EDIT: Of course I couldn’t finish this lengthy post in one lunch break so I posted it the next morning.

As some of you already know I am working as an intern at rise visual effects here in Berlin and spend my days working with Nuke, Combustion as well as Avid, the latter two being a major pain in my brains. Rise is currently doing the VFX for quite a number of international projects, putting me in the position to participate on some of them with minor shots. I keyed and comped ² for the German TV movie Die Patin some dull green screen shots, helped out with a replacement of an Oslo tram sign for the Norwegian movie Appelsinpiken as well as designed a fake UI for a screen replacement in the same movie. And after messing around with Avid on the company’s demo reel for two and a half weeks I was assigned to one shot for the upcoming Warner Bros movie Ninja Assassin.

The shot is equivalent to the movie’s title: Two fighters, one ninja and the protagonist (probably Rain, but it is hard to tell because of all the action going on) stand on wet asphalt in the middle of a street, their blades crossed. A car sends both of them flying into the air, Rain lands in front of the camera on a dark stunt patch whose fabric matches the tarmac not really perfect. And both stunt men are rigged with fat wires for their stunt, the camera panning along.

This shot from scene 98 is 136 frames long and one hell of a wire removal. Everything is moving and shifting, the overall lightness changes all the time depending on the headlights of the other cars and the wires move wildly behind and in front of the flying men. Seen from the compositor’s point of view: Hell. At least close to it.

On Friday I really started out with Combustion and felt quite lost at first. My co-worker Sascha introduced me to the Painting tool and I started painting like crazy and was certain to have that shot finished by Wednesday. On Monday I looked at it again and it just was awful. Jittering, double images, offsets and all the things you don’t want to see when you expect to see the background instead of the wire.

I couldn’t find a quick tutorial or at least a guideline on the web on how to start out with that kind of shots so I learned by trial and error. For any of you interested in a short guideline on how to pull off wire removals here’s what I suggest, thanks to Florian, Sascha and Jonathan for helping me find my way through to this. Hence I am not allowed to post any stills from the shot I will deal here only with basic concepts.

How to remove the wires

The Topmost Layer – Foreground

Take out your scissors, it’s roto time! The first step is nearly always to rotoscope the wires tightly but not too tight, you want to add about 3 or 5 pixels surplus on each side, in case you need to feather your mask later on. And probably you will. Pay special attention to the parts where the wire disappears behind the actors and make this really perfect that you won’t have to deal with partial removals in that areas later on.

The Bottommost Layer – Solids

If your shot is like mine and provides you with a couple of frames where the wires are shot against a (more or less) uniform solid (such as the sky) you can put a layer with the original footage below the layer with the cut out wires. Now nudge the original so that the solid color will look through where the holes of your wires are. It is advisable to do this for each wire separately so you don’t have to make any compromises. Also don’t compromise with the areas where you have background features because we will make a clean plate of those parts.

In the Middle – Clean Plates

For any background that has features you will need to draw a clean plate from your original material now. That means to use the clone stamp (or it’s equivalent, depending on your tool of choice) and to paint out any of the actors and wires for one frame. Attention: This is no photograph where it doesn’t matter what portion of the background you use to paint out a wire! Hence it is an animation you have to paint exactly the obscured background. You do this by setting your clone source to a frame later or earlier in your sequence when the part you want to paint over is not covered by any foreground elements. If the actors are moving quite a lot it should be done in no time, but usually you have to use half a dozen or more source frames to clone one. If the actors are very static and there is no way to get a clean view on the background behind them you have to fabricate some background yourself. Make sure it is always your background that’s showing then, otherwise the features will flicker.

Place this clean background under your rotoed layer and on top of your sky-nudge-layers after you cut out the sky from your clean plate as well.

If the camera is moving too (like in my case) then track your background clean plate to the camera movement. The combustion tracker works really well but is not perfect. So you might want to nudge your plate in position manually from time to time.

And here’s the tedious task: You need a clear plate of the background whenever it has changed. In my case the camera was moving wildly and while it still was the same background after 100 frames, it was seen from a slight different angle and very different lighting conditions so I had to account for those circumstances as well.

The Colors Change!

I was not very lucky with my shot and the brightness and color values kept changing all the time so even my clean plate and nudged background did not always match the foreground. The only way I saw fit was to have an animated color correction in every layer but the original one. So I raised and lowered gamma values somewhere far beyond the decimal place frame by frame until it looked right.

That’s it?

In fact: No. Until now I was only writing about the background. But what about wires in front of your actors? In my case one of them has wrapped the wire even around his torso so he could be lifted even higher in the shot.

