Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

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?!

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.

There’s too much goooogling on these days. A few days ago I attended the first Google AdSense Forum at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. I got overstimulated by meeting fellow Google AdSense webmasters, enthused presenters and smart Google team members, and liked it! Jennifer Slegg was one of three presenters, and she has dutifully written the Forum up in greater detail at her blog, Jensense. Another panelist, Chris Pirillo founder of Lockergnome.com gushed all over Google AdSense arousing curiousity and laughter. The next few days I’ve spent furiously tweaking parts of mediaspin.com to reflect improvements and techniques discussed at the meeting.

Did I mention that I am moving and will be off-line for almost a week? Does anyone care? I for one care, and will write to Congress to have them act immediately to prevent me from being unplugged, and becoming a brain dead demonic monster, or worse. More on this political hot potato topic later…

I’ve got a feeling in my bones. What do my bones tell me? Do I trust my bones? Kay Cordell Whitaker knows about Bone Throwing and their ability to predict for 2005. Worth a look. Of course there are cyber shaman bone throwers. Levitated, also worth a roll. Trust your bones.

Hey kids! Wanna do some cool Digital Effects on Spider-Man 3 or Stuart Little 3? Great! Well, get the air out of your heads and listen up punks! Your colossal boss will be a bean-counting professional, much like Digital Domain’s Scott Ross, quoted in the Phil LoPiccolo’s editorial in Computer Graphics World, “Making movies is an art, but it’s also a business,” he adds. “I tell my people, if you want to be Vincent van Gogh, go cut off your ear and live in the South of France.”

Is Scott still feeling his lumps from Titanic’s near suicidal artistic excesses? And folks, if you catch Boss Ross’s drift, be ready to work long hours at Van Gogh-ish salaries. Or move to Singapore. What wuz ya thinkin’… this is ‘spose to be fun? Fuggetaboutit!