Krull To Be Kind

After the VCR and video rental boom, and during the sell-through affordable video cassette era of the 90s, I decided that I wanted to have my very own collection of ten Fantasy Films that I had enjoyed during my teenage years. These were, in chronological order of release, Dragonslayer, The Dark Crystal, Krull, The Neverending Story, Ladyhawke, Legend, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Willow, and Dragonheart. Most of them were cheesy as all get-out, but I didn't know that at the time. For each one I was the perfect age to fall for them, hook line and sinker. Dragonheart, a 90s movie, was added in to round it up to ten, and a couple of years later I decided it probably shouldn't have been included in that list, I never really felt great love for it.

When DVD came along, I was very excited as one by one each of these movies were released in high(ish) quality widescreen, with copious extras included. By 2005 I had amassed the entire collection I'd dreamed of, and more.

I hadn't seen Krull since it had last been on TV, fifteen years at least, and I eagerly lapped it up. Did it hold up? Holy crap, no it did not. And I've rewatched it again now for this, a more formal review made at the suggestion of and alongside my mate JetSimian, and also in association with his mate Jamas Enright.

It's high fantasy. It has Kings and Princesses and fantastical beasts, in a classic plot carefully following the hero's journey. It has a bombastic score by the appropriately named James Horner (he loves his brass) introduced in a scene with a giant misshapen thing flying towards the planet Krull. This is the Black Fortress, in which lives the Beast. That's about as creative as this movie gets for names.

Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa. Not pictured: Lyssa's real voice.

Meanwhile a marriage is to take place between Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa. That's a lot of Ys, maybe they're Welsh. Lyssa is played by Lysette Anthony, who I had a little crush on when she was on a British sitcom, but here has been cruelly dubbed with a horrible American accent that is incredibly distracting. Colwyn is played by Ken Marshall, a blandly attractive and charisma-free actor who has done nothing of particular note either before or since.

The Prince and Princess go through a marriage ritual that involves fire on their hands. This is IMPORTANT, though it kind of feels like it was jammed into the final draft of the script a week before shooting.

Slayers. Their single-shot weapons are like muskets with bayonets.

The Beast has sent out his soldiers, Slayers, suitably creepy creatures with an exo-skeletal carapace. They attack the wedding and kill everyone in the castle, and kidnap the princess. Why? It's never really made clear. That's just what baddies do.

But one man survived the slaughter, and no prizes for guessing it's Prince Colwyn. He is discovered by the sage Ynyr (yeah, definitely Welsh) played by Freddie Jones, who plays the role of "wise old man who provides exposition".

Remember to hold it the right way round, to avoid owies.

Colwyn must retrieve the Glaive, the fabled weapon that is in all the promotional materials, the five bladed frisbee star thingamajig, which I very much would like to have a replica of my own one day. Colwyn has to reach into the lava to get it. Why is it there? Don't know. Just is. Because. Cue slow motion, soft focus sparkles, and choral chants.

Alun Armstrong acts circles around everyone else in the movie.

As they travel they pick up a cavalcade of actors, known, unknown, and future stars, including David Battley as Ergo the Magnificent, a wizard who can turn himself into various animals and has a penchant for gooseberries; Robbie Coltrane, Alun Armstrong, Todd Carty, and most famously Liam Neeson, as a band of escaped prisoners; and Rel the Cyclops, played quite brilliantly by tall Carry On actor Bernard Bresslaw and who has more character development than almost anyone else in the whole film. It's a Wizard of Oz kind of enlistment of tag-alongs and cannon fodder.

Bernard Bresslaw couldn't see very well, yet ran full tilt through forests, swamps, and rock strewn deserts.

Because the Black Fortress appears in a different location every day (quite a cool concept, I think), they need to find someone who can tell them where it will be the next morning, so they enlist the help of a blind Seer and his young boy assistant, who take them to the murky Soundstage Swamp.

In quite an impressively spectacular battle, the Slayers attack, and here's where some of the more memorable images, which held 13 year old me transfixed, occur. The Slayers' deaths, with their carapaces cracking open and the squids inside escaping underground, are really cool! The Changeling taking over the Seer and fooling them, only for Rel to race along and save the day, was a really thrilling sequence! By far the scenes in the swamp are the most effective of all.

Not what it looks like. Depending on what you think it looks like.

After the death of the Seer everyone is very sad for about three seconds, then they shake that off and head out of the swamp, happy and laughing.

Let's pause here to count how many women have been in the movie so far: One. And she's held captive, alone, for the majority of the film, with barely any dialogue. Princess Lyssa, with her shock of Nicole Kidman curls, is having a boring time of it living inside something resembling a conch shell, with nowhere comfortable to sit down.

There are only two women of note in this movie. The damsel in distress who needs rescuing...

The Beast, meanwhile, sounds a bit bored by it all, waiting for her to capitulate to his demands that she love him. Not very seductive. Though maybe he's hampered by the fact that he seems to live in a different aspect ratio to everyone else.

"Fear me, for I live in the 4:3 anamorphic dimension!"

Without the Seer they're buggered. Or are they? Conveniently there's another way to find where the Black Fortress will be. A fancy lady, played by Francesca Annis, lives in the middle of a spiderweb, where a giant stop-motion spider guards her. So the second female character with dialogue is also imprisoned, and in her scene they mostly talk about how tragically beautiful she is. Or was. Or something. This movie fails the Bechdel Test quite badly.

...and the self-exiled Nun.

The Widow of the Web sequence has always been the scene I've disliked the most; it's too laboured, the pacing is horrible, it's far too melodramatic (which is really saying something for this film), and it has a big poorly-animated spider in it. This was also about the time I started to get annoyed at stop-motion as being too distracting and outdated (I deliberately didn't watch the original Clash of the Titans because of my attitude towards stop-motion).

