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.

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.

I glance down at my tablet and swipe left. The view’s rotating around me, standing there in the middle of Johnny’s living room. I step to the left, and where I once stood I see zebra bars. But Johnny’s got the fan turned on, so the bars fade away in a second or two.

“How much we got left?” Johnny asks me, walking up to me with the can and looking over my shoulder.

“That corner right there,” I say, pointing towards a patch of zebra bars still showing up over by the big grandfather clock.

“I did that corner like five times!” Johnny says.

“Really?” I ask. I’d been going over lines with Theresa and Craig for the past hour, so I hadn’t really been paying attention. “Is there airflow or something?”

“You wanna check?”

Johnny hates the fog filter. It makes him dizzy. Can’t say I blame him; it’s not really meant to run on lenses, and we kind of had to hack it to get it to do so. Someday I’ll be able to afford a pair of goggles. But for now, this clunky lens port will have to suffice.

I activate the filter and I can see the fog now, glowing bright orange. Little specks of blue twinkle on and off within, representing individual nanocameras. I can see why it’s not getting into the corner now. There’s some kind of draft coming from the ceiling, blowing the fog away. Oh, right.

“Remember when we were wrestling up in your room that one time?” I say.

“What’s that got to —” he trails off. “I thought we fixed that hole!”

“Not entirely, looks like.”

“All right, I’ll get the ladder.” He snatches up a roll of duct tape and runs off to fetch a step-ladder.

We wouldn’t have to deal with this shit if I could afford active swarming fog. That’s the kind where the nanocams send out electromagnetic fields to keep themselves in roughly the same place, so you don’t have to worry about airflow. The downside is that you need special fans to disperse them, but those are pretty cheap. And it’s so worth it. You can even cap outdoors with that stuff. Last summer we had to hack the city’s surveillance fog to get an outdoor scene. It worked pretty damn well — that surveillance fog is high-res stuff — but the cops ended up chasing us and Greg got arrested. I think that’s why Greg doesn’t make movies with us anymore. But at least we got the scene.

Right about then, the front door opens. I hear Theresa and Craig talking about something or other as they walk back in. She yells out to me, “Hey! You guys ready yet?”

“Almost!” I reply.

Craig’s rolling his eyes as he ambles into the room. “Geez, what’s taking so long?”

“It’s a big room.”

“Do we really need all of it?”

“Hey,” I retort, “I don’t wanna be cutting this thing and all of a sudden realize I don’t have coverage for a spectacular angle.”

“And besides,” Theresa chimes in, “what about people who wanna play with the view themselves?”

“Who does that?” sneers Craig.

“I do!” I say.

“Well, yeah, but you’re a director.”

“And so are a lot of people who are gonna watch this movie!” I sigh. “Look, we’re almost done, see?” I point to Johnny, who’s climbing down from the ladder now. The hole’s all taped up.

“We all good?” Johnny asks.

I turn the filter back on and check. “Draft’s gone.”

“Good.” Johnny shakes up the can and sprays. The fog billows out into the air, silvery as it leaves the can but turning invisible as it disperses. Down on my tablet, I can see the zebra bars disappearing from the corner, replaced by the visual data from all of the nanocams floating through the area.

There. Total coverage.

“We are good,” I say, tapping the record button on my tablet to start capping. “Oh, shit, Johnny! Move the ladder.”

“Where?” he asks.

“Anywhere. Just away from where it is now.” Wherever he moves it to, I’ve already capped without the ladder in place. Now I just need to cap the corner with no ladder, and I can erase it entirely in post.

Craig and Theresa take their places, Craig sitting on the couch, Theresa outside the doorway. I take a few steps to the right to cap the spot I was standing without me in it. Johnny puts the ladder down across the room and takes a seat, watching.

“Ready, guys?” I ask.

Craig and Theresa nod.

“Action!”

While they do the scene, I play around with the view on my tablet, framing a closeup of Theresa, a closeup of Craig, a wide view of the whole scene, and more, splitting the screen between all of them. None of these are framed nearly as precisely as I’d like, but I’ve got all the time in the world to tweak that later. Right now, I’m just watching their faces, their bodies, listening to their voices, and realizing once again just how lucky I am to have such talented actors as friends. This movie’s gonna be great.

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:

The Problems

Advertising
In conceiving the project, I decided I was fed up with advertising-supported media. Humanity had created the Internet — possibly the most empowering technology of the millennium — and yet had failed to come up with a better way of sustaining its contents than by splattering ads all over everything. At best, it’s annoying and ugly — São Paulo, Brazil mayor Gilberto Kassab famously called advertising “visual pollution” when banning billboards in 2006. At worst, advertising has a chilling effect on free speech, making it too unprofitable to say something that corporations disapprove of.

