I've put the results of my visual narrative project up in the gallery. It's a little rough right now, I definitely could use some time to polish it up, but I probably won't have that time for a while.
I wasn't completely satisfied with how the project turned out. I had hoped to develop a very strong set of visuals and use a fairly simple narrative to connect them. But the process became so tedious that I found myself cutting corners just to get it finished. Though the game was central to the story I created, and my desire to work within a rich but unpredictable environment, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was not very hospitable to my efforts. But, I guess, that was part of my whole point. I'm riffing off machinima here, where the trend is toward greater and greater visual sophistication and character control. But so much of the charm of machinima, to me, is in the tension between what the "director" wants to do and what the gaming platform allows them to do.
Anyway, you have to admit, even if you think the end result is not brilliant, that it's pretty cool to be able to do this kind of stuff for school.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Monday, October 03, 2005
David Lynch is Happy
David Lynch was in Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre Saturday night talking to a crowd of mostly college students on the subject of "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain." One might expect from such a talk an attempt to delineate and describe these weighty concepts, and, from an artist as preeminent as Lynch, some anecdotal narratives giving insight into his creative process. Instead, the evening did little but to further mire these concepts in a web of vague abstractions.
Taking my seat in the theater, I felt an inkling of the disappointment that would follow. The very setting spoke to the lack of interactive, and hence dialectic, possibilities. I've become accustomed over the past several weeks to academic colloquia which encourage audience engagement. These have been held in utilitarian, some might say "ugly," lecture halls with limited capacity and shortened distance between speaker and listeners. The Majestic, true to its name, rises vertically hundreds of feet to provided immense capacity. From my seat in the balcony, the speakers were but fuzzy, acutely foreshortened forms. The proscenium, encrusted with gold paint and bands of sculptural fruit, framed the ensuing event as performance rather than dialog. Which is not to say that the audience wasn't ostensibly encouraged to ask questions. Though I couldn't see them from my vantage point, microphones had been deployed, and after some introductory comments Lynch accepted questions from the audience. But was it coincidence that the questions asked were slight and/or sycophantic?
I'm willing to accept that the theater setting was a necessary evil to allow as many people as possible to see a very popular but typically reclusive filmmaker. And I certainly appreciate Lynch's willingness to participate in a public forum on his life and works. However, it became clear by the end of the opening statements that this would not be a free-form discussion of art and creativity, or even a formal lecture on those topics, but a biased and scientifically specious presentation (or, as a colleague of mine correctly pegged it, an "infomercial") on the benefits of Transcendental Meditation.
Supporting Lynch's impassioned but ultimately unhelpful ruminations were John Hagelin, the director of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, and Dr. Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management, who put on the full-court press for legitimizing the foundations of TM. Hagelin made baldly controversial claims like (and I'm paraphrasing) "science has proven that consciousness is the unified field of Unified Field Theory," without any hint of acknowledgement to their contentiousness. And I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the audience was filled with plants, but consider these ostensibly spontaneous questions from the Q&A period:
"I'm a film teacher and filmmaker. Can you share how has Transcendental Meditation helped you be a better filmmaker?"
"What would you say to those who are skeptical about Transcendental Meditation?"
Listen, it's great that David Lynch is a happy, positive person who has found inner peace through TM. And, certainly, one who has found happiness has the right, if not the duty, to share his methodology with the rest of us. But that doesn't make it interesting.
Taking my seat in the theater, I felt an inkling of the disappointment that would follow. The very setting spoke to the lack of interactive, and hence dialectic, possibilities. I've become accustomed over the past several weeks to academic colloquia which encourage audience engagement. These have been held in utilitarian, some might say "ugly," lecture halls with limited capacity and shortened distance between speaker and listeners. The Majestic, true to its name, rises vertically hundreds of feet to provided immense capacity. From my seat in the balcony, the speakers were but fuzzy, acutely foreshortened forms. The proscenium, encrusted with gold paint and bands of sculptural fruit, framed the ensuing event as performance rather than dialog. Which is not to say that the audience wasn't ostensibly encouraged to ask questions. Though I couldn't see them from my vantage point, microphones had been deployed, and after some introductory comments Lynch accepted questions from the audience. But was it coincidence that the questions asked were slight and/or sycophantic?
I'm willing to accept that the theater setting was a necessary evil to allow as many people as possible to see a very popular but typically reclusive filmmaker. And I certainly appreciate Lynch's willingness to participate in a public forum on his life and works. However, it became clear by the end of the opening statements that this would not be a free-form discussion of art and creativity, or even a formal lecture on those topics, but a biased and scientifically specious presentation (or, as a colleague of mine correctly pegged it, an "infomercial") on the benefits of Transcendental Meditation.
