One of the things you never hear about when press, moviegoers, Buzz Lightyear, etc. rave about computer animation is the fact that its stunning visual display is also its greatest flaw. That’s because computers are too stunning: tell them to give you a brick wall, and they’ll give you the flattest, smoothest and most symmetrical brick wall imaginable. Animators must take special care to muck up the wall enough that it might actually exist in our flat-tire world, such as by tacking on chewed-up bubble gum or festering sewage.
I’m pleased to announce that next month, I will personally be playing the role of the sewage.
Actually, it’s less glamorous: I’ll be playing an extra in Parental Guidance Suggested, the next film by American Pie producer (and Firefox fan) Warren Zide. But the goal is the same: I exist to make a perfect scene more average. It’s quite the ego-booster.
It’s probably a good thing I’m playing the role of Kid with Freckles #9, because having read the script Warren sent over, I think it would be illegal for me to play any other role in at least 19 states (you do NOT want to see what Kid with Freckles 7 has to do). One studio executive characterized the film as: “This movie has no redeeming moral value.” Even the Fandango puppets are pixelated.
Reading the script for PGS rekindled my own longstanding dream to write films. In weaving together stories that reach out to us and touch our collective souls, screenwriters do what I, as a young boy writing stories for Literature class, could only fantasize about: pad 3 lines of text into dozens upon dozens of pages. Seriously, the average film script looks something like this:
“Greeting”
INT. BOB’S VOCAL CHORDS
BOB (greetingly): Hey
(BEAT)
BOB (exclamatively): !
The general rule of thumb is one beat per actual character heartbeat. The original Terminator script was just “Hasta La Vista”, followed by 119 pages of beats and an exclamative “baby”. It was much better than the final product.
But you need to start somewhere, and I will do my best to faithfully depict the Average Joe, the everyman, the “guy next door”, by wearing a Firefox t-shirt, a Firefox hat, a Firefox sandwich board and Firefox long underwear (outside of the sandwich board) . When you see this movie, it should be very easy to spot me. If you can keep your eyes off #7.
March 24th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Roger on how CGI makes thinks too “perfect” and you need to dirty things up - rambling story below about how I approached a situation I had with this.
Looking forward to seeing Mr. Firefox in film - my guess is you ought to be able to get away with sneaking something in - heck, Anil Dash got a picture of him in the New York Times wearing a goatse shirt! ;-)
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2005/06/02/defining_ones_
alek
My CGI experience was when I did a simulation of my christmas lights webcam from 2002-2004 … see complete writeup at http://www.komar.org/xmas/hoax/
Since the original images were shot with a Canon DSLR, they were fairly low noise - i.e. leaps and bounds ahead of any consumer webcam technology at that time. So after futzing with various solutions, I finally just settled on a last step of adding a few hundred random pixels into the final generated image.
And couldn’t just add “black dots” since that would look funny on a bright object, so I had to check the RGB values for the random pixel, and then push the values down a bit. There was a sweet spot on the amount of random bias in the RGB values (combined with number of pixel to fiddle) where it ended up really looking like CCD noise .. heh, heh! ;-)
Advantage I had was that it was expected to be dark and not have that great of image quality. Real-world CGI is TONS more work to make look real - the human eye/brain is really good at spotting a fake if given a chance.
BTW, while those 3 years were 100% hoax/simulated (and I out’ed myself via the Wall Street Journal after the media coverage just got outa hand), 2005 was 100% real. And while it was easier to just have a *real* image feed, in some respects, it was harder because real-world issues came into play … like weather, 802.11 dropouts, etc.