The only tension in this sequence is in the threads of the web. (rimshot)

After some overwrought nonsense dialogue, Freddie Jones's character also dies, just after providing the location of the Black Fortress in his last moments. The hero must now go on alone, to the Iron Desert. This leads to the best piece of music in the whole movie: The Ride of the Fire Mares. This is the other key moment in the movie that stood out in my memory, and it is still quite fun indeed, though it also has very poor bluescreen effects.

The Fire Mare sequence probably goes on too long, but it is quite beautiful.

They reach the Black Fortress with moments to spare, where Rel the cyclops dies while holding the door open. Well, of course. Noble sacrifices seem to be two-a-penny in this tale. Robbie Coltrane's character dies in this scene, and then Liam Neeson gets an ignominious death soon after. Most of the deaths in this movie are random, motivated by bad luck. None of the characters have any discernible personality, and their only roles seem to be to fill out the crowd scenes, and be sacrificial lambs during the adventure. Not to mention the numerous anonymous red-shirts who get knocked off in each battle. This movie is very poorly written, on every level. It's one of those films where I'd think "I can write something better than this" and I'd be right, I really could.

In this magical kingdom, all spells are cast with a constipated grimace.

Finally they reach the cell where Princess Lyssa is being held, and Colwyn has a reason to use his Glaive weapon at last. Remember that? The bladed thing he got at the very start, is in all the promotional material, and was seemingly so very important? And do you know how he uses it? As a glorified circular saw, to open the prison cell door.

This is how a hero saves a Princess - with power tools.

He does then use it against the Beast, but that's a double bluff because it doesn't kill him, only wounds. The actual successful way to get him is with the fire. What fire? You remember, the flame, that was part of the marriage ritual! I told you it was important! Colwyn uses that to finally destroy the Beast!

Only a true king can set his hands on fire and not be harmed. I think that's the point of the whole movie.

Wait, Lyssa had that the whole time? She had the means to defeat the Beast, literally in the palm of her hand, and yet she did nothing? What?

The Beast defeated, they race out of the Fortress. Surviving member count: Alun Armstrong, Todd Carty, Ergo the Magnificent, the Seer's boy, the Prince and Princess. Not much to rebuild a kingdom with. But they do all live happily ever after! Probably.

Note how each actor is looking in a different direction.

In a world with no villages or towns, with people who wander about and join any travelling band of wanderers that happen along, where nothing important happens for hundreds of years until the whole planet hangs in the balance over one incident involving an ugly beast who kidnapped a Princess for no clear purpose, and loads of people die quite randomly... I don't think I'd want to live there.

This script needed another couple of drafts. We needed to see some of the Prince and Princess together before the wedding so we cared about them. We needed a better motivation for the Beast to exist and to want to kidnap the Princess. We needed some proper motivation for why the gang of misfits join the quest. Every character had to have clear personalities that motivated their actions and made them lovable so we were affected by their deaths, which needed to be for more than just convenient plot reasons. And we needed a Princess worth fighting for, someone with spunk, intelligence, resourcefulness, and a prettier accent, and she and the Prince needed to defeat the Beast together.

As cheesy fantasy movies go, this is the cheesiest in my list of ten. It does not hold up too well. I once had the idea of getting a hold of all the original footage, including alternative takes, and re-editing it to modern sensibilities, updating the visual effects, adjusting some of the scenes to be more dynamic or improve the storytelling. But it may be that this movie is beyond help. They tried, just not very hard. It's a clumsy, melodramatic, poorly acted, poorly written little adventure of no consequence.

But it's fun, and sometimes that's enough.

Blu-Rays Make Me Blue

Early last year my TV ran out of steam. It was on its last legs for quite a while, but a few kludgey fixes via my technologically minded friend Adam, and a couple of judiciously placed bangs to the case seemed to fix it, until one day nothing I did worked anymore and it was consigned to the forever after. At that point I had no job and even less money, so I just had no TV for what turned out to be around 8 months, and I watched all my TV online instead. I don't actually watch that much free-to-air TV locally anyway, I download it all. It may or may not be legal, but they get more real money from my DVD purchases than they ever got from my watching an ad. Plus my watching does not affect ratings measurements, so whatever. In the end, no TV wasn't too much of a loss.

Eventually I got a new job, which is still going very well, thanks for asking, and could afford a new TV, which I purchased late in 2011; as this time it was an HD set I figured the least I should do to take advantage of that is buy a BluRay player; there certainly isn't any HD content to speak of on TV, which is ridiculous, so this is the only way to see HD in all its glory.

I made a decision pretty early on that I would buy most new movies as BluRays, unless there was no advantage from them, such as a comedy or romance, something without interesting visuals. And I would purchase only a few of my existing catalogue in BluRay, movies that I love and watch repeatedly. For the most part I have kept to that, especially when they're at affordable prices.

But it wasn't long before I began to suspect that BluRay wasn't all that special. I had always had doubts that higher resolution was all that much of an improvement over DVD, but now I saw that I was right. There is an increased sharpness, no compression artefacts, better range of gradient colours (no banding), and some extra detail in shadows, but in the overall scheme of things those are very minor improvements, and in some cases even those don't apply - the DVD copies are plenty fine. BluRay players and HDTVs both "upscale" a DVD, the higher spec components improving the image quality.

So I have made a second decision, and that is BluRay is only worth it if it's on sale. Otherwise I'll most likely get the DVD every time. If it wasn't for the fact that some BluRays have better Extra Features (a conspiracy they've implemented to encourage BluRay purchase) I wouldn't even hesitate. And these days I'm getting a bit bored with Extras as they are usually three minute sound-bite patronising self-congratulatory crap in fast cut edits. Ugh.

When they created the BluRay standard, it was competing directly with HD-DVD, a system that arguably would've had better features, but eventually capitulated under pressure from Studio support going to their competitor. I think BluRay rushed their development, and missed a lot of useful features that could've made the system robust and future-proofed. Instead they concentrated only on slightly more dynamic interactive menus and stupid interfering crap.

