Us Now, Documentary on human collaboration

Continuing from my last post, this entry is the on the same subject which is about the importance of sharing or collaborating with others. Whats more interesting about this short film is that it shows how we could use the technology which exists today to improve fundamentally everything we do in our life from socializing to government policies.


Its funny that I felt the first person (Clay Shirky) who appears on the video was Tom Hanks but I just found that he also feels same way about himself. Anyway I found his views very interesting especially the following, "As time goes on, we'll see people increasingly comfortable participating in situations where the social value is really about other people caring enough rather than someone being paid to provide that value."

Here is TED talk by Shirky himself on importance of co-operative model and btw, I am excited to attend TEDx singapore meet later today!

Secret of success is helping others, says Lucas

For sometime I really wanted to post this entry into my blog to just tag this up in my web space so that I won’t forget these really great words of wisdom from this interview. I believe this interview was done on sidelines with 33rd AFI Life Achievement Award which was presented to Lucas.

If you have watched the above video you might have noticed him saying, “getting the most praised for least body of work”. I was very moved by those words especially since I was also who was one among the people who looked only at his success but not at what methods or practice he would have had adopted to achieve it.

This interview had some really good insights into how he achieved his success and following are few quotes which I found really inspirational.

Lucas says, “No matter how easy it looks on the outside, it's a very, very difficult struggle. You don't see the struggle part of a person's life. You only see the success they have. But I haven't met anybody here at the Academy or anywhere else that hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever.“

Other than passion, practice, perseverance, one interesting point he pointed to be successful really caught my attention and that is helping others. According to him it also matters how much one dug his own life to understand things around him and how we all fit into the bigger picture. He says, "bigger picture" understanding -- of how we fit into the world, and how we fit into the universe. Not necessarily thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.”

He explains It is ironic that most of the people doesn’t understand this phenomena which exists all around us and we fail to look at the large picture by being a self absorbed creature which would end like a cancer cell. According to him, “If you put that notion on a larger scale, you have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever.”

Lucas reminds us that if we look at human history all the inventions and advancements we ever made is because we had worked together. As we know helping others is the basis of any society and it is obvious that as a group we are stronger than an individual but once we become possessive or selfish it is very difficult to win or succeed in anything we start out to.

According to Lucas, ‘My success was based on how much I could push everybody up. And eventually their success was the same way. And in the process they pushed me up, and I pushed them up, and we kept doing that, and we still do that.” He states that even though his friends were his competitors that doesn’t stopped him from enjoying their success as his own.

I think Lucas’s career is a best example for what he is trying to describe above because a good amount of his success was truly based on his associations he had with Coppola and Spielberg from the very beginning of his career.

It is also important to note that Lucas not only revolutionised film industry by bringing the digital realm into reality but also he along with Coppola proved that how films could be made outside the gated Hollywood studio system which existed during their era.

Following are two videos in which he talks about his two early films and how Coppola played a crucial role in both of them.

Finally as a personal note, I think lot of people today doesn't understand the importance of cooperating or helping others. It is very much apparent in the Internet forums where people would just gaze at the threads while never take any effort to contribute back. It is even more ironic when people think that by contributing to forums they are not gaining any knowledge. As for me whole reason I write blog or I am active in the forums is not just to contribute but to learn and expand my knowledge. I think the best possible way to learn is when you share.

TED talks on CG Face

Here is a talk on the technology by Paul Debevec. Do check out his website for more information on facial capture technologies.


Next is talk by Ed Ulbrich on the technology put into practice in the film Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Please do note that it took 155 people and 2 years to pull this amazing VFX and it was for a invisible VFX which most of the audience wouldn't even have noticed!

Poor film scripts which killed purpose of great VFX

I was searching a bit deeper into one of my favorite website (wired.com) checking for some random articles and I found these two articles very interesting, namely, 10 Sci-Fi Movies We’d Like to Throw Into a Black Hole and 10 Geeky Movies That Should Have Been Great, but Weren’t.

One of the thing which you can find similar in all these movies mentioned in above articles are they all had some good amount of visual effects being Sci-fi or geeky movies but still they fail to impress majority of the audience. This issue reminded me of a in-class presentation (presentation given during late 2006) I did during my degree class back in college.

I think this lists mentioned in the above two articles could be even longer including some of the recent movies but this issue is more serious than critics bashing VFX or VFX artists bashing poor scripts. After my research in college I had came to point of realization that this whole phenomena is effect of various trends and other factors which affected this dynamic industry and this is something which will continue to evolve.

