Animatics

How animated films are built

A while back, in the post ‘A Question for Tim,’ I wondered about a new (if it was new) form of film, one in which you build up a soundtrack like a radioplay, then add visuals to this – visuals like stills, or graphics, short animation, anything you can do cheaply and simply.

Tim answered my question by saying this is the way it is usually done in cartoons: the soundtrack is built up not in final form, but pretty close; then the animators match their cels to the soundtrack, adjusting the soundtrack as needed.

The term for this process, he says, is animatics.

He doesn’t know for sure of any live action films that use the technique, though one director (who used to be an animator) is said to use it, at least in part, in his live action films.

So there you have it.

This isn’t exactly what I had in mind, though.

And Tim didn’t like the notion that the soundtrack could be sufficient unto itself. Truly, this is frowned upon in film criticism: rightly so, no one element should be sufficient unto itself, and each should be necessary for the whole. My goal, though, is to have two tales: one the soundtrack, and the other the film with sound and picture, which would enhance and elaborate the soundtrack.

The only example I know about is one that was never intended to be: on the DVD to The Magnificent Ambersons there is a recreation of the ending, whose picture has been lost, but the soundtrack to which has survived. You can hear the dialogue with productions stills. It’s the best they could do, but it isn’t what anyone would do who had the method in mind during production.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, September 14, 2008)

Revolution

Questions on where we go from here

We in the world are facing our greatest challenge ever. Over the next 50 years we will face what Europe faced when Rome fell, and what China faced when the Empires fell – only we will face it all over the globe, and we will face climate change which will feel like the rug pulled out from under our feet. Many of us will die; I’ve seen estimates that world population over this century will shrink from the present 6.5 billion to 1 billion. But maybe ‘only’ three billion people will die…

At the same time, we face a leadership (on just about every level in the United States, and on many levels throughout the world) that is stubbornly refusing to admit that anything needs to change. These are the men who won and wield power under the current state of affairs; they have everything to lose, and it is in their interest to convince themselves, and all the rest of us if we are fools enough to listen to them, that all we need is more of the same actions, behavior, and attitudes that got us into this bind. Yeah, that’s the ticket, all right.

What we need, then, is a revolution.

But when things are this bad, and the people are facing a leadership this powerful, this obstinate, and this ruthless, any challenge to the status quo will be met with guns and brutal repression.

Here’s a question to ponder: Why do revolutionaries think they have to kill anybody?

What’s the purpose of violent revolution?

I suppose that the thinking is that no peaceful change is possible, and since the authorities mean to hold onto power by force, only by force may they be toppled.

But when a violent revolution succeeds, it only places in power a new régime that is based on violence, and therefore only really understands violence. This new régime will therefore maintain itself through violence, and that means it will only be put down, in the event it proves mistaken or corrupt, by more violence … and so it goes, round and round.

Why can’t a revolution refrain from being a revolution at all?

Why can’t a revolution be a movement?

If you intend to build, you can’t start by destroying, however tempting you might find it. Whenever you start out by destroying, you blaze a trail of further destruction, and construction (which is what we really need now) is only that much harder to achieve.

My advice to anybody seriously concerned about the coming catastrophe – as we all ought to be – is to turn your back on your obstinate leaders standing four-square in the way. Just start building your own society, the society as you understand it ought to work now, and through the collapse, and after the collapse.

We need to build a sustainable society in a sustainable world.

If we can manage it, it will be the first time we will have done so – ever.

Forget the ‘noble savage’ mythology.

Think of the future.

Do whatever you can – whatever the obstinate, gun-toting leaders don’t absolutely stop you from doing – do it now with your family, your friends, your neighbors. Study and learn all that you can. Publish what you know and have learned, disseminate it freely and as widely as you can, trade and share with all the others.

We will be small, lonely groups in the great darkness, at first.

This is not a failing, it is the basis of understanding.

Nobody knows what we should do, what is the truly sustainable society. Not yet.

If a million efforts bloom, most will be wrong, all the way. Many will get only a little part of the answer. Others will get a large part of the answer. If we are very lucky, maybe one effort out of the million will understand it all.

Share what you know, and listen to the others with an open heart.

We can all trade up toward that full understanding.

If your leaders block you, think always of being like water against stone. Give way, yield, don’t fight back. Be humble. Be the bending willow, and not the stiff, breaking oak. Leave it to your leaders to be stone and oak. Be you water or willow.

