Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

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!”

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.

Back online after moving across the bay to Pleasant Hill. Offline for over a week was weird, but rattled my cage in many good ways. My fingertips are sore from lifting, moving and handling too many cardboard boxes.

Enduring the conditions of disaster recovery from moving many boxes of life’s accumulations requires more forethought than I had prepared for. For example, these adapters are becoming more and more common, and their fine in their place, but dislocate them from their intended connected mate, and Jim, we’ve got a problem. The conversion of AC power to DC batery storage has created an explosion of these wall socket devouring devices. One might wonder, why can’t these items be made smaller and more tidy. My Sony Cybershot camera AC recharger is larger than the camera! I had several panic atttacks trying to find misplaced the special AC chords that connect into the DC rechargers.

The philosophical words of Swami Sivananda, “Adapt, Adjust, Accomodate” came to mind while dealing with the gross material details of relocating my life. Practice this and you will be rewarded, and better yet be sure to package batteries and cables with their respective tools.

For more tales of adapters, see my pre-blogging story, “Beta Test”, in Media Spin’s Horror Story section.

In an act of compassionate brilliance, United State Congress ordered blood transfusions from steroid using baseball players into the brain-damaged Terry Schiavo. “It is the American Way, and darned good sportsmanship too, for the super strong to care for the super weak,” declared a congressman from New Mexico.

In a related story, weakened by high fuel prices, SUV owners stood vigil and prayed for government passage of a large oil transfusion from the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.

Steven Levy’s recent Newsweek article covering a Harvard conference on blogs points out a quote attributed to Keith Jenkins. Jenkins wrote, “My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere… will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.” Additonal fears were expressed by female bloggers. I suppose Harvard will always be the target of these kind of slings, until there is no longer is a Harvard.

I am relatively new to blogging, and not a big media player, so I do not share Jenkin’s concerns. My own first discovery in exploring blogging was Beccary, which turns out to be a wonderful young Asian woman’s web site. I enjoy her work and what she communicates, period. Nothing to do with race or gender.

Dragging race and gender preference into blogging stinks of professional paranoia and the claims of ownership that are the lifeblood of professional organizations and associations. Jenkins is a professional photojournalist. In a world where everyone is a photographer and more and more are bloggers, most likely defending territory is part of his survival story.