The copyright industry is not going quietly. The legitimacy of its monopolist and consumerist practices are still upheld by policymakers and panicking creators who haven’t seen any real alternative in action. I humbly submit my silly cartoon about people with inanimate objects for heads as a first step in that direction.
Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0.
My friends and I formed Plankhead to produce the series. At the beginning of 2011, we released the first full-length, 25 minute episode — a pilot that we pitched not to a TV network, but to the Internet. We were able to raise enough money from individual donors to make a second one, which came out astronomically better than the first. Naturally, we’d like to continue the series — we have five more episodes planned, and we’re starting on the third in the next few weeks. But this isn’t just yet another crowdfunded indie project.
Your Face is a Saxophone started out as an assault on advertising. Since it began, I’ve realized that the problems with advertising are just one part — along with the copyright monopoly, unchecked greed, the pursuit of censorship, and other problems — of the holistic problem that is the ancien régime of the corporate entertainment industry. Much like these motivations, Your Face is a Saxophone is a part of a larger whole; a prototype for how to produce, promote, and proliferate culture in complete opposition to the problematic habits of the copyright industry.
I certainly hope you find the show entertaining. But even if you don’t, let me explain why you should still help it succeed:
Continue reading ‘Why You Should Support Your Face is a Saxophone’
In Other Words, Why Can’t Animated Movies Have $1,000 Budgets?
I suppose I should be glad for the publicity on my post about how Pixar is overdoing it. Unfortunately, the nature of the discussion was mostly skeptical; I think that was my fault for explaining it the wrong way. So, how about this:
Pixar has $180 million to spare, and doesn’t mind having hundreds of people manipulating 400 yottabytes to create one film. Good for them. But that shouldn’t scare off the rest of us.
The barrier to creating great looking animation doesn’t seem to be time, money, or resources; it’s the misconception that those, in fact, are an obstacle. Video game developers constantly show us that there is the potential for great looking visuals without an excessive amount of polygons. The reason video game graphics don’t yet rival Hollywood CGI isn’t because there isn’t enough processing power for detail, but that there isn’t enough processing power for implying detail.
Simple depth of field can dramatically improve a low-detail image. By simulating the focus of a camera lens, not only is a more photographic look achieved, but strategic use of it can remove most of the ugly portions of an image. This is possible in Valve’s Source engine, and can look great, but it’s not practical for video games; about two frames of it per second can be rendered in real time. But movies don’t need to be rendered in real time – a three minute high-definition sequence from Final Cut can take up to half an hour to render on my laptop, but after that it plays back smoothly; Pixar, by contrast, produces films that would take a single supercomputer several million hours to render (that’s why they have a ton of supercomputers), and they too can be contained within a smoothly-playable video file. But by taking graphics which could, theoretically, be rendered in real time, then rendering it with realistic looking blur and smoothing effects at two frames per second, an independent animator wouldn’t need to have access to supercomputers with enormous hard drives to make a film.
Perhaps I was too quick to call Meet the Scout on par with The Incredibles or WALL-E. Jenni Chasteen‘s comment about the lighting design was spot-on – Pixar has people who know cinematography, and Valve isn’t nearly as experienced. I disagree that it’s not even close, though; while it’s not great for photorealism, “cartoony” CGI is very possible to do with just a video game engine and blur effects.
Valve’s promotional movies may not be Pixar-quality, now that I think about it, but the technique and technology has the potential to be. In the hands of talented filmmakers, it’s wonderful for compositing onto live action. Is extending it to a full animated film that much of a stretch? I doubt it, myself.