Do whatever you can, be it ever so little. Do whatever is allowed for you to do. Break no laws. Help others who seek the answer. Join in league with them. Raise up the banner.

The violent revolution is the typhoon sweeping over the coast. It smashes, it wrecks, it floods – it passes.

The peaceful, determined movement is the flood rising with the groundwater. It surrounds, envelopes, drowns, engulfs, swallows, devours, rots. It takes its time but there is nothing that can resist it.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, September 13, 2008)

Defective Tales, Nightmares, and Dreams

Looking at Gilda as an example of a lousy tale that is a great tale

I was thinking about the Rita Hayworth movie Gilda this morning. This is one of the great films noir of the 1940s. The movie takes place in Argentina or some other South American country. Glenn Ford plays a down on his luck adventurer who is rescued by a mysterious nightclub owner. The nightclub owner is played by George Macready in a cold, sinister fashion. He has three things he values in his life:

1. His nightclub
2. His new bride (Gilda, played by Rita Hayworth)
3. His plans to corner the market in some metal (I think it might have been tungsten)

Glenn Ford’s character is taken in by the nightclub owner as his assistant, in charge of the club and also in charge of Gilda, who takes a lot of looking after. It’s clear as soon as we see Gilda and the adventurer meet up, that they have met before – even though they deny it to the nightclub owner.

Gilda proceeds to drive the adventurer half crazy trying to keep up with her. She makes a show of taking up with every man who asks her, and Glenn Ford’s adventurer he sure she’s fucking every one of them (although we in the audience are not too sure – we never see any evidence of it, and most audience members feel that Gilda is only putting on an act for the adventurer’s sake).

The story then proceeds along two tracks: first the love triangle, and the jealousy dance; second, the mystery of what the nightclub owner is really up to with his connections to former Nazis and the Consortium that seeks to corner the market on tungsten.

Glenn Ford’s character narrates the story in voice over. The voiceover is the only thing that preserves even the semblance of sanity or rationality in the storyline. The voiceover is overwhelmed by the visuals – the crisp, beautiful black-and-white cinematography and the musical set pieces as Gilda sings and dances and practically performs a striptease in the nightclub just to madden Glenn Ford even more.

These set pieces are what the movie is all about. Your impression of the movie a day or so after you’ve seen it consists solely of these set pieces. They linked together like the scenes in a nightmare or some erotic dream. There is a sense and a rationality somewhere about the movie, but even if you consider the voiceover, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

What makes this work, and makes Gilda a great film (or at least an unforgettable one) is that the cinematography and the music and the chemistry between the stars is so powerful. Basically, what makes it work is that the audiovisual aspects of film provide us in the audience with enough entertainment and enjoyment that the storyline, which is held in the weaker, subordinate verbal aspect of the film, isn’t even important.

A movie consists of these two elements: the emotional and poetical photography and music (or sounds) and the verbal. This is the only thing that makes a movie like Gilda possible. It allows the movie to entertain us while at the same time defying all rational explanations and analysis.

I’m not sure that this would be possible in a story that exists as text only. It would be possible in a play (which isn’t that different from a movie) or a radio play (which lacks the visual aspects of plays and movies, but has the audio aspects as well as the performance of the actors).

I think the closest the text only tale can come to this sort of defective talesmanship is in a narrative poem. The narrative poem tells us a story, but it can also include elements of lyrical poetry and it can be sung with a beat or a rhythm. Think, if you will, of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic: this poem tells a story (several of them in fact) with a strong beat and a rigid, inflexible rhyme scheme. Even reading the Kalevala silently, you can’t help but get caught up in the rhythm and fall into a kind of trance – the kind of trance that destroys your sense of time like a good marching song. I’ve read that the Kalevala was chanted by two men while they sawed wooden logs – back and forth the saw would fly, and the men would sing out the staves back-and-forth likewise.

But this is a far cry from the seductive powers of the movie Gilda.

(Composed by dictation Friday 12 September 2008)

Notes for Readers and Talesmen Both

The pleasure of tales, and the promise and peril of Romance

I will try now a little experiment, using the voice-recognition software to compose this blog post off the top of my head – without any idea of what the hell I’m going to say.

As the reader follows the threads of a story, he probably grows more and more engaged in the characters and in their various desires, frustrations, and conflicts. Fiction offers us a way to live vicariously through the lives of imaginary characters. This creates the possibility of the spectrum of approaches from the more Romantic to the more Realistic. I tend to categorize readers into these two camps – those who prefer Romance and those who prefer Realism.

