Fiat Lux

Holy crap but I've been busy. It's not all been work work work, but even the fun bits eat up time. The main things occupying my time are getting our shots ready for a temp screening next week (just as well we don't celebrate Thanksgiving as we're going need all the time we can get) and also preparing two talks I'm giving one in a week or so to a big industry shindig in London and I'm delivering another one this Friday at a university whose computer graphics course is regarded by many as the best in the UK. I'm much more excited about the latter as I get more of a sense of fulfillment talking to students than I do talking to industry people since the former might be appreciative of some inside knowledge.

I spent all Sunday preparing notes and slides for the lecture, which wasn't my intention. I'd planned to spend about 4 hours putting it together but as these things tend to, time ran away with me and I finished at about midnight. The lecture I'm doing is on creative lighting in computer graphics, something which a lot of CG courses are none too good at. I'm lucky because I started out as a fine artist and went through all the training that comes with that. These days, it seems, students are encouraged to specialise much sooner and so they miss out on the broad brush strokes of visual learning and frankly I see that in their work. My plan is to give them 40 minutes potted art theory and history focusing on light and then colour and round it out with looking at a specific example. It was making the slides for the "specific example" that took the time.

The idea was to set up a scene and try and light it in a few ways to show what emotions and moods can be created with lights alone including some not so successful ideas and explanations about why they don't work. I decided to use a model of the goddess Athena I have and set her in an alcove as this makes the lighting challenge more difficult as you don't have much free freedom to place your lights as if she were freestanding. To complicate matters further, she's holding a spear which can cast nasty shadows reducing the freedom of light placement further.

Anyway here's how it would look if you lit it with just a camera flash mounted right on top of the camera:

Yuck.

And here are a few different takes on lighting her:

I'm pleased with the last one. I hope the students get what I'm trying to tell them. The talk's on Friday afternoon so I'm bolting out of work at 12, heading to the station, travelling for two hours, getting a cab to the college, delivering my talk, getting back in a cab, another two hours in a train and then back into work at about 7 if we have another conference call to L.A. And then I shall rest.

VFX T-shirt

I now have my VFX Artist t-shirt, it's no longer just a design in Photoshop. I'm quite pleased with the quality of the shirt, the print has easily withstood a couple of washes and the few other people who bought one also seem pleased. Bountee seem like a good site though they screwed my order up the first time. I get the impression that the outfit is run by a bunch of slightly stoned but well-meaning latter day hippies. Their hearts are in the right place but they can't necessarily remember what they were supposed to be doing, like sending me my shirts in the correct size. It's all good now and I have my shirt in medium as ordered. If you want to do t-shirts yourself and don't want the hassle of organising someone to screen-print them (and believe me, you don't) this seems like a good alternative. This is the link to my shirt so you can see how it all works at Bountee and what their site has to offer. I might even do a few more, non-cynical VFX artist, designs now.

Casting Call

For one of the projects I'm doing at work an in depth analysis of human facial skin qualities is needed. One of the things I thought would really help would be a good plaster cast of a human face and since I'd feel bad about bullying someone else into doing it, and I wouldn't want to ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do myself, I spent most of Sunday morning in a variety of very sexy outfits. First off is this skin tight, see-through polythene top. Note the handles at the bottom and its distinct resemblance to a bin bag with arm and neck holes cut in it.

Next up, once I had my skin-tight (spotting the theme?) rubber hat on, my glamourous assistant poured dental alginate all over my my face and made sure it was massaged into all the cracks and crannies. My world went dark and strange smelling for a while.

The next item was several layers of plaster bandage, applied to support the mould. The next photo is taken at the moment when the plaster is drying and becoming quite hot, as it does, whilst I listen to Rammstein. My world is now very dark and smells of algae and hot plaster.

After waiting for ten minutes for the plaster to harden I was finally able to start wriggling my face and after a few minutes of this the mould came loose and I emerged back into the light following a very strange a calustrophobic half hour. The mould, when angled to the light in a certain way looked like a positive image which was odder yet:

Here's the mould filled with good ol' plaster of paris:

After another couple of hours to allow the plaster to really set hard I carefuly lifted the plaster bandage support off the mould and then began peeling the mould itself away from the cast. This is quite nerve-wracking. iI you screw it up you have to start again because you destroy the mould pulling it away from the cast. Fortunately this worked out OK:

A bit of a clean up to remove any loose lumps of plaster or alginate that stuck to the mould:

And here's the finished article.

I find it very odd to look at. Because I'm more used to seeing my face in a mirror I find it weird to see it the "right way round" and although I recognise the face I don't think it looks much like me. Tinseltroos on the other hand is equally freaked out because, she feels, it looks exactly like me. She wasn't too freaked out though as she now wants me to cast her face. That'll have to wait for another Sunday though.

VFX Artist T Shirt

VFX Artist T Shirt, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

After having a grumble with other VFX people today I decided to do us a T-shirt that sums up how we collectively as a group feel. Having read yet another review of Hellboy 2 today where the film is praised for using "real" men-in-suit effects rather than CGI and then goes on to praise scenes that are nothing other than CGI I felt the time was right for a graphic complaint. The optional tag-line I might add on the back of the shirt would read, "Ruining cinema one pixel at a time."

Hellboy 2 Cast and Crew

I was up bright and early today for the cast and crew screening of Hellboy 2. I know it's been out for over a week in The States but it doesn't open for a month here so it was still a sneak peak by UK standards.