Here are a few things wrong with BluRays:

1. When one starts, it asks for a language setting. That should be a default setting in the player, so the disc automatically plays in the language of choice, instead of just sitting there waiting for input.
2. Many BluRay discs have copy protection, which slows down startup to sometimes as much as five or six minutes of pissing about. I don't know what it's actually doing, but it's the most annoying crap ever. Plus copy protection is a waste of time, it doesn't stop the Pirates and only inconveniences the legitimate buyer. Just stop it, already.
3. Trailers are still sometimes unskippable. Fuck that.
4. There should be a way for the player to detect the current date, and change the trailers to adjust their "Only In Theatres" to "Now Available On Disc" after six months.
5. After the second time you've played the disc, the trailers don't need to play automatically anymore. Or those stupid disclaimers. Or any of the other crap that clutters up startup of a disc. We've seen them already, no need to subject us to them forever.
6. BluRays have 25GB of space on the disc, single layer. A Dual-Layer disc has 50GB. You could store two entire seasons of a TV show each made up of 22 x 42m episodes, in 720p HD, and yet the box-sets come on as much as five discs per season. It's bullshit designed to make it seem like you're getting what you're paying for, but it's just an absurd hassle to be forced to get up and swap discs all day.
7. BD-LIVE is a joke. You need an absurdly good internet connection for downloading, which I do not, and a home theatre system that works in tandem reliably, which is an almost impossible task, and in the end all you get out of it is nothing anybody could possibly find entertaining.

Here are a few things worth getting BluRays for:

1. The image is prettier.
2. The menus are easier to use, though they are a little bit confusing occasionally.
3. If you want 3D, this is the only format that can do it. But 3D is a fool's errand.
4. Apparently the sound is better. I am not very good with audio so I can't tell.
5. That's about it.

Here are some good things about my new home theatre arrangement, though.

HDMI, which is the cable connections between an HDTV and the BluRay player, via the AV Receiver as the main unit, makes for interactivity between all the devices. I can turn the TV on and my AV Receiver will turn on and switch to the optimum settings I've preset. I turn on the BluRay player, and the AV and TV turn on. Same when I turn one off. At first I had bought a universal remote to do all that, but turns out I didn't need to, and in fact it was more annoying than just swapping remotes anyway. Plus I can adjust things like channels and audio on one remote because of how HDMI works.

I download a lot of TV, and they come in two formats. It used to be only AVI, compressed in DivX, but recently they've added MP4, compressed in H264, which makes for smaller file sizes, faster downloads, and better quality image. However, there's a problem. The only way to reliably watch the AVIs on my TV is to save them to a USB stick and watch them through my BluRay player. Whereas the only way to watch the MP4s is to connect my TV directly into the Network. Any other method for each causes glitches. This is because of the brand of my devices, in this case Panasonic. Other brands do things slightly differently.

I admit these are 21st Century Problems. I live in a future arguably better than projected by science fiction. My ability to watch any TV shows from around the world, any movies only a short few months after cinema release, under my personal control, is an incredible situation that if I could've imagined it when I was a kid would have blown my mind to smithereens. But really it is a shame that a few missteps make the whole thing that much more irritating than it needs to be.

Bridge to the Stars

I was looking at an image of a fantastic new mega-camera that will be installed on the Blanco Telescope at Chile's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and was marvelling at the bright attractive colours. It wasn't that long ago that everything technological was white or silver or grey, and now they are deliberately building complex machinery in bright colours.

It occurred to me that the garish 60s colour scheme found in the original series of Star Trek's Enterprise now may not be so out of place as it was looking for so long. Yes, it's still very dated, but stylistically it wouldn't necessarily be as out there as we might have expected when we were living through the Space Shuttle-oriented functional style of Science Fiction of the 80s, and the beige casual style of the 90s. We're now widely adopting the iPod-style of the 2000s, which may subsequently evolve into a colourful candy-coated style of the 2010s. Certainly I see many cars are starting to move away from the whites, silvers, and bronzes of recent times, into bright greens, yellows, and reds, so I think it's inevitable that this will spill into other electronics.

But the Enterprise style still looks cardboard and studio-bound. It definitely needs a spruce up if it was to be realistically adapted into a style that would actually be utilised in a spacecraft. Big boxy desks and chunky platforms would not be likely, and would need some softening and practical adjustments to be useful.

So I was thinking about that idea, on how you might want to adapt the bridge into a more modern styling, while still maintaining the original series palate and sensibility. After looking around online to see if anyone else had done that first, and not finding anything, I decided to do it myself. I would make a 3D model of the original Enterprise bridge and then use that as a template to update all of it into something sleek and modern but still very familiar.

The first thing I changed was the control panels, moving them from chunky desks to flat iPad-style touchscreens. This lent itself well for all the displays, including the wallscreens around the circumference and the display monitors.

I added a second turbolift door, to balance the symmetry of the bridge's layout, though it could just as easily lead to a different room instead, such as a conference room or the Captain's ready-room.

Then I made the Captain's chair into something slimmer and more flexible, while still maintaining the same dimensions and location, overlooking the Conn.

The railings around the central pit could be thinned down to bars, instead of the ugly thick wood of the original set, and shifted around to give a clearway from the turbolift to the Captain's chair. I also added an extra display panel on the railings for access convenience.

In the end, I'm not sure how much of an improvement it is. It is just as likely to appear dated in fifteen years as the original bridge does, but it is, I think, more in keeping with the future of technology and is somewhat more logically arranged, if not strictly speaking as interesting to shoot (the clearway to the lift doors does make areas in the frame feel empty).

Overall, though, it's not bad for a first pass.

Joss Is Just Not Popular Enough

I have never been a big a fan of Joss Whedon's work. He created and masterminded such shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its spinoff Angel, the SF Western Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity, and most recently the hard-to-define Dollhouse, while dipping his finger into a few other pies here and there throughout.

