … ahem. Okay, who am I kidding? I do it for the fame, the money and the girls²!

For example, Jot needed a “playful, computer-styled retro font” so I spent one or two afternoons with my sketchbook in my favorite café and designed him a font I titled Digital Disco despite the fact that there’s already a font by that name, as I learned much later after a quick Google search.

If you’re interested in my font, you can get it here as donation ware, which means you can have it for free but not clicking either the Flattr, the Kachingle or the PayPal Donate button makes Baby Jesus and Baby Moses cry. And nobody wants that, right?

But there was a new request: A couple of days ago my good friend Jot from ilikescifi.com told me about a new game of his in beta, called “Aratatatt” which will be available in the near future on the interwebz (I keep you up to date). It’s a jump and shoot in a post-apocalyptic world populated by evil robots. Since the game was all retro again (the synth-pop and new-wave soundtrack by none other than Jot himself) it featured a level boss. And Jot wanted 8-bit sound for it and asked me if I could supply him with a loopable chiptune that would last a good 40 seconds at least.

That’s what he told me via Steam when we were roaming our individual irradiated wasteland of the Mojave desert of Fallout New Vegas. As I was in a tough fight in Vault 3 with some fiends I got the guideline from Jot: “I’d love it to be just like a great Metroid-like showdown. I want 8-bit metal!”. I walked in the rearmost chamber of the vault with my companions Rex and Cass as I heard another message come in from Jot: “It’d be great in the next two days or so!” Only two days?! I took down Motor Runner with a skilled headshot and exited the game. I had work to do.

The tune

I switched on my Yamaha keyboard and launched the magnificent FamiTracker, a capable tracker that allows anybody interested and nerdy enough to make her or his own NES-compatible chiptunes with it, and hit some notes. It sounded terrible. I took some more time to tweak on my instruments, to come up with a rhythm and melody, hit the keys and — major suckage again. After an hour I was in grave despair and spent the following hour looking for kick and snare drum samples to use in the DPCM channel. Luckily end-boss-8bit-metal has a fairly straight-forward percussion. Really bland.

Then I tried coming up with a melody or at least a rough direction to the sampled drums, using the noise channel for hi-hats. Nada. I was incredibly frustrated until I decided to listen to some game soundtracks in my vast library. I hit gold when I dug up the soundtrack to Legend of Xanadu. The first part in my tune is largely based on the track JEMEUX MOUVAIS in the game, whereas the intro was inspired a little by XARKAS although my lacking proficiency in chiptuning really shows when you compare my tune to these two songs.

So finally I could start with the first part and it sounded really good and I got really far by my standards: 20 seconds. And absolutely no clue how to stretch it to 40 seconds. So I sat there, in front of the computer, the sun already up again. That’s when I went to bed. Luckily I was on a night shift the next day. So when I came back from work around 3 a.m. the next day I sat straight to my Mac and moonlighted color grading on some another project. Whenever I had graded enough shots for a decent render time, I switched to composing on the chiptune until the next batch of shots was ready to be colored. Despite what anybody’s common sense would imply, this back-and-forth of two totally different demands was highly effective and I managed to compose two patterns of nice breaks for the tune. This helped me out another 10 or so seconds but I still wasn’t very close to 40, and again, out of ideas.

That was when I really took the coward’s exit and after half the song I just transposed everything up one note and repeated what I had so far with some minor variations. I played it and took the time. Almost 50 seconds for the loop. I was free! And the sun had already risen again. But I wanted to be sure that it would sound good enough for Jot, so I copied the compiled song onto a CF-card, popped it into the PowerPak and turned on my TV. I wanted to know what it sounded like on a real NES.

It sounded holey, a lot of instruments weren’t playing and I was pissed. I went back to the tracker and tweaked around the omitted sounds in the hope of eradicating the problem. I don’t know what I did but the next time it worked. Like a charm. And it sounded really thick and familiar. Thanks to the system’s bias to let the song more or less completely clip and apply a rather stringent low-pass filter. But it was an analogue and warm clipping and the low-pass only made it less clicky.

As soon as I was done I sent it off to Jot and awaited his reaction. I was really hoping that I didn’t disappoint him too profoundly but a couple of hours I got his feedback: “shit phil it works so fucking well! you gonna love it. shit! thanks.”

Despite all the profanity it’s still the best reaction I ever got to a chiptune of my own. And since it is now officially Jot-approved I thought I might share it with you. You can listen to it here or even download the .NSF-file below. Enjoy! And you might want to click the Flattr or Kachingle button…

Seph Carissa – Showdown. 2010.
Download audio file (seph_carissa_-_showdown.mp3)
No player? Try this.

³
Download .NSF

Klik & Play didn’t support scrolling although some smart and crafty nerds found a way to fake it, yes, even fake parallax scrolling. Hacking at its best! ↩
In fact there’s only one. ↩
Icon by RaiderXXX ↩

BleepCast – Level 7

Phil Strahl — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:00:33 +0000

This is the BleepCast on Rob Hubbard, part two. Everything you want to know about the man that taught the Commodore 64 to produce grand sound-scapes and catchy tunes amidst the incoherent 8-bit turds coated with incompetence in the early 80′s. We will hear his later music, hear him talk about his time in the US and why he eventually came back. Don’t miss it!