It's always a mixed bag of emotions seeing a film you've devoted so much time and energy to for the first time. One part is relief that the film definitely must, finally, be done since you are attending a screening of it and the other is wondering whether all the hard work was worth it. I have only really loved one film that I've done, that being Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I've liked others and most have been ho-hum, but that's pretty much how any statistical breakdown of film quality would pan out; you're only going to get the odd gem. Hellboy 2 certainly isn't the worst film I've worked on but it definitely ends up in the ho-hum category for me. My personal moment of happiness was that during the scene I did, Danny Elfman saw fit to put some walloping good music over the top which helped immensely. I've done quite badly with the scoring over the sequences I've worked on in the past. The big fleet reveal shot in Troy always makes me wince because it had such sweeping epic music in the trailers and then nothing so robust in the film itself resulting, I felt, in a rather lacklustre experience. Today though, Danny Elfman did us proud and though he has no clue who we are we thank him anyway.

Hellboy 2 also felt a little odd compared to other shows I've done because of the sheer amount of it I'd seen before the screening. Usually a studio will award chunks of work to several VFX houses so if you work in one of those houses you'll only see the bits that you're working on and the rest of the film will be a mystery. The company I work for did pretty much all of the VFX work for Hellboy 2 and so there was very little of it that was unfamiliar. I don't think that helped my appreciation of the finished film much. A film that's about magical spectacle is hindered if you've seen all the magical spectacle a hundred times before. On the other hand it was nice to se it with the soundtrack - we tend to work just to picture so we may not hear the sound at all unless you're animating a character. I know people who worked for months on Sweeney Todd who were very surprised to find out that it was a musical, though they did admit that "Johnny Depp had looked like he was talking a bit funny".

It's now a couple of hours after the screening and I'm glad I saw the film with the people I worked with. The film may not have been great but the people who worked on it are and I think it's them and the actual craft of making this stuff that floats my boat rather than simply how good or well-received the end product is. That said I do hope that one day I'm lucky enough to work on a truly great film.

My quick, capsule review of Hellboy 2 for anyone who hasn't already been would be that if you liked the first one, you might like this, it's OK for a B picture but don't go in expecting greatness. 5/10

Fame and Glory (kinda)

There's an article up on one of the Visual Effects sites about how we did the work on Hellboy 2. I even get quoted. Crikey.

Sun Burn

I spent all yesterday at Pinewood Studios for a miniature shoot for the film I'm currently working on. It was an 8 a.m. call meaning that I was in a car at about 7 a.m. heading up there. As usual the day went very slowly and we were out on the back lot for most of it. You learn pretty fast that hearing "going on set" should trigger the thought "take some sun-block". I did remember this and covered my lily-coloured geek-pasty skin with factor 50 for the whole day. I felt a bit slimy but only the tops of my ears got a little toasty. The one highlight of the day was the inevitable fried breakfast in the Pinewood canteen. It's a very long way from sophisticated dining, quite like school dinners, but we must take our crumbs of comfort where we may. I did see one, rather large, fellow with a plate stacked with a baked potato and chips. Very fond of potato obviously.

On the journey back the car that came to collect us was a Toyota Prius, the hybrid car. I have seen plenty about but never had a ride in one. I was rather impressed. It was quiet, comfortable and brisk. With me (a little over six foot) and my colleague of similar height behind me we both had enough legroom to be comfortable and in a car of that size you can't often say that. The driver was saying that the saving in fuel from the hybrid car over the Mercedes he used to drive was over £200 a week. Now obviously this guy does serious mileages but to be able to save £10 000 a year in fuel is crazy. If were thinking of buying a car, which I'm not, I'd definitely put the Prius on the list.

In Hellboy 2 promo news there's a new trailer out which has excerpts from three of the shots I did. There's a whole lot of stone giant in this one at about 1:10 in:

OK, self-promotion over. Time for bed.

Speak My Brains

I've just been back into work, albeit briefly, to do an interview for the "making of" documentary that will be on the Hellboy 2 DVD. I've done interviews before, plenty in print and a couple for the radio but this is the first time I've done one on camera. I have absolutely no idea how I sounded or looked. I did notice that I picked the perfect day to have a big zit on my chin so you can look out for that come November. Perfect.

I'd carefully prepared a load of bullet points for topics I'd quite like to have discussed pertaining to the shots I did but the interviewer had his own set of questions so my notes went on the floor and I had to wing it. They attractively lit the wall behind me with a sea blue, no doubt to match my natural skin colouring though I was too busy trying to keep my head still so that they didn't get excessive flare off my glasses from the light they were blasting onto my face to really notice too much. I have, and I'm only writing this an hour after the fact, absolutely no idea what I said. I probably came across as a complete tosser but time will tell.

I find doing interviews for non specialist press difficult from a pitching stand-point. When I'm talking to journalists from computer graphics or film-making publications I know the sort of things they want to hear and I also have a level of expectation on what terms I can expect the audience to understand. It's the same thing with lecturing to students. I know I'll be able to say "diffuse shading", "ambient occlusion" and "displacement mapping" and not have to explain myself plus the people I'm talking to want to know how we did what we did so they can further their own knowledge. What does the viewer of a DVD feature want to know? Do they care how we did the work or do they just want to hear the amusing anecdote about how I spilled coffee all over the director? It's tough to know. Even if they do want to hear how it was done it's difficult to explain it without resorting to a lot of technical terminology. If you don't use jargon you end up saying, "well we shot it all in front of a green screen and then used computer graphics to add in the foreground". No shit? That's so non-specific as to be meaningless. Anyway all of this is really just me excusing myself for when I appear for 5 seconds on this documentary sounding like an ignorant ares-hole. Sorry in advance.

