C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Remember when I learned Motion Capture Animation? Let's just I got an opportunity yesterday which I had to turn down. I had been really excited about it at first. My heart kind of broke. I guess that's all that would be appropriate to talk about here. Ask me some time.

It has become difficult for our contemporaries to imagine a fantasy world inside a mundane, utilitarian chunk of plastic, without openable screws, with apps you are not allowed to modify. To them, TRON: Legacy might feel like the adventures of dust particles in a Bissell Cleanview Helix® Bagless Upright Vacuum Cleaner, $79.99 at Target after rebate. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the otherworldly makes some reviewers uncomfortable.

Wardrobes are a well-understood technology. We know their molecular proportion of wood-vs-Narnia with scientific precision. But a wardrobe can be very, very old, and made from very, very old trees-- old enough to have been around when the world, perhaps, worked by different rules. Your daughter would not find Narnia in her plywood-and-brushed-steel Hanna Montana wardrobe.

TRON: Legacy might easily leave you cold, if you never watched the original... during the eighties. Watching the original now for the first time might only put you off more. I watched it for the first time years ago, but was saved from my overwhelming disgust by having played the game in the eighties. That movie serves to tarnish its own legacy as if it were its own Star Wars Prequels.

Those who are nostalgic for the original can remember what it felt like at the time. It felt like the first one minute and twenty-three seconds of this streaming soundtrack. Of course, even then I never thought TRON was remotely plausible-- rather, the art design and music expressed how the idea of information systems felt.

The strength of TRON was a holy trinity of Syd Mead (Blade Runner, Alien), the French comic book artist Moebius (warning: possibly NSFW), and Wendy Carlos, the legendary synth composer. It should have been an art film resembling Walt Disney's Fantasia, but instead, it attempted to add a script and acting, both of which were terrible.

(The art film approach would have also benefited Osmosis Jones-- Wait. What... What am I doing? Let us never speak of that film again.)

Because a sequel has to carry on all the premises of the original, whether they worked or not, I would have preferred a remake, preferably helmed by Tarsem Singh. He directed The Cell (excerpt) and The Fall (trailer), both of which reminded me of Destino (short film) a Disney animation inspired by Salvador Dali.

The bottom line is that I greatly enjoyed TRON: Legacy. It put the problems it inherited into the background, and did well with its advantages. I rarely go to first-run movie theaters, so I saved specifically to see this alone from the current season. I was not disappointed. I plan to watch it again, and would recommend it to anyone prepared to accept it on its intended terms.

I daydreamed about this system for years, and now I get to watch it.

World Builder from BranitVFX on Vimeo.

Every time I go to a convention, there is usually an anime room. Sitting in there watching the otaku enjoy subtitled animation from Japan, I am impressed by how powerfully this medium spreads a foreign language through other cultures. I think back to the anime conventions I've visited and consider the classes on Japanese that they teach there! An entire subculture exists online, called "fansubbing", for amateur hobbyists to translate Japanese culture into English and other languages before it is officially released.

For another example, audiences hear Klingon spoken with subtitles in Star Trek, or Quenya spoken with subtitles in The Lord of the Rings, and are captivated by the setting that language creates. Not only could Lojban gain the speakers that it needs by using this effect, we'll have fun creating a film!

Animation once required prohibitive amounts of time and money. But with the advent of machinima, that's no longer true, if you're willing to settle for relatively crude computer animation.( Read more... )Much of the work could be distributed among multiple people who become excited about this project. It would require:

1: finding or writing a story.

2: converting it into a screenplay format with dialog and voiceovers.

3: drawing storyboards.

4: translating the script into Lojban.

5: modeling the characters, props and sets in 3D.

6: if we decide to use Second Life, probably purchasing land and paying to put the models in it.

7: puppeteering and recording the models in machinima software such as Second Life.

8: recording our voices acting the Lojban script.

9: editing it all together with music and English subtitles.

10: posting it to Youtube and Google Video.

11: submitting the link to my friend Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net who will probably blog the $#14 out of it.

12: welcoming the influx of newbies.

Conventions frequently promote themselves with room parties in hotel suites at other conventions. Cafe Penguicon and the ConVersation party were both great successes at ConClave.
Both conventions got many pre-registrations at their room parties, and a great time was had by all. We partied Friday and Saturday nights. In addition to the whole-bean freshly-ground coffee and espresso, Cafe Penguicon served the home-made fudge for which Kimba "The Fudge Goddess" is renowned. In honor of the latest addition to our guest of honor list, we featured a new flavor, "Google Fudge"!

