October 13, 2012 ~ 7:30 AM
After DOG then what? What do I want to do?
FXPHD and widening my horizons, knowing what i don’t know
VFX supervisor course, turns out I am naturally doing what the big kids do and finding out what they know. I may be groping in the dark, but so are they – an opportunity.
The big kids are groping in the dark?! In spite of ridiculous amounts of money to hire gangs of artists, the result is trite eg Hunger Games, Prometheus… The VFX in HG were ok – not groundbreaking or even very compelling. In fact the dogs were downright… bad. The movie had some beautiful shots sure and moments of fun but, I was lost, lost, lost in a forest of mediocrity. The curse of the big studio daunts these creators. They may have all the keenest stuff, but perhaps the very nature of the process dooms the product.
Ridley Scott gets a lot of credit for Alien, but perhaps it was the very limitations of production that made it great. A stellar cast and a fiery director who did (perhaps accidentally) the right things to get them there. Perhaps bigness is it’s own liability. The production of Alien cost 11 million, (34 million in 2012 dollars) but how does that compare with today’s budgets for features with serious effects? The studios in England, Shepperton Studios and Bray Studios… were they big studios, did the production dominate them? Checking out the handy list from ThinkProgress.org we can see the revenue for more recent releases in the Alien franchise steadily going down as the budgets went up. Bigger budget, less box office?
Alien (1979)
Budget: $11 million ($34.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $104,931,801 ($331.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: Approximately $33,333 ($105,321 in 2012 dollars)
Aliens (1986)
Budget: $18.5 million ($38.72 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $131,060,248 ($274.3 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $1 million ($2.1 million in 2012 dollars)
Alien 3 (1992)
Budget: $50 million ($81.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $159,773,545 ($261.2 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $4 million plus a share of box office ($6.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Alien Resurrection (1997)
Budget: $70 million ($100 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $161,295,658 ($230.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $11 million ($15.7 million in 2012 dollars)
Prometheus
Budget: Estimated at $100-$150 million
October 13, 2012 11:05 PM
Just watched P, what shite. Theory supported.
October 13, 2012 ~ 7:30 AM
I am one to talk, hoo ha. I haven’t made anything really, even anything that sucks. But if I really believed my post about health and the approaching singularity, and if Jeff is right and it’s Storytelling (capital S) that makes the human species a super organism, then the horizon stretches. At slightly shy of 50, I’m just getting started.
Continuing the research, let me say what a horror show coding in a spreadsheet is. Writing complex functions is next to impossible because the little one line cells can’t be easily formatted, so it’s very hard to tell whether you’ve even got the appropriate number of closed right parens. Meanwhile, we are also cracking the door on expressions with another FXPHD course. Awakening the sleeping giant within – who likes to code. The spreadsheet thing is not trivial. Sheena the VFX supervisor and John Montgomery did a huge intro spiel about the planning and budgeting of a VFX project, and it was chock full of planning / projection spreadsheets and databases that were of the VFX director and producer’s own making! Anyone remember my prototyping a cost estimating spreadsheet? Reinventing the wheel! Sheena herself doesn’t come with her own number crunching toolset, and why is that? I’ll just ask her online.
If I want to breathe my full being, I’ve got to be able to make tools, just like I can fabricate gear gizmos or draw storyboards, prediction and project management are pretty fundamental to getting where we want to go.
So a database like Filemaker pro versus a spreadsheet. what about being able to break these open? I can imagine a tool including true coding that can express itself as a spreadsheet or database. I suppose I need a better understanding of these two types of applications and the sort of viewports they are (vaguely recalling Fred Oeflein’s metaphor). Because with open source apps like open office or neo office, I could potentially pop the hood, switch some wires around and fire the whole thing back up again. THAT’s the true potential of open source. Standing on the shoulders of giants, taking a thing that already exists – tons of fantastic infrastructure – and owning it.
October 13, 2012 7:52 PM (same day)
After writing this blog entry, which continues below, I spent the day catching up on the blogging backlog, (klogging?) Mostly stream of consciousness, but got me to the vista I command today.
Queue for Fall 2012, v.9 √
Projects in progress chapter 1 √
Projects in progress chapter 2 √
Assembling a VFX crew √
What I want to be when I grow up √
December 2012 √
Alone √
Holy something √
That’s the foundation for the future summaries and battle plans, which are inventoried towards the end of this post.
It’s now evening and I’m almost ready for a bath and Prometheus, courtesy of The PB, who were also kind enough to loan me HB. Meanwhile, back in this AM, I got a bit more rambling out of my system regarding art and the super organism.
October 13, 2012 (morning continued)
How to hire artists V2.0
How to finish this movie, exactly where to step so far as we can see and manifesting the rest of the path after that.
Do I really need or want another apprentice or intern? I certainly want the possibility of another Ben Woody calling me. Maybe that’s a once in a lifetime thing, but if I could cultivate, what would that look like.
My god, it’s full of stars! My god, I’m building infrastructure to become an agent of the sustainable super organism! Appropriate the super organism! Hijack the super organism? I am Gods plan for the planet, muhahahahaaa (pinky in mouth).
This is cool -> appropriate the super organism can mean both take it over or make it suitable to the circumstances. The circumstances are a global life support system, a web of species. I mean both!
World domination through ART! Art (and USA funding) is why the Nazis got as far as they did, they were a bunch of reality hackers and (gulp!) artists. Call Hitler a mediocre painter, but he was just getting started. What would have happened if he stayed a painter? A different super organism, certainly. But… he switched to performance and the 3rd Reich and Holocaust (so many capitals) thing was a show that everyone is still talking about, 70 years later. He’s an icon, mythic almost. We know he wasn’t the son of god because unlike Jesus, we’ve got him on film (he loved movies and Leni Riefenstahl, uh oh…)
So this is a very dark road we travel, we creators. Perilous. This is a riff on the Architecture of Doom, for those who haven’t seen. I don’t agree with the dismissive Wiki summary, it’s a profound insight into art making generally – a cautionary tale. Why do we want to discount Hitlers artistic prowess – because he was such a fucker? Sure, assert that his aesthetic was flawed (mass murder) but why that he was an *amateur* painter and architect. Why do we want to say that evil and art are mutually exclusive? If we imagine that art is only the domain of the righteous and humane, we do so at our peril. We are all Hitler potentially. He started out just like most humans, a little kid who was loved and was lonely, who laughed and dreamed. Then what? There’s the story. To imagine he is not our brother is to reprise his horror show.
So appropriate the human organism, and what is our sense of the appropriate? Vidi well, brother. Consider carefully what we propose for the world. Look within, realize that there could be ovens and vengeance weapons just around the corner. What’s this all for?
This isn’t quite an abstraction and thought experiment. I recognize myself as a wild card. I feel super alive, sparkling wth power. I strive to organize and deploy my power, to be what I am AND perhaps change the world. To free the prison planet, to swap awakening for suicide. With art, I might some day appropriate the super organism. It’s kind of a big deal!
October 13, 2012, evening again.
Ok, so here’s the list of key topics upcoming. Repeating the two from above…
How to hire artists V2.0
How to finish DOG, step by step.
Projects in progress chapter 3 (was incomplete projects) and Projects to finish by december 15
The credit card caper
James speaks
A study in virality
Phew! and now for my bath.