Leaving The Nest

Had a quite "work-stuff meets the outside world" related day today. The copies of issue 113 of Cinefex, the visual effects fanboy's magazine, finally hit London today. The reason I'm quite excited is that the tiger I helped make is on the cover. The actual cover image we re-rendered a couple of months ago just for Cinefex. I hesitate to say the extra weekend's work for one extra high resolution image was worth it given the stress it caused but Mittens (that's the name we gave the sabre-tooth whilst we were doing the film) does look pretty good, even though I say it myself. You can at least see the millions of hairs and all the detail we put into the teeth, eyes and so on. I've worked on films that have featured in the magazine but I've never done a cover before and it's quite a feather in a company's cap to be asked to do it so we're all secretly quite pleased, hidden behind the front of cynical apathy of course.

I also got the first final (a shot declared finished and ready to go into the film by the director) on Hellboy 2 today. It's one of the tricky ones too which makes it extra gratifying. The new trailer went up today and an older, edited version of the now finalled shot is in it. It's the aerial shot of the stone giant at about 1:41 in. The rest of the shots should get to final status quite quickly now we're hoping. It's been a lot of work to get these shots done but there's light at the end of the tunnel now and I think I quite like it. When you've been staring at the same thing for months you lose all critical faculties but given the size our little team I think we've done a pretty decent job. See what the punters make of it I suppose.

Now Listen All You People, Come Gather Round

It's been quite a hectic week so I'll break it down into a couple of posts. Monday was fairly uneventful but Tuesday was a day out of the office. Zounds!

A while back, when I was assured I'd be finished on Hellboy 2 by now, I agreed to do a talk about visual effects at a university up North. Even though I'm not actually yet done on Hellboy I was still determined to do the talk. There are a lot of industry people who were very nice to me when I was student and I feel I owe a debt and should give something back. I also like teaching when I get the chance.

I've done lectures before but I've been so busy for the last eighteen months to two years that I haven't visited anyone in a while. This meant that my talk needed completely re-writing to bring it up to the latest technology and put some more up to date films into it. Preparing this new talk was the main motivation for getting that new laptop when I did as I wanted to have a machine capable of playing the newer high-res video I wanted to show. I had spent several evenings running up to Monday night sorting material, producing slides to show and editing video to try and make as slick a fifty minute presentation as I could. I was quite pleased with this slide and the animation I did on it to introduce each element. I spent a whole evening with pieces of paper on the living room floor at home trying to design a flowchart where none of the lines crossed. It took a while but this is the result:



Tuesday morning came and I duly presented myself at St Pancras and took the train north. I went through the town where I latterly grew up, which is a dump, but the scenery improved after that and got properly lovely once we hit Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Train journeys when you are going there and back in a day and for something specific tend to take on a sense of stasis for me and so I sat staring out of the window for the whole journey once the countryside had become good, my mind pretty blank.

Upon my arrival I was snapped out of my reverie and whisked over the road from the station to the campus. I was given a whistle-stop tour, a brief moment to grab a sandwich and drink before I was ushered into the lecture theatre and set my laptop up, plugged it into the college's projector and got my trailers running for the students to have something to look at as we waited for the room to fill up. I got a pretty good crowd: all three years of their computer graphics degree, a few masters students and four members of staff. As we were five minutes late starting I had to take the talk at quite a pace and by the time I was done the whole fifty minutes had gone by in a blur. I get stage-fright when I perform "creatively" (music and such) but I have no nerves about giving speeches or talks. I just don't think I have much in the way of shame. Even so there is a largish dose of adrenaline that kicks in when I speak publicly and I was quite high by the time I was done.

After the talk a few students came to chat in the college coffee bar until it was time to put me back on a return train and I was just coming down off my natural high as we pulled out of the station. All in all a good day. The five and a half hours on trains went at a geologically slow pace but the three hours between getting off and getting back on the train went by in what seemed like a heart-beat. I got some good feedback from the talk and I now have up to date notes so with luck I'll get a few more invites to talk again soon.

More of the same

This week has, as you have no doubt come to expect, been completely work dominated. I spent 4 hours yesterday going to, coming from and waiting for a meeting at Pinewood which lasted precisely twenty minutes, including handshakes. On the up side we did get quite a swish Mercedes to take us there so we could at least pretend to be a bit important en route. We normally get taken up in a mini-van and then feel like the naughty kids in the back of the car on the family holiday.

I'm still rushing to get my work on Hellboy 2 finished. I suspect I shall be working the weekend again, but I do at least feel like I'm headed into the final bend on this show. It's been a bit of strain on the nerves, willpower and soul but with luck it should look OK and I daily count my blessings that I have a great team of people to work with. Whilst discussing the project in the car yesterday, one of the guys told of his experience of working on Chicken Little for Disney. He worked on the show for four and a half years, during which time they made the film twice thanks to executive meddling. He said after the first two years you had to talk yourself into going into work every morning. I can believe that. The longest I've ever worked on a project is eighteen months on the last Harry Potter and that damn nearly did for me. Reading back through my posts from the end of that time I can still sense how stressed and miserable I was. This current show is nothing compared to that but I am pretty shattered right now.

One fun thing I did discover last night whilst poking about in the latest version of GarageBand that came with the new laptop was that it now has some rudimentary EQ controls for each recorded track. I re-mixed that guitar thing I did a few weeks back to add some more mid-range to the second and third parts and it has improved it, to my ears at least. If I get home at a reasonable time tonight and Tinseltroos goes out to Stitch and Bitch then I might record a little more. One of my work buddies, who's really good at this sort of thing, suggested that if I manage to get a week's holiday or so after HB2 wraps I should spend a week making and recording some sounds. That does really appeal I must say - I think it would be very therapeutic. I also want to get my Processing renderer working. At the moment my trigonometry is still broken. I might have another crack at debugging that tonight too, if I get time. Music first, nerdy playtime second I think.