Supporting Lynch's impassioned but ultimately unhelpful ruminations were John Hagelin, the director of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, and Dr. Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management, who put on the full-court press for legitimizing the foundations of TM. Hagelin made baldly controversial claims like (and I'm paraphrasing) "science has proven that consciousness is the unified field of Unified Field Theory," without any hint of acknowledgement to their contentiousness. And I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the audience was filled with plants, but consider these ostensibly spontaneous questions from the Q&A period:
"I'm a film teacher and filmmaker. Can you share how has Transcendental Meditation helped you be a better filmmaker?"
"What would you say to those who are skeptical about Transcendental Meditation?"
Listen, it's great that David Lynch is a happy, positive person who has found inner peace through TM. And, certainly, one who has found happiness has the right, if not the duty, to share his methodology with the rest of us. But that doesn't make it interesting.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Noah Baumbach Update - Fantastic Mr. Fox
I'm a huge fan of the film Kicking and Screaming. No, not the film with Will Ferrell about a kids soccer team. The first K&S was written and directed by first-time filmmaker Noah Baumbach, and followed a group of recent college grads immobilized by a "quarterlife crisis" long before anyone had coined that term. I found the characters' self-doubting and malaise eerily familiar, making this one of the seminal films of my early adulthood. Baumbach followed it up with Mr. Jealousy, and underrated romantic comedy that failed to capitalize on his earlier critical success. The bizarre, ultra-low-budget Highball came next, and was, I believe, released straight to video. Sometime during all of that activity, he produced a television pilot about 20somethings starring Eric Stoltz that failed to attract a buyer.
The last few years have hosted a, for me, long overdue Baumbach resurgence. He cowrote with director Wes Anderson the brilliant Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson then produced Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which earned great accolades at Sundance. I can't wait to see that film, a 80s-era memoir of how he and his brother dealt with their parents' divorce (again, likely to prove creepily similar to my own experiences), and noticed, with excitement, the recent online dissemination of the trailer.
Already basking in the anticipation, I came across this tidbit while exploring his bio on the film's website:
"He also co-wrote THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) and the upcoming FANTASTIC MR. FOX from a novel by Roald Dahl with Wes Anderson."
Fantastic Mr. Fox! Further research indicates this will be a stop-motion animated film. The last attempt at adapting Dahl to stop motion, James and the Giant Peach, yielded very mixed results. But with Anderson directing, and Revolution Studios producing (instead of Disney/Touchstone), the film has a chance of being true to my own nostalgic memories of the novel.
The last few years have hosted a, for me, long overdue Baumbach resurgence. He cowrote with director Wes Anderson the brilliant Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson then produced Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which earned great accolades at Sundance. I can't wait to see that film, a 80s-era memoir of how he and his brother dealt with their parents' divorce (again, likely to prove creepily similar to my own experiences), and noticed, with excitement, the recent online dissemination of the trailer.
Already basking in the anticipation, I came across this tidbit while exploring his bio on the film's website:
"He also co-wrote THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) and the upcoming FANTASTIC MR. FOX from a novel by Roald Dahl with Wes Anderson."
Fantastic Mr. Fox! Further research indicates this will be a stop-motion animated film. The last attempt at adapting Dahl to stop motion, James and the Giant Peach, yielded very mixed results. But with Anderson directing, and Revolution Studios producing (instead of Disney/Touchstone), the film has a chance of being true to my own nostalgic memories of the novel.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Shadow of the Colossus - Video Game 'Art?'
Got my Official US Playstation Magazine this weekend, which includes full coverage of the upcoming release developed by Sony CEA: The Shadow of the Colossus. "Full Coverage" means the mag features an article about its production, a staff review, and a playable level on the included demo disk. I could probably write a comparative analysis about how each of these classes of text represent the game, the different assumptions and methodologies each bring to defining its significance, but that's for another time. I want to talk about the content - the game itself and the claims the writers make about it. As such, I will be treating the demo as truly representative of the overall game experience, though it might not be (as the magazine specifically warns).
