Intellectual Curiosity

Intellectual Curiosity - A desire to learn more about a person, or a thing, or a way of life.

Again from Animonday about comparing the Animation Block Party and the 47th Ann Arbor Film Festival.

"just about every entry was bogged down with the trappings of pop culture, animation self-referencing, and light-weight themes and ideas. None offered much (or any) insight into important issues, the state of world, the human condition, or even simple human relationships."

"Despite endless possibilities, many animation artists would rather contemplate how to use any story set-up as an excuse to create an epic fight scene. Among the most technically polished pieces in the ABP show was a seemingly endless film that featured a pint-sized character rambling on and on in a post-game locker room. The attractive design work and subtle character animation were not enough to generate interest in the tedious film. Can you imagine a live action equivalent, with great lighting, art direction and cinematography but no story, just a guy rambling on and on? If you're doing a narrative film, it’s not enough to have good animation or high production values. A narrative film requires structure and interesting characters working through something the audience can relate to."

"A personal film has the opportunity to explore areas that a big budget theatrical animation or an animated TV series couldn't touch. But, many personal films are love letters to those very institutions, repeating themes and scenes and jokes we’ve seen before, with the effect of diminishing returns."

"It’s ironic that animators are the first to defend the potential of their medium and are also the least likely to exploit it. What does it say about us that we are more concerned with getting a cheap laugh or recreating a fight scene from “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” than we are about really saying something?"

"What some of these student animators are choosing to express does not give me hope that they have the needed intellectual curiosity to create work that will surprise the older generations like mine and inspire the generations after them."

Creative Currency.

From Animondays a article about creative currency.


"To develop a pitch is to develop your voice as a writer and an artist. Even being strung along by an insincere development executive (no, they are not all insincere) doesn't change the fact that you created something that you may take with you to greener pastures."

"I share this story because I think it's evidence that pitching is only a waste of time when you choose to pin all your hopes on one idea or on one particular opportunity or executive."

"I have come to believe that development executives will always let you down; not that they intend to but there's just no way they could ever be as excited about your project as you are. And in turn, most creators they strike deals with probably disappoint the executives since it's got to be tough to live up to what an exec might imagine your project to be before it's made.In the end, it's up to you to make sure that pitching isn't a waste of time. All your efforts travel with you and build up your creative currency over time. "

What's at stake is nothing less then life and death.

In the making of my animated short, I felt that there was something lacking in the emotional investment that the audience needs to make. That statement above pointed out in neon bold letters the problem I think I had.

The one below struck me.

"Remember the goal we are after? We want to give the audience an emotionally satisfying experience."

It was a section from a book "Directing The Story" - by Francis Glebas.



Most of it is something that is common sense about but often something that you do not give serious thought. Its a really good book to get your hands on.

Some useful notes about it.

- "The most important thing about making a movie is that it must be about something big, important and significant. Otherwise why should we care. "

It has to say something important about the particular subject matter. i.e friendship, love.

- "Show the audience why your characters are absolutely driven to do what they do"

- "Characters drive stories, like characters who go after a goal and face obstacles, make decisions, then take actions of life changing consequences."

- "It has to speak to something that we can relate to". Does not have to be a big story. But got to be big issues. e.g family, honor, law, crime, freedom, guilt. etc...

- "Something has to be at stake" e.g Have to show what the consequence is if the mission fail."

There is a paragraph about the hero's journey, about creating obstacles which is already covered in many other books. So I wont get into it.

But in summary

- We watch movies to feel good. Meet that need in your audience
- Make sure your story is about something that matters
- Aim at providing an emotionally satisfying experience for your audience but works at a structural level
- The secret of storytelling is story-delaying. There is a whole repertoire of story-delaying tactics based on the control of info of who gets to know what, when and how to tease your audience by making them wait.

Story Development in Animated Features

"How much time is typically devoted to the story making/boarding/animatic phase of a movie? How well can you tell if the film will work when it’s in animatic form? . . . do stories come out weakly because they didn’t have enough time to keep tightening them, or because you can’t get a good enough idea of the final product from just the boards?"