Glitz

Pinewood Studios, originally uploaded by Nattydreadful.

I had to go up to Pinewood Studios yesterday for a meeting about an upcoming film project upon which I hope to be working. It's always an interesting experience because the reality of going to a film studio is so far removed from the popular perception as to be almost comical.

When you arrive you pull into a gate which looks like a mixture of a small rural airport departure lounge and Checkpoint Charlie. Here you exchange a series of pleasantries with the security personnel who come in two flavours: not really bothered and retired Stasi officer. Yesterday's guards were of the former type. Once you're through Checkpoint Charlie you're on the backlot itself. Our meeting was in the very glamourous sounding "Kubrick Building".

To get there we had to circumnavigate the 007 Stage, which is huge. The last time I was there was for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the whole building has burnt down and been rebuilt since then. It looked identical to me, but then I suppose there's a limit to the number of ways you can build a giant metal shed. The whole area feels like a downtrodden, disused airfield from the 70s. You have the hangars/sound stages and the backlot which is mostly a wasteground with the odd carpark and a lot of rubble and long grass.

The Kubrick Building itself looks like a dull school building we were disappointed but not surprised to discover. It's red brick and two stories with lots of large classroom sized rooms painted white and a bunch of tiny cubicled offices. There's nothing quite like the sight of a noted film director sat in standard-issue grey office cubicle pecking away at a computer with a look of boredom on his face to make you realise that 90% of indoor work is the same the world over regardless of what you actually do for a living.

Mind you, compared with Leavesden Studios, Pinewood is extremely glam. Leavesden, where they shoot the Harry Potter movies, is a converted engine factory. Only it's not very converted. In fact it's a massive, evil, diesel smelling tin shed outside Watford, a very hum-drum suburban town just outside London. At least Pinewood has the decency to be in the middle of the Hampshire countryside so the drive to and from is picturesque.

It's quite remarkable the power that mystery has over people. Pinewood don't do tours (there's bugger all to see so there'd be no point) and yet every day there are people taking photos of the entrance and asking if there is a public tour available. I will admit that when you're on a soundstage with a big set it is impressive for about 10 minutes. Then you realise it's cold, nothing's happening, they've only built the set to head height as we'll add the rest in post production and the place reeks of petrol, paint and other unsavoury chemicals. People say I'm cynical and jaded when I complain about being sent on-set. I say I'm realistic. I prefer being in a warm room, with people I like, in easy reach of a decent coffee and lunch. But perhaps that's just me.

Grindstone

This is the grindstone to which my nose has been affixed for most of the last six months. If you fancy watching the trailer my bit is this stone giant hauling himself out of the ground. It's nowhere near finished yet but it gives an impression of what's going on. I have a few weeks now to actually finish all the shots. Busy January you reckon? I should say so.

Neither Big Nor Clever

There's a trailer up for one of the films I spent part of the summer doing some work on. I worked on the sabre-tooth cat during the latter part of post-production. I haven't seen the finished film, only the shots I was assigned to, but I am not about to suggest that this is a must-see film. I think you can probably tell that from the trailer. There's a fantastic dead-pan plot summary on Wikipedia. Not a hint of a smirk; very impressive.

Lonely Chair

Lonely Chair, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Another picture because of another weekend in the studio. We're now at day 21 without a day off and there is no let up in sight. I actually can't remember the last time this happened. There was certainly a time on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where I seemed to be working most weekends but I don't remember it being as relentless as this. I did a lot of very late nights on the last Potter film but I did seem to have at least one day off each weekend. Despite it, I'm reasonably compos mentis still, I do feel incredibly tired and quite sluggish but I'm not about to go postal (yet).

The Backlash Against Computer Generated Imagery

N.B. I have not corrected any of the quotes in this piece for spelling or grammar. They are mostly culled from the comments section of this article in The Guardian and, as is common for comments they are posted in a very stream of consciousness fashion with little proof-reading. Please imagine your own (sic) throughout.

"Now I should point out before we begin that I have major, major issues with digital effects. I had to go through several months of counselling after witnessing the sight of Jabba the Hut digitally recreated and superimposed onto a previously deleted scene in the "updated" version of the first Star Wars film (I refuse to refer to it as A New Hope). And I haven't yet seen Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but plan to keep things that way after viewing the trailer, which features a Spanish Armada rendered completely devoid of grandeur and menace through the use of CGI.
...
"Frankly, I would happily see a blanket ban on all digital effects in film, tomorrow. Imagine if science fiction movie makers had to use their ingenuity again when depicting spaceships and monsters (as in the original Alien). We might witness a return to the practice of using scale models, such as those in the original Star Wars films, which were 100 times more realistic than their CGI equivalents in George Lucas' rubbish triptych of prequels." - Ben Child writing in The Guardian

For every well reasoned piece written about CGI there are a mountain demanding a backlash. Most of these pieces and innumerable fora comments are targeted against computer generated visual effects and this week came the call, albeit tongue in cheek, for all CGI to be banned. There seem to be two strands to the complaint. The first is that films with visual effects are aesthetically inferior to those without. This argument is generally couched in terms like "not real" or "fake looking". This is a complaint about the actual imagery produced. The second line of attack comes against the processes themselves and those who use them. Digital effects are created by "boffins" rather than artists and they are made "by a computer", the implication being that no human effort or talent has been expended in their production. Directors are lambasted for resorting to digital trickery rather than using ingenuity and talent as previous generations had.