I have tried to watch and enjoy Buffy, but it just didn't work for me. So much of it seems tailor made for my demographic: It's a fantasy adventure show, with great characters, witty dialogue, complex story arcs, all well acted; and yet whenever I tried to get into it, I'd get bored halfway through an episode. Many of my friends absolutely adore it, so I tried multiple times to give it another chance, but I just couldn't sustain any interest in it. I didn't even try with the spinoff, Angel. I don't even know what the plot of that is.

The science fiction show he made next I had better luck with, I found Firefly to be much more my cup of tea. Similarly, it had adventure, complex story arcs, witty banter, and brilliant acting, but even then, I just didn't find it compelling; I have only watched the series once. I know I would have kept watching if it had been picked up for more than 13 episodes, but it wouldn't have ever been in my top ten must watch list.

Dollhouse just left a bad taste in my mouth. A company wiped the personalities of people, and replaced them with manufactured ones, made to order for whatever they were hired to be. Be they prostitutes, assassins, or something in between, they were kept dormant and placid until they were implanted with whatever talent, skill, or personality the client requested. Presumably the plots started to explore the immorality of this, and it began to unravel, but I gave up on it before it reached that point. I may give it another chance some day, but I found it so unlikeable and distasteful I'm not going to seek it out.

Here's the problem. Almost all of the above shows have not had good ratings. Buffy is the exception, the rest skated on thin ice and died before the real meat of the series kicked in. Some blame the network, Fox, for this, as it seems to operate like it has no faith in Joss's work. For a while I accepted that analysis, because the evidence seemed to suggest that.

But here's the thing, I think Fox were right to have no faith in Joss Whedon's work; I don't think he knows quite what he's doing. Yes, he has an excellent grasp of plotting and character and dialogue, but he doesn't understand what appeals to a wider audience; he can't formulate a concept that will appeal to the demographics a Network needs to sustain a show.

What made Buffy a success with the geeks that obsess over anything Whedon-esque wasn't what made it the ratings winner that kept it going over seven seasons. It certainly made it an entertaining show to follow, but it wasn't enough to grab a wider audience. What Buffy had going for it was the teen Soap factor. It had a lot of pretty teens battling relationship drama, all set in a High School. That is a very tangible concept to sell to a wide audience. People know what they're getting, and it's just what they want. The vampire and demon hunting is just the mcguffin, that a lot of people can overlook to get to the meat of the issues. But the fanboys don't care about the good looking teen stuff, they like the monster hunting and the witty banter.

Take away the wide audience appeal of a teen soap, and you get Angel, a broody demon saga. In theory it should've worked again, as a good drama often grabs an adult audience, but in this case the teens who liked Buffy didn't like Angel, and adults who like drama don't like fantasy demons and vampires. They didn't follow. Only the fanboys remained.

Science Fiction adventure in the vein of Star Trek is even harder to find new audiences for. You tend to get a small hardcore fanbase for that, which is disappointing as the shows tend to be expensive to produce so require a decent audience to justify the costs involved. Firefly just doesn't have enough going for it to draw in the wider audience, not even the Trek fans. For whatever reason, and I think it's in the cynicism in some of the characters' attitudes, they didn't come flocking to Firefly. Once again, only the Whedon fanboys remained (they have now started calling themselves Browncoats; this really annoys me, for some reason).

Dollhouse was a failure of an idea from the start. And to be fair, Fox did re-jigger a lot of the early episodes into something the show wasn't supposed to be, which didn't become clear until later in the series when Joss started to get his way more often (or so I have gleaned from reviews and articles). But nevertheless there was no wide audience appeal for its style. It just didn't have what it takes to get the eyes trained on the screen.

Joss Whedon may be great at dialogue, character, and story arcs, but he sucks at understanding the audience he needs to be a true success in the Industry. He is a huge nerd, his fan base are huge (HUGE) nerds, and that's fine in and of itself, but if he wants to get anywhere he has to make a show that has 70% non-nerd-appeal.

I'm not holding my breath.

A Different Kind Of Remake

Sometimes I watch a movie from a long time ago (the 80s - sad to say that is almost the dark ages, in some respects) and wince at it. Not because it's a bad film, but because styles and technology have changed so much in the intervening years that it feels dated and creaky.

The most obvious difference, especially for me, are things like the visual effects, which back then were entirely practical or optical, which is to say they were literally filmed on top of the original film using another camera, or were drawn on by hand. Almost no computers were used at all for filmmaking back then (except for motion control cameras and some crude computer graphics).

But there's also audio quality, colour grading, title sequences, soundtrack orchestration, and the pacing of the editing. All of these have improved, or changed, quite significantly in the last decade or so, and have altered our expectation of how our entertainment plays out.

And it occurred to me how interesting it would be for someone to take the original footage of an entire shoot from a film made in the 80s, and completely re-cut it, from the ground up, into their own movie. They would have to be unfamiliar with the movie, so it shouldn't be a much-loved classic, but can't be a completely obscure lump of nothing, so I figure a typical 80s fantasy film that could do with a few tweaks to boost its quality would be ideal.

Krull was not a runaway success on its initial release in 1983, but as cheesy 80s fantasy movies go it did a lot of things right. Some of the casting was excellent, with rough-hewn Alun Armstrong, a pre-fame Liam Neeson, a very amusing David Battley, and a noble and wise Freddie Jones.

But it also did a lot of things wrong. Lysette Anthony was very pretty, but they dubbed over her voice so she had an American accent! Why? Almost none of the other cast were American, so why change her lovely voice? Plus her role was to be a damsel in distress, which in this day and age is unacceptable.

The lead was played by Ken Marshall, who has not done anything else of note, and it's no wonder as his acting is mediocre at best; He has some charisma and charm, but absolutely no energy and is certainly no hero; As a prospective King he would be a weak and ineffectual ruler.

The bad guy is a monstrous creature, known only as the Beast. He doesn't play much of a proactive role in the story. Yes, he kidnaps the princess and throws challenges at the band of heroes, but all from a distance.

And finally, the magic weapon, the glaive, is all style and no substance. It isn't used as a knife or sword, instead it is mystically operated to fly around and slice in a method not adequately explained or explored.