Realism, I think, depends largely upon details and close observation of character, nuance, and setting. It also asks of its readers that they also relish these very details, and know something about the material. The better we know both the setting and the kind of people who populate the story, the more we can appreciate how well or poorly the talesmen has drawn them. Realistic stories about faraway lands and strange, exotic characters can offer us innumerable details, but how can we tell whether these details are true or accurate? The closest we can come is to recognize certain aspects of psychology and domestic life that are similar to the ones that we know in our own daily lives. This creates its own pleasure – the pleasure of recognizing in aliens commonalities with our own people, our own family, and ourselves. It also allows us to view our own lives (and these characters who are so like ourselves) through new eyes and with new perspectives because we see them in strange dress with different-sounding names carrying on with slightly different customs at whose base we recognize universal traits and actions and behaviors of all mankind.

Romance, on the other hand, offers us a journey away from ourselves, and away from our own lives. There are two joys in Romance:

1. The joy of leaving ourselves.
2. And the joy of coming back.

The joy of leaving ourselves touches close on the joy of listening to all tales. Every tale, be it ever so Realistic, deals with someone else and someone else’s life. Even if the character lives in our own town on the next street, all the same he is not us. And the life he leads, and the situations he gets involved in, are not our own.

When the tale is, on the contrary, Romantic, the journey away from ourselves is all the greater and (for those of us who enjoy such things) all the more fun. We journey to exotic lands, we live alongside strange beings and we participate in bizarre customs. All our worries, cares, and anxieties are left behind. In exchange, we take up a new worries, cares, and anxieties – but these are all to some extent ‘safe.’ We know, after all, that it’s only a story. Even though all the characters may die, and evil prevail and good languish and perish, when the tale is done we will be safe and ourselves again (at least, as safe as we were when we began to hear the tale).

The joy of coming back, involves I think two things: the first is whatever sense of amusement, entertainment, and delight that we experienced when we heard the tale. All this we bring back with us, and it lightens our load in facing whatever troubles, toils, and gloom that plague our daily lives. (If, on the other hand, our lives are full of enjoyment and suffer no pain, we can nevertheless enjoy the refreshment of having taken a break into story land.)

The second joy of coming back derives from whatever wisdom we have gained in the process of hearing the tale. Not all tales of course have morals, or impart to us any wisdom at all. But every tale encloses like a shell encloses a nut – because every tale embodies and encapsulates its author’s wisdom. Every author has some wisdom. Every talesmen has something to tell us. Every human being has learned some lesson in life, both authors and audiences – but they are never the same lesson. Every person has something to teach us.

In an odd way, when the talesmen spins a yarn about strange lands and mysterious beings, he approaches in a roundabout way his deepest truths and most intimate wisdom. He will tell us things without realizing it. He will tell us things that he doesn’t know that he knows. The world of fantasy is connected in subterranean ways to the world of dreams. And the world of dreams is connected to her innermost desires, longings, needs, fears, and earliest experiences of life. Out of dreams emerges the wisdom of the body, that is always learning even as ‘we’ are learning, only in very different ways. All these lessons will be revealed as the talesmen tells a tale of complete and utter imagination, without the slightest connection to ‘real life’ and without himself realizing just what it is exactly that he’s doing.

In just the same way, we when we hear or read a tale of this kind, experience it as a kind of dream ourselves. The process of reading a fantasy tale creates a mirror to the process of writing one. The writer allows himself to ‘speak in tongues’ and from this babble emerges the language of his deepest heart. The reader then ‘dreams’ the tale when he reads it and this dream writes its own wisdom back on to his heart.

This process operates below the conscious level. That gives it enormous power – and creates great danger at the same time. Evil dreams, when we eat them off another’s plate, can write evil in our own souls. Therefore, be warned! Listen, and be warned!

(Composed by dictation Thursday 11 September 2008.)

From the Horse's ... Mouth

A few months ago, I wrote about Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials and noted that I just couldn’t understand why so many critics loved those books. To me, although there were good passages, and even good sequences, overall, the storytelling or talesmanship was weak, illogical, even nonsensical – and what’s worse, and worst of all in my opinion, it wasn’t good dramaturgy.

Recently, a London newspaper published an article concerning the resurgence in popularity of children’s author Enid Blyton. In the article, they consulted Mr. Pullman about Miss Blyton’s work. Here’s what he had to say:

“The characters are two-dimensional and the stories are mechanically recovered, like mechanically recovered meat. There’s no lasting quality in it whatsoever.