If your actors aren’t moving much but the wire is, you should be fine by painting it out frame by frame but be very careful and alert about any changes of lighting and motion and do it like the folks at Disney: After every paint stroke view it in motion with the frames before and after. In fact it is possible to pull it off in Photoshop (you will love CS3 Extended for importing image sequences and being able to use the healing brush in case you can’t use or don’t want to use one of Combustion’s greatest features: tracking paint strokes over time to certain features).

If there’s a lot of action going on any most of it will be lost in motion blur it becomes a little easier for you, the same way it becomes harder when there’s not much motion in the picture and a constant wire removal in the same place to do. The only way to pull this off I see is to make a small clean plate of the area in question and employ a four-corner pin or warping or that kind of stuff on top of it. It will be a lot of nudging and fine-tuning but in the end it will be much smoother than fidgety paint strokes.

Quality Assurance

Just as you think you’re done, it gets ugly: To ensure the quality of your work crank up brightness and contrast of your viewer and view our work whether it really matches the background and prepare yourself mentally to be busy for another couple of hours. Some masks won’t fit all too well, some colors are a little off and some things you expected to be in the blacks aren’t that black at all.

Phew, that was more than I expected…!

But you said something about a….

Yes, I mentioned learning about “an inconvenient truth” in the beginning, right?
As of one hour ago I was positive to be finished by Friday with the whole shot, already having done a great deal of the work. Only some minor painting and corner pinning would’ve been necessary. Shortly before taking my lunch break Florian, my supervisor asked me to look into the scene’s references folder. “There are only five frames in it” I replied puzzled. “That’s right! Those are the frames that will be in the current edit. So render what you got with additional four frames before and after and you’re done on this!”.

Five frames. The five frames of the car hitting the two guys. That’s a little more than a fifth of a second! I was hoping to be done with the shot by Friday, still I don’t feel satisfied with the shot anymore.

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.

I was plotting and scheming how I could convert a HFS+ file system into a platform friendly FAT32 but the easiest way is usually the one which takes you the longest. I copied every single file to the Mac’s hard drive, reformatted the disk to FAT32 and currently I am waiting as the files are transferred back onto the external hard drive.

Effectively this whole process ate up about one hour of my time. One hour I could have been working on the data instead of moving it around. But it wasn’t over already.

I remember requesting the files as, quote, “MXF files, straight from the P2 card” from my source but I haven’t paid attention to the fact that I won’t be supplied with dailies rather than excerpts from an edit. So I got the strangest files I’ve encountered so far: MXF.DV-QuickTimes that won’t play back on my PC – thanks to DVCPRO-HD compression. I strolled the web to get hold of the codec for QuickTime. To cut a long story short: For Windows users there aren’t any. So I spent the rest of the evening in the lab on a Mac with Final Cut Pro installed which read and played back the files no problemo re-encoding and reading some gaming magazine.

So it was recoding time – from HDVCPRO HD to QuickTime JPEG with about twice the file size that made me fondly remember the days back when I purchased my notebook — when 40 gigs meant a real big hard drive.

And now?

Now I’m reformatting the QuickTime files to TIF image sequences because Nuke doesn’t like JPEG QuickTime files. Time lost today: About 7.5 hrs — and counting.

What I have learned today:

• That sometimes it’s the cable, not the device.
• That you can access a Mac’s Disk Manager under Applications > Utilities.
• That this Mac can read NTFS disks — but not move data onto them.
• That I really can’t stand a Mac mouse’s acceleration and behavior.
• That there’s no way to read a DVCPRO HD QuickTime file on a PC.
• That a Mac has to have Final Cut Pro installed to play back a DVCPRO HD QuickTime file.
• That QuickTime exports the video files in the resolution currently displayed.
• That JPEG-QuickTimes (maximum quality) are twice as big as eqivalent DVCPRO HD QuickTime files.
• That Nuke doesn’t like QuickTimes with JPEG compression.
• That I should communicate better what files I need in what format and on what file system.

My Demo Reel Mass Production,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

It all began a couple of weeks ago when I was hastily asked on the threshold of a door if I wanted to join this year’s conference.

I said and it was settled.