Before examining the state of digital visual effects it is perhaps worth looking at what qualities are lauded by these critics and therefore, by extension, what CGI apparently lacks. The over-riding concern seems to be one of ingenuity and craft. The hand-crafted models in the 1977 version of Star Wars are regarded more highly than the digital creations in Revenge of the Sith. The question is why? Are they more realistic? This is a very loaded question. Realism is a slippery beast. Is the complaint that, if the film-makers were to construct full size examples of these ships, put them into orbit and photograph them and then compared that footage with a CGI version and a traditional model, the model would more closely resemble the real plate? That is a tough question to answer objectively in this instance. We can however compare the huge amount of virtual set work done using CGI where a digital element takes over from a practical set. Take the exterior of Newark Airport in United 93. This and every aircraft exterior was created digitally, apparently without complaint. If therefore, digital effects artists were able to create, with scientific precision, an object would that then be acceptable or is there more subjectivity at work here?

When Troy was released, complaints were raised in some corners that the ships in the Greek armada had too tiny wakes and almost no bow-wave, a sure sign they said of CGI trickery. A little nautical knowledge is a dangerous thing. The Greek penteconters upon which the CG armada was based were keel-less and had a very shallow draft. There is minimal surface contact between the boat and the sea because it is much harder to row a boat that sits deeply in the water, overcoming drag becomes exhausting and your crew mutinees. These ships create no wake at all, one can examine footage of the 'Olympias', the trireme (a much larger vessel) built for the Greek navy in the 1980s. When creating the effects for the film, the VFX team, of whom I was one, elected to put some wake in as we felt, artistically, it looked odd without them. Perhaps we did not add enough fakery to make the ships believable to that section of the audience. The bow waves were photographically sampled from a real penteconter and layered onto the CGI ships incidentally; they could not have been "more real". The difference between realism and believability is key. They are not synonymous. It is not "reality" that the opponents of CGI crave, it is a believability that they see modern films with digital effects lacking.

Believability of course implies "suspension of disbelief". Everyone, but the most credulous, is aware that fictional films are just that. The events portrayed did not occur. Looking at the mechanics of film-making we do not in reality see in a series of edited long-shots and close-ups. We however buy into their believability because of our continuous exposure to them from the first moment we are placed in front of a television as a tot. We absorb what these devices mean to the point where we no longer need consciously to decode them. Much as when reading a novel the experienced reader does not consciously decode the squiggles on a page into letters, process the assortment of letters into a word and then recall the meaning of that word - this happens subconsciously. We experience cinema similarly, there are tropes, conventions and stylistic choices we learn instantly to decode. Puppetry and model making fall into this category. We understand, certainly in the case of films we saw uncritically as children, the symbolism of the animated Talos in Jason and the Argonauts. Though beautifully animated what we see on screen in no way matches what a 100ft tall bronze giant would look or move like, but we learn how to read this image, how to understand it. We learn how to believe it, and images created in the same manner. Such is the depth of our immersion and our ability to believe in these narrative conventions that a journalist can write the following and no-one will pick him up for making an obviously fatuous statement that live-action films are "real":

"On the other hand, for a movie which features what should be appalling scenes of men having their heads bitten off and gently crunched by Grendel, perhaps the most hideous creature ever to be shown on the big screen, not to mention Angelina Jolie starkers, it somehow fails to really get the blood pumping. And I can't help feeling that's down to the fact that the use of CGI is less affecting than live film. If it's not real, why should we react to it as though it were?" - Ben Child

As we become older, more critical and sophisticated, this entrenched belief changes into a nostalgic familiarity for what we loved and responded to when younger. It is now the aesthetic we delight and believe in. The more familiar the trope, the easier it is for an audience to become immersed. To use the literary analogy once more; if, whilst reading a novel, we come across a word we do not understand we are immediately jolted out of the narrative, the artifice of the literary form laid bare in front of us. This is the problem that CGI has to overcome. For those of an age to post on the Guardian website, CGI effects have come after childhood. There is no deeply ingrained way of decoding them. The only time they work for this audience is when they don't notice them because they are so seamless. To put it crudely, this is why critics respond more harshly to imperfect CGI than they do to sub-par models or puppets, they have no inbuilt mechanism for subconsciously decoding what is happening on screen. The huge, sweeping "impossible" camera moves jolt for the same reason, they lie above our subliminal understanding. That these artificial camera moves are so often combined with CGI merely compounds the problem.

The natural reaction of people to something they don't like is blame. In the case of CGI that blame is generally aimed in two directions, the film's directors and those who actually do the work. Directors are blamed for being "lazy" and visual effects professionals are either labelled "boffins" (another way of saying, in the popular lingo, not artistic or creative) or irrelevant because the effects are created by a computer not a person. This is not as complex an issue to understand as the reaction of an audience to what they see on a screen. This is simply an issue of ignorance and misunderstanding.

Part of the problem is that the process of creating CGI is very complicated, full of acronyms and has a massive learning curve for anyone wanting to understand it. Most people have dabbled with a paint set at some point in their lives, even if only as a child. There is some knowledge therefore that creating a beautiful painting is difficult. We understand how it is done and most of us understand that we cannot do it as well as Rembrandt. The same can be said of puppetry or model-making. We can see that professionals do it so much better than most amateurs. Amongst the majority of consumers of cultural product there is a mannerist appreciation of difficultà or skill. Again from the Guardian comments:

"When it comes to special effects vs. real spectacle, let's be honest. Sometimes, we pay for the thrill of watching people do something difficult, perhaps dangerous or just really, really impressive." - BigBennyBoy

This is not new. John Donne, the poet and preacher, wrote in his "Sermons" (1649) about judging the quality and worth of a painting based on the technique of the artist thus:

"A picture without any drapery, any clothes about it...is much a harder thing, and there is much more art showed in making a naked picture, then in all the rich attire that can be put upon it".