A few other factors are also worth mentioning. The score is suitably grandiose, with a couple of pieces being very cool, especially the piece accompanying the fire mares. The Beast's soldiers are really creepy, as they scream when they die. Rell the cyclops is very well done, and is a great character. The landscape is quite epic and beautiful, especially as much of it was not augmented by matte paintings, but were genuine Italian locations. And the adventure as a whole, where they travel across the kingdom picking up members of their band as they go, was well structured and had a lot of time for us to grow to love the characters.

So I think it would be marvellous to be able to go into the original takes and edit the film my way: Choose new shots, with new edits; Use the original voices of the cast; Replace all the visual effects, matte paintings, and model shots with CG and digital set extensions; Improve the makeup on the creatures and cyclops; Colour grade to bring out the vividness of the colours and match the interior sets and the exterior scenes. Re-record the soundtrack to match my new cut; and make it faster, funnier, and more exciting.

I figure with a small team of ten or so to achieve it, especially not having to actually organise and shoot the film itself, it would cost only a couple of million dollars and take 18 months to get it looking perfect, perhaps sooner.

Who do I talk to to get this happening?

I Don't Know Nothin'

Sometimes I wish I had a tutor looking over my shoulder, giving me tips and step-by-step lessons.

My current hobby, amongst many, is that of visual effects. That includes 3D Modelling, Texturing, and Animation, as well as Compositing, Rotoscoping, and anything else that comes up as needs must.

In the professional Visual Effects industry you can specialise in any one of those disciplines, but when you're an amateur just trying to put something cool together, you have to know a little bit of everything. I do know a little bit of everything, but only a little. It's not quite enough of any one of them to get professional work straight away, but it's plenty enough to continue as an amateur.

My skills lack mostly in understanding the tools I have at hand. Though I have many excellent books, and there are plenty of great websites to get some tips from, including Video CoPilot and SpinQuad, there's nothing quite as useful as turning to an experienced person when you're stuck and asking them just how to achieve the fiddly thing that's missing.

I have a good eye. I can look at a clip and see what it needs and have a reasonably good idea of how to achieve that, in principle. But in terms of actual execution, I am average at best, and struggle.

In the picture above, which is from a clip about ten seconds long, only the soldier is real. Everything else is digitally created or a manipulated still image photograph. I had to: key out the greenscreen, and then rotoscope around the soldier for his every move to give him a clean edge (and also the second soldier who has since been cropped out of the shot); build and texture the truck model, animate it coming down the road; build and texture the road and walls using a blend of several photographs; and then composite them all together using a series of layers, tracked to the original camera shake, and colour graded so that all the disparate elements fit together as a whole.

I have worked on this shot for over a year, from prepping and shooting the plate of the soldiers, modelling the truck, through to assembling the pieces, and then subtly adjusting it until it has reached its final stage. In that time I learned a lot about modelling a vehicle; about animating wheels; about rotoscoping in separate chunks instead of in one big go; about colour grading; about "expressions" which are mathematical ways to manipulate 2D layers; about "Depth Maps" which are greyscale images that represent the Z-Scale, or depth, of a 2D image or clip to give me virtual 3D to play with; and about "chromakey" which is a method of removing a single colour from an image, such as for a greenscreen.

If I had a tutor, guidance from an expert, I could have finished it much sooner, and with less struggle, and perhaps even more efficiently using techniques and tools I've not even touched before. I do wish I had the time and money to organise something like that. But I don't even know where to turn. I'm no beginner, so a regular Night School course isn't quite what I'm after, but there are no doubt many beginner's steps that I do need to brush up on before I can skip to the top level.

Until I figure myself out, I will enjoy being jack of all trades, master of none, and be thrilled by those artists who really know what they're doing, and who produce first class awe-inspiring work every time.

Am I Geeky Enough?

I am not sure if I am as geeky as I ought to be. It is time for an analysis.

I have never been someone who has made friends easily. Throughout my life most of my friends have been few, and borne of circumstance rather than true appeal. This is not true of every one of them, but enough to make me wonder.

At ages from birth through to ten, I had three friends of any significance, and that was because I lived in a small seaside village out in the country. The population was barely 150 people, and the kids who were listed as my friends were within 12 months of my own age. That's generally how it works; anything beyond is that nebulous range called either "the older kids" or "babies" both of which you stay away from.

Though we went through periods of disliking each other, and I was a weird kid even then, I had those friends throughout my childhood until I hit my teens and High School, where they were instantly abandoned as I discovered people with the same sense of humour as me. This overwhelmed me, that I could actually make friends with people I could relate to, and we spent the next five years joking around about the nerdiest stuff ever, ranging from British TV Comedies, Fantasy Action Films, and any other weird stuff that would make us giggle.

We kept to ourselves, in our own little out of the way corner of the school playground, and it never once occurred to me that we were nerds or geeks or whatever the word-du-jour was for our kind. We just did our own thing and enjoyed ourselves. And yet we discovered Computers together. Video Games! Adventure Games! Computer Graphics! We rushed to book the "Computer Room" each weekend when the schedule went up (our school had two computers back then, both Apple IIe clunkers with greenscreen CRT monitors. It was heaven!) If that didn't compartmentalise us, what did? We weren't really aware of it, but the truth is we were card carrying nerds; dictionary definition outsiders; obsessive Star Wars geeks. And yet we had no idea. Unlike how US movies tend to demarcate things, we were an amorphous bunch of kids, and all our circles overlapped. Even some of the girls liked computers at least a little bit.

Speaking of whom, girls generally dismissed us as not worth bothering with. Except both my friends got girlfriends over that time (then lost them again, I might add) while I did not. Girls have never been interested in me, despite my being interested in them just fine, and this has not changed throughout my entire life. I've given up caring about that facet, though, and now prefer my solitude.