This weekend most of my colleagues sharing my major at college drove on Sunday the 350 kilometers up to Stuttgart where they probably enjoyed a nice evening and had a whole night of sleep to prepare themselves for today’s tour de force of lectures and presentations. The same night I was busy mass-producing ten portfolio DVDs complete with menu and all the necessary PDFs in the DVD-ROM section. When the printer finally printed the labels in the right location on the templates it was already 1am. As the printer was busy labeling, I got busy myself preparing and packing my bags for the four day trip. Big mistake! Currently I am sitting in bed with my notebook ¹ here in Stuttgart, assembling the following list of things I should have brought with me before leaving:

• Soap
• Shampoo
• Something to eat
• Something to drink – anything
• A charger for my cell phone
• A charger for my digital camera’s batteries
• A map (at least printed out) of Stuttgart in case my navigation system fails to operate (as happened when trying to reach the hotel)
• A micro-particle-emission seal mandatory for vehicles in Stuttgart. I’ll gamble and see whether I get to pay the fine of 40 €
• My iriver
• Something to read apart from the fmx program.
• Chewing gum

What I have learned today

• That you should never pack your bags when you’re tired and/or otherwise occupied
• That drinking self-made ice tea doesn’t help falling asleep quickly
• Neither does playing Audiosurf

This Saturday was a big day for me: My first Visual Effects supervision job apart from anything related to my education. Magic Movie hired me for the visual effects to their documentary for national TV which will be aired some time in fall. I can’t tell you about the story (because I’ve signed a non-disclosure contract) but I can tell you about my day.

The day started by missing the first train thanks to a couple of old ladies who were totally inapt when trying to purchase a train ticket from one of the ÖBB vending machines on the ramp. After they somehow managed to get a ticket they got onto the next train to Salzburg city, but I missed my connection and had another hour in the morning to get ready for the day.

Usually I avoid riding in trains but when money is tight there’s not much you can take. On the plus side you have six hours of time for disposal when you’re not the one driving. Luckily there weren’t many passengers traveling to Vienna that day except that one guy who sat across me and nearly finished “Hector’s Journey” by some French author by the time we reached Vienna. I was plugged into my iriver the whole train ride and enjoyed the three hours I had by napping for two of them, the other hour was filled with listening to Calexico ¹, reading the IHT, preparing for my upcoming tutorial-class and, most important, reading and pondering the storyboards for today’s shoot.

I arrived at the studio at around 1pm as the crew just had finished painting the white background to blue. It still smelled of wet paint while I was offered a strong espresso. I didn’t even notice that there was no sugar in it for I was so eager for some java. It was the first time I went to Vienna without paying good old Starbucks a visit.

When the actor arrived too and got his special-effects makeup applied by no less than director Michael Satzinger himself I set up the blue screen for VFX with Christoph Skofic, now a very talented and passionate cameraman and cinematograher I know from school. Luckily he already knows much about working with visual effects so I could spare everybody the explanation what exactly tracking marks are and why I need them so badly. On some DVD commentary track I’ve once heard somebody say “Why did we need a visual effects supervisor anyway? Last time the VFX came out well without one”! I say: That might me true, but it would’ve been much cheaper and faster with having a VFX supervisor. Not to mention the thousands of curses from the guys in VFX…

My last train back to Salzburg was leaving at 8:40pm so we had to carry out the most important and most difficult dolly shots in the beginning – the dolly shots. Usually everybody on set hates a Visual Effects Supervisor but I felt fine with that team: They gave me the time needed to mount the tracking marks on the background, on stand-ins and to perform the tedious measurements of everything and the camera’s gamma-mode. You can’t be too thorough when recording what’s happening on set, especially when you do the post-production of the shots yourself. But this crew was very relaxed and gave me the time I needed which I appreciate much.

Difficult VFX shots are always a compromise between what you can force on set to decrease the workload in the post-production, and what you can’t do on the set which results in hours of clean-up in the post. Working as a VFX supervisor means balancing these two positions. It also means being imaginative enough to tell whether a shot works or not by just seeing two people walking around a blue studio. And it also means that it looks like you’re the only one without a “real” task like grip.

Bewteen two shots our director was asked by Lukas, another old classmate of me and grip/lighter/sound in this team
  “Hey Michi, why aren’t you into commercials at all?”
Michael replied boldly that
  “I am not making films to make money!”, directly followed by a comment from technical director and co-founder of Magic Movie, Jörg Steger,
  “Well that’s exactly the problem!”
Jörg spent about 100 € that afternoon for purchasing 30 liters of buttermilk among other edible props for upcoming scenes the next day. “Nobody drink the wine or eat the prosciutto!” – pause – “It’s poisoned!”.

New Horizons

Time flew by and I could assist on three shots before I had to leave for one interesting train ride home. First, I nearly ended up in a train car to Venice (Italy) but finally found a seat in a cabin with only three older ladies and an older man reading a thick book. I thought that they wouldn’t be trouble when I was trying to sleep. Big mistake. Except for the man with the book (who got off after 15 minutes) they were all drunk. Majorly. Plus their husbands where only one cabin apart — just as drunk and also with an open door towards the aisle. One of them paid cheesy visits and babbled something about “how I love you, Hildegard” and “how I hate you, Hildegard”. Somehow I still managed to sleep a one and a half hour in total, waken up every ten minutes by a high-pitched sharp laugh. When the old men started singing again on the aisle I woke up and harshly shut the door which irritated the old drunks but I couldn’t care less.

