Lost in the Plot

I came across this intelligent quote from John Mayer about how he looks at performing, and it got me thinking about filmmaking, and how audience expectations can impact a film-

That’s the thing about people knowing anything about you before you meet them - is that you have to work just to get people back to knowing nothing about you. - John Mayer

It could be because of a star, director, trailer, etc, or even just the fact that people see hundreds of hours of film and TV, and arrive at the cinema loaded with past experiences and the resulting baggage. There’s an urgent need to wipe their minds clear as quickly as possible, to make them forget whatever they think they know, and just get them really involved, really watching, thinking, feeling.

So many films fail hopelessly that this; the first ten minutes just make you more aware of yourself, of your expectations, and in no time you’re judging the film rather than getting involved.

When you leave a film that fails to manage and reset your expectations, all you can think about is how the movie compares to those expectations. That’s why, even when a film is partially successful, your mind is preoccupied with defining just what disappointed you.

When you leave a good film, all you should be thinking about is the content of the film, the story, the surprising experience that made you totally forget everything you thought you knew.

I chose an image from The Matrix for this post because I consider it an example of successfully, even cleverly, managing audience expectations. From the film’s oblique marketing, and through the brilliantly intriguing opening minutes of the story, it challenged you, so you were hungrily asking “what is this about?”; your were eager for answers, but you didn’t know what to expect, and the filmmakers could tell their story.

Suffice to say that Pixar’s Wall-E is a moving, stunning film, working on two exciting levels. Firstly, it really succeeds on levels we haven’t seen before, with poetic, visual, bold direction, plenty of pathos, and some dark, vulnerable storytelling. But secondly, and importantly, it is also just a showcase for great characters and a wonderfully simple, romantic story, and it really grabs your attention and makes you care.

Andrew Stanton is, I think, confirmed as a master writer and director of extraordinary vision. He described in an interview what he and Pixar strive for, and I think what is the key to Pixar films standing out from the crowd of animated films-

“Movies made by a singular vision. Made by a filmmaker who knew what he wanted. That’s why I go to the movies—I go to see what those filmmakers want to make. I don’t go to see what a studio wants. And so we’ve applied that ever since.”

Stanton’s interest in focusing on his own vision rather than ‘what audiences want’ has apparently insulted some people, though regardless, the overriding reaction to the film is extremely positive. The previous link also alludes to Best Picture Oscar talk.

And on branching out into fresh thematic and narrative territory, and treating animation as a medium, not a genre, Stanton says-

“I don’t go to [a live-action movie] and say, ‘Oh, it’s a live-action movie. Well, that guarantees that it’s going to have a cop chase and it’s going to have, you know, a long melodrama or dramatic scene or whatever.’ I don’t think that way, and I don’t know why people do that when suddenly they’re dealing with the medium of animation. It’s still just a movie. What’s the story? What’s it about? How is the best way to tell it? That’s the way we’ve always made many of the movies, it’s just that I think we’re getting a little braver now.”

All I can say is that my love of animation, and ultimately great filmmaking, is refreshed by this film.

The VFX legend died on Sunday. His work was a major influence on me when I was young, I think it really fueled my passion for movies and visual effects- Jurassic Park will definitely be burned in my brain forever. It’s amazing how many films he had a major influence on, everything from Edward Scissorhands to Terminator to the recent Iron Man and Indiana Jones. Cinematical has some notes on a few of his films, and at Wired there’s a write-up.

“I rode his cutting edge from teddy bears to aliens to dinosaurs,” Spielberg said in a statement. “My world would not have been the same without Stan. What I will miss most is his easy laugh every time he said to me, ‘Nothing is impossible.’”

So Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda has some nice opening and end title design from Shine and James Baxter Animation. AWN has a write-up about the work, and over at the Shine site you can watch the video of the closing titles. SynchoLux has a video of the opening titles. It’s great to see an independent company like Baxter’s playing a part in feature animation with this sort of thing, as was the case with the excellent animated segments in Disney’s Enchanted.

Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter film, The Prisoner of Azkaban, is a fascinating study in filmmaking. After repeated viewings, the film’s real magic has become clearer to me; the way Cuaron handles the camera, the pacing, how he establishes physical space and guides us through it, and the way in which visual metaphors and patterns resonate throughout the film. Many of the techniques he would come to use in Children of Men are in use here too. Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about these things, and I’ve decided to try and explore some of them a little deeper here.

The first thing that always stands out to me as a brilliant filmmaking device is the use of the Whomping Willow as a kind of act-break and pause between the action. Like a deep breath, the Willow is used to moderate the pace of the story as well as to punctuate the passing of time, revealing the changing seasons and signaling a new phase of the narrative.

Windows and mirrors are frequently used to demarcate transitions to magical spaces and events, and Cuaron’s camera frequently takes us through the glass in a kind of symbolic passage to ‘the other side’. This technique functions to subtly indicate to us that we are entering a shifted reality, or crossing a barrier. This is especially clear in the classroom sequence with Lupin; the camera pushes in through the glass of the mirrored cabinet at the start of the scene, the magical action unfolds, and at the end the camera pulls back out of the glass to reveal the whole sequence took place in a reflection. The whole scene unfolds flopped, so the images are all mirrored backwards, a trick that’s easily missed but helps suspend our disbelief and adds to the otherworldliness of the sequence. The same technique is leveraged in the time-travel sequence at the end, where the camera takes us literally through a clock-face and into the past.

“One thing that I felt was perfect for Michael was that we have this magical universe that he could really ground. Because he has got that grittiness, and that grittiness comes from the fact that he is a single-source light cinematographer. He’s very naturalistic in that sense. I felt it would be a good marriage with the material.” - Cuaron on cinematographer Michael Seresin, from BBC Films.

Cuaron and Seresin also use the camera to gently direct our gaze from subject to subject, with long fluid shots that move with the action. An impressive, subtle use of visual glue maintains the flow, with a character’s gesture or movement used both as a cue for the camera to follow, and to guide our eyes. Ron’s hand on the train window bridges the cut from interior to exterior, Dumbledore’s hand gestures guide our view to the staff behind him, and the brilliant image of the umbrella in the storm is a visual echo of the Dementors who are about to close in. The Whomping Willow and the small bird are also visual glue, bringing energy, pause and pattern to the narrative.

An unusually large amount of the action is covered using point-of-view shots, the camera looking either directly from a character’s eyes, or back at the character from an object. Instead of the more common over-the-shoulder edits, and avoiding the close ups Cuaron dislikes, characters frequently appear to stare straight into the lens, and then Cauron cuts directly to their POV. This pulls us into the character’s experience in a more intimate way, putting us in their place, letting us see with their eyes. It grants the filmmaker permission to present an altered or subjective view, and indicates to the audience that what we see doesn’t have to be ‘real’, thus helping to sustain our acceptance of the supernatural events.

“I’m becoming very disappointed, very disenchanted with close-ups - more the way that generic Hollywood movies use a close-up. Unfortunately, the close-ups in contemporary Hollywood cinema have lost the strength as close-ups. It becomes such generic grammar; I’ve been more into trying to observe from more of a distance, a character with their surroundings, and allow that openness to convey as much as possible. It also has to do with the rhythm of cuts. Most contemporary cinema is just one cut each half a second - here, I’m curious to see how much visual information you can hold. In my previous film (Y Tu Mama Tambien), I did more - it was very wide and the shots were very long, seven minutes or so. Here, you adapt and serve the material. In Harry Potter, we don’t have that many close-ups - you go in there when it’s relevant to go in there. Or in most of the cases, it’s because the camera has gone very wide and eventually finds that character. It’s about coverage - most of cinema nowadays is about shooting a lot and figuring it out in the cutting room, rather than seeing the film in your head and shoot what you already envisioned.” - Cuaron, from a UGO interview.

These techniques ultimately function to help us experience what the characters experience, to create a real sense of space, to suspend our disbelief so we willingly enter a shifted reality, and bring a visual, almost musical flow to the story. The result – a beautifully fluid, evocative, involving piece of cinema.