The entire process is actually a series of overlapping processes, and while the goal may seem to be to satisfactorily complete one phase before moving on, that never happens.

Inevitably, more story and character changes ensue during the animation process, when the folks in charge figure out the real heart and soul of the film, so that much of the animatic is revised or thrown out as scenes and sequences are reboarded, redesigned, reanimated. The story department is usually still hard at work on a film up right up until shortly before animation finishes.

So how well can you tell if the film will work from the animatic? I’m not sure the animatic is the thing anyone should be judging. The typical animatic, despite how detailed these things have become in just the last ten years, still lacks any acting. In CG features, they’re far less expressive than the storyboards. And the animatic production values (lighting, cloth, effects, score, etc., etc.) are crude at best. So animatics can be deceptive.

Super_Villains__The_4_Major_Food_Groups and Why We Deserve Better Villains — And How To Get Them

http://www.ifanboy.com/content/articles/Super_Villains__The_4_Major_Food_Groups

Cant agree more.. Awesome article.

From io9.com

http://io9.com/5039185/why-we-deserve-better-villains--and-how-to-get-them

Villains do not need no reason. They are because they are evil. Explaining villains are lame-o.

How villains lose their shit: 1) They get redeemed. Like Sylar, supposedly. Or, I suspect, like Ben on Lost, who's already becoming a much more sympathetic character. (Although he still has the immoral psycho edge, as when he's willing to kill everyone on the freighter to get revenge on Keamy.) The ultimate example of a redeemed villain who loses his mystique is Darth Vader, whose redemption at the end of Return Of The Jedi presaged his whoah-TMI over-explanation in the prequels, which brings us to...

2) Too much information. Even Doctor Who's archetypal nasty, the Master, isn't immune. He went around killing and wreaking havoc for 30 years without any explanation other than "he's a sick fuck." But "he's a sick fuck" wasn't enough for writer Russell T. Davies, who had to give the Master an origin story that explained how he became evil. It was the weakest point of an otherwise great story. Sometimes, knowing why the villain is a psycho isn't the point. The best part of TDK's Joker is the fact that he keeps telling different origin stories, all of them completely fishy

3) They become analogs of real-life nasties. It's just way too easy to make your villain just like Bill Gates, or Dick Cheney, or Hillary Clinton, or Ahmadinejad or whoever. (I almost wrote "Hillary Klingon," which I would pay to see.) In a few rare cases, it can make villains creepier — as in the plethora of Margaret Thatcher monsters coming out of England in the 1980s — but most of the time, it's just a cheap shortcut.

4) We see too much of their world. James Callis, who plays Gaius Baltar, said recently that he thought bleak space-opera Battlestar Galactica made a mistake by letting us inside the Cylons' Baseships and showing us their internecine bickering and weird internal decor sense. We stopped thinking of them as the implacable masterminds of human genocide, and started thinking of them more as The Real World: Baseship.

5) Too many defeats. This is one of the things that went wrong with the Borg. (The other one being the ridiculous "Borg Queen" which I think comes under the heading of "seeing too much of their world.") When we first meet the Borg, they're so unbeatable, Captain Picard basically has to beg Q to get the Enterprise away from them. And then the good guys defeat the Borg once, against tremendous odds. After that, every victory gets easier and easier, until finally Captain Janeway is reducing the entire Borg collective to rubble with a few well-placed kicks.

6) Too many victories. This is why I'm somewhat startled that the movie version of the Joker has so much power: he's a dillweed in the comics. The comic-book Joker is a victim of his own success. Where do you go after you've killed Robin and destroyed Batgirl in the same year? Away, that's where. The Joker should have been retired in the comics after "A Death In The Family" and "The Killing Joke," and in fact he did disappear for a year or two. But it was too tempting to keep bringing him back, and he's stuck being a has-been villain who can never top his best (worst) year, which was 20 years ago now. I've read hundreds of Joker comics published since 1988, and none has left much of an impression.7) The villain that's a reflection of the hero. This is really where Iron Man and Incredible Hulk fail. (Someone emailed us about this a few months ago, and I'm afraid I can't remember who now.) You have a guy in super-powered metal armor? Who should he fight, if not another guy in super-powered metal armor that's a knock-off of his own? A big green guy? Let's create another big green guy from his blood and make them fight. A unified theory of villainy: We need good villains, for the health of our society. Good villains make great stories. A truly chilling villain makes the hero seem more important because the stakes are important, and the hero's actions matter.