In Linz they finally got off and I was alone — at last! I switched seats and just when I had fallen asleep again three young black hip-hoppers with two local R’n'B-styled lower-Austrian girls hopped in and started babbling, partly in French, and insulting each other so bad that I wasn’t sure if they really belonged to the same clique. Half asleep I learned that one of the girls, Kathi, was pregnant and always concerned that her folks would stare at her belly while she was insulting Foma all the time that
  “Africa stinks of all the cows and I’m gonna sue you because you ain’t Austrian.”
Foma kept laughing
  “It’s the corruption that’s so terrible don’t you go to school?”
Kathi growled angrily. Foma looked at me
  “Sorry, man, she just keeps talking and talking and talking.”
He laughed tipsily and one of his “brothers” leaped in and gave him a 2-liter plastic bottle of whine of which he took a big gulp.

Half an hour later their peers found a cabin they had for their own, one without a creepy sleepy blond guy, and went off. Before he left Foma looked at me.
  “Everything alright? You want me to turn off the lights so you can sleep?”
  “Thanks, man. I’m fine. But keep them on, I don’t wanna fall asleep again and miss my station!”
He nodded, smiled and left, keeping the door open, but I didn’t mind. Still after another thirty minutes I got a terrible headache, dimmed the lights and decided to order my thoughts while blankly staring into the dark, ever changing landscape outside as Foma and his folks were merrily goofing around in the aisles. Suddenly one of them looked into my dark cabin, assumed that I was sleeping and silently closed the door before he went back to his friends.

In Salzburg I got off, paid the exorbitant amount of 5.20 € for a pair of hot wieners and went to my train due campus Urstein that wasn’t leaving for half an hour and so I waited more or less alone and more or less awake for it to start moving. I was tired and exhausted and felt as if I was the only one awake around. But I was mistaken. Two stops before I had to get off a goth girly all in black, of course, tumbled in, nearly tipped over her enormous boots and cranked up the volume of her white iPod Nano to the max listening to an old Evanescence track. She opened her bag and dug into it for something. As she finally found a tiny lip-gloss she let out a sigh of relief while applying it. I could tell from the intense smell that it had some very fruity flavor. And I am not sure but I think she even ate some of it.

When I got off at my station there was cold silent fog everywhere. It carried away some of my dizziness as I made my way towards the campus building. As I was making my way to the backside I noticed that it was full moon and with the floating fog around and with the already turned-off garden lamps the place looked nearly magical. Behind many blinds the rooms were lit, probably with awake people inside them, working, talking, still I was certain there was nobody else awake. I was so sleepy that it was enough for the whole campus that night.

The worst part is having the textures and the Phong-shading look right. Somewhat. And also tough is getting the proper model setup, with physical calculation meshes and that stuff. And getting the VTF and VMT scripts right. Phew!

In fact it is total horror the first time. And it’s not much better the second time. The third time you know what mistakes you make. The fourth time you finally understand what’s really going on. The fifth time you get a hang of it. The sixth time you want to try something new. Then: proceed to the beginning of this paragraph.

Maya to Source

In case you are interested and have a good understanding of the German language, I suggest that you download my video tutorial on how to get a Maya model from Maya into the source engine within forty minutes — with installing all the necessary plugins too.

You can download the video (DivX, 52 megabytes) by clicking this link. Hope it helps you a little!

Although we had to queue up to get our tickets I bought over the internets we were lucky with the seat. Somewhat. You probably noticed that there’s no plural. But I didn’t mind standing because I had a better view and taking photos felt more natural. Additionally I was able to use one of the columns as cheap tripod. It turned 8pm and no Chuck there yet. So we kept on waiting among the people who took turns to order “two beers” at the bar. Book-groupies and The Cult members everywhere were eager to meet their idol.

But how do you pronounce Chuck Palahniuk? [Pah-lae-nik] the evening’s moderator said and a bald Chuck in a grey suit with flip-flops sat down between the moderator Bernhard Robben and the German (also voice) actor Johann Nikolussi who read out passages from Chuck’s latest book Rant.

Chuck is a very nice and very fun guy, we learned quickly, and he has a very distinct way of telling stories, especially when they involve himself. Usually he smirks, leans forward to the microphone and beams at the audience. Then he looks around beginning very slowly and emphasizing important passages and continues not much faster.