For more, there’s an interesting interview with Alfonso Cuaron at GreenCine, his Wikipedia page provides a brief overview, there’s his complete interview at UGO, and another interview at BBC Films.

So I can’t help but be kind of confused about my feelings on Apple’s new iPhone. The addition of 3G is nice, though are data plans now significantly more expensive? The GPS I don’t need right now, since using Google maps to find your spot on the map only takes about five seconds, and the turn by turn directions were already there. The things that seemed needed to me-

Improved camera, maybe with video (please!!)

Voice dialing, maybe recording

Bluetooth or WiFi sync with OS X’s iSync (why on earth not?)

Copy and paste

Syncing To-Do’s from iCal (glaring omission since the beginning)

Syncing Notes

Choice to turn off predictive text

It seems to me that most of what’s new is just enterprise functions and the potential for third party apps. Apart from 3G and GPS, which both seem like improvements to existing iPhone features, there are no new features or functions. I guess the apps, combined with the new 2.0 software, might remedy this. And for $199, I’m keen despite the above omissions, since it’s basically still the same iPhone that I wanted before.

A very interesting feature on the relationship between Pixar and Disney over at the New York Times. Firstly, there’s mention of Princess and the Frog (I hadn’t seen the above promotional image before) and the retooling of Chris Sander’s American Dog into Bolt, which, quite frankly, doesn’t look all that promising. Especially interesting in the feature, though, are mentions of Pixar’s two-films-a-year output starting in 2011, their sequel production (and offshore outsourcing) ramping up with Toy Story 3 and the now-confirmed Cars 2, and the uncertain forecasts for Wall-E’s box office performance. I’m still a believer in the integrity of their process, stories and art, though some of these growth directions make me nervous. I can only hope they’re not aiming for this kind of thing-

By contrast, the competing DreamWorks Animation has received applause for its coming “Kung Fu Panda,” featuring the vocal talents of Jack Black and Angelina Jolie. Ingrid Chung, a media analyst at Goldman Sachs, said recently that she found the film’s concept and execution “strong enough to create a franchise.” When it came to Pixar, Ms. Chung declined to comment.

And the Goldman Sachs media analysts have it right, since a franchise is exactly what Dreamworks wants. Maybe I’m a snob, but starting a franchise makes me think of Dunkin’ Donuts, not film.

Read ‘Disney and Pixar - The Power of the Prenup‘ at NYTimes.com.

Also of interest is a recent Variety article on the slated films from Disney and Pixar through 2012.

So, after what has been more than a year of continuous tinkering with many, many designs, I’ve finally gotten my creative portfolio online with all the main ingredients I wanted. It’s nothing super amazing, but really the main things I’ve learned while putting it together are-

a) Encoding videos to be small in filesize but high in quality is an elusive, irritating art, even when making the most of Apple’s Compressor. I have yet to find the magic workflow that makes it easy.

b) It’s a strange struggle to decide whether to show fewer, larger images, necessitating more navigation and potentially hiding good work, or show more work, but smaller, and keep it simple to browse and see everything.

c) My attention span for personal web projects like this means I have to work fast to avoid changing my mind mid-way and starting again. This is irritating, since I’ve designed or built over two dozen iterations of my portfolio in the last year, and none have satisfied me. The upside, however, is I’ve gotten very fast at prototyping, building, and making stylesheets that I can quickly, dramatically rework. As a result, I designed and built this portfolio in less than one day, and because of that it still seems somewhat ‘fresh’ to my eyes!

I’ll post more later about the failed designs from the process, it’s interesting to look over them. There are many, and I think some nice ones too, but for now it’s nice to just have something finished and actually live!

Check it out at www.lostintheplot.com, any comments are welcome!

An old pen drawing, reworked and layered and given new life. There was a particular day in Brooklyn, when the weather was warm and the sun was intense, that felt like this, with texture, movement, colour, sound! Now that spring has struck, though, the main visual impression of Greenpoint is, fittingly, green. Maybe this image should be the first of a seasonal series…

I have a little bag with some of these badges left over from when I made them a couple years ago, but I really want to make more. There’s something special about the small, round canvas that can really make an image pop. See Benjamin’s badges for some really nice ones.