So, I decided to prove that a full-length TV show could be made without advertiser support — by making it something that nobody in their right mind would want to sponsor.

But how to finance a show without ad dollars? There’s grants, but that just gives the veto to governments or private foundations instead of corporations. No question: it would need to come from individual fans — the people who actually care about the message. So, that’s why we crowdfunded Episode 2 of Your Face is a Saxophone, and plan to continue that.

Obviously, crowdfunding alone can’t go very far; Mike Masnick reminds us often that “Give it away and pray” isn’t a business model. That’s why many independent creators make their money selling T-shirts, mugs, mousepads, posters, and other merchandise. Except that falls into the trap of…

Selling a Product
The chief reason why the copyright industry is running around with its head cut off is because its products — music, movies, news, information — are no longer products. Everything digitized can, and will, be made available for free, regardless of its creator’s wishes. You can’t sell a non-scarce good.

Obviously, many companies and artists still try this by “selling” digital downloads. But it’s been said that the way to compete with piracy is to respect your customers; selling a glass of tap water is not respectful to your customers.

Whereas the old guard tries to recreate the scarcity of information by lobbying to destroy our civil liberties, more nimble independent players simply find new scarcities to sell. This often takes the form of merchandising, which the copyright industry does its fair share of as well.

But that runs into another problem: everything can, and will, be digitized. Why buy an official T-shirt, poster, mug, or mousepad when you can print your own? 3D printers are set to drop in cost, increase in capability, and pervade society through the next decade, making the sales of merchandise into a very short-sighted business plan.

Merchandising also alienates the audience, reinforcing the false dichotomy of producer and consumer. It turns the art into yet another advertisement, and the fans into nothing but customers for the mass-produced crap which the art is hawking. Speaking of which…

Monologue Culture
When you hear the term “consumerism” thrown around, you often think of what I just alluded to: people being sold a bunch of crap in massive quantities. But the copyright industry fosters another type of consumerism: the consumption of monologues.

Most media takes the form of a creator or author communicating a message to the audience. The audience’s response, input, or thoughts do not matter, because they can’t change the message. This isn’t inherently a bad thing — indeed, it’s often a good thing for one person’s message to be communicated without meddling from others. The problem is that the audience doesn’t feel invested in the message. It doesn’t feel like it’s theirs.

The works which foster large, devoted fanbases are the ones which capture an audience’s imagination. A well-built fantasy world will inspire thousands of fan-fiction spinoffs; a great piece of music will inspire thousands of cover performances; a video game is already more engaging simply because it’s interactive, but open, hackable code will inspire thousands of modifications. Works like these do get the audience invested, and give them a sense of ownership.

This creates two challenges. First, not every story worth telling, song worth performing, or creation worth creating has the capacity to inspire direct remixing; Hitchcock’s Psycho isn’t the most fertile ground for a fan-fiction movement, for example. That point, I’d like to get back to. For now, let me digress with the second challenge: the fact that the copyright industry makes such creative communities illegal.

Creative Monopolies
Through use of the copyright monopoly, the industry acts as an oppressive creator’s guild. If you’re not a member of their inner circle, they don’t want you to be creating anything. They can achieve this because there is no such thing as “originality” in creative work; everything is based on, built on, or inspired by something that came before. Sometimes, the best new work comes from directly appropriating the past.

This is what makes the copyright monopoly so powerful. Hollywood can license a soundtrack of popular music, but an independent filmmaker cannot. Live performance venues cannot exist without paying licensing fees to the Big Three record companies, just in case a performer does something that might intersect with a copyright. Spinoffs and sequels to stories are the exclusive domain of the original publisher, and fan-fiction is regularly intimidated or sued out of existence. These are just a few examples of the hundreds of ways in which copyright monopolies are used to financially repress artists outside of the guild.

The attacks on civil liberties by the copyright industry aren’t about irrational fears of piracy or lost sales. The executives in charge aren’t that stupid; they’re well aware that the entertainment industry is growing, not shrinking. It is chiefly about stifling competition from the masses themselves. They fear that if we can meet all of our entertainment needs with YouTube videos, independent music, local art communities, and other such things, then we’ll no longer want to watch their TV and movies, listen to their music, read their books, or play their games. And they’re right. As Clay Shirky said in his legendary TED Talk, “Time Warner has called, and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming, not producing, not sharing. And we should say no.”

The problem is, having entrenched themselves and stifled competition for over a century, the copyright industry has our work cut out for us.