During the course of the first set of questions Chuck Palahniuk explained how he got into writing. “I wanted to become immortal, I wanted to become famous and I wanted to become rich. And with that in mind I began writing my first book that flopped.”. The more we learned about Chuck the more we realized that many of his books are composed of autobiographic details.

I was a driver for a hospice and drove dying people to their self-help groups and back to the hospice. And during those meetings I was sitting a little aside waiting to bring some of them back home. And because all the people were dying of some disease they thought that I was too, because I just sat there along with them. But, you know, you can’t tell them that you don’t. ‘No, I’m just a tourist’ – you can’t say that, that’s rude! And that was the starting point for my next book called Fight Club.

About the writing style of his latest book, which is an assembly of more than 50 different people’s points of view, Chuck said that it is much easier to create a fake “reality” by using bits and pieces rather than by a coherent narrative flow.

People nowadays grew up with movies and can read film language. You see a picture. And then another one. And another one. And you construct the narrative in your mind by yourself, you don’t want to get taken by your nose and guided through it. But today many people still write in this 19th century fashion: ‘She heard nothing of him. Two weeks later…’ etc. You don’t need this kind of connections.

[...]

Making people believe they are witnessing a documentary of any kind makes it much easier to give it a real touch. It’s the way Welles’ War of the Worlds works or The Blair Witch Project.

Another thing is that you can easily watch or read small pieces of a huge thing like some people’s personal view on a certain event instead of trying to recreate it as a solid whole. It’s just a small bit. And you don’t mind having another one. It’s like popcorn.

Palahniuk was asked what he thought about the local fight clubs that had emerged after his book and that, especially after the adaptation with Pitt and Norton, had popped up increasingly all around the world, and if he is afraid what will happen when people try out the things he invents in his books.

I don’t make things up. All the things I write about have happened somewhere to somebody. They are all around us, but we don’t want to know. But I think it is important to write about those things.

[...]

When I was in London a well-groomed guy in a suit came up to me and wanted to talk about Fight Club.
“The thing you wrote about in your book about urinating in people’s food in restaurants… I am a waiter in one of London’s finest restaurants… and we do it all the time!”.
I was like What? and he just smiled shyly. “What restaurant?” I asked him and he replied
“I can’t tell you or I will loose my job”. And I said:
“Then I am not going to sign your book!”. He stood there, looked at me, having a hard time and finally said: “There are two five star restaurants in London…” — pause —
“Margaret Thatcher ate my sperm.” – “WHAT?” – “At least five times”.

[...]

So you see those things are out there no matter I write about them or not.

After about ninety minutes and after hearing the complete chapter 16, a detailed description of “Party Crashing”, we were honored by hearing a new and unpublished short story from Chuck called Cold Calling only to be read out at this very place and not to be published anywhere. Could this be true? Of course it wasn’t according to an article in the Austrian newspaper Kurier that said he also read it out there the day before. What a charming son of a bitch!

But today’s session was no traditional reading. After hearing chapter 16 read out flawlessly by Nikolussi it was the audience’s turn to ask Chuck some questions while he smiled and took out a couple of envelopes with something written on them. It took people nearly a minute to become bold enough to ask.

“Thank you for asking me a question” Chuck said “I just handed you an envelope with a card on which my address is written. If you send it to me I’ll send you back a little surprise present as a way to thank you.”
“Any more questions?” Bernhard Robben asked and now more hands were raised, eager for that surprise from Chuck.

“I just hope it’s not a cut-off ear or something” I said to Lisa afterwards. “That wouldn’t surprise me from this guy”

The question asker stated that he writes on parties too, like Chuck wrote portions of Fight Club. He wanted to know if it had ever happened to Chuck that he couldn’t remember the next day what he had written the day before. Chuck took a deep breath and started another story:

I take these pills called Ambien when on a long flight. They make you forget, it’s like you have a hole in your memory. And before checking into the hotel there was a long line on the airport waiting at the security check. So I took a pill that I would forget about it. And after a couple of minutes I didn’t feel anything so I took another one.

The next day I woke up in my bed. And somebody had scattered sandwiches across my bed, mayonnaise, salad, bread, the whole stuff, and had only eaten out the ham and the cheese… And I suspected that it was me. And I couldn’t remember a thing. I called the reception if I had ordered room service the night before. ‘Not after 10pm’ the receptionist said ‘but the bar sells sandwiches. Well, I went to talk to the barkeeper whether I had bought any sandwiches last night. ‘You bought all of them’ he said.
I have to add at this point that I like to sleep naked.
‘Was I wearing any… shoes?’ I asked him. ‘No.’
‘Was I wearing any… clothes?’ – ‘No.’
And I learned that I didn’t use the elevator and walked fourteen floors naked with eight sandwiches to my room where I ate only the good parts.