When my friends started to gravitate towards other interests and important events occurred in their lives, they left High School, while I went through a bout of loneliness and loss. My Dad died when I was 14, but it wasn't until I was 16-18 that I started to really miss him, having reached the age where I could have used some guidance. So I felt like I was adrift. Unfortunately this lasted right up until I was about 25, and I aimlessly meandered through a sad grey little life doing almost nothing with myself.

I moved away from the little village at 19 years of age, and moved to the nearby metropolis, population around 80,000. There I stumbled upon friends who would shape my future. First a comic book artist who urged me to participate in the comics he himself either produced or contributed to. Then a movie geek who wanted to make his own films, preferably involving prosthetic make-up and pyrotechnics, who also introduced me to acting in the theatre. Then a few friends from that world, one of whom went on to be a film Director who I did some storyboard work for.

The new friends I met during the "making movies" stage of my 20s were very influential, but ultimately just as aimless as I was. Though we all had big dreams, we had no money, few opportunities, and didn't know what the hell we were doing. This has plagued my whole life.

Then I discovered the internet. Not only did this open up the literal World to me, but also the Web, a new frontier which required something called Website Designers. Could it be that two of my favourite things, computers and art, were no longer impenetrably obscure sciences, and could be accessible by poorly educated little old me at last? It was where I felt I could make an impact, and though I have continuously struggled with getting my head around the technology which consistently forged far ahead of my skill level, I have made something of a small career out of it.

When my movie-making friends all moved away to new cities, I was left behind just as my first Web Designer job ended (the Manager was a completely useless idiot). Suddenly, and it was very sudden, I had no job, no friends, and no idea of my future. I figured the best way to kick myself in the butt was a complete restart, and the easiest way to do that, I thought, is to move to a whole new country, preferably one with as little a culture shock as possible. So I moved from New Zealand to Australia.

I quickly found more work in the Internet realm, as a Web Designer and beyond, and also made new friends, who initially were just open to any Star Wars fan who happened along, but I was instantly a hit with a couple of people for my storyboard experience for the films they were making. Eventually I moved onto doing visual effects, and after ten years that's where I still am today. These friends have been great companions for the most part, and we've had a lot of fun, but still now, as before, I am not a very social person, and tend to enjoy my own company more often than not. I happily stay at home most days and do my own quiet thing in my own little corner of the world.

So, it seems to many I am sure, that clearly I am a geek. I like comics and computers and movies and the internet. I used to wear glasses. I am skinny and balding, with a beard. My hobbies include CG visual effects and fantasy books. I even wrote a script that was a classic mediaeval fantasy film, and my other unfinished screenplays are also somewhat fantasy-based. I have a decently large DVD collection, and was the first of my friends to get a big fancy TV (which is now outdated and old compared to theirs).

But... I do not obsess over things to infinite detail. I am not any kind of expert in any subject. I do not have encyclopaedic knowledge of anything, useful or obscure. I laze around and try to find shortcuts to even completing any of the fun things I do, and would much rather not do any work for anybody at all, if I could get away with it.

Am I a geek? Or am I just a lonely man with hobbies?

I can't tell.

I'm not sure if it even matters.

You Can Dance If You Want To

I was having a quiet evening in (just like 99.9% of all my other evenings) randomly leaping through YouTube, when I stumbled across the music video for the 80s one hit wonder Safety Dance by "Men Without Hats". Famous for its incomprehensible nonsense, coupled with a weirdly catchy tune, it was the band's only success, and is still popular amongst the nostalgic. And to match up the weirdness, the video is equally incomprehensible.

It begins with a man, Ivan Doroschuk, in pseudo-peasant dress skipping through a field, with a diminutive court jester (played by actor Mike Edmonds, who is great in the TV show Maid Marian and her Merry Men) when they spot a landmark and head off towards it. They meet up with an enthusiastic girl who is skipping along in her own way, where they reach a crossroads, and randomly choose a direction.

It takes them into a village, where they wait by a gate while continuing to dance, and are soon joined by locals and Morris Dancers in a parade down the main street, over a bridge, until they reach a farmyard where they have a May Day festival.

The end.

Pointless, but infectious, fun.

The "safety" dance, incidentally, is when you make an "S" shape with your arms, which they do a few times through the video. S for Safety, presumably.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I could probably find most of those locations in Google Maps.

Luckily Wikipedia solved half my initial obstacles by mentioning the exact village where it was filmed, called West Kington, in Wiltshire, in the UK. And amazingly it's barely changed in the intervening 25 years or so since it was filmed. There seems to be a commitment to preserve the old-timey feel of a lot of country villages in the UK, maintaining their chocolate box appeal for tourists and historians.

I present to you now a few comparison shots of the location, the map of which you can find in Google Maps here.

The sequence was filmed in two separate locations, so there's a subtle break in continuity, but that's not unusual in any kind of filming. In this case, the two locations are barely a mile apart from each other.





The field is still there, but they filmed it away from the roadside, so the Street View camera doesn't get the same angle. But after much searching (see next shot) I know this is the exact field, and the stone wall in the foreground of the video is that seen at upper left in the lower streetview pic. It is now overgrown with bracken.

You can see on this map the wall that leads away from the road, from the north to the south, towards the path. This matches the continuity of the video, where the characters walk through the field, to the corner of the wall, and then run down to the path.



I struggled to find this location, as the road is not a main one, and could have been private, where Street View rarely goes. I searched for the distinctive building on the hilltop. After matching up fields, pylons, buildings, and road divisions, I found the exact spot. And as you can see, it has barely changed at all.

And even more amazing, you see the log on the patch of grass in the music video? Well, it's still there! It's just been rolled a few metres away.

Then the sequence leaps to the village, and continuity is tight here. They start by skipping down the lane, west to east, past a house, up to a gate at the junction where the villagers cross a bridge, and straight into a farmyard.



This lane was a challenge, as there are three that radiate out from the village, and more beyond, so I had to look at each of them before determining which one it was. You can see the house behind them is the same, and the power pole to the left of shot also matches (a new pole, but in the same spot), with the shed behind the girl.