As a VFX artist I love to bash at some of these high budget VFX movies which killed purpose of those great VFX shots and most importantly hard work of people behind it. So here goes my list of 5 bad movies which killed VFX (oh we all love to doing this, lol)

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!)

1.) Star Wars prequels
Seriously after watching these prequels it even downed my appreciation for the original trilogy. Tough I enjoyed those best of the best ILM eye candies after a while it was apparent that I was watching these movies just to enjoy the VFX shots not the movie as a whole.

2.) The Matrix sequels
The very first Matrix is my favorite movie both visual effects and story wise but both movies came after were fail to impress me like the way first one did. It would be better to quote from Weird's article for this one;

The Matrix is one of the best science fiction films ever made, period. The first 40 minutes of the original leaves you scratching your head, trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. During the rest of the film, the pacing, the action and the story are beautiful in their execution. The film ends with enough questions to keep the audience talking, speculating and watching again for new clues.
What we didn’t need, however, were answers. The answers are a letdown. They were full of quasi-mysticism about the nature of man and machine

The sequels also feel bloated by the special effects in a way the first film didn’t. At various points, the story just stops so we can see our protagonists fight the bad guys in various unbelievable ways. What began as a compelling story moves steadfastly into mind-numbing, summer-blockbuster territory.

3.) Daredevil
Though there mixed reactions to this movie, for me this movie was one of the first superhero movie which left me with some emptiness and this one represents trend of other superhero movies which followed the same suite like Electra, Fantastic four, Spiderman 3, Ghost Rider and most recently X- Men Origins.

4.) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Great cast, good visual effects but poor script, I think that was this movie was all about. It is interesting to note that there aren't much good Steampunk films made in Hollwywood, another one I could think of is Wild Wild West and I think both these movies didn't really exploit the depth of genre instead they just became like any other high budget Hollywood flicks.

5.) Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
This is again one of those sequels which again fail to capture our expectations. Though Schwarzenegger was present in this movie it didn't really help the poor story in any manner. This one was suppose to be direct continuation of last movie but I felt through out the movie it was drifting away from the first two movies.

I think they continued this trend for some reason even in the latest movie T4. I felt the latest movie is not as bad as T3, maybe it because the only thing I could associate T4 with first two movies is the soundtrack and everything else seems like some other new movie. Oh yeah, I liked dramatic out of world and sudden appearance of CG Schwarzenegger at the climax.

There are other movies which I didn't mention but then this list won't have an ending. I only mentioned the movies which I personally had lot of expectations and in which I enjoyed the VFX but not the movie as a whole. So I would like to stress this whole post is more of a personal reflection than a general opinion.

I think the main reasons behind these failures are audience's high expectations and their increasing maturity to high end VFX or action/dramatic sequences. I am not blaming the audience and safe guarding the filmmakers but if you look at the industry as a whole , the audience plays a major role in creating and destroying the trends in industry.

Like I stated before my expectations were very low for the fourth installment of Terminator but due to failure of T3 I felt T4 was a much better film . And on audience's maturity, this is where it gets really interesting because according to an eassy at filmcritic.com,

One of the first films that shocked audiences was The Great Train Robbery, where audiences reportedly ran from the cinema in terror when the criminal pointed his prop gun straight at the camera. A film, which was described as ‘general slaughter’ by a New York Times film critic, was James Cagney’s 1931 Public Enemy. This included eight deaths, all of them off camera, used suggestive sound effects and actors reactions to notify the audience that a death occurred. If you compare this with Bruce Willis’s 1990 Die Hard 2 in which 264 people died, all on camera and all of them very brutally and bloody, this proves that audiences are becoming difficult to shock.

I think only way out of this phenomena is when audience really appreciate visual effects for its story telling qualities instead of it's awe-inspiring effects but then I really don't know when that is going to happen because currently it is very apparent that VFX is used as a marketing tool and not to mention the high end FX race between the top VFX studios.

The industry is always going through constant evolution mainly due to technological development and then due to social and cultural changes. I remember back in my college presentation I quoted Lucas on this issue as follows,

"The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie. Those movies can't make their money back anymore."

"It's no accident that the 'small movies' outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. Is that good for the business? No—it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art! In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies."

If you compare his statement with latest movie District 9, which had an overall budget of 30 million and which boasted top notch visual effects. It is apparent that there is strong trend for low budget film making and I think in future the budgets will continue to shrink. It doesn't mean the death of high end visual effects but I think it will be the birth of very niche class of films which will use visual effects more for its story telling qualities that can be comparable to films in 70s & 80s.