“Take Swallows and Amazons or Tom’s Midnight Garden and you can read them for the pleasure in the style. There’s no pleasure in reading Enid Blyton’s style. There’s no sense of delight or joy in the language.

“But any objections are irrelevant because people read them to find out what happens next, at a stage in their lives when that’s the most important thing for them.”

Well. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

(Composed Wednesday 10 September 2008)

Republicans, Democrats, and Audiences

Insights into talesmanship from a recent study of political psychology

Today online I read an interesting analysis of why people vote the way they do. The particular starting-off point was the question: Why do people vote Republican when it is against their economic interests to do so? And why can’t the Democrats win votes from these people? I recommend the article, which is online, so far, at: http://www.edge.org/discourse/vote_morality.html.

Here in an oversimplified nutshell is the conclusion:

People who prefer the Republican world-view are in need of a simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil reading of the world. The Republican politicians offer such a reading. It is a comfort to be told what to believe, as it spares one the trouble of thinking. Moreover, consideration of subtle distinctions, and the notion that the world is a palette of shades of gray, where there are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ can be unsettling, and lead to anxieties. But it is precisely to escape from such anxieties that many people seek shelter in the communal, agreed-upon notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with simple, easily-understood tools to mete out justice to both.

This conclusion reminded me of something that J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote. I believe it was in his essay, ‘On Fairy-tales’ and the line concerned the frightful deaths, often accompanied by torture, that witches and ogres met at the end of the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Professor Tolkien wrote that whereas parents and other grownups were shocked at the brutality of these endings, the children loved them:

“For children, being innocent, love justice; but we grownups, being sinners, crave mercy.”

Joining these two notions, we derive the general thesis that Republicans are innocent, and seek justice (by which they never mean social or economic justice, but rather the stern and severe punishment of the guilty) – and that Democrats are sinners, and crave mercy (for themselves, and for others as well).

Lay aside any ideas we have of preference for conservative or liberal camps.

Let us go on, then, to explore this as it might pertain to talesmanship and audiences.

We can stretch things and divide ourselves as audiences into two ‘parties’ – the ‘Republican’ and the ‘Democrat’ audiences.

The ‘Republican’ audience seeks justice, assurance that there is good and evil in the world, that good will prevail, and will wreak a frightful punishment upon the evil. This last, I believe is a crucial point: there seems to be (in the political world of today’s America at least) a real desire, even a lust, to relish the pain and suffering of our ‘enemies.’ For this audience, it isn’t enough for the hero and heroine to join together in happiness at tale’s end. But they must see the villain and villainess cast down, tormented, tortured, maimed, and killed – or at least so wholly damaged that there need be never again anything to be feared from such as them.

The ‘Democrat’ audience, on the other hand, is more interested in what we might call soap opera or tales of human drama. The hero and heroine have their flaws, the villain and villainess have their virtues, and in the words of Jean Renoir (I believe it is in Les Regles du Jeu) ‘Everyone has his reasons.’ This audience is, I suspect, less interested in the outcome of the plot, and more interested in the process of moving towards this outcome. Indeed, probably this audience considers any ‘outcome’ as an outdated concept; for them there is no ‘end’ to any tale, merely a finishing-up point dictated by practical considerations.

For the ‘Republican’ audience, the world at tale’s start is in balance and (for the most part) good; then comes a Disturbance, and Evil afflicts the hero; the hero struggles strives and does battle with the Evil that lays behind the Disturbance, until he vanquishes it, casts it down utterly and forever, and resumes the wholesome, healthy balance that prevailed once upon a time – indeed, by tale’s end the hero has won to a greater, higher level of happiness than he had at tale’s start.

But for the ‘Democrat’ audience, the world at tale’s end is fraught with unease, or at least longing. The hero might well be an anti-hero who wants what he ought not have; he might gain what he wanted, and lose what he needed; he might win his heart’s desire only to fine it wasn’t what he wanted after all; the end might be ironic, and will at least be mixed – as mixed as the start. At most, the hero will gain some measure of wisdom, though it may well be bitter-sweet. But the audience will be mostly interested in the state of unbalance, and enjoy the various motives and cross-currents in the events, that subtly shift the balance back and forth.