If the average audience member believes that CGI is created by a machine without human input it is quite understandable that they would look upon it as an inferior art to that of a model-maker or painter. Even the term "Computer Generated Imagery" perpetuates this myth. I presume the term, "Artist Designed Computer Generated Image" was deemed too unwieldy. Just as a painter is not criticised for not making his or her own brushes and pigment, neither should the digital artist be lambasted for his or her choice of tool. Every digital effect is designed, described and planned by a human, or more often, a team of humans. Within 50ft of me there are painters, sculptors, animators, model-makers, graphic-designers, engineers, scientists and mathematicians. There will be many for whom the inclusion of the latter three under the heading of "creatives" will seem odd. Surely these are "boffins" so scathingly described thus:

"I actually don't think it's the technology that's to blame. It's the folk that 'use' it...the boffins that harness the tools, are blinded by the possibilities; instead of an artist with a vision we get a gadget obsessed dad in front of a flat an HD TV fiddling with the controls and marveling at the apparent improvement in quality.
I don't think they're is anything wrong with CGI or any digital technology, it's just the people of a certain age and temperament that get very aroused - possibly sexually - by the lengths that can be reached, exaggerated, spoiled, overdone, and polished to an unnatural sheen when working in this field.
Boffins are to blame. You have boffins making films. All should be controlled by the director." - francaisenyc

This comment suggests that those with technical skill must de-facto have no artistic ability, or to put it another way, they are not creative. It is a huge failing of our society that mathematics, engineering and computer programming are not seen as creative disciplines, quite the opposite in fact. When one actually examines them it becomes increasingly apparent that they are deeply creative, but it requires a certain basic level of understanding to appreciate it. If one is illiterate then there is no beauty to a novel. We do not however argue that because there are people who are illiterate that the novel is an invalid art-form; we instead suggest that they should perhaps learn to read. Appreciation of any art-form or culturally creative endeavour requires an investment of intellect and time from the audience. Films and TV are absorbed from an incredibly early age, reading comes a little later. To understand the basic principles of computer programming, mathematics or engineering takes effort and time; if one does not spend that time it is unsurprising that looking at the results of these disciplines is unrewarding and perhaps challenging, maybe even an affront. A computer programme can be a very beautiful thing indeed. When its output is an image of delicate complexity and depth it has an additional level of aesthetic quality that even those without an understanding of programming can appreciate. One comment from the Guardian piece writes:

"The wonder of film was in seeing the smoke of the train coming into the station, the rustle of the leaves in the trees. There's nothing wrong with faking these things - the broiling, rolling seastorm in Pinocchio is an artistic achievemennt of the highest order - but when you fake it with algorithms you simply throw away the mysterious germ of truth in film" - ruskin

I am unsure precisely what point is being made here. In reality smoke moves in a mathematically describable way, as do the leaves on trees, these are the laws of physics. A sophisticated piece of fluid dynamics software in the hands of a technically savvy artist can produce utterly beautiful, convincing results. The smoke can be controlled to behave in a fantastical fashion (wizards apparating in Harry Potter) or to mimic reality incredibly closely. For example, the smoke, along with the towers and debris in World Trade Center was created digitally for obvious reasons. The "mysterious germ of truth in film" sounds to me like a pseud's way of describing nostalgia once again mixed with a great deal of ignorance of the processes that are involved in CGI's creation, either in reality or in simulation.

So, seemingly, it all comes down to familiarity and comfort. Children emerging from any of the Star Wars prequels had the same expression of magical delight on their faces as I did seeing The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi in the 1980s. For this new generation, the current debate on CGI will seem archaic and incomprehensible. In 1929 The American Federation of Musicians ran a series of press advertisements following the introduction of "fake" (pre-recorded) music into films:

"This is the case of Art vs. Mechanical Music in theatres. The defendant stands accused in front of the American people of attempted corruption of musical appreciation and discouragement of musical education. Theatres in many cities are offering synchronised mechanical music as a substitute for Real Music. If the theatre-going public accepts this vitiation of its entertainment program a deplorable decline in the Art of Music is inevitable. Musical authorities know that the soul of the Art is lost in mechanisation. It cannot be otherwise because the quality of music is dependent on the mood of the artist, upon the human contact, without which the essence of intellectual stimulation and emotional rapture is lost."

The idea that someone could object to a recorded film score seems laughable now. In 30 years I believe we will see reprints of the piece from The Guardian being sniggered at in the same way.

Varied Fun Shenanigans

What a difference a week makes. Last weekend I worked so by the time last Friday rolled around I hadn't had a day off in a fortnight and I was beginning to feel it. For reasons too dull to catalogue here I didn't have to work this weekend at all. Joy! Apart from my birthday weekend I think this has been my first two-day weekend in about three months. This enabled me to have some fun time!

As I've mentioned previously I made up my mind a couple of months ago that the Flying V would have to go and that all my travels around guitar shops in London had not yielded that which I sought. I put all the search terms I could think of into eBay and sat and watched as nothing turned up for weeks until Tinseltroos suggested I try the US eBay site. I had no idea we in the UK could use it but that's just my dumbness for you. This made perfect sense because not only is it a much bigger marketplace but the type of guitar I desired was very American in nature - and never really caught on here so much. Joy of joys I found the perfect model, a brand new Charvel EVH San Dimas guitar located in a guitar shop in Fort Lauderdale.