The gaming press makes much of the work's status as the next title from the developers of the critically acclaimed Ico. Let me just say at the outset that I've never played that game and know nothing about it. The ubiquitous association of the two titles seems a bald attempt to position both as part of a canon of "artistic" games. That's fine, we do the same thing in every media. A work takes on greater depth, or, at least, greater interpretive possibility, when we can locate it within the ouvre of some author. But, I found the rhetoric of the reviewer, Joe Rybicki, rather defensive, as if we need to appeal to these conventional signifiers of high art to justify taking a video game seriously. The most egregrious example is his description of the beautiful landscapes in the game. He posits that they point to "the designers' priorities: Make it beautiful—make it art—even if it has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay itself." OK, once and for all, aesthetic beauty and artistic value are not equivalent. Thomas Kincade paints some pretty landscapes (he's the painter of light. Light!), but, well, his paintings aren't quite the cutting edge of artistic expression. Call me a snob. Furthermore, in the form of video games, gameplay is a huge part of artistic content. In the reviewer's defense, we don't quite have a well-developed language for talking about the art of gameplay, and the Official US Sony Playstation Magazine is probably not the forum for development of such a language.
How about the game itself? For those unfamiliar with its basic premise, the player controls a humanoid on a quest to kill 16 giant creatures that roam a desolate landscape. The magazine's writers refers to these giants as "bosses," but that seems misapplied. "Boss" implies the end of a sequence of progressively more difficult opponents. In other words, you can't have a boss without lackeys. In Shadow, the creatures are the singular challenge, and they each require sufficiently complex manuevers to bring down that it might be more accurate to call the creatures "levels". But the subversion of these video game conventions is what makes the game interesting.
What makes it breathtaking to play, even in the short demo, is the sense of scale. The creatures tower over your little avatar. Here, I think, we see pioneers of the video game form feeding back to us a shared cultural dream: the slaying of the dragon. Actually, we're in gaming territory here, which comes out of a different cultural tradition, so I better be specific. This isn't the European St. George and the Dragon, vanquishing of the pagan by the Christian kind of thing. The associations that came most clearly to my mind while playing the game were from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Here is dragon as magnificent nature spirit, slayer as heroic and daring, yes, but also modernizing and destructive. The game creates with its story, and supports with its music and cinematographic elements, a very ambiguous moral task for the player. Of course, having only played the demo, I can't speak to how the story unfolds to its end. The review indicates, again apologetically, that the ambiguity is maintained. If so, then that's quite an achievement.
So the concept seems brilliant enough, but how about the gameplay? The review complained of complexity, but that's a pretty relative term. It's hardly flight simulator complex. In fact, I'd say it's as or less complex than most action games. I found it intuitive after a few minutes. In the demo, the camera was very annoying, pulling back to show a preferred framing rather than sticking to the player's direction. Unfortunately, that preferencing of the designer's will over that of the gamer's extends to other parts of the game. As far as I can tell, the game allows only one way to kill a Colossus. In the demo example, I replayed it several times to see if I could find my own way: climb onto the giant's hammer instead of up his leg. It confounded my every attempt, until finally some words came up on the screen to the effect of "you have to climb up the leg first." Directions. Disappointing. They designed so much scale and graphical complexity into the giants, but prescribed a single path for attacking them? I'm also curious about how the progression between Colossi is acheived. Again, despite building a world that seems to allow free roaming, I sensed that getting from one Colossus to the next was a rather linear process. Now, that's a choice by the developers. Not all games have to be open-ended sandboxes. But, from my short experience with this game, I think it would have been a better choice.
Despite those caveats, I'm sold on this title as a valuable addition to the gaming canon. But is it art? Well, duh.
The gaming press makes much of the work's status as the next title from the developers of the critically acclaimed Ico. Let me just say at the outset that I've never played that game and know nothing about it. The ubiquitous association of the two titles seems a bald attempt to position both as part of a canon of "artistic" games. That's fine, we do the same thing in every media. A work takes on greater depth, or, at least, greater interpretive possibility, when we can locate it within the ouvre of some author. But, I found the rhetoric of the reviewer, Joe Rybicki, rather defensive, as if we need to appeal to these conventional signifiers of high art to justify taking a video game seriously. The most egregrious example is his description of the beautiful landscapes in the game. He posits that they point to "the designers' priorities: Make it beautiful—make it art—even if it has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay itself." OK, once and for all, aesthetic beauty and artistic value are not equivalent. Thomas Kincade paints some pretty landscapes (he's the painter of light. Light!), but, well, his paintings aren't quite the cutting edge of artistic expression. Call me a snob. Furthermore, in the form of video games, gameplay is a huge part of artistic content. In the reviewer's defense, we don't quite have a well-developed language for talking about the art of gameplay, and the Official US Sony Playstation Magazine is probably not the forum for development of such a language.
How about the game itself? For those unfamiliar with its basic premise, the player controls a humanoid on a quest to kill 16 giant creatures that roam a desolate landscape. The magazine's writers refers to these giants as "bosses," but that seems misapplied. "Boss" implies the end of a sequence of progressively more difficult opponents. In other words, you can't have a boss without lackeys. In Shadow, the creatures are the singular challenge, and they each require sufficiently complex manuevers to bring down that it might be more accurate to call the creatures "levels". But the subversion of these video game conventions is what makes the game interesting.