Nowhere Else To Go
While I was drafting this post, Paul M. Davis of Shareable happened to put out an article describing many of my concerns. Davis is ambivalent towards Techdirt’s Sky is Rising infographic, and writes:

For the truly DIY — the creators with limited resources who live precarious lives to pursue their passions while navigating an ever-changing media landscape — the effect of the Internet is far more complex than optimistic infographics and studies often suggest.

[A]s traditional sources of industry support (promotion, distribution, and simple business admin) crumble, it can take longer for indie artists to reach the critical mass of audience awareness to quit their day jobs. In the meantime, the workload for creators has increased, until they begin consistently making enough money to hire others to handle the additional labor that the Internet adds to the equation.

It’s unquestionably a good thing that the Internet is dismantling the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly, but its promise of eliminating their stranglehold on promotion hasn’t been fully realized. Before the Internet, creative people had to play the lottery, hoping that a corporate agent would notice them and scoop them up. Now, creative people still have to play the lottery, hoping that somebody with a large social network will notice them and tweet a link to their website. The odds may be better, but it’s still a raw deal.

The notion that artists need to work a day job until they one day “make it” is a tragedy, not a desirable component of a healthy society. As I’ve touched on previously, distracting people by forcing them to worry about meeting their basic needs holds back human progress. The copyright industry has done a poor job of solving this problem, but thus far, so has the Internet. As Davis says, DIY promotion for an unknown artist is still absurdly difficult.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand, in fact. The second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone was released at the end of October 2011. The reason you’re seeing this article months later is because working full-time on its production bankrupted me. When I said we’d raised enough money to make the episode, I was referring to buying new equipment — there wasn’t much left over to cover anybody’s cost of living. While finding and keeping a day job, I neglected to open-source the assets and project files, enact a promotional strategy, finish subtitling the new episode, or do much of anything that I’d needed to. Being unable to pay one’s bills is, as you can imagine, very distracting.

The Solution

It’s these problems that we’d like to tackle with Your Face is a Saxophone, using it to lay the groundwork for a new creative culture. Others may have pioneered the bits and pieces I’m about to describe, but it’s time to put them together in a cohesive, intentional whole.

Free and Open Source
Your Face is a Saxophone is CC0 Public Domain. Once an episode is finished and released, it belongs to the commons, irrevocably. We wouldn’t be able to enforce any copyright monopoly on it even if we someday lost our minds and wanted to.

Furthermore, it will be entirely open source. All art assets, audio, project files, and (if feasible) renders will be made available to the public. We’ll use as many open formats as possible (sadly, I haven’t had the time to learn Blender, so the first two episodes’ project files are in the propirateary (that’s not a typo) Apple Motion 5 format).

We won’t use creative monopolies, and through open source, we’ll chip away at the monologue culture problem. To further attack that…

Selling a Process
As my experiment in impromptu filmmaking shows, people enjoy creating things — and it’s not just self-described “artists” who find the creative process to be just as entertaining, if not more, than experiencing the final product. This is why video games which spark people’s creativity — for example, anything that Will Wright has ever been tangentially involved with — have proved to be so massively popular.

But not every message worth communicating can be expressed in an interactive medium. There will always be a place for monologue media — for immutable text, sound, or imagery comprised solely of the vision of its author(s). That’s why we need to blur the line between audience and author, consumer and producer, by bringing the fans into the creative process.

We can’t — and shouldn’t — finance Your Face is a Saxophone by selling access to the finished episodes. Instead, we sell access to the community. Everyone who contributes any amount of money to Your Face is a Saxophone becomes a producer of the show.

To describe what that means, here’s an excerpt of an email I sent to current producers a couple weeks ago:

Though Plankhead does provide entertaining things to the world, it’s not — as people who wear suits and have far too high incomes would say — our “core business”. We don’t aim to sustain ourselves (or, in suit-speak, “make money”) by saying to people, “You are the audience”. We do that by saying, “You are the artist”.

If you’re receiving this email, then you were instrumental in the creation of Your Face is a Saxophone. That makes you an artist, because you brought art into being. You’re all artists. Guilty as charged.

And you know how else you’re all artists? Have you ever heard a song, and then hummed it to yourself in your head for hours and hours afterwards? Have you ever quoted a movie to your friends? Ever gone halfway through a terrible pun, put on sunglasses, finished it, and then screamed YEAAAAAAHHHHH? Those are all creative acts. Even if you didn’t make up any original words or sounds, performance — even if nobody’s watching — is creative. You’re all artists.

Everyone has that burning drive to create. Some people have it during urination; they should probably see their doctors and get tested. For everyone else, Plankhead is here to help.

