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.

A large group of devoted Mass Effect fans absolutely detested the ending to the game’s third, final installment. The outrage became so frenzied that developer BioWare announced that they were going to change it. This news has led to further frenzied outrage from game developers fearing that their artistic integrity will no longer be respected, critics decrying it as the death of games-as-art, and other general quasi-enlightened indignation.

The simple answer to all this is that video games are inherently a collaboration between author and audience. The more holistic answer is twofold:

1. An author’s intent is meaningless if they fail to communicate it to the audience
2. Art and meaning does not have to be intentional, and is often unintentional

The first point is a uniquely metamodern observation: it neither rejects nor accepts the validity of authorial intent, but makes it contingent upon its relationship to the audience’s interpretation. The second point is something that has been well-established since the dadaist and surrealist movements (but obviously not widely-understood). The result is that Mass Effect is not a mere series of video games. It is performance art, being unwittingly performed both by BioWare and their fans.

VAGUE SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 3 FOLLOW

Mass Effect 3 tasks the player, as Commander Shepard, with defeating the Reapers: an ancient race of synthetic lifeforms which live in intergalactic space, and return every 50,000 years to consume all intelligent life in the Milky Way. The technology which makes space travel possible in the Mass Effect universe was placed there by the Reapers as a trap for intelligent civilizations, urging them to develop along a predetermined path. It’s cosmic horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft: humans — and all intelligent life — are insignificant in the face of something much bigger than ourselves, which we can never hope to understand.

The Mass Effect trilogy is all about defying cosmicism: yes, we can understand it, the player says. Yes, we can defeat it.

This is especially prominent in the third game. In order to raise an army to fight the Reapers, the player must unite all of the alien species in the galaxy. This is nigh impossible; hundreds- and thousands-year-old conflicts divide these races, preventing them from ever wishing to work with one another. Some of the most alien and strange races are believed to be inherently violent and dangerous — the insectoid Rachni with their hive mind; the artificially intelligent Geth who exist as algorithms on a server, and construct and destroy robotic bodies for themselves on a whim. Throughout the game, the player as Shepard defies this impossibility. Yes, we can unite all of these races. Yes, we can solve all of these conflicts.

This is exactly what happens. In the game’s final act, all of the intelligent species of the galaxy have indeed put aside their differences as a direct result of Shepard’s — the player’s — actions. Galactic peace seems inevitable once the war against the Reaper threat is won. The player has done the unthinkable. They have solved the unsolvable. Intelligent life is significant in the face of the cosmos.

But then, in the game’s final moments, all that is thrown away. The player is presented with a series of events so illogical that many fans believe it must have been Shepard’s hallucination as a result of Reaper mind-control. While logical, this “indoctrination theory” still constitutes a sudden about-face of Mass Effect’s underlying theme: yes, we can defeat the undefeatable.

Critic MovieBob has compared this sudden about-face to the bleak ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, likely in an attempt to evoke the challenge that Gilliam faced in releasing the film with such an ending. What he fails to realize is that Brazil‘s ending was not a sudden about-face. The bleak, fatalistic tone is present throughout the entire film. Every moment of hope in Brazil is clearly false in hindsight, whereas Mass Effect 3 makes every effort to make its uplifting moments perfectly genuine. If Mass Effect 3 was trying to imitate Brazil, it only succeeded at imitating Repo Men‘s failure to imitate Brazil.

This is what the fans realized, as evidenced by the popularity of this alternate ending. Throughout the entire game, the player is able to make Shepard point out logical flaws in an effort to bring peace, but this option is suddenly gone at the 11th hour. When I played the ending sequence myself, I remember — halfway towards the green-explosion-ending-o-tron — turning Shepard around and having him fire his gun at the ghostly child. I don’t know why I thought it would do something. But I remember thinking, why should I have to make this false choice? I’ve never been forced to do this until now.

The game ended. But for many outraged fans, it did not. Before, it was Krogans, Turians, Quarians, Salarians presenting false choices to players, and they handily dismissed them all. Now, it was BioWare themselves. BioWare became the antagonist. And all of a sudden, Mass Effect wasn’t over anymore. The players had become Commander Shepard, and they refused to accept defeat; they were going to defeat the Reapers. But they could no longer do that inside the game.

Video games are a powerful medium because they are not stories about someone else. They are a story about you. For one hundred hours, BioWare had engulfed players in the emotion of defiance. For one hundred hours, players asked the question, why does it have to be this way? And for one hundred hours, their struggle against injustice paid off. The players had fully assimilated the notion that with enough effort, enough struggle, they could correct any perceived injustice against them, and make anything make sense.

What else did you expect they were going to do?

Mass Effect is about defiance, and its persistence in the face of a supposedly unsolvable problem. When I say that, I’m not talking about the games. I’m talking about the fans and BioWare. They are performers, playing the protagonist and antagonist of Mass Effect, on the stage of the world.

And the fans won. That’s not the death of art. That’s art on a level that we never could have imagined.

When this idea hit me, I envisioned it as something to do at some kind of fandom convention — a place full of regular people who’d be interested in doing something creative. But I needed to make sure it worked first, so I tried it at a party.

As you can see, it definitely worked. For the most part. We did go slightly over two hours total, so I’ll need to refine the formula to keep things moving along.