I offer no praise for either camp here (at least I hope that I don’t). This was more in the nature of an exploration of what these two ‘parties’ of audiences might consist of, if we marry the political psychologists’ ideas with that of Professor Tolkien, and apply the result to a theory of audience and talesmen.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday 9 September 2008)

Update on Voice Recognition Program

Today I’m going to give you an update on my progress with the voice recognition software – this is where I am now, and how it’s gone so far, and the lessons I’ve learned so far. I think it would be a good idea if I did this every week or so – that way I could compile a list of everything that I’ve realized as it happens before I forget any of it. I hope that I will be able to use this in the future, and that anybody reading this who is interested in voice recognition software will also be able to make use of it.

I’ve been thinking in particular about what I’m going to do if I get a new computer. It will be a Macintosh, and that means I have a choice: I can either run windows XP in virtualization, or I can buy MacSpeech (which is voice recognition for the Macintosh using a licensed version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, or at least its engine). Either way, I probably won’t be able to use my user profile that I spent all this time perfecting in this installation of the program. The standard version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking doesn’t allow you to export or import user profiles.

So, was that going to mean that I have to start all over again from scratch?

The answer is, probably not. What I realized in the couple of days since I had this revelation, is that half of the training is done on me, and not by me. I have definitely learned how to speak in a different way – the way that the program finds easier to parse and to recognize. Probably a lot of this involves the simple act of speaking more clearly, and not any special way of speaking to the microphone so that the program understands. Not being an especially sociable person, alas, and also not being too outgoing, I’ve never spoken clearly, loudly, or in any way easy to understand by listeners. Probably that means that the voice recognition software is going to have a harder time understanding what I say – harder than it would understanding most people.

Now, I think that in fact, I have been changing more than the program has been learning. Call it may be 60% to 40%, or even as high as 75% to 25% – but I imagine that 75% is an upper limit.

So that’s lesson number one: Time spent creating one user profile and minimally training the voice recognition software is not all wasted if you have to reinstall the program or moved to another machine and began a new profile. Much of that time you will be using training yourself, and that will give you a head start on any new installation or training program.

Another thing I noticed, is that when I tried to speak too clearly, I over enunciate – what I notice that I’m doing is placing special emphasis on the final consonants of some words, especially when one word ends in a consonant and the next work begins in a consonant, and I anticipate the program is going to have a hard time distinguishing between the sounds of the two consonants. Since I normally slur the end of my words, when I speak too clearly in this way, what happens is that the program thinks it should throw in another syllable there – or rather, that I have said an extra word.

So that’s lesson number two: when you originally train the program, it’s very important that you speak in your normal voice as you normally would speak. That’s what they tell you anyway – and it’s true: because when you train the program, you’re feeding the program certain sounds, phonemes as they call them. The program then expects you to speak in this same way when you go on and do actual dictation. If you speak more clearly when you train the program then you do normally, the program is going to expect you to speak just as clearly from then on. And by the same token, if you speak more clearly after you train program than you did when you trained it, the program is still going to expect you to speak just as clearly (or rather, just as unclearly) as you did when you trained the program in the first place.

Since I have changed the way I speak in light of my understanding of how the program was recognizing what I said, maybe it would be a good idea for me today to go on and train it again. It does gradually learn as you speak and dictate, whenever you correct it. He learns not only what you mean by a certain sound but also it adapts to your way of writing and speaking so that he can tell the difference between words that sound exactly the same, according to the context in which you speak them.

Here’s another way, a specific way of speaking that I know that I have to do so at the program has a better chance of understanding what I say. Since the program operates with a certain degree of what looks like artificial intelligence, context is very important. The program recognizes what you say not only as individual words strung together, but also as phrases. So it helps if you speak each sub phrase of every sentence as its own small group of words, with appropriate pauses to mark its beginning and its end.

There we have lesson number three: you must learn to speak in full phrases.

An interesting side note to all this is how where I am of good diction from other people. Today, for example, I watched the DVD version of the 1936 Bette Davis movie, Satan Met a Lady – this was the second version of Dashiell Hammett’s (I had to type out his name by hand – this is another lesson that you have to learn this program: some words and phrases that the program doesn’t know already just aren’t worth teaching it, and you save a lot of time just typing them in) The Maltese Falcon. It stars Bette Davis and Warren Williams. Williams had a diction that was amazing. It’s very clear that he had stage training and was an accomplished speaker on the stage. In fact, he rather overdid it – his performance was a little hammy.

(Composed by dictation Monday 8 September 2008.)