I think I don't have to stress again how important story is in the process of film making and to conclude this post I would like to quote VFX producer Rick Baumgartner from his blog

On one level, visual effects deals with the problems of human perception – finding ways to take advantage of the strengths and weakness in the human visual system. Cues such as scale, perspective, depth, color, pattern, texture, intensity, shadow, parallax each of us instinctively use to place ourselves in the world. Visual effects take advantage of these cues.

On still another level are the technical problems related to the tools and materials used to develop a visual effects solution. But no matter what the eventual technical hurdles, visual effects starts with the written representation of the story -- the script -- and very quickly moves into iterative visual representations of the story.

The bottom line always is the story: depictions of real or imagined events with characters, objects and environments illustrating some aspect of the human experience

Traditional Mattepaiting and Albert Whitlock

Today I was digging a bit deeper into history of mattepainting, one of my favorite craft associated with visual effects. Though we all seen the craft of mattepainting in very early specials effect films such as the A Trip to the Moon, the digital craft was really perfected by few elite group of men in Hollywood mainly during mid and late 90s. As from my preliminary search on web I think there ain't much information on Internet on this but what I found is worth posting here.

First of all here is an almost comprehensive list of those artists by a VFX artist called Domingo Lizcano. He had done a great job collecting images and matte paintings of almost all the artists used who used traditional methods of mattepainting. It is quite difficult to find articles and resources on these old techniques, maybe there isn't much information on traditional methods of mattepaiting because of the closed nature of Hollywood during that era.

Anyway a good insight into these techniques can be found this book called 'The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting'. It is important note that one of the coauthor of this book, Craig Baron worked in ILM during early days for Return of the Jedi(1983) and others. After ILM he founded Matte World Digital, one of my favorite VFX studio. I particularly admire their work because of its invisible nature. It is very evident in their work for Benjamin Button which made Baron won a Oscar for VFX.

As I said I am big fan of invisible visual effects and this is one the reason why I admire the work of all these old great artists. One of the legend of this invisible craft was Albert Whitlock, he is considered as one of the most skilled matte artist of all time. He was born in London in 1915 and started his career by working in film warehouse, then miniature painters to helping carpenters, creating titles and then signs for several of Hitchcock's early classics and later he had worked for Disney and finally Universal as matte artist.

(Excerpt from Albert Whitlock: A Master of Illusion)

Following are few of my favorite Albert Withlock matte paintings.

Mattepainting with live action (History of the World: Part I (1981))

Original live action plate and matte of above shot

Mattepainting with live action (The Birds (1962))

A Photo realistic Matte Painting from film Earthquake

Mattepainting with live action (History of the World: Part I (1981))
There quite lot of good shots and I can't include them all here but here is a montage put together by Craig Baron for Visual Effects Society's tribute to Albert Whitlock talk session.

Floyd W. Martin on his article on Whitlock states that most of the films he worked were not Sc-Fi or visual effects oriented films but normal films in which mattepaitings were subtly used to tell the story. Martin continues, Whitlock was often depicted the natural world through his paintings and extensively used the technique of perspective & depth which Italian Renaissance mastered perfected. Though Whitlock associated himself with Fresh impressionist art movement which studied the affects of light on objects than objects itself.

Following is an excerpt from Whitlock's interview by Super-8 Filmaker magazine on above subject of the effect he looks for in a mattepainting.

Well, you can't live on matte shot for a lifetime. Eventually you realize that it's quantity that film producers are interested in, so you start developing techniques whereby you can turn out quantities. So by necessity, you find yourself in a situation where you're looking for minimum of effort. As my mentor in England would say, the right kind of scribble is better than wrong kind of painting. After a little bit of accidental painting you realize that you're painting something close impressionism.

Like impressionistic painting, my paintings are not concerned with the object, but the effect of light on the object.

He further continues in the interview stating, whenever he looks for a reference he don't look for the exact reference he could find in terms of the location or the subject but in fact he look for a similar reference which has the same lighting condition which he want replicate in his shot. According to him, "In there you have phenomena, which is much more important for creating a realistic effect. the light, the time of day and effects in that painting are much more important than the individual buidlings which nobody would take account of. "

This above statement of Whitlock had an instant strike on my mind because I never looked at my work in this perspective though I pay lot of attention to lighting on my work but I never wondered that those buildings or structures in my painting will never exits if there is no light. I think a normal viewer would often think if there is no light then it is a night shot but only very few would think even in a night shot there are lights.