The girl then dances effusively in front of a couple of houses, which are distinctively recognisable by the fence palings and a red letterbox at the gate. Both remain unchanged.



The gate is just off the centre of the village, at the junction of three roads, a lot closer than the video implies. Though there are some considerable differences, and a mismatch due to the lenses used, you can recognise the same power poles in the field behind the gate.

Note the girl and Ivan (the lead singer) are each doing the "Safety Dance" "S" move.



The wide shot of the village bridge is deceptive. It's filmed in the middle of the field quite a distance behind the gate, and not as a POV from the gate. I couldn't find a matching angle in Street View, but you can see that there are vines on the main building just right of centre in the video shot, and also left of centre in the Street View angle, which are barely unchanged after 25 years. What's up with that?

In case you are confused by the different angles, if you look at the video frame, they are dancing on the bridge, marching from right to left. Whereas in the Street View shot, they would be coming towards us, with the bridge in the midground.





And finally a few metres down the road is a farm, with a large open courtyard, where they set up the fairground for the big dance finale. You can recognise the tractor shed and the long building as the most obvious matching features, though there are some minor alterations like new roof tiles and different paint jobs.

It was quite fun to go through it and confirm the locations, especially as it's such a beautiful, charming area. Whenever I found a match I got a thrill of recognition.

I am such a nerd.

Is There A Draft In Here?

This won't be a long post. I don't want to talk too much about the new screenplay in case I jinx myself into not ever finishing it, just like so many attempts that have gone before.

But I have completed the storyline, to at least a level that I feel can now be attacked and shaped into a first draft script, so have begun the task of writing it.

Its current working title, after floating many different options, is "ShadowGlass".

Assembling the story elements was an interesting development. I had a few sequences in mind when I first came up with the story, and wanted to keep those intact as much as possible. There's often a risk of losing those initial elements after you throw in all the important sub-strata to flesh a story out to completion.

For example, the story may have been inspired by a scene where the protagonist has an argument with a character over something that has a really funny line in it, and you love that idea so much you build your entire plot around that. Then you see holes and gaps that need filling in, so as you flesh those out, other elements start to dominate, until finally after a lot of juggling it all falls into a decent script.

And then you realise there's no place for that initial scene that had the funny line; No matter how hard you try, you can't fit it in anymore.

Well I didn't want that to happen, so tried hard to keep the main elements as close to my initial idea as possible. I did need to find new motivations for some of the characters, but once I found those motivations, they actually added new threads that I could follow, which helped support and strengthen the story, including a whole new scene at the climax, so that was a particularly fortuitous idea.

The first draft is the most important, but also the least precious. The idea is to just write and write and write it all out, no matter how unwieldy or convoluted or boring any given scene may be to read. It will be dry, and perfunctory, and overrun with clichés, and possibly be an absurd load of nonsense.

But then once you have that all on (virtual) paper you have something to edit. The second draft is where characters can develop. By the last scenes in the first draft, you know your characters pretty well, and understand what they are doing, so you can now go back to their earlier scenes and rewrite their dialogue and actions to be more consistent and fulfil their motivations.

The second draft is also where you can see where some scenes are unnecessary, or can be combined into one, or are being too heavy handed with their message, so need to be rearranged or cut or otherwise tweaked to flow. Structure and pace is as important as character.

Third drafts are where you play with the dialogue to make it sparkle, to tighten it so the pacing is right for each sequence, and make it readable. That can often be the draft that you would send around to get reactions or even sell, depending on your skills.

You'd likely get feedback to adjust some things, and they may be small, but they may be big, in which case a fourth or fifth draft may be on the cards. By then you know the story and characters so well, it's usually a simple job to make those adjustments without it negatively affecting what's already firmly in place.

Anyway... I'm not there yet, I'm on page 10 of what will be a 100 page script. Ask me how I'm going after a couple of weeks have passed.

Sounds Different

I posted a query on a messageboard about something, but after some discussion where they answered a question I wasn't asking, I have come to realise there may not actually be an answer.

I thought I would talk about it here, so I can clarify some things in my own head, and cover a little bit of technological development history at the same time.

The saying goes that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. The key word in that phrase is "better". Not to invent something out of whole cloth, but to improve what is already out there so it does it more efficiently, perhaps more humanely, and probably more cheaply, but gets better results.

When George Lucas looked at the way visual effects and film editing were done (which was optically, physically, in a linear, laborious way), he knew that it was time for improvement. Somehow he recognised that the technology was available, or coming very soon, to make considerable improvements to workflow, which would increase productivity, reduce frustration with limitations, and ultimately lead to a new way.

He, or rather technicians within the company he headed, invented EditDroid, a Non-Linear Digital Editing system that allowed editors to move clips and frames around the timeline in whichever combination they wanted, quickly, immediately, and without chopping up the physical film (with every cut of a strip of film, you lose at least two frames, one from each end of the splice). This system eventually evolved into what became Avid, the industry standard for editing. Few film editors still cut physical film anymore, and it's a rare one who doesn't use Avid as their NLE editor of choice. There are also low budget off-the-shelf amateur NLE applications, that borrow some of what Avid pioneered, though they have approached it from the digital video camera side, so have distinct variations in interface and methodology. But effectively, it was Lucas's needs to adjust the status quo that set a new standard and forever changed the way we edit film and TV.

James Cameron, in the same industry, is another pioneer who recognises when things are being done inefficiently and require fundamental improvements. He is excellent not only at motivating changes, but pinpointing the exact areas where it's failing, and even has insightful suggestions on how to fix them.

The reason why 3D worked so well for Avatar was because he knew where it was going wrong, and that he had the technical expertise to adjust it so it worked. And he saw where motion capture was consistently tripping up, and was familiar enough with visual effects and camera technology to provide solutions that would address a lot of its main problem areas. I'm sure he has many more planned improvements for his future films, especially as all of them undoubtedly will be 3D and use motion capture. He used the same uncanny skills in bringing forth the liquid metal T-1000 into Terminator 2, and the pioneering of motion capture characters for wide shots of the Titanic.

