Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

More of the same in software food chain evolution, Adobe announced it is acquiring Macromedia. Of course this is a big buzz all over the Internet, so I had to get my 2 cents in.

Many say it’s Adobe’s defensive move against giant Microsoft. Others say against Apple. Whatever the case, this is no surprise, and big fish eats little fish business as usual for many industries.

From my own experience, Macromedia’s upgrade prices have always been aggressively high, so just maybe with Adobe’s large product and license base, those costs might come down. Also there is some hope of better product integration, for those who bounce from Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop to Macromedia’s Flash.

Story behind the story, the illustration above was originally designed and created in Flash, but WordPress 1.5 doesn’t integrate Flash files yet, so what you see is a substitute animated GIF. Maybe Adobe will buy WordPress, and fix that, but for what price? WordPress is currently free.

Last night the San Francisco ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter hosted an evening with Walt Disney Feature Animation at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater. Speaking straight from the mouse’s mouth, Disney Producer Don Hahn led the presentation. Don has been at the center of Disney’s animation renaissance, having produced Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The audience of over 200 was treated to four previews of upcoming Disney 3D animated feature projects, Chicken Little, Rapunzel Unbraided, American Dog and A Day with Wilbur Robinson. With fresh stories and terrific looking design, Disney Animation is clearly entering the 3D Animated Feature horse race with all four legs galloping. Also in the works is Toy Story 3, so obviously no one at Disney is looking up to Pixar for their 3D animated bling bling supply.

Don described the story lines, inspirations and creative references of the features, followed by three senior Disney Animation staff member presentations and demoes of Look Development (3D surface texturing) software, Effects and Shot Finaling. Disney makes use of many third party tools, such as Maya, Shake, Photoshop and Renderman, as well as actively developing their own software for lighting, 3D painting, hair and fur control, and visual effects production.

The Disney group fielded questions from the audience, such as “How do you define family entertainment?” Don answered simply, “Something the entire family would enjoy.” The meeting concluded with refreshments and breakout discussions in the theater lobby, the crowd buzzing about the big things to come from Disney.

Soothingly advising customers about skin care, a flesh crawling musical jingle can be heard at this beauty products site. For the thick-skinned only, you’ve been forewarned!

CGTalk Forum has some very impressive discussion threads. Animators are observers, and they are impressed by good acting. Check out this thread: “I can’t believe **** was the dude in ****!!” which at this writing has nearly 17,000 viewings! Sounds like the basis for a good movie trivia game.

For example, I can’t believe Ray Milland was the dude in “The Thing With Two Heads!”

Sunday, April 10th was a celebration of various kinds of green power. Islamics in Baghdad gathered in protest of the 2nd anniversary of the falling of their city to the Coalition of the Willing strike forces.

Back in the USA, the Masters Tournament plodded on for the prize, a green jacket. Great golfers learn to tune out all distracting crowd noises in order to make good scores. And so they did.

Looking back to Iraq, will freedom mean installing country clubs and golf tournaments in and around Baghdad? It would be too simple to say that places with golf courses and miniature golf parks tend to be peaceful. For now, Muqtada al-Sadr and many Iraqis do not seem to be interested in lengthening their drives and sinking long putts.

Recently I’ve noticed many flags at half staff around town, flying mournfully over various strip mall stores. I wonder, “Who died? Another random Iraq bomb casualty? The Pope? Johnny Carson? The Prince of Monaco?” I don’t know what the rules are anymore. Is this part of a big Government-Business-Religion soft sell marketing pitch to appeal to humanity’s tragic tendencies?

A review of Spamalot in The New Yorker quotes Oscar Wilde, “It is rarely in the world’s history that its ideal has been one of joy. The worship of pain has more often dominated the world.”

Or as Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, let fly on Bill’s Corpse from Trout Mask Replica,

“The only way they ever all got together was
Not in love but shameful grief.
It’s not the way I’d like it to get together
That’s not the kind of thoughts I’d like to keep .”

In my History of Visual Effects class, instructor Shaun Featherstone poses the question, “Let’s consider which of the following has the most impact upon 3D digital animation… is it Harryhausen’s and Tippett’s Puppet construction? The techniques of Replacement Animation? Or the aspects of Claymation?”

I suppose I was involved in the history of 3D digital animation, having worked at NYIT Computer Graphics Lab in the early 80’s, where many software techniques were just being developed, from paint systems on up.

Around 1983 there were very few if any flexibly jointed character animations. The state of the art was Robert Abel‘s famous “Sexy Robot” can commercial, a stiff jointed character. I was anxious to see flexible joints in characters, and was able to work with a software engineer, Richard Lundin, who animated the famous NYIT Ant robots. We used a model created by Edwin Catmull of his wife’s hand. It had no knuckles or joints, and we tested methods of generating polygons along B-splines created in-between joint nodes. This led to my modeling a Gumby character, on which we ran Dick’s flex software. This was all done long before SoftImage, XSI, Alias, Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio, etc., etc.

Claymation and the freedom expressed in all of the flexible skinned stop motion puppets gave us a goal to aim for. The digital technique was very different, and in many ways required as much or more patience and determination to achieve.

Sin City looks very cool, an intense, high contrast graphic novel noir opus. It appears that the team of innovative directors, Robert Rodriguez and comic book artist Frank Miller have pushed the envelope of how films can look. Both directors are cartoon artists, so strong comic book layout and storyboards should influence the crafting of this movie.

In my city, I’m taking a class at SF’s Academy of Art University, “The History and Technology of Visual Effects.” The syllabus is Richard Rickitt’s excellent book Special Effects: The History and Technique. We are studying visual effects in older films amd writing our comments in discussion essays. I’ve enjoyed the writing, and will edit and publish them as part of this blog soon.

A film covered in our reading, the 1978 Superman – The Movie based on the early Action comic book hero looks really awful upon DVD review. With a John Williams soundtrack the Superman movie struggles to mimic the contemporary Star Wars greatness. Starting with an overly long, boring opening credit sequence (during which I could have read 2 or 3 pages of a comic book!), and then a fly over into an obviously miniature set of planet Krypton. An art director was given too much range in creating a crystal Krypton world of an orderly civilization wearing glowing outfits. Senior scientist Jor El (Marlon Brando) manipulates mysterious glowing crystal rods with little cinematic results.
Next up, Fantastic Four. Flame on?!