What makes it breathtaking to play, even in the short demo, is the sense of scale. The creatures tower over your little avatar. Here, I think, we see pioneers of the video game form feeding back to us a shared cultural dream: the slaying of the dragon. Actually, we're in gaming territory here, which comes out of a different cultural tradition, so I better be specific. This isn't the European St. George and the Dragon, vanquishing of the pagan by the Christian kind of thing. The associations that came most clearly to my mind while playing the game were from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Here is dragon as magnificent nature spirit, slayer as heroic and daring, yes, but also modernizing and destructive. The game creates with its story, and supports with its music and cinematographic elements, a very ambiguous moral task for the player. Of course, having only played the demo, I can't speak to how the story unfolds to its end. The review indicates, again apologetically, that the ambiguity is maintained. If so, then that's quite an achievement.
So the concept seems brilliant enough, but how about the gameplay? The review complained of complexity, but that's a pretty relative term. It's hardly flight simulator complex. In fact, I'd say it's as or less complex than most action games. I found it intuitive after a few minutes. In the demo, the camera was very annoying, pulling back to show a preferred framing rather than sticking to the player's direction. Unfortunately, that preferencing of the designer's will over that of the gamer's extends to other parts of the game. As far as I can tell, the game allows only one way to kill a Colossus. In the demo example, I replayed it several times to see if I could find my own way: climb onto the giant's hammer instead of up his leg. It confounded my every attempt, until finally some words came up on the screen to the effect of "you have to climb up the leg first." Directions. Disappointing. They designed so much scale and graphical complexity into the giants, but prescribed a single path for attacking them? I'm also curious about how the progression between Colossi is acheived. Again, despite building a world that seems to allow free roaming, I sensed that getting from one Colossus to the next was a rather linear process. Now, that's a choice by the developers. Not all games have to be open-ended sandboxes. But, from my short experience with this game, I think it would have been a better choice.
Despite those caveats, I'm sold on this title as a valuable addition to the gaming canon. But is it art? Well, duh.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
OK Go - Indie Boys Don't Dance
The new OK Go album, "Oh No," has been out for a few weeks now. Probably listened to the whole thing about 3 times, maybe 4. In that time, the music has burrowed in like one of those ear parasites from Star Trek II, and now has full control of my mind, though its only command to me so far has been to "put the CD back in the player!"
By now you've probably seen the infamous dance video. If not, I highly recommend it. I've heard several theories about why it's so popular. One pointed to the inherent comedy of seeing men do choreographed dance. And certainly, the routine itself mixes cheerleader flair, ballroom twirls, Michael Jackson struts, and recognizable bad dance moves in an amusing way. But I have some more theories:
1. Though created by the band itself, they have skillfully produced it to appear like a fan-made viral video. The resolution is poor, the setting casual. The dance is choreographed to a CD played off-screen (we hear the end of the previous song as they take their places), rather than overlaid with a studio mix. The "singer" in the video is not the lead singer in the band. There are no cuts away, and minor dance missteps and misalignments have been left in. All of these contribute to a perception of the video as not an abstract visual representation of the song, like most music videos, but something like an artifact. In watching the video, we feel we've discovered something. The dance feels like a discreet moment in time, it has that aura of authenticity. And because it feels more real, it triggers those voyeuristic endorphins.
2. We expect pop groups to have dance routines. All the boy bands do it. All the soloists do it, even when they're no good at it (Jessica Simpson). Indie-pop bands, however, don't. Not one (until now). Why? Because they're different. How? Because they don't dance. The video throws our musical categories back in our faces. Like most rock n' roll, it's all a semiotics of style over substance. Sullen, ironic boys make indie music. Cheery, sincere boys make pop music. The video pleases by confusing those boundaries.
By now you've probably seen the infamous dance video. If not, I highly recommend it. I've heard several theories about why it's so popular. One pointed to the inherent comedy of seeing men do choreographed dance. And certainly, the routine itself mixes cheerleader flair, ballroom twirls, Michael Jackson struts, and recognizable bad dance moves in an amusing way. But I have some more theories:
1. Though created by the band itself, they have skillfully produced it to appear like a fan-made viral video. The resolution is poor, the setting casual. The dance is choreographed to a CD played off-screen (we hear the end of the previous song as they take their places), rather than overlaid with a studio mix. The "singer" in the video is not the lead singer in the band. There are no cuts away, and minor dance missteps and misalignments have been left in. All of these contribute to a perception of the video as not an abstract visual representation of the song, like most music videos, but something like an artifact. In watching the video, we feel we've discovered something. The dance feels like a discreet moment in time, it has that aura of authenticity. And because it feels more real, it triggers those voyeuristic endorphins.