The other advantage of buying from the US is that the strength of the pound means I get a lot of guitar for my money. So I bought the instrument and then waited. Firstly I waited for the seller to acknowledge that they'd received my money. This took days during which I panicked that I'd been scammed somehow as the cash had definitely left my account but no word. Finally I hear that they have the money and that the guitar will be dispatched the next day. Days more silence. I prompt them to send me the shipping info so I can track the package and arrange to pay duty when it arrived at Customs. Silence. I begin to get very nervous. Perhaps it really is a scam? I begin to do some extra detective work. By Googling the email address that I sent the PayPal payment to I find out that the firm is a large music store in Florida. I find their 'phone number and call them up. The staff are incredibly helpful and say they will bully the guy who deals with the eBay sales to send me the info. Eventually said guy admits that the courier who took the guitar to the Post Office never got a receipt with the shipping info. ARGH! My beautiful guitar could be anywhere between Fort Lauderdale and a van on the way to our studio and neither I, nor anyone else, have any way of knowing. It could vanish and no-one would be any the wiser. All I could do was wait. Finally on Thursday a letter from the UK Parcel Force turned up demanding that I pay a hundred pounds in import duty and tax before they'd deliver my guitar. I have never been so pleased to hand over a big chunk of money for effectively nothing in my life. And then on Friday the beast turned up. Here it is being held by a happy little rock monkey.

Today we took our annual pilgrimage to Discover Dogs. This year, because Tinseltroos and I have decided which breeds we'd be potentially able and want to own we tracked down the breeders and made sure we met as many of those dogs as possible. I had a play fight with a Griffon Bruxellois (which I would have won had it not run away), as well as petting a Tibetan terrier and a Norfolk terrier. After we'd done our "serious research" we went and played with as many dogs as possible before we tired ourselves out and had to retreat to the Fulham Road for burgers and beer.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with real-life Hollywood film industry types as we try to sell them on the idea of bringing the visual effects on their next project to the studio I work at. I am a mixture of incredibly nervous and very intrigued. It isn't something I do that often because I try and avoid the whole selling side of the business in favour of actually doing the work and I think I make a pretty poor salesman but I really want to work on the project so I'm willing to be a complete whore for a morning. Fingers crossed.

Realising Fantasy

One of the aspects of my job which is hardest to explain to non-VFX people (or "muggles" as I am now tempted to pretentiously and ridiculously call them) is that of interpretation. When we are charged with creating a fantastic entity, be it a machine or a creature, we are generally presented with some kind of concept drawings from the production art-department. These generally bear no resemblance to what the client actually wants the finished effect to look like but that's a topic for another, more embittered post. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the concept sketch is the perfect graphite or gouache embodiment of what the client wants. "Right, well go and make it then" you say. "Ah", I reply, "but it isn't as straight forward as that because we have to interpret the drawing."

How can this be? It seems so obvious, here's the drawing, the plan if you will, how much clearer could it be? The difficulty is that concept artists and model-makers have a different agenda to us. They want to create a beautiful image/sculpture that works as an immobile art-work. We have to realise this vision as an entity that works visually from any angle, but also probably moves and often in a very complicated way. To think of a reductio ad absurdum example of this, M.C. Escher's drawings are beautiful and very detailed but you couldn't actually build them. On a lesser level all artists, either knowingly or not, put these kinds of tricks of the eye into their work. Sculptors who produce statues only need the body to work in the pose that they're carving, if it is a figure it doesn't have to articulate. I can think of a show I worked on where the clients had spent a lot of money getting a life-size and quarter life size sculpts of a character made and then cast in silicone. These were then duly delivered to our studio with a "Build that!" brief attached.

As we examined the modelling we realised that the way the the trapezius muscles had been placed and modelled meant that the creature could never turn his head. We looked at the clavicle, and this was angled in such a way that his shoulders could never articulate. The pot belly had musculature on the outside, just under the skin (was he pregnant? - seemed unlikely) and the thigh muscles were simply attached in the wrong places to move the legs. Had we realised the concept as delivered the character would have been just about able to bend his knees and elbows and that is all. "But, surely this is all fantasy", you say, "Surely you can do anything in visual effects?" Well, yes we could have made a perfect copy of the sculpt and put a CG skeleton and muscles inside and made it move. But it would only ever look like a real actor wearing a heavy latex suit. Or to put that another way - rubbish.

Our eyes are very adept at seeing structures under the surface of the skin, seeing how joints move, how muscles move and how the skin slides over them. If we cheat on this, it immediately begins to sound alarm bells in all but the most obtuse viewer. One of the main reasons why Gollum, King Kong and Davey Jones are such leaps forward are that they are the results of countless hours of careful anatomical analysis, the development of new tools to simulate muscle and skin movement and the application of those tools by diligent and technically obsessive artists.

And so we don't leave these sketches alone, we have to interpret them and this can be a protracted and argumentative process as you have to persuade the client that the design they signed off on will never look right "on the move". Notice I don't say "look correct" here, but "look right". We can and do cut corners in this design process. We generally do not simulate every single muscle, it would take too long with current technology but we have to do enough that the viewer sees a convincing creature, one that has believable weight distribution, moves as our minds with years of experience of looking at a wide variety of creatures thinks it should move and seems part to the world it inhabits.

