Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

After the tedium of months of doing rotoscoping on Shrek 2, why on Earth would I imagine doing an even more extreme version of it in Austin, Texas on A Scanner Darkly? The thought did cross my mind. Doing a feature length rotoscoped movie requires a marathon runner’s mentality, and ideally a lot of weed.

I could have done it, but talked myself out of it. The idea of moving to Austin to work on a punishingly tedious test of patience seemed like a quest I could take a pass on. Good thing too. The current issue of WIRED magazine recounts in Trouble In Toontown the realities of coping with the super sluggish process of photo-realistically tracing every ding-dang frame of digital video.

The original Linklater groundbreaking, experimental rotoscoped film Waking Life was the beginning of something freaky, but with Scanner somehow being able to say, “Yeah we could do that,” came too easily. Perhaps as bad an idea as, “Let’s redo Fantasia! …again.” I’ve read a number of P. K. Dick’s books, and A Scanner Darkly was a bit too dark and introspective for me to care to finish. A creepy story about a paranoid narc becoming addicted while bumming around suburbia with his deadbeat house mates. The monk-like mind-numbing hours of rotoscoping in dark rooms is no far cry from the cold, dark world of P. K. Dick’s story.

Rotoscoping, the tracing of live footage to create animation, was done by Disney way back on Snow White and Cinderella, and then Ralph Bakshi did some awfully disappointing stuff in American Pop. Bob Sabiston and his crew at Flat Black Films deserve a lot of credit for Waking Life, but after A Scanner Darkly they should be ready to turn out the lights and wake up to a new life.

Congratulations to the little guys! John Canemaker and Peggy Stern won an Oscar for Best Animated Short film, The Moon And The Son, at the 78th Academy Awards last night, beating out the mighty Pixar’s One Man Band. The handwriting is on the wall that the psychological expression of hand drawn animation is the real treasure, since 3-D computer animation has become as common and all pervasive as video games.

Luma Pictures recently produced 200 monstrously realistic visual effects shots of vampires and werewolves for the recent horror movie UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION. Apple’s web site has a good write up of the software and visual effects techniques of Luma’s artists on Underworld, Crash and The Cave. The 3-D modeling, animation and compositing is very high end.

Luma’s work generated a VFX Forum discussion which includes an excited artist bubbling over his first film experience. Looking at the trailer I am too removed from the excitement. With all the real life horrors in the world, what is so scary about this old fashioned hocus pocus stuff?

Loose Change 2nd Edition is a hard hitting, provocative 9/11 documentary that can be viewed at Google Video. The observations in the documentary are highly disturbing, which many Americans would prefer not to believe: that the 9/11 was a staged event by our own government to create a Pearl Harbor II as a pretext for Middle Eastern wars, political power grabs, gold, insider stock profits and insurance money.

The documentary covers these 9/11 mysteries:

• a missile-like hole in the Pentagon and lack of aircraft debris.
• black box flight recorders not retrieved.
• lack of aircraft debris or bodies found at Pennsylvania “crash” site.
• explosion evidence at base of twin towers, far from aircraft initial impact.
• evidence of controlled demolition explosions at WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7.
• inability of cell phones on aircraft to contact phones on ground.

The stomach turning implications, if proven out, would of course be the horror story of the century. The documentary suggests that there are clues that could be tracked down, such as accused hijackers may still be alive, aircraft victims may still be alive, because planes were switched, and the list of deep, dark secrets goes on and on. Could so many innocent people be sacrificed for such a ruse? Could so many Americans be fooled? Who knows?

Online resources such as Killtown.org have collected theories and evidence.

Update:  New York Magazine’s article, The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll.

Today on the KQED radio program Forum, documentary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back”), Richard Leacock, Stephen Ujlaki, director of the Documentary Film Institute at SF State University, and Dan Krauss, Bay Area filmmaker whose film “The Death of Kevin Carter” is nominated for an Academy Award discussed their craft. Part of their debate was if the documentary filmmaker should be a “fly on the wall” or not.

My own experience shooting photographs of rock bands performing in small clubs is that the performers know you are there and they know how to act. As a photographer I’ve felt the need to be “cold blooded” in order to best capture a moment. The focus is on the technical aspects of the film, lighting, camera and lens fitting the subject into the frame. A good photographer calmly and cooly stalks the great image and can only indulge in emotional reactions after it has been successfully captured. I know people who have flown to war zones in order to find “great” photographs, and that is not for me.

Dan Krauss discussed the dilemma of whether or not to become in involved in the subject matter, explored in his Oscar nominated documentary short about photographer Kevin Carter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his picture (above) of a Sudan famine victim above. Mr. Carter was haunted by the photo and committed suicide, tormented by his conscience and other critics for exploiting the suffering of others.

Conservative columnist William F. Buckley recently wrote It Didn’t Work in which he states, “One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.”

This implies the overall theme of the past 6 years of the Bush Presidency: he is learning on the job and we are paying for his education. This administration ignores scholarly research and planning, basing policy upon envisioned hopes, croney theories, and faith. More dangerous is their negligence and reluctance to admit mistakes until too late.

Another conservative voice echoing this sentiment is Bruce Bartlett. Mr. Bartlett served in the Reagan administration in the Office of Policy Development and in George H.W. Bush’s Treasury Department as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy. The title of Bruce’s new book, Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacyto speaks volumes.

On recent radio interviews Mr. Bartlett has compared President Bush’s style to Richard Nixon’s, with the obsessive secrecy that often accompanies corruption, and the avoidance of accountability. Former White House counsel to Richard M. Nixon, John Dean, has also makes a similar case in his book, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.

Computer animation artwork based on fractal flocking logic by Spot Draves. From his Dreams In High Fidelity web site:

A Painting that Evolves:

Physically Dreams In High Fidelity consists of a small computer driving a large liquid crystal or plasma display. The computer creates a continuously morphing, non-repeating, abstract animation.

This work stretches the definition of “painting,” in this case, a computer rendering math logic onto electronic displays. I believe the legion of painters from Picasso on back to the cave dwellers might argue in favor of the hand rendered definition of painting, whereas this is a robotic automaton spitting electronic fire.

Chet Helms was part of the inspirition behind the art and music of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury community, Summer of Love and Avalon Ballroom. Joel attended the concert in his memory last October, and we’ve put some photos up on the site. Somehow the Rock Pix Gallery feels completely blessed, and blissed too, by the presence of a tribal leader.