Enough of this abstracty mumbo-jumbo. Let’s talk concrete stuff:

For Episode 3 of Your Face is a Saxophone, we’re going to keep you updated, every step of the way, with production. And you know what I want you to do? Respond. Make comments. Make suggestions. Throw us ideas. Help us create this thing. If you think something should be animated differently, let us know. If you think there’s a hilarious prop missing from a background, tell us. Maybe you can even draw it for us and we’ll put it in. If you think Dave needs to re-record a line because he’s not making Blake sound enough like an adorable idiot, say so. Be a part of the process.

We’ll be putting up wikis and forums and stuff to make this kind of thing easier, but also suggest ideas for how we can share the production process, and get your input. Help us create the creative process.

For future episodes, we’ll also be letting you into the writer’s room. I’ve only written the scripts up until Episode 3, so I’m going to need everyone’s help to flesh out the stories for the remaining four episodes.

YFIAS isn’t just a prototype of a new way to finance art. It’s also a prototype of a new way to create it: having the community involved every step of the way, blurring the line between fan and creator.

This will effectively make our revenue stream completely indifferent to file-sharing. It won’t even be possible to lose a “sale” to a free download, and we’ll be able to brag that we have a 0% piracy rate.

For-Progress, Not For-Profit
We reject the notion that art is an investment that needs to be recouped. It is a desirable end in and of itself. The copyright industry views art as an incidental logistical concern on the path to making money; if they believed they could make more money selling toilet paper, they’d do it. This is the root of the problems that they cause.

I’m not seeking personal financial gain from Your Face is a Saxophone; my cost of living just happens to be a necessary expense of the project. And I’d wager that most artists feel exactly the same way about their work.

We’ll use the success of Your Face is a Saxophone to build Plankhead, our organization, into a support network for artists. A cooperative media company, owned and operated by its creative workers. Were I pitching it to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist — people who like to hear things like “it’s an AirBnb for Facebook games” or whatever — I’d call it “a Mondragon for media”. When we get to that stage, we will promote any work in any medium that is A) technically competent and B) willing to be released under CC0 — and finance it if possible. We’ll do our best to keep personal taste out of the vetting process, because all art has a right to exist.

Ultimately, the goal is not to make artists fabulously wealthy; it’s to keep them fed and clothed so that they can concentrate on creating things.

How You Can Help

To make this happen, we need producers and volunteers.

Today, I’m setting a new fundraising goal of $3000. That amount of money would allow me to devote my full time to animating the third episode for three or four months. If we raise even more than that, we might be able to add a second or third animator to speed the process along. You can contribute and become a producer through our donation page.

We also need people who can help produce, promote, and proliferate the show. A comprehensive list is on our volunteering page, but a few examples include:

• Subtitle translators
• Torrent seeders
• Social network/blog promoters
• Web technicians/designers
• Python coders who can figure out how to automate the “lip”-sync animation so that we can switch to Blender already (or anyone who can help us switch to Blender in any way, for that matter)

People who make significant volunteer contributions will probably get producer status out of the deal.

Ultimately, we need you to help us prove that this works. Let’s give the world hard, concrete evidence that even a traditional TV-length show with no copyright protection whatsoever can be successful. Let’s show that we don’t need to create a false pretense of buying and selling digital “goods” to sustain artists. Let’s validate the idea that art for art’s sake is something that society values, believes in, and wants to exist.

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.

There are counteless articles discussing fears that the iPad might mean the beginning of the end for the Mac. The near-universal “no” argument is that professionals will always need the power that Macs afford, versus iPads, which are primarily “content consumption devices.”

Exactly. Steve Jobs recently said that, “PCs [i.e. Macs] are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.”. Obviously, as anyone in the US knows, the amount of people who own trucks is much higher than the amount of people who actually need them, but if our culture were sane, one could probably approximate that 1% of people would own trucks. This sounds an awful lot like the 1% rule: the assumption that only 1% of people actually create anything.

This is why it would make no sense for Apple (and by “Apple” I mean Steve Jobs, because seriously, who else at that company makes any actual decisions?) to kill the Mac. The 1% will buy Macs, and create “content” to be “consumed” by the 99% with iPads and iPhones, as envisioned by Jobs. Obviously, with the introduction of iOS apps such as iMovie, there will be some ability for those without a “creation device” to do something creative. But the limitations of such apps, and, for that matter, touchscreen interfaces themselves, mean that only in a small variety of cases will one be able to produce anything of professional quality on an iDevice. If you want a degree of control that’s necessary for professional quality, you’ll need a general purpose computer, such as a Mac.