I think we all have to closely look at and study the methodologies which masters like Whitlock used to perfect their paintings. It is especially very important in this digital era where these concepts are very much overlooked because of the simplicity of the tools we use.

To end this write up I am quoting couple of authors from articles on Whitlock, firstly from Matrin whose article I mentioned before;

'Though his work may go unrecognized because it is so convincing, Whitlock's artistry with special effects is important in understanding three concepts: the collaboration necessary in movie-making, the need to use effects for budgetary reasons, and the fact that film is a two-dimensional illusionistic medium.'

And finally to quote Ray Zone on his article called Matte Painting Monet in American Cinematographer Magazine July 2000 issue

He was truly unique a master painter with the precise mind of a photographer. He would paint in f-stops and light his images according to the key lights and fill of the original photography the kinds of computations that are done today by highly complex computer software. Whitlock made such calculations in his head, and he knew what would work on the screen. "Hopefully, the camera does lie," Whitlock said, "because it’s looking at a painting that we are trying to convince people is the real thing."

Some bitter truth about the industry

Yesterday I saw this old thread in mattepaiting.org about interview of Hollywood illustrator/storyboard artist, Sylvain Despretz and interestingly Despretz himself had commented there few days ago. Go through the thread if you have time since it has some valuable information and different views, even Dylan Cole has his say (guess he was active in the forum almost 5 years back).

The more I think about these issues I feel it is notl ironic when someone says you need have a lot of luck or be at the right place at right time. Actually it matters a lot and God knows what holds for budding artists but anyway all one could do is just work your ass off and be persistent no matter what.

Here are few are quotes which I felt very interesting and insightful from his interview hosted at cgchannel.com

"You could say that most people are essentially interested in the Prestige of the movies that I worked on, more so than any objective notions of personal artistry, or drawings, but I guess you can’t ask too much of people."

"I have learned that Professionalism is often antithetical to Enthusiasm, but that when given a choice, it is also more reliable.

'I am a sort of Artistic Rent-A-Friend; “rent” being the operative word.'

"In music, after enjoying a Century of rich and heartfelt compositions in Contemporary Classical, Jazz, Big Band, Blues, Rock & Roll, all disciplines requiring a decent amount of Skillfulness, we are asked to accept Star-Puppets barking to walls of prerecorded sounds…They even have a new name for “ripping-off without crediting”: it’s now called “Sampling”.

There is an another article by Despretz called 'YOU WANT TO BE A HOLLYWOOD ARTIST?'. Even thought it is more based on illustrator/storyboard artist scenario, it still holds lot of things similar for other artistic trades in film industry. I really liked this article and here are few excerpts from it.

Is there a standard path to a career in film arts?
There is no path to a career in the film arts, or any kind of art, for that matter; this should be the first thing art schools ought to tell their students: "We haven't a clue; no one does". The problem for a student or young professional is three-fold:

a) Acquiring experience, to become competitive.
b) Making money just to live, in a way that remains at least on target.
c) Breaking into the "gated community" of show business.

I'm being offered a job today, but I want to hold out for a better one that promises to begin soon; what should I do?
This is a Jedi Mind Trick; the better job may manifest, sooner or later, but most likely, it won't. Common wisdom says that you might consider taking whatever job is in front of you - even if only for the time being. Look out for you; no one else does.

And here is my favorite one and believe me or not this happened to me already few times even in my short career span.

Will talking about money reflect negatively on me?
You bet it will!

You are expected to behave like Van Gogh.

The industrial world relies on Artistic low self-esteem for its survival. The hunched-back, Igor-like, image of the drooling Artist-Geek, chained to a drawing table, is a staple of our business. To complete that image, you need do nothing more than be ashamed of your need for money. People will be delighted.

Learn to identify the euphemisms of the trade:

"We want people who are excited about the project": We are looking for suckers.
"We would like to send you the script before we discuss money": We are looking for suckers.
"We want team players": We are looking for suckers.
"You are so talented": Are you a sucker?
"He's a trooper": He's a sucker.
"We getting a crop of young artists": We are looking for suckers.
"He's High Maintenance": He's figured us out.

Only then, can you identify the only sign that you are dealing with a professional outfit:
"Are you available; what is your rate?": We mean business!

Ancestor of Vue or Fractcal Noise?

Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo.

I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world's first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each.

Loren Carpenter

I think this is one of the most commonly used algorithm in 2D and 3D computer graphcis today. To know more about its humble beginings read Act II of Micheal Rubin's book driodMaker.