“So do you still take these pills?” the guy with the question asked.
“Yes!” Chuck said with glowing eyes.
“But now I sleep in my underwear”

Wie geht es mit Sie?

After the session many people brought their books to Chuck’s table and wanted him to sign them as the highlight of the (rather short) evening. Lisa and I carried two Fugitives and Refugees and one Survivor with us. But shame on us: We purchased the books the day before in Graz and only knew their beginnings. And Fight Club was out of stock everywhere.

So we cued up, were asked for our names by an assistant to Mr. Palahniuk who wrote them on slips of paper in big letters and placed them on the page where Chuck would sign. He seemed rather familiar with signing books and got ready by unpacking a bouquet of fake flowers, a veil and a big box with a lot of ball-pens out of his bag and placed them in reach. Lisa and I giggled and wondered about the mysterious flowers and veil.

I was first and because Chuck is a nice guy he wrote something different in their books for everybody along with his signature. He even knew a few German phrases and signed Survivor with “Für Phil – 1-2-3 Testen Sie sich. Chuck Palahniuk” (“For Phil – 1-2-3 test yourself”). because the book starts with “Testing… 1-2-3… testing 1-2-3″.

On the cover of Fugitives and Refugees a bunch of Santa Clauses are pictured — I don’t know why yet. Chuck wrote “Ho, ho, ho Santa Phil – You. Chuck Palahniuk”. I thanked him and smiled and then it was Lisa’s turn. He signed “Für Lisa – Wie Geht es mit Sie? Chuck Palahniuk.”, (“For Lisa – How is it going with you?”) grammatically completely wrong and hence just adorable. Lisa bravely asked for a photo.
“Sure!” he said and pulled her behind his table where he handed her the fake bouquet, equipped her with the veil and smiled like James Bond next to her. Lisa just married Chuck Palahniuk ¹! I took two photos, shook his hand and we thanked each other.
“One second longer and I would’ve gotten majorly jealous!” I said to Lisa while walking out.

What a great day!

[singlepic=212,500,500]

I nearly just snapped because we thought that we wouldn’t be able to jam everything into the car. Worrying for six hours if everything really fits in without knowing the answer until the last piece is a good way of becoming mad within hours instead of slowly building a mental illness with years with of neurosis. Lisa, by the way, got claustrophobic within just the four hours of our journey to Graz by just sitting on the side driver’s seat. Yes, my car is a Yaris Verso but on the other hand I just have too frickin’ much stuff!

Here’s a short selection of the things that needed to fit into the car

Filling the car was like professionally playing Tetris, but without the disappearing lines. When we finally, finally were ready it was dawn already and the car was so stuffed that Lisa had to have my backpack on her knees and our pot-plant sat on the cockpit. The pot plant’s name is Lily, by the way because Lisa wanted to buy a lily for her staged photography project but only got this pot plant of undisclosed breed. So we ended up calling her lily and giving her water every day.

I predicted a long drive to Graz because the car was just overloaded. So I stuck a big Koopa from Paul’s and my animation on the back of my car so the other drivers would know that I would be as slow as a tortoise. ¹ We left the campus for the summer around 5:30am instead of 11am, but I just couldn’t stand it there anymore — loading the car was just too much stress for me.

Of course I was too tired to make the whole drive at once and so Lisa and I made a stop after 160 kilometers and took a nap for nearly an hour. Then we made it to Graz where I had to dump all of my stuff in the garage: My parents get the roof fixed and it will be done within the next week hopefully. Because I usually dwell in the attic my room there is more or less uninhabitable.

Unfortunately Lisa doesn’t have an internet connection, so I will blog this article as soon as I snuck into my parents’ house at night and got hold of the loose LAN-cable.

But there’s a good thing to it too: Lisa was so kind to let me move it at her place. Yet I think she already regrets it…

If you want to read about Stefan Sagmeister, a sudden incident and a cat, sacrifice ten minutes of your precious time and read on.

Prologue: The Dream

I am cruising with my car somewhere around Graz and its surroundings. I feel at ease, it is a warm day and I have nothing to worry about, I just feel the flow when I suddenly hear glass breaking, the terrible scratching sound of metal shoving against metal and wrinkling like tin foil. I am shaken, badly, my head hits the steering wheel. I taste the metallic flavor of blood. I just had an accident. The windmills in my mind catch a fresh breeze: “It had to happen sooner or later!”, “I didn’t pay enough attention!”, “I am gonna die!”, “Who’s gonna pay for the total?”, “What am I gonna do without a car?”, “What are my parents going to say?”. I felt a stinging pain near my ankle, like sharp needles closing in on my flesh.

