Sam-K.net

• Battlestar Galactica Season 2

  Season two will air this summer. It’ll be a full 20-episode run. This show was definitely a surprise, especially to fans of the original series. It was quite a departure from the first Galactica, and fans panned the show prematurely because of the changes — namely the big ones, like the fact that the new Starbuck is female — but I think it caught everyone off guard; it’s a great show with a strong story and a near perfect cast.

• CSI Finale

  I just can’t watch this show on a regular basis. The acting, although better now, was horrible in the beginning; way too melodramatic. Many of the characters (Grissom especially) had too many goofy one-liners, usually delivered as a stinger just before the opening credits. But, if there’s one thing that attracts me to the show, it’s the cinematography. The special effects used to explain the forensics behind the show are pretty amazing. At any rate, I’ll try to remember to catch the season finale, because it will be directed by Quinten Tarantino.

• 24

  Every season of ’24′ surprises me. I expect the show to decline in quality at some point, but somehow, the show manages to keep building the tension. I wouldn’t be surprised that if Jack Bauer ever dies, it’ll be from stress.

• Lost

  Another show that just keeps getting better. This show has a lot of things going for it: strong character relationships (there’s Jack & Kate, Jack & Sawyer, Jack Kate & Sawyer, Hurley & Jin, Jin & Sun, Michal & Jin, Michael & Walt, Boone & Locke, Sayid & Shannon — Ok, I could do without that one; that one is just weird), big mysteries and a generous helping of action. So far, the show has maintained a good balance of answering some questions and leaving others unanswered. There’s a danger to both, though. Answer too many questions and your audience stops watching; Don’t answer enough questions and the viewers get frustrated. So far so good. The season finale for this one is bound to be a zinger.

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.

-Hunter S. Thompson

Trippy.

I don’t know much of anything about the original Philip K. Dick book on which this movie is based, but perusing over the descriptions in the Amazon.com listing makes it seem like the funky animation technique is more than warranted.

I hesitate to call it “animation”, because that might be interpreted as a slap in the face for any hard-working animator who works on traditional hand-drawn or 3D animation and creates works of art from scratch. A Scanner Darkly is visualized using what looks like a sophisticated rotoscoping technique. Rotoscoping is a method of animation in which frames of live-action film are “traced”. It’s basically like using tracing paper to copy a drawing. Rotoscoping allows the animators to capture realistic movement, while at the same time giving them the option of augmenting that reality with their own vision. Sometimes it’s very effective, while it can often be seen as a cheat.

Ralph Bakshi has been known to employ rotoscoping in his films; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Bakshi’s animated 1978 version of Lord of the Rings was the first film to be made entirely using rotoscoping. At the time, that was probably the only way to realize such a huge film on a reasonable budget. (Interesting bit of trivia: at the time that film was made, Screen Actors Guild rules prohibited providing on-screen credits for actors who did not have speaking roles. Since the actors in the live-action footage had no speaking parts, none of them were credited. Billy Barty — one of the most famous “little people” actors in Hollywood — who played two roles in the film, was so incensed by this that he challenged those rules. Because of his efforts, thousands of people who would normally go uncredited are now recognized in films today.)

There are various methods and levels of rotoscoping, each requiring different amounts of work and allowing varying degrees of artistic freedom.

On the one hand, rotoscoping can be sparingly used to, say, capture the basic movement of a dancer. Sometimes, a simple animated stick figure is produced by rotoscoping. This gives only the minimum amount of information needed to create realistic motion. An animator can then use this reference to create a final finished work.

On the other end of the spectrum, rotoscoping can be used to create an animation from start to finish. Using the example above, an animator could trace the dancer’s body form, even the folds and colors of her clothing, to yield a fluidly dancing animated character.

Of course those are two extremes, and there are varying degrees of rotoscoping in between. But generally, the amount of rotoscoping used is inversely proportional to the artistic talent required to create the finished work.

On the digital front, rotoscoping has inspired new techniques.

Motion capture, or mo-cap, is a sort of grandchild of rotoscoping. Mo-cap animation is created by attaching reflective spheres or dots to an actor. The location of the reflectors correspond to the locations of the body’s joints. A series of cameras or infra-red detectors records the movement of these reflectors during the actors performance, creating a three dimensional skeleton. An animator can then attach a 3D model to the skeleton and quickly create an animation sequence with the model. Usually, mo-cap requires a lot of tweaking to create a polished animation, but it does allow the animator to create very realistic and convincing motion.

Computer generated films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within were created using motion capture. At times, the performances of the digital actors is almost eerily realistic.