Perhaps, to some degree, it’s always been this way. Creating something to show on a television has to be done with all sorts of professional equipment. The fact that everyone, for so many years, has owned a device which could be used for endless creativity has been by accident. Only 1% of people have leveraged the creative capabilities of their computers. Steve Jobs simply aims to remove the complexity of computers for those who don’t wish to create anything.

So, why is this cynical? Is it because Steve Jobs desires monopolistic control over the lives of creators and consumers alike? Is it because Steve Jobs believes he can tell people what they want, and that they just have to lie down and accept it? No, it is because Steve Jobs is building creative professionals an ivory tower. He chooses to reinforce the idea that only 1% of people create anything, instead of asking, “why?”

The answer, of course, is that creating things is really, really difficult. Not actually being creative, though. Anyone can come up with a great idea. But the execution of these great ideas is, to 99% of people, extraordinarily difficult.

There’s a different Steve who is asking that question, “why?”. Stephen Wolfram.

Wolfram is the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of plain-English calculator which can take, for example, the phrase “wind speed of Hurricane Katrina times stock price of Cisco” and actually give you a result. It’s interesting if not mind-blowing in its current form, but it’s only the beginning of Wolfram’s plans for the future. In an oddly downplayed remark near the 11:45 mark of a TED Conference talk, Wolfram describes how Wolfram|Alpha integrates with Mathematica, a complex computational programming language he created. Already, you can type “spiky” into Mathematica, and it will use Wolfram|Alpha to understand which complex shape you’re talking about.

But then, Wolfram speculates what might happen once this plain English technology gets even better: “It really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to just sort of say what they want in plain language, then…Wolfram|Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they’re asking for.”

That’s amazing in and of itself. Now replace “programming” with “computer-generated animation.”

Obviously, it’s going to be an extremely long time before I can give my artificial intelligence assistant a sci-fi movie script and have it render the whole thing in Avatar-level detail before my eyes. But at least Stephen Wolfram is working to bring us closer to a world like that. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to lower the barriers to creativity. He is taking the barrier between “amateur” and “professional” and electrifying it with 40,000 volts.

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.

Like a camera, the human eye has a lens in the front, which collects light and sends it into the photographic medium behind it. In a camera, it’s film or a digital image sensor; in an eye, it’s the retina. However, in between the lens and the retina is squishy gel called “vitreous humour“, and anything inside the vitreous humour gets in the way of the light passing through the eye. The blood vessels in the humour never change position, so our retina learns to disregard them soon after we’re born. However, there are always little bits of material that don’t stay still: floaters. These little deposits of protein and debris don’t stay in one place, so our retinas never figure out how to tune them out.

You’ve probably seen floaters in your eyes before; in most people they look like small, faint dots traveling down your field of vision from top to bottom. You can usually get a good look at them by rolling your eyes all over the place for a second and then staring at one spot for a while.

Floaters are only part of the patterns we see every day, though. The brain’s visual cortex, which interprets the information sent to it by the retina, isn’t 100% accurate. In fact, it’s constantly hallucinating.

Close your eyes, and then gently press on them both with your fists. After a few seconds, you should start to see a strange, kaleidoscopic pattern. This is a geometric visual hallucination, or form constant.

This pattern is generated by your visual cortex as a by-product of all the neural activity going on in and around it. It’s amplified by closing or pressing on your eyes, and even more by taking hallucinogenics (not that I’d know that from experience or anything), but it’s actually present all the time. Again, try staring at one spot for a while. It usually helps to stare at something very low saturation; mostly gray, white, or black. You’ll probably start to see a fainter version of that same geometric pattern you got from pressing on your eyes. If you close your eyes after staring for a while, you’ll still see it.

It’s interesting to know how much our vision has in common with the photos and videos we look at every day. Not only do we capture images the same way as cameras do, but the results are similarly imperfect and grainy.

Creative Commons-licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, modified by me.

So the most realistic prop gun I’m legally allowed to purchase or possess in this city is yellow. In theory, I could spray paint it black and hope that nobody reports me, but since we’re shooting under black light, there’s a much more fun and infinitely more legal solution.

It’s quite simple: spray paint it MORE YELLOW!

That awful, disgustingly blurry photo was taken by my cheap point-and-shoot camera that can’t cope with the pressure of shooting without a flash. But it gets the basic idea across: yellow prop gun + black light + yellow black light paint = really, really yellow. And that’s a very helpful thing for post-production. By strategically positioning the camera so nothing else is yellow in the shot, I can just chroma-key the gun to black:

Yes, I’m aware that there’s a white halo around the gun. That won’t happen when I shoot with a film camera, nor would it happen if I shot with a decent digital camera. For now, it’s a proof of concept. I should also note that the same technique can be used for shooting a movie in runner vision:

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.