The Cat, Part I

This was the first new experience, and I had it half an hour before waking up. “Ouch!” I pulled back my leg and opened my eyes a little. The big red tomcat that likes to crash at my place (and in my bed), bit me above my left foot. It wasn’t a mean bite, just a playful one. Still I haven’t been bitten by a cat in my sleep ever before…

The alarm on my cell phone rang exactly at 11:30am, half an hour before the lecture of star designer Stefan Sagmeister from Sagmeister, Inc., New York took place in the FH Salzburg. Interestingly, the same time the FH was crammed with people because it was Open Door Day and word had spread about Sagmeister. From what I heard there were even some classes from design-high schools around just to look at the god of design. Way more people than last year made the building buzzing like a hive. In the lobby some Stomp-inspired group was drumming on cans and barrels and made a terribly loud and uncomfortable noise. Lisa had a quick cigarette and we hurtled into the main auditorium which was already full. Luckily Lisa pulled some strings and so we both got a seat. Actually I was sitting between the seats (not metaphorically). After some schmoozing of our head of department, Mr Sagmeister stepped onto the podium and began his lecture with a curious “Helloooo?”. A baby cried. He turned into its direction, smiling “Helloooo!”. Then he went on, one word every two seconds – obviously he wasn’t used to German anymore. Thankfully he sped up after his MacBook materialized his slideshow on the screen. Just after two words I instantly discovered and then recalled that he was from Vorarlberg county, and he reminded me a lot of Fabian, an old school colleague who is from Vorarlberg too. They all seem to be related in some ways.

Sagmeister’s List

Stefan Sagmeister called his lecture after a typography series he is working on for some years now, inspired by a list in his diary: “Things I have learned in my life so far”. Inspired by the works of Jenny Holzer, with whom he did some early works in New York, he designed the small sentences that he only noted down for himself. Maybe because of this honest, personal and simple messages that series really touched me in some ways. It was so refreshing: A sentence with no underlying “Buy me!”-message where you always have to look twice for what they want you to buy. Instead it was honest and positive, a little naive in its openness maybe but hence even more charming.

Of course, the geek and teacher’s pet in me (which is pretty obvious) copied Sagmeister’s list. Here it is:

• Helping other people helps me.
• Having guts always works out for me.
• Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
• Starting a charity is surprisingly easy.
• Being not truthful works against me.
• Everything I do always comes back to me.
• Assuming is stifling.
• Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
• Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.
• Money does not make me happy.
• Travelling alone is helpful for a new perspective in life.
• Keeping a diary supports personal development.
• Trying to look good limits my life.
• Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
• Worrying solves nothing.
• Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
• Actually doing the things I set out to do increases my overall level of satisfaction.
• Everybody thinks they are right.
• Low expectations are a good strategy.
• Whatever I want to explore professionally, its best to try it out for myself first.
• Everybody who is honest is interesting.

A Win-Win Situation

In this list there lies some thruth and insight Sagmeister packaged in small doses for mass media. Especially the story about “Having guts always works out for me” was as interesting as enlightening:

One day in 1983, young student Stefan Sagmeister was riding the tram somewhere in Vienna where he sat next to a, in his terms, absolutely stunning old lady in her eighties. For the whole ride he wanted to tell her that but he didn’t have the guts to. When the old lady eventually got off he decided to jump off too the last second, stopped the old woman and told her that she looked absolutely great. Both of them shared a good laugh and from that day on Sagmeister decided to always have the guts – and it always worked our for him. A nice story, an interesting experience 24 years old…

I came to think about the last time when the guts doing/saying something. The only thing that came to my mind was the day when I asked Prof. James W. Nickel, special guest professor in human rights and ethics who visited Graz in 2005, to take his picture for my website. He said yes, I took his photograph and we swapped email addresses. Maybe I’ll have the guts to ask Stefan Sagmeister the same, because he really has an interesting face for a black and white portrait against a white backing. If he says something like “Why are you asking me that?” I can boldly reply: “Because you told me to have the guts!” – a typical win-win-situation.