Level Information:

This level occupies 51.5 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 56:27 min.
This podcast is for once NOT EXPLICIT because I could keep my f**king mouth shut – yaaay!

More information about the games Hubbard made music for, including cover art and personal experiences by the author at The Commodore Zone.
An Interview with Rob Hubbard from 2001 by Neil Carr.
A really comprehensive Interview with Rob Hubbard on c64.com
Rob Hubbard’s unabridged speech at the “Assembly 2002” Demo Party in Finland, found in stormblast0891’s YouTube channel.
Rob Hubbard’s Wikipedia page. Somebody should edit it with additional information!
An interview from 1997 with Rob who was still at Electronic Arts back then.
Not the Rob Hubbard you’re looking for.
An awesome amount of remixes of Rob’s tunes at remix.kwed.org.
Too lazy for browsing the High-Voltage SID Collection? Here are almost all of Rob Hubbard’s SID tunes.
The starting point for your own research.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 6

Phil Strahl — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:00:06 +0000

Two words that describe this and the next BleepCast: Rob Hubbard. The man that taught the Commodore 64 to produce grand sound-scapes and catchy tunes amidst the incoherent 8-bit turds coated with incompetence in the early 80′s. This level is huge, so it’s clipped into two. And you better stock up on extra lives and get ready to enjoy Hubbard’s music, hear Hubbard’s voice and lean about the man in a tenaciously researched podcast. This is part one.

Level Information:

This level occupies 41.5 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 45:27 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally I get quite profane…

More information about the games Hubbard made music for, including cover art and personal experiences by the author at The Commodore Zone.
An Interview with Rob Hubbard from 2001 by Neil Carr.
A really comprehensive Interview with Rob Hubbard on c64.com
Rob Hubbard’s unabridged speech at the “Assembly 2002” Demo Party in Finland, found in stormblast0891’s YouTube channel.
Rob Hubbard’s Wikipedia page. Somebody should edit it with additional information!
An interview from 1997 with Rob who was still at Electronic Arts back then.
Not the Rob Hubbard you’re looking for.
An awesome amount of remixes of Rob’s tunes at remix.kwed.org.
Too lazy for browsing the High-Voltage SID Collection? Here are almost all of Rob Hubbard’s SID tunes.
The starting point for your own research.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 5

Phil Strahl — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:00:20 +0000

The BleepCast inspects covers, remixes and de-makes of our favorite tunes in the last 30 years in this level and asks how everything started, how it evolved and where it all went. This is a broad topic and so there’s no screwing around: This BleepCast hits you massively with 50 minutes of pure nerdsound, spoken and played alike. And the best of all: You’ll love it! I’m happy, Bob!

Level Information:

This level occupies 50 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 55:27 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. It’s a ~~fuckin~~ habit — I’m sorry

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 3

Phil Strahl — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:01:58 +0000

This all new episode of the BleepCast deals with gamifications of great movie scores. If you were already alive in the 80′s, going to the movies or just watching classic flicks from the 80′s on your VCR you probably had once the urge to become Indiana Jones, Marty McFly or Luke Skywalker yourself. Then you just had to go out (yes, I know, that’s the hardest part in the life of a nerd) and get yourself one of the games that had licensed movie content among them, and usually some crappy game as well. Although sometimes you would be surprised by actually real good games…

Level Information:

This level occupies almost 40 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 43:29 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth once again.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Homo Ludens

Phil Strahl — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:48:32 +0000

Max, a former fellow student, asked me a few weeks ago whether I was interested in buying some old gaming consoles with a bunch of games from him. Since I started collecting and maintaining old computers and gaming consoles a couple of years ago, starting with the few I had since I was a kid, I was interested in Max’ offer, expecting not more than a few dusty plastic boxes with missing cables and scratched game discs with broken jewel cases to add to my museum. Man, was I wrong!

So yesterday I finally had the cash together and some time to pick up the heavy packing case with tons of 1990′s state of the art consoles. There was a a black Game Boy pocket, a painted PlayStation (“it glows under a UV-lamp”), a SNES with 50/60 Hz switch (“So you could play Japanese titles as well”), Nintendo 64 with memory extension, a Sega Dreamcast with modem and keyboard and a Sega Genesis with 32x extension and SEGA-CD drive, something so bulky that you just gotta love it. Everything in good to very good condition, complete with many controllers and memory cards (such as the Dreamcast’s VMU).

Holy frick!

And that was not all, there was a bunch of Sega 32 games, some dream cast CDs, excellent N64 cartridges (such as Golden Eye 007, Ocarina of Time or Perfect Dark) and many PS1 games. I don’t know when I have the time to hook all these consoles up or rather implement them into my museum’s grand hall of ludology (i.e. my dorm room), nor do I know where to put all the stuff! I guess for now I put them back into the big torn box they came in hoping that Ikea might sell some day a Billy-shelf that fits my nerdy needs.