And that, dear reader, is the situation I find myself in at present, and have been for most of the last fortnight - interpreting someone elses drawings and written briefs, trying to visualise how to make their ideas work in a believable manner in CG. I think my retinas may start bleeding imminently.

Art for Art's Sake

I have been asked to run an advanced lighting course at work to try and take junior and mid-level artists up a notch in their lighting skills. To that end I spent most of yesterday photographing photographs (like the Josef Koudelka above) and paintings to use as slides and as lecture notes.

It's something I very passionately believe in as I was fortunate enough to go through a full art education before I ended up doing computer graphics. When I was at art college there really weren't any computer graphics courses and so most people of my generation in the industry come from fine art, photography or graphic design backgrounds if they're creative types or computer science or engineering if they're more technical. These days there's an abundance of fully computer graphics orientated degree courses and most graduates we now employ come off one or another of them. I personally do not think that this is a good thing, primarily because they leave school at 18 and go straight onto these degrees. Back in the day (12-15 years ago) if you wanted to do a creative degree course you had to do a one year "art foundation" diploma where you did life-drawing three times a week, studied art history and practiced every type of art production from print, to paint to film so that by the time you went onto your degree you were a well rounded creative person with a developed eye. This does not happen any more and I see it in the work we produce as an industry - it's all very clever and innovative but not much of it is particularly beautiful. And that's where I come in apparently.

I have to distill a year's course into 3, 1 hour sessions. I'm actually really looking forward to it even though I'm having to do it during my free time at home because work has suddenly got so busy. Once I have some sort of syllabus I'll probably post it here for review since I know that there are arty types who read this and hopefully have an opinion.

It's TV, It Ain't Cinema

David Bordwell has written another excellent piece on modern cinema, this time on the style of film-making in "The Bourne Ultimatum" which, in typical Paul Greengrass fashion, is a dizzy melange of kinetic hand-held camera work and slashing edits. Bordwell summarises his resistance to the style thus:

(1) The style isn’t original or unique. It’s a familiar approach to filmmaking on display in many theatrical releases and in plenty of television. The run-and-gun look is one option within today’s dominant Hollywood style, intensified continuity.

(2) The style achieves its effect through particular techniques, chiefly camerawork, editing, and sound.

(3) The style isn’t best justified as being a reflection of Jason Bourne’s momentary mental states (desperation, panic) or his longer-term mental state (amnesia).

(4) In this case the style achieves a visceral impact, but at the cost of coherence and spatial orientation. It may also serve to hide plot holes and make preposterous stunts seem less so.

I agree with all of these but I thought I might add a couple of points about the origins of this style and possibly why it is more prevalent now than in the past.

We can summarise the style as comprising loosely hand-held camera work, sharp focus pulls and then blistering quick edits in the cutting room. I first recall seeing this style of film-making on television in the mid-nineties. I remember people at the art-college I attended getting very excited by the series "This Life" which featured the hand-held camera and the hard focus-pulls if not the quick edits. But this was television, and a TV screen is contained comfortably within your field of view, is inherently less immersive and requires the use of big graphic styles to make any impact. We can, and often do, move around whilst watching TV so our spatial relationship with the screen is quite dynamic. This is not so at the cinema. More kinetic styles work well on TV because it is less intrusive into our field of view and its smaller scale means it has to be bolder to be seen - it cannot perform subtlety of style like the cinema can.

The style was simultaneously being used by documentary makers, often those on a budget and shooting with just a single camera. The quick reframes and focus pulls would be edited out were more coverage available but the lower the budget, the less coverage and so more of these "mistakes" end up on screen and eventually become indicative of a small-scale, non-corporate project. Even now documentaries can be seen with this style. "Mondovino" by Jonathan Nossiter was self-funded and self-shot and though its subject matter, the international wine industry, is rather more sedate than a Jason Bourne outing Nossiter's film has the hand-held, pull focus style that we come to associate with the rebel documentary maker.

These are tropes for mainstream Hollywood though. These films are not low-budget, nor are they really run and gun film-making. The VFX studio Double Negative has put months of work in on Greengrass's film, making all that expensively shot material look as though it were captured just as it is seen. The use of green screen elements, CGI are all on a par with any other big budget action film, because that's exactly what the film is. Hollywood hopes to get us to believe that this is a "grittier" more "real" vision of the action film by aping the mannerisms of the indie documentary or edgy TV series. I don't agree. It makes it seem like lazy film-making for television, not cinema. When one then considers the hack and slash editing style that is then layered on top to ramp up the kineticism further we often end up with an incoherent mess.

It is the pop video editing piled on top of the rebel documentary visual stylings that finally push them into the absurd. The relentless manner of these films' construction in fact makes the drama and narrative terribly one dimensional. If there is no variance in pace, framing or movement then the eye and mind adjust to it until the fast cutting seems normal. Speed is relative. If there is no slowness to contrast the frenetic action then action seems staid. Three rapid cuts after several longer ones have impact. Three rapid cuts after 120 previous rapid cuts have none. By shooting and cutting dialogue scenes like a low budget pop promo doesn't make the film more exciting overall, it in fact reduces the impact of the action when it begins.

I often wonder whether a great deal of the televisualising of cinema has come about because of the reliance of directors on video-assist technology. These devices allow the director to watch exactly what's being filmed on a small TV set as it is being shot and then use that video to edit the sequence before the film cans have even had the chance to be taken for development. The days of 'dailies sessions', where rushes of the previous day's film are screened on a cinema screen, are gone to great extent. Directors and editors do much their work on a film by looking at a TV screen or computer monitor. I suppose we shouldn't be all that surprised that they end up making faux indie documentary television not cinema.