The Cat, Part II

Lisa and I left for Graz rather late, around 8:40pm so we spent the whole three hours of our journey in the dark – nothing special here. In the back there were piles of luggage: My new Mamiya RB 67 (to be reviewed soon!), two crammed notebook-bags, an e-guitar, an e-bass, a preamp and my dirty clothes. During our long journeys through a black and indifferent landscape Lisa and I share the best conversations. Far better than in our small rooms where we float in circles like bacteria in a slowly drying puddle somewhere in Nairobi. We developed some interesting theories about why society needs stories and narratives from books, films, commercials to dry statistics and calculations. Lisa came to the point that everything needs an ending to be a story. Like our lives. We only can tell the morale when it’s over and everything’s too late. So, via a narrative, we try to virtually live through experiences that have an ending like death (and in most cases death literally is their ending condition). The bottom line is that every narrative is a little death when it ends – the ultimate end.

Twenty minutes later everything happened in a few seconds. Lisa saw the red cat as late as I did. A furry red cat was crossing the highway from the left to the right and came into my sight too late to draw rational conclusions. My id region in my brain reacted for me and pulled the wheel hard left. It would’ve been okay if I was driving in the city with comfortable 30kph but at around 140kph it was way too hard: My bulky Toyota Yaris Verso jumped to the left the very instant I knew I had lost control over it. Lisa let out a quiet scream. I was screaming louder when the car was about tipping. I pulled the wheel hard right to catch the weight in the back. The car hopped into the other direction. Now I did the pedal work. My mind was echoing “It had to happen sooner or later!”, “I didn’t pay enough attention!”, “I am gonna die!”, “Who’s gonna pay for the total?”, “What am I gonna do without a car?”, “What are my parents going to say?”. All four tires where screaming because of the immense forces put onto them, in the headlights I could clearly make out the beam barriers on my former left. Now they were perfectly parallel to my cockpit instead of merging to a point in infinity. The car wouldn’t slow down and already completed a 90° twist at 100kph. White smoke emitted from the pitch black skid marks my tires assumingly left on the tarmac. “I am not going to hit that barrier!” I was resolute and when I felt the weight shifting again, I pulled the wheel another time in the right moment. I could hear a hard breath – it was me, my fingernails dug into the plastic of the wheel while everthing seemed to slow down for a brief moment… “Was my dream that realistic? Or is everything now so dream-like?” I heard my camera bag hitting a gig bag real hard when I could see for a moment perfectly into the direction I just came from – and felt the car still having way too much momentum. In the distance I could make out a pair of headlights, no, two pairs of headlights. “Please, don’t come to a stop on the tracks in that direction!”. Now the car was pushing backwards, into the direction of the ditches, where a few seconds earlier my right side had been. “No way! I am not going to have the car pulled out from there!”. Another time I jerked on the wheel and brought the car back onto the first track even facing roughly into the direction before the incident. Finally, FINALLY, it came more or less to a halt. For good I released my foot from the brake that I wasn’t pushing very hard. I cranked in the first gear and rolled onto the emergency track and lighted the hazard blinkers.
“Whoa!”
The cockpit smelled as if I had hand-grilled my tires in there, mixed with a healthy stench of the clutch. White smoke was in the air – lots of. The other cars passed by. I took a deep breath. Then – another one. Lisa was silent but perfectly okay. I checked whether any warning lamps on my display were lit. None were. I accelerated the car a little and it felt okay. I kept on pushing the gas and it still was ok. I pulled back onto the tracks; the steering felt awkward but okay. We were back on our way, about one kilometer before Übelbach.

“It was like ballet” Lisa said after my rush of adrenaline had more or less subsided. In fact, it came when we were already rolling again, but fiercely, so my hands were shaking.

In that very 15 seconds of our near-crash the countless hours of Gran Turismo 4 driving school payed off. If I had pushed the brake too hard I would’ve triggered the ABS and probably lost any control over the drift. Luckily I was so insanely calm during the maneuver that I did *everything* right. Best thing was that the little kitty was okay – and probably as shocked as we were.

Weasel Questions

Three kilometers later some kinda weasel crossed our way from right to the left, also very close to the car. But this time I was like wrapped in bubble pack, slightly adjusted the wheel and passed by the little critter as if I just did the same with the cat.

What concerns me most about this incident is that it didn’t concern me at all: After half a minute Lisa and I were back on the road as if nothing had happened – and that felt so weird. I expected something like “I nearly died and met Jesus and he told me to raise 20,000 Duracell-bunnies in my bathroom”, but there was absolutely *no* morale or insight. It just was bad luck paired with a hunk of good luck right after.

But nothing changed – I feel exactly like before. Well, not quite. I am still awake (it’s now 4:06am) because I want to say that I had a moment of insight, that I have a clear vision of what I really want after this Grenzerfahrung, philosopher Albert Camus called it nearly hundred years ago. Maybe my insight is that there is none. Maybe my vision remains the same as before. Maybe I am just afraid of going to sleep and dreaming…