And I need to figure out a better solution for shooting footage that can be edited right away, without wasting any time to capture, transfer, or transcode. We shot this on a camera hooked up to Adobe OnLocation on my MacBook, and carried the laptop around along with the camera. Then, I put it into Target Disk Mode and connected it to my larger and more capable iMac, and used ClipWrap to make the footage editable into Final Cut. Unfortunately, the process of Target Disking and ClipWrapping took up a good five minutes — which is fast compared to capture or transcoding, but still too long for this purpose. I’ll probably need to get a camera which shoots to SD cards in a QuickTime-native format (or maybe ClipWrappable, since that process only took about a minute; I can live with that).

Unrest is brewing in republics worldwide. As nations are ravaged by socioeconomic crises, the people no longer feel served by their elected officials. Is this a temporary hiccup, or an inevitable result of traditional representative democracy?

[...]
Corporatocracy in the US and out-of-touch reactions to social inequality in Europe are just symptoms of the real problem. How did it get to this point? Why don’t the people stop things like this before they happen?

Disconnection.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

A banker offers you a loan so that you can buy a house located near your cushy new job. You sign, comfortable that your salary will allow you to afford the payments. Months later, your employer downsizes, and your job disappears. With no job, you can’t pay back your loan. But the banker’s not upset — in fact, he was hoping for this. As you miss payments, your interest rate goes up. You need a new job to pay your increasing debt, and conveniently enough, the banker is the only one in town hiring. This is the crux of the issue with the profit motive: those who profit can put harmful pressure on others.

At its core, profit is power. Whether it takes the form of having many coins, being owed many debts, or something else entirely, profit is a measure of one’s ability to get other people to do things. By giving a merchant money, I can get her to give me her product. By reminding my friend of all the favors I’ve done for him, I can get him to do me a very large one. I gain these abilities through profit.

As I’ve tried to drive home, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to desire, and a perfectly natural thing by which to be motivated. But today, sometimes profit enables us to make people do things that they don’t want to do. Is this a necessary evil, or just another fixable bug?

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

A salesman sells you a tube of toothpaste, claiming it will make your teeth whiter than they’ve ever been in just a week of use. It’s a bold claim, but he wins you over — for twice what you’d normally pay for toothpaste. A week later, your teeth are still yellow, and you’re tremendously ill. Not only was the toothpaste nothing special, but it was also contaminated with a nasty bacteria; apparently, it was cheaper not to sanitize the toothpaste factory equipment. Now your friends certainly won’t buy any of this not-so-miracle toothpaste, but the damage is done. You’re vomiting, and the salesman’s got your money. Herein lies the problem with the profit motive: bad behavior is profitable.
[...]
Fortunately, it isn’t insurmountable. It’s a bug in the system, and bugs can be fixed. To fix a bug, you often have to dig deep to find the root of the problem, deconstructing it — and the system it exists within — to its bare essentials.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

A man in a big house on a hill asks you to tend his garden. In return, he’ll give you a great deal of shiny gold coins. It’s not like he’d miss them, because he has more shiny gold coins than anyone you know. But you don’t want to lift a finger for this man; everyone knows that he got all his shiny gold coins from lying, cheating, and stealing. Unfortunately, you’re starving and your rent is due — the only way to pay for food and shelter is with shiny gold coins, and Big Evil House Man is the only one with any to spare. This is another problem with the profit motive.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

First, let me explain what the hell Your Face is a Saxophone actually is: it’s an animated comedy series about people working at an advertising agency. All of these people have inanimate objects instead of heads.

The title does not, however, come from the fact that people might have saxophones for heads. Here’s the character Blake O’Malley explaining it:

“Your Face is a Saxophone” is a statement that may not be true, and may not make sense, but it would definitely get your attention if plastered on a billboard. Thus, it is a metaphor for all of advertising.

Anyway, my plan was to release a pilot episode at the beginning of the year, and raise funds on Kickstarter for the rest of the season. The funds would be used to buy a computer that didn’t choke on this really, really simple animation, microphones that didn’t suck, register as an LLC or corporation or whatever, and other things. There are several reasons why this has not yet happened:

The cast and I recorded all the voice acting over the last weekend of January. After having animated the four-minute Goliath over the course of three days, I figured that I could animate a full 30-minute episode in a few weeks. However, I’d forgotten just how low-complexity Goliath actually was, as well as the fact that it took me about a week to recover from the sleep deprivation I’d inflicted upon myself to finish in three days.

In addition, it turned out that I actually did need some money. I bounced around between a bunch of jobs, which took up a great deal of my time. In hindsight, I would have been perfectly capable of working on Your Face is a Saxophone during my free time, but for the most part, I didn’t. Working for The Man burned me out, and I wanted nothing more than to be lazy. So I was.

It is now November. I am spectacularly displeased with myself, as I have not been able to get this one damn episode done for the entire year. So I declare now, to the entire Internet, for reals this time:

Animation for the pilot episode of Your Face is a Saxophone will be completed before the end of 2010.

There are a few methods I’m using to ensure this:

• I’m bringing David Lanz, who voices Blake, on as an environment artist. Evidently, Apple Motion has no idea how to handle both a 2.5D environment and moving characters at the same time without overloading a computer. I don’t think it even knows what a GPU is. In addition to distributing the labor, Dave’s skills with Cinema 4D (an actual 3D program) will cut out a tremendous amount of time lost to crashing, freezing, and exploding.
• Dave’s duties will also include becoming officially Very Disappointed In Me if I don’t achieve a minimum level of productivity on a given day.
• I’m going to write a blog post every day about progress, so that the entire Internet can also become Very Disappointed In Me if I’m lazy.
• No more taking odd jobs. For all intents and purposes, I am officially employed full-time at Plankhead. Speaking of which, I probably shouldn’t be writing any more blog posts at 3 in the morning.

Here goes nothing.

Herp derp.