This kind of innovation has been rare, but effective. To fundamentally change how everyone does things is a huge undertaking, but it has to be done, or we will remain stagnant, and trapped in an ever-increasingly limited pocket as other technologies pass us by.

So if digital editing and digital visual effects can have such a transformation of technology, the next step has to be with digital audio.

I think there are flaws in the current standard of digital audio editing and manipulation that are being overlooked, overshadowed if you like by the visual, and it is time for them to be addressed.

Here's my problem. When filming takes place on location, the sound is always at risk of being interrupted by real world interference, such as traffic, wind and weather, creaky floorboards, aeroplanes, and a hundred thousand other things. I once was trying to film something so went hunting for a quiet spot out of the way where nobody was going to interfere, and as soon as I clicked "Record" a big truck pulled up, playing its radio really loud, tuned to Salsa music. It was absurd.

So the answer to that, often unavoidable, problem is to record the audio again later, and the most popular way is in a soundproof recording studio. This is called Looping, or ADR, which stands for Automatic Dialogue Replacement (or some think it's Additional Dialogue Recording; they're wrong, but whatever).

The problem with ADR is that in a real location, there's an open air quality that is distinct and unique. The sound bounces off nothing but the ground, or a wall that is a particular distance away, adjacent to another wall that is made of a specific wood of a particular thickness, and there's one (or five or two hundred) people nearby all wearing clothing giving a unique dampening quality, etc. It never ends what makes not only the location, but the way the sound reverberates and is recorded, unique. Even the brand of boom microphone can make a difference. So when they go back into the studio and record the ADR, it does not sound the same as the live location. It instead sounds like a carefully dampened soundproof booth.

Actors are getting increasingly adept at re-creating the exact phrasing and timing for matching their dialogue, so I cannot lay the blame on them. But the dialogue audio editing needs a serious shake-up, because there's no excuse for the shoddy mismatching of audio quality between location and ADR anymore.

We have recording equipment of astonishing quality, and unbelievable digital manipulation tools with unparalleled fine tuning controls. Surely they can analyse waveforms and re-create the effects. After hundreds of tests, they should be able to put together a thousand macros and new filters to make the ADR audio sound the same as the surrounding audio.

What is holding them back? Why are they stuck with such useless software that cannot achieve what, in my mind, is simply manoeuvring waveform peaks and troughs to be anything we want?

If we can have pixel control of the visual image, then surely we can have similar fine control of audio waveforms.

The technology is still stuck in an analogue mode of thinking, and it needs a kick up the arse to break free, a whole new approach, rebuilt from the ground up, to finally see the infinite possibility it has at its disposal.

No more limitations!

I've Started, So I'll Finish

I am very good at starting things and then never finishing them. I know I am not alone in this skill, but it is frustrating how many good ideas I begin and then abandon, even though they would probably be really brilliant if they'd been completed, maybe even fortune-inducingly good.

Since completing my first screenplay, I've been aching to write another. Each time I think I have a good idea, and it will thrill me to start on it, I get lost about halfway through and interest starts to wane. This is a bad thing on many levels, not least of which is if I ever want to dabble in it as a career, not motivating myself enough to finish it is not encouraging for prospective Agents or Producers. But then, if I had time and money as part of my motivation, provided by said Producers, I'd be sure to make it a priority and do a better job of it.

But that's a poor excuse for my appalling level of non-completion. My motivation should lie in the strength of the story, and the entertainment I get from creating the characters and sending them on their adventure. Being discouraged at a plot hole is no way to operate. I really have to kick myself into gear if I want to be a writer, even on an amateur level.

When I grew up in the 80s, a series of movies for young teenagers came out with a similar structure and setting. Not the Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink series, though they were certainly significant for many. I am instead referring to the Fantasy/Science Fiction movies where young kids in a small town go on a fantastic adventure, with no interference from adults except as potential enemies. Goonies, Gremlins, E.T., Explorers, Back to the Future, Time Bandits, etc.

But films like that just aren't made any more, and it's a shame. The fantasy films of today are all based on book series. I can understand how Harry Potter might influence a few incidental releases, but every single one, bar the occasional unique animated film? What's going on with that?

I want to write a film like I remember from the 80s. With kids having adventures, involving a small fantasy element, but with only a localised threat to contend with. None of this "Saving the World" nonsense. Just saving their own lives or their neighbourhood is enough of a challenge for most kids, so just leave it at that.

So while I was watching a DVD of one of the recent kids movies, inevitably based on a book series, I wondered if I could come up with even just an original concept that would fit my wishes. Could I come up with a story with a solid beginning, middle, and end, with all the potential for comedy, thrills, and threats, plus a few fantasy elements, something original, that has not been done in a film before?

And rather surprisingly, I thought of one. As I considered each individual element I wanted to include, it all began to fall into place remarkably quickly. I was so excited, I started to write it all down.

So far I have about 60% of the main plot, but the other 40% has to be sorted out before I can begin the script writing itself. Crucial elements aren't yet determined. But as I piece together what I do have, I can see plenty of opportunities for fun sequences, both action and comedic, which hopefully will only strengthen the plot, and lead to ideas to fill in the crucial blanks.

I am so excited by this story, and its originality, that I feel as giddy as I did when I first started putting together my first screenplay, Pegasus Rampant, though I had the bonus of being in recovery mode from my wisdom teeth surgery, giving me time to seriously concentrate on one thing. Nevertheless, it feels very much like I'm in a similar place for this project, so I hope I can maintain that enthusiasm and follow through to a finished screenplay, even if only a first draft. I really want to complete this one, because if it works it will serve as an excellent second example of what I'm capable of.

An interesting thing happened when I was looking through the Thesaurus for some keywords to create a title from. I stumbled on another word, not appropriate for this film, but perfect for another story idea, a short film in fact. So I took the opportunity to scribble down some notes on that idea too. I may revisit that one when discussing our next big project, whatever and whenever that may be.