Conversly, Pixar’s CGI films ( Toy Story , The Incredibles, etc.) were created using little or no motion capture at all.

There are films that fit somewhere in between. The digital dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park films obviously could not be animated using normal motion capture, since no real dinosaurs exist to provide a performance that could be “mo-capped”. However, motion capture was used extensively for the film’s research of how dinosaurs might have moved. Animators used motion capture to record the walking movements of elephants to approximate how a huge and lumbering brachiosaur might walk.

I have a feeling that A Scanner Darkly uses a form of automatic digital rotoscoping. Computer programs can be used to analyze live action footage and create a sort of “cell-shaded” look. The computer creates thick black outlines around moving shapes and high-contrast color boundaries (for example, outlining a character’s clothing or head), and reduces the number of colors and shades used in other areas (such as reducing the color in a character’s face and skin to only a few shades with hard boundaries). This visual “simplification” of live action footage gives the film the look of a traditional animated cartoon while at the same time preserving the realistic and subtle motion of the actor’s performance. Also, reducing the complexity of the scene allows animators to more easily manipulate the footage — important when creating a film that apparently will have a lot of trippy drug-enduced halucinations.

Like any digital art, however, one cannot rely on the computer to do all of the work and expect great results. Even this kind of rotoscoping requires a lot of adjustment and tweaking to achieve the desired look.

I’m not sure if the subject matter of A Scanner Darkly is something I can relate to, but it looks to be an interesting science fiction story with a unique visual style. I’d love to see the trailer on the big screen.

The official trailer for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has finally been released on, of all places, Amazon.com

I’m glad to see that the new film will uphold the spirit of the books.

OW. OW.

Disney has released images of the Vogons from the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film.

A close-up shot

The Vogons plan the demolition of Earth

Arthur and Ford in the Vogon Poetry-Appreciation Chairs

Another close-up. Talk about unfortunate skin. Unfortunate face, in fact.

If you take a lot of digital pictures (or just have a lot of them stored on your harddrive), you can’t go wrong with Google’s Picasa 2. Picasa 2 is a great image management application that catalogs your pictures (videos, too) using a handy interface. There are also image touch-up tools built in (rotation, resizing, automatic and manual color correction, redeye reduction and even some effects like soft focus and sepia tone). Now of course these editing tools are limited, and nowhere near as complex as those found in paint packages like Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or even freeware packages like Gimp, but having them available in Picasa is a nice touch. The automatic adjustments like contrast and color correction produce some very nice results.

Picasa 2 also allows you to e-mail and print photos, create a nifty collage/poster, publish photos to a Blogger blog, order prints through a few different services and even create image galleries that can easily be published on the web. The default gallery designs are somewhat limited, but since they use CSS, I was able to easily edit them to match the theme of my site.

. . . to improve on yet another internet resource:

Maps.Google.com

The interface is very slick; crisp and clean. I had a few problems where certain sections of the zoomed-in map wouldn’t load, immediately, but other than that, I like it.

Please excuse the Dr. Smithian alliteration in the title of this post. Oh, the pain.

Thanks to Creole Ned for inadvertently introducing me to WordPress, the amazing collection of PHP resources that allowed me to create this site. WordPress is so easy to set up, it’s almost embarrassing.

Ned is also the head honcho at QuirkyBastards.net. QB.net has sort of become my second online home, and there are a lot of great people at the forums there; and I’m almost certain that most of them are not at all insane. Ned also graciously allows me to host my Half Park and Spam Art collections there.

After I posted a picture of Merlin in a box, Ned responded in kind which, as everyone knows, is a declaration of Cute Cat Photo War.

Here’s my return volley; I’m bringing out the big guns:

A company called CinemaNow is planning to provide single episode downloads of TV shows. NBC Universal is the sixth of seven major networks (Paramount/Viacom being the seventh) to sign on. If done correctly, this could be a really cool thing. The biggest problems I see are a) providing enough content to keep people interested, and b) balancing the quality of the recordings with download times.

Personally, I would love to get high quality widescreen DIVX versions of some shows (like Battlestar Galactica, Lost, ’24′, etc.) while it’s not as important with shows like sitcoms.

Then there’s the issue of price. What’s a reasonable price for a half-hour sitcom? Fifty cents? A dollar? Five dollars? Again, that depends largely on the quality of the episode, among other things.

The popularity of TV shows on BitTorrent networks is a testament to the fact that this kind of thing could work. It’s already being done with movies (on sites like Movielink.com), and of course music (iTunes, Napster, etc.).