ConClave has been going thirty years, and despite the definition of the word "conclave" has never elected a pope. This year the ConVersation room party had an event in which we did so. Sadly for palindromeg33k, who wanted the position very much, he came in a distant second to the door of the hotel room. The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Since the pope costume and hat was unable to fit on the door, we gave them to palindromeg33k, who was dubbed AntiPope and blessed the balloon herding event as a huge cloud of balloons were pushed out of the ConSuite, down the hall, into the elevators, and into the ballroom for the dance.

Tux the Penguin put in a brief appearance. Tux wanted to meet Dr. Kage because of the "furry" connection, and although I (as Tux's agent and co-ordinator) am not into that, I felt it was appropriate. But due to poor timing that meeting was fated not to be.

I loved the panel "Fun With Liquid Nitrogen." After that event I got a pair of volunteers to bring liquid nitrogen to Penguicon and make liquid nitrogen ice cream in the consuite! Another panel I enjoyed very much was the discussion of Disney by Bill "Aksel" Kuehl and paranthropus. I knew paranthropus was a fantastically talented animator but until I looked through his portfolios it had not quite sunk in how stunningly accomplished he has been.

It's a three-year tradition for me after paying for the hotel room on Sunday to buy a book in the dealer's room at ConClave. But this year I didn't have cash. The minimum purchase to use credit was absurdly high, so I went completely overboard on cosette_valjean's credit card. In my insane, giddy spree I actually had nine or ten science fiction novels on the checkout pile, until she pointed out I already had enough. I culled the list down to Ventus by Karl Schroeder, Iron Sunrise by Charlie Stross (antipope), and two Robert Sawyer novels, Hominids and Calculating God. I owe cosette_valjean lots of money. With apologies to the Popeye character Wimpy, "I'd gladly pay you Friday for a library today." Fortunately cosette_valjean is only too happy for me to get mind-bending science fiction novels because I'll either tell her the complete story or actually read it aloud to her.

I like being with a rare woman who is interested in that. :)

( Thoughts about Karl Schroeder's Ventus. Spoiler warning. )

Here's a useful LJ meme, gakked from howardtayler: Identify one goal that you've had, and that you've not been able to reach in the past. State why you don't think you've reached it.

Despite a lifetime of sculpting (in plasticine, a medium so fragile that I have almost nothing to show for it) I have not yet made a clay-animated short film. When I was a child and a teenager I had the talent and the time, but animation in any form was outside my price range by several orders of magnitude. I still have the talent and now I have a little disposable income which is not half-owned by another person with her own spending priorities, but find myself without time. As a beginner I'd be lucky to get two seconds of satisfactory footage -- that's sixty frames -- into the can in eight hours. I'd need a place to do the shooting that would be completely sealed off from daylight so I control the lighting conditions, that can go utterly undisturbed. If the tripod or set nudges out of alignment even slightly, I would have to start the shot over.

After I found The Clay Animation And Stop Motion How-To Page I realized that the goal is financially within my grasp. It answered questions I had been researching all my life, and also sold me the fine tools and equipment I've been looking for all my life. I've even started mixing custom clay colors in a melting pot.

If I ever got a Video LunchBox, I would no longer have any excuse at all. This is a standalone digital video appliance that requires nothing more than a camera, a TV, and a VCR. Press a button and it records a frame. It superimposes a view of the last frame over the realtime view of where the model is now, and provides instant playback of the motion so far. Too bad it costs as much as my car. I'll bet there exists a combination of camera / video capture card / software that's more affordable and can do the same.

I rented the anime anthology Memories by the creator of Akira, Otomo Katsuhiro. The entire film is top-notch, with breathtaking visuals and uncompromising artistry. Each segment is an individual vision instead of marketing-driven by a board table full of business suits. The first episode, Magnetic Rose, set in orbit in 2192, is now my favorite work of animation ever. It's rare to see zero-gravity depicted and ships with thrusters that actually fire correctly to move in it, even in anime (Cowboy Bebop notwithstanding). For its realistic acting and plausible visualization of the future I've got to own Magnetic Rose. A couple of technologies (which I won't describe to avoid spoiling it) are on the blue-sky fringe of legitimate futurics, but are depicted so convincingly that they are more an asset than a liability to the segment. The film contrasts them against a background of solidly realistic hi-tech which is antique to the characters because it's based on our own present-day research trends. I'd like to show Magnetic Rose to my GURPS Transhuman Space group, but I doubt I'll find a copy in time for our session Saturday.