Up Color Script.

This is the color script of UP by Lou Romano. Very cool work. It is used to conceptualize the atmosphere, mood, tone for the entire movie via colors before doing it in 3D. Very useful way of working and awesome work.

Shatner Kirk vs Pine Kirk.

"One thing I liked about the original Captain Kirk was that he was the best captain in Starfleet, not becuase he'd been anointed as a young man, but because he was just the best. It was a singularly old-school idea of heroism: He came up through the ranks, he passed the same tests as everybody else, and he just happened to turn out the best."


Damn straight. None of these new emo spoiled annoying rebel shit.

the light bulb that came on..... finally.

i always had this nagging feeling about joseph campbell's hero's journey. It is a compelling concept that I thought of using for my short.I can understand its significance but it is repetitive in a majority of movies in recent times ....... Cookie cutter. Below is the jeez of it.

It confuses personal growth with solving problems.

"Sometimes in order to defeat a great evil, you have to learn an important personal lesson and grow as a person. But often, you don't. Oftentimes, defeating a great evil just requires fighting like hell and doing what has to be done, and there's no time to meet the goddess or touch your magic wand or any of that stuff. Campbell's monomyth is unrealistic and spreads the idea that war is therapy."

This caused me so much angst trying to find a cause or some kinda of journey that the damn hero have to take during the writing pharse. but then I realised sometimes you just got to bring-it-on.

Below again. Why is one hero so special anyway?

The hero doesn't just get the "call to adventure" because everyone's getting it. He gets it because he's the most important person alive, with the most special skillz or the biggest brain. Everybody who's not him sucks and should go away. It plays into people's fantasies that they're secretly amazing, without having to work for it. But for those of us who aren't Ender Wiggin or Luke Skywalker, it's just pointless.

http://io9.com/345313/eight-reasons-why-the-heros-journey-sucks

cinematography notes

http://mysterymanonfilm.blogspot.com/2006/09/art-of-visual-storytelling.html

http://livingromcom.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/09/ingmar_bergman_.html

"“A motion picture doesn’t have to look
absolutely realistic,” Nykvist says. “It can be
beautiful and realistic at the same time. I am
not interested in beautiful photography. I am
interested in telling stories about human
beings, how they act and why they act that
way.”

“The truth always lies in
the character’s eyes,”
Nykvist says. “It is very
important to light so the
audience can see what’s
behind each character’s eyes. That’s how the audience
gets to know them as human beings. It opens up their
souls."

Sven Nykvist

http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis/htmfiles/cinematography.htm
http://www.wildsound-filmmaking-feedback-events.com/cinematography-shots-and-camera-angles.html

http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/lnewcomb/English%20117/cinematography.htm

http://courses.csusm.edu/fmst300bc/kinetics.html

http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/anatomy.php

books and dvds to buy or borrow.
vison of light http://www.amazon.com/Visions-Light-Cinematography-N%C3%A9stor-Almendros/dp/630583685X

the cutting edge http://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Edge-Magic-Movie-Editing/dp/B0009PVZEG/ref=pd_sim_d_1

cinematic style http://www.amazon.com/Cinematographer-Style-Roger-Deakins/dp/B00197POY0/ref=pd_sim_d_5

painting with light http://www.amazon.com/Painting-Light-John-Alton/dp/0520089499/ref=pd_sim_d_6

cinematic storytelling http://www.amazon.com/Cinematic-Storytelling-Powerful-Conventions-Filmmaker/dp/193290705X/ref=pd_sim_d_4

quotes from james cameron.

"But the beauty of movies is that they don't have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there's a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don't care if it goes against what's likely."

"I don't think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now. The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them. They're about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they've become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely."

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-04/ff_cameron#