Lost in the Plot

To go along with a new edit of my reel, I needed to create a new DVD to present it. I worked quickly to get this done, since I know how easy it is to get bogged down endlessly redesigning a personal project. I based the interface on a random motion graphics experiment I created a few weeks ago- a collage of photographs of a tree, layered and blended and then subtly animated using Apple’s Motion.

I made a 30 second loop from it in Final Cut, then built the menu interfaces in Motion. I also made brief animated intros for the menus, which are nice, though DVDs just don’t seem to be capable of switching between menus or tracks quite quick enough to make the effect seamless.

Anyway, now I can finish working on the presentation of my reel, and get back to actually creating new stuff!

I updated my online portfolio to include a new edit of my animation reel. I just wasn’t happy with the old version- it was put together in hurry, and I included things that in retrospect weren’t either necessary or appropriate. Seeing several of the excellent talks at Siggraph earlier in the month, especially those hosted by Animation Mentor, helped me make better decisions and edit a reel I’m more happy with. To summarize the process I’ve gone through: remove work that isn’t great, edit down unnecessary length. It’s obvious advice, and I’ve heard it many times, but turns out it’s been a slow process to really do it, to be ruthless, and only leave the strongest stuff.

Another pen on canvas work, this one from sometime mid 2007. Inspired by many hours of listening to this song by Joni Mitchell, and all the songs on her Hejira album.

This image is definitely a candidate for a much larger reworking, possibly in a slightly different style, less rigid and dark in the line-work and solids.

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.

Update: I still think Wall-E is an amazing film, but Mark Mayerson’s analysis of the film’s narrative weaknesses and lack of direct message are interesting to consider. Warning, though- spoilers abound in his post!

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, 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…