In case you are interested in a complete list of the games I own, you can check out my have-list at MobyGames.

The Future of Visual Effects

Phil Strahl — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:27:18 +0000

“Is this a computer film or a normal film?” I recently overheard a question of a girl directed at her boyfriend near a movie theater. The guy told her that they were about to watch Terminator 4 and it would be a “normal film but with lots of computer stuff”. The girl sighed. “Nobody falls in love with anybody in those movies…”

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.

So many men… Do I sense chauvinism or a deliberate homoerotic shift in mainstream cinema? ↩
“…although it looked so fuckin’ awesome in those animatics! Why don’t we throw out that supporting character and show more devastation?” ↩
This quote from the Angry Videogame Nerd stand for all those CGI-laden, plotless movies “Perhaps it’s a silver turd: It might not look like shit, but it sure smells like it.” ↩

Status Update: Still Alive

Phil Strahl — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:29:21 +0000

It’s been quite a while since my last blog entry. In fact it has been so long, that I had to think twice to recall my password for this sweet blog o’ mine.

You ask “What’s new? What’s cool?” and I tell you: A lot: I’ve been in the trenches with Nuke and fought After Effects so there’s a lot of stuff I want to show and tell what I’ve learned in the past weeks, not only about VFX.

I recorded a couple of tracks for my upcoming album (release: summer 2009). The Samson G-Track is a sweet piece of hardware, it combines a condenser microphone and an USB-soundcard. Finally I am able to record my acoustic guitar and piano work without the “help” of my 5€-headset whose microphone buzzes worse than the wasp hive in Donkey Kong Country 2 and rumbles more than my PS2′s Dualshock 2 controller that surrendered yesterday to material fatigue after nearly nine years of heavy duty service. Got me a new one today.

Between all my private creative work I am tackling 87 effect shots for our student short film “MOSKAU” and have only 4 weeks more to go. Luckily I am not alone with that truckload of effects still many shots end up on my todo-list. I am really honing my skills with Nuke right now. One year ago I only considered After Effects as the way to go and even was surprised that neither Double Negative nor Dreamworks ever came back to me after my enthusiastic applications at the fmx/08 conference.

That reminds me: If I was you (and I am 80% certain that I am not) I would keep an eye on this blog because I’ll be covering the fmx/09 in Stuttgart in detail on this very blog, complete with pictures and serious grammatical errors. So if you won’t be able to see it all in Stuttgart yourself, come back on the 5th of April 2009.

That’s all for now folks. I gotta get some sleep before the weekly meeting tomorrow. Which means I am shredding some Guitar Hero songs on extreme. Yes, you read correctly: I am publicly admitting that I am good at that game. On the upside: I got better on a real bass guitar as well.

So it all boils down to that simple phrase for me at the moment: Practice makes less imperfect.

Zombie Fever

Phil Strahl — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:26:53 +0000

Here we go again. When posting my previous post, titled Sicko!, I was referring to my first moments of playing Vavle’s Left 4 Dead. But I didn’t expect it to become worse.

I bought Left 4 Dead last year via Steam during the 30%-Off! days. The download took frickin’ ages thanks to the trickling internet-connection here on campus and so I started on the last day of 2008 to really play it. A lot. Hardcore in fact. I only made a pause for fifteen minutes around midnight when I went to the highest point of the campus building and observed in perfect loneliness the fireworks before getting back to the game. I solely play it online and there were a lot of people in my time zone who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the new year, because they wanted to play the game — NOW!

So after about 12 hours of zombie slaying I felt odd and decided to go to bed. That was the last time I felt splendid this year. I woke up on the next day (in fact, the same day) with terrible pains in my tonsils and a fever. It was hard to tell being awake from being in delirium and thanks to my L4D gaming the days before I had the worst fever-trip ever. I guess I got a free glimpse of what Vietnam veterans mean, when something “really takes them back”. All the time zombies were coming for me when I closed my eyes, and even when I kept them open. I groaned and rolled from side to side but it was no good. This bad trip lasted for about seven hours.

I think I have nailed down how fever-dreams work. They single out a few little moments of a normal dream and repeat them again and again and again. The only way out, as far as I’ve discovered, is to bring some new images in, by, say, watching TV.

I don’t recall my awake/asleep phases exactly, the only thing stable was the fever, the chill and the zombies. Today I felt a little better, not so many zombies in my mind anymore but still the same pain in my tonsils though. I got a lot of phone calls I couldn’t answer, a lot of text messages about my missed calls and it took me half a day to overcome my dizziness and get up to look at the phone.

While I was feeling a little better today I noticed that I am slowly running out of food and drugs and didn’t yet feel in the condition to get up and get some. So hopefully today I’ll get myself together to do buy the most urgent necessities.

What I have learned in the last days

That playing horror-games hardcore go terribly with fever!
That watching TV all the time has some appeal.
That stocking up on packet soup, instant noodles and that likes should be done regularly.
That Podravka-brand soup doens’t taste too well two years after expiry date (Hint: Don’t eat anything from a packaging with a company’s old logo on it!)
That my first machinima fun video has over 70.000 views on Rock Star Social Club. It’s crazy!