2. We expect pop groups to have dance routines. All the boy bands do it. All the soloists do it, even when they're no good at it (Jessica Simpson). Indie-pop bands, however, don't. Not one (until now). Why? Because they're different. How? Because they don't dance. The video throws our musical categories back in our faces. Like most rock n' roll, it's all a semiotics of style over substance. Sullen, ironic boys make indie music. Cheery, sincere boys make pop music. The video pleases by confusing those boundaries.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Six Feet Under - The Finale
I finally got around to watching the last three episodes of Six Feet Under. If you haven't yet seen the finale, and are planning to, please avert your eyes, as spoilers will follow.
Alan Ball provided a fitting end to a TV series that could be considered the great memento mori of the motion picture/television canon. Many viewers, critics included, have lamented this season, and it has been difficult to watch characters that I've grown to love make some really questionable choices, reveal darker sides of their personalities, and, well, die. But it's also been brilliant. Nate's death framed perfectly the concerns of the series. Many episodes owed their drama to disagreements over proper burial rights for the corpse-of-the-week. Would the family that saw other families torn apart by these arguments be able to avoid falling into the same traps? The answer, of course, was no. The Fishers were no more immune from anger and misery and spite than Nate was, as the main character, protected from death.
The finale itself hit all the emotional notes expected from a show of this depth and complexity; that is, it hit ALL of the emotional notes. It was all over the place. Series finales often have these moments of great ontological confusion, when all of the layers of a character's identity come to the surface at the same time. In this case, Claire's farewell to her family reached a level of maudlin excess that had me wondering, "is this Clair saying goodbye to her family, Lauren Ambrose saying goodbye to her character, or Alan Ball saying goodbye to his cast?" Probably all three at the same time, especially at the moment she thanked her mother for giving her life. A bit much, yes, but immediately redeemed by what followed, a musical montage closing the book on the Fisher family, showing that, though the series may end here, it's characters will not live in eternal glory forever. Remember: you, too, will die.
A note on the specifics of this montage. Like the "ghosts" of departed characters that appeared to the Fishers throughout the series, I interpreted the parade of events as completely internal to the character: possibile futures as imagined by Claire as she sped towards her future. It seemed likelier that Claire, at the moment of leaving her old life behind, would imagine meeting up with Ted 20 years later and marrying him, than that this would ever come to pass. But I guess Alan Ball intended a more literal interpretation. He prepared obituaries for the show's homepage, and in this interview, references some very specific biographical information about the characters post-show. But I like my explanation better.
Alan Ball provided a fitting end to a TV series that could be considered the great memento mori of the motion picture/television canon. Many viewers, critics included, have lamented this season, and it has been difficult to watch characters that I've grown to love make some really questionable choices, reveal darker sides of their personalities, and, well, die. But it's also been brilliant. Nate's death framed perfectly the concerns of the series. Many episodes owed their drama to disagreements over proper burial rights for the corpse-of-the-week. Would the family that saw other families torn apart by these arguments be able to avoid falling into the same traps? The answer, of course, was no. The Fishers were no more immune from anger and misery and spite than Nate was, as the main character, protected from death.
The finale itself hit all the emotional notes expected from a show of this depth and complexity; that is, it hit ALL of the emotional notes. It was all over the place. Series finales often have these moments of great ontological confusion, when all of the layers of a character's identity come to the surface at the same time. In this case, Claire's farewell to her family reached a level of maudlin excess that had me wondering, "is this Clair saying goodbye to her family, Lauren Ambrose saying goodbye to her character, or Alan Ball saying goodbye to his cast?" Probably all three at the same time, especially at the moment she thanked her mother for giving her life. A bit much, yes, but immediately redeemed by what followed, a musical montage closing the book on the Fisher family, showing that, though the series may end here, it's characters will not live in eternal glory forever. Remember: you, too, will die.
A note on the specifics of this montage. Like the "ghosts" of departed characters that appeared to the Fishers throughout the series, I interpreted the parade of events as completely internal to the character: possibile futures as imagined by Claire as she sped towards her future. It seemed likelier that Claire, at the moment of leaving her old life behind, would imagine meeting up with Ted 20 years later and marrying him, than that this would ever come to pass. But I guess Alan Ball intended a more literal interpretation. He prepared obituaries for the show's homepage, and in this interview, references some very specific biographical information about the characters post-show. But I like my explanation better.
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