My dad used to tell me about capping video with a camera. You got one vantage point, and that’s it. If you wanted to move it, you have to do that with your hands. If you wanted a second view, you had to get the actors to do the whole scene over again. Can you believe that’s what they train you on in the academies? Sure, it’s classic, it’s old-school, and it’s great to get an appreciation for the traditional way of doing things. But even the biggest auteurs have all moved to fog.
Tag Archive for 'cheaply-generated imagery'
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’
Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.
He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.
Continue reading ‘I Admire Steve Jobs the Way That Teddy Roosevelt Admired Elephants’
You’ve probably noticed from looking at photos or movies that no photograph is absolutely, 100% pristine. Each one has a speckly, spotty texture — usually barely perceptible if the photographer’s done their job right — which is formed as a technical artifact of the film or image sensor.
For pictures or movies taken on film, it’s called film grain, and it’s determined by the physical structure of the photographic film. On a digital photo, it’s image noise, which is an often random pattern created by the circuitry of the camera’s sensor.
Grain usually has to be very, very extreme for our brains to immediately perceive it; at normal levels, we often don’t even notice it unless we’re looking closely. But our brains are generally quite skilled at perceiving small visual patterns — the pages of a closed book, the bumps of paint on a wall, etc. — so does the average case of grain or noise fail to register? Perhaps it’s because we’ve learned to ignore the noisy, grainy pattern that we’re constantly seeing all the time.
Yes, our eyes have a film grain of their own.
So is this grain caused by a physical texture in our eyes, like film grain, or by something in our circuitry, like image noise? A little of both, in fact.
Continue reading ‘Do Human Eyes Have “Film Grain”?’
Film Needs More Minimalist Theatre
The other night, my mother treated David and me to the production of Jesus Christ Superstar that’s playing Broadway right now. We did this because somehow, despite living in the New York Metropolitan Area all his life, David had never seen a Broadway musical before, which was in serious need of rectification. I, on the other hand, have seen quite a few, and I’ve always been fascinated the most by shows like Superstar: the ones with minimalist staging.
Many Broadway shows use elaborate sets, realistically depicting the surroundings and location of wherever the characters are supposed to be. The process of changing these sets mid-show is often just as elaborate — the stage crew scrambles to move props and backdrops offstage, move new ones on, sometimes using pulleys to drop them from the rafters, elevators to lift them from below the stage, whichever. The most impressive productions automate all of this, with setpieces that seem to magically roll on and offstage without the aid of crewmembers.
This is expensive.
Because of the cost — or sometimes purely for artistic reasons — many Broadway shows resort to minimalism. They don’t have a set. They don’t have a backdrop. The few props and setpieces they have are often multi-purpose. In lieu of backdrops, they set the scene with lighting and writing. For example, Superstar handles scene-changes by scrolling the location across a big text marquee; “STREETS OF JUDEA – FRIDAY” scrolls across the stage the way stock prices glide through Times Square. The RBC production of The Threepenny Opera used neon signs. And both times I saw Company — the 2006 Broadway revival and the 2011 Lincoln Center thing with Colbert and Neil Patrick Harris — they basically just moved props around to indicate a scene change.
In 2009, I remember asking myself, why not do this kind of thing in film? The result was the clusterfuckity failed experiment of Bright Black, which is something I’ve vowed to revisit someday when I’ve actually had the chance to coherently plan it. Getting another look at minimalist theatre got me thinking about it again, though.
First, actually, let me answer that question. Why not stage a film in the style of minimalist theatre? Because films don’t have to deal with set changes, time constraints, or any of the other things that makes minimalism advantageous in theatre, for example. Also, theatre has a rich tradition of the audience suspending their disbelief and filling stuff in with their imagination, whereas films have to depict absolutely everything or risk seeming unrealistic. To which I retort, or do they?
My idea for Bright Black was a film lit entirely with black light. Costumes and props would be painted with UV-reactive paint, while everything else would be bathed in dark blue if visible at all. This lends itself very well to minimalist set design, because most of the background is going to be shrouded in darkness anyway.
And besides, the plot would be about wisecracking, katana-wielding Illuminati assassins who have sword fights in Belgian dance clubs. So any pretense of realism has already left the building.
Now, I’m definitely not the only person who’s ever had the idea to stage a film this way. I’ve seen it in Adrian Noble’s 1996 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and…well, that’s it, really. Rob Marshall’s Chicago kind of did it in a few scenes. Spike Lee’s Passing Strange movie (pictured above) was actually just a recording of the Broadway show, so that doesn’t count (By the way, watch Passing Strange. Right now. I firmly believe it is the most spectacular piece of performance art that anyone has ever staged in any theater, anywhere, ever.). Hitchcock’s Rope was a film staged like a play, but not like a minimalist one. So minimalism on film is, from what I can tell, fairly uncharted territory.
It’s interesting, because when film was first invented, the medium struggled to be anything more than recorded theatre. It wasn’t until Griffith and Kuleshov that the idea of film as a narrative medium distinct from live theatre really took off, only for it to regress back into emulating the stage for a few years as soon as talkies appeared. It seems like film has ever since been trying to loudly proclaim “I am not theatre!”.
So I was thinking, during the intermission of Superstar, when I decide to pick up Bright Black again and really do it right, why not stage it like one of these minimalist shows? And not just borrow the sparse set design, like I was originally envisioning? Why not totally go for broke? Don’t cut to the next scene, have a bunch of ninjas in the background change the set while the actors are still there. Use spotlights and stage lights, and have them all be very noticeable and visible. Let’s make the head of the Illuminati be called “the man behind the curtain”, and literally open a curtain every time Jarod Bright walks into his office.
It’s kind of like how the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill was clearly designed by an architect who knew the choreography of the sword fight that would one day happen there. But even further off-the-wall and thoroughly divorced from reality, concerned only with the abstract aesthetics of what’s happening on screen.