Dorkman's Blog

And now for something completely WordPress

2009-02-14T14:57:00.000-08:00

I officially shifted the blog to WordPress hosting -- which you'd know if you were checking it via DorkmanScott.com! For shame.

Anyway, that's where I plan to post new posts from here on. All posts and their comments to date have been transferred over, so it'll be like nothing changed, aside from the look. See you there!

Happy Darwin Day!

2009-02-12T09:31:00.000-08:00

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of naturalist Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species. Darwin did not create the theory of evolution, which dates back to the Greeks; he only postulated the mechanism by which it occurred, natural selection.

Despite the efforts of certain people to discredit evolutionary theory, because of a vested interest in Bronze Age superstitions that cannot be reconciled with observable fact, our understanding of evolution forms the cornerstone not only of modern biology, but resonates throughout all of the natural sciences, from chemistry to archaeology to anthropology to medicine.

If evolution weren't true, none of the modern medications or antibiotics we have would work. But they do, because it is.

There was a lot that Darwin didn't know about -- he had no knowledge of what we today call genetics, for example. Although DNA would be discovered during his lifetime, its implications in relationship to natural selection would not be understood until the mid-20th century. With all the advancements in knowledge we have made in the last century and a half, Darwin would likely find any of the current work being done in the field of evolutionary biology completely mystifying.

But through 150 years of science, evolution by means of natural selection has been proven, and strengthened, with every new discovery. There are certainly conceivable discoveries that could be made that would render the theory invalid, or at least inadequate to explain them; but such discoveries have, to date, never been made. Anyone who tells you that evolution is a "theory in crisis" is either ignorant of the facts, or lying about them.

Ars Technica has an article about appreciating evolution. I'm sure you will find many more out there to enjoy and learn from.

Today, by the way, also happens to be the actual 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. So props to him too, though the official birthday celebration has been paired with the celebration of Washington's birthday and gets everyone not working in post-production a day off on Monday.

Sony Releases New Piece of Shit that Doesn't Fucking Work

2009-02-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

Brilliant, biting, and like all good satire, way too fucking true.

Where the Wild Things Are -- Wild Thing Pics

2009-02-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

Slashfilm has some images from the Spike Jonze film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, showing for the first time the eponymous Wild Things.

WTWTA is a classic children's book -- I doubt there are many of my generation or younger who don't have a strong affection for it. And everything I've seen and heard about the adaptation sounds fantastic. There was a brief scare after Jonze turned in his first cut -- it was deemed too scary for kids and too weird for adults. This worried the studio. But it excited me.

Even though WTWTA is an extremely short book (only 48 pages, and averaging a single sentence per two-page spread), it sounds like Jonze used that as a starting-off point to create what could be an equally classic, timeless film. Bizarrely, even though there is limited source material and I expect (and even desire) deviations, my expectations are higher for this than any other adaptation in recent memory.

Loved Jonze's work to date. He's just weird enough to pull this off. Fingers crossed that October 2009 it turns out to be what I hope it is.

New Job Joys

2009-02-09T09:50:00.000-08:00

So as a brief note, I've landed a full-time visual effects gig for the next couple of months with Digiscope. I can't say yet what I'm working on, I'm afraid, but I think I will be able to by the time the trailer hits.

This isn't my first experience with working at an FX house. I had a brief stint at Glowgun at the end of last year working on Feast 3 (which I assume is safe for me to say since they've already added it to my IMDB profile). But this is the first time working on a high-budget, high-profile movie that will see a wide theatrical release. But again, I can't say more than that right now.

I've got a ten-hour workday and I've still got a bunch of personal projects that need my attention in the off-hours, so while I'm not suspending blog activity, I'm going to shift the focus for a little while. Instead of the longer, more opinion-driven posts, it'll probably be more re-blogging. YouTube videos, news articles, stuff like that, with maybe a very brief commentary. That's aside from Secular Sunday posts, which will still be relatively comprehensive.

So I'll still be posting with frequency, and possibly even more frequency than before since the posts will be brief. And stay tuned for when I can actually say what I'm doing here!

Secular Sunday: Atheist Q&A!

2009-02-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

So I actually can't find my copy of Case for a Creator right now. I picked it up to have it with me to write this week's entry and now I can't remember where I put it, and with a new job taking up ten of my daily waking hours, I actually don't have a lot of time to look for it.

It probably sounds like I chucked it in the bin, but I didn't -- I'd tell you if I did. So please, nobody send me another one. I will find it.

But this week, we're not falling far from that tree, because I'm still going to talk about a Lee Strobel topic. Lee Strobel was asked some questions, by an atheist, which he answered.

I may address his answers another time, but I am led to think that maybe I've been a little harsh on the guy. I've accused him of intentionally obscuring or distorting the truth, but it appears quite possible that he really just has poor critical thinking skills, no doubt atrophied from years of disuse. It seems like he may honestly believe that the things he writes and relays in his books really are logically sound.

To paraphrase Gandalf: a fool he may be; but perhaps, at least, an honest one.

But as I said, that's not what I'm going to post about today. In response to the atheist questions posed to him, he and some of his apologist buddies came up with some theist questions they would like to hear answered by atheists. Other atheist blogs have addressed them, but I thought I'd take my own crack at it.

What I say is not the "official atheist answer," as no such thing can exist. Atheism has no tenets or dogma and thus cannot have an "official" position other than the non-belief in gods. These are only my responses to these questions.

By the way, some Harry Potter spoilers slipped in there by means of comparison. If you haven't read the books, particularly the last two, then you should have by now, but I'll still tag it in case you want to avoid.

Christian apologist Mike Licona: "What turns you off about Christianity? Irrespective of one's worldview, many experience periods of doubt. Do you ever doubt your atheism and, if so, what is it about theism or Christianity that is most troubling to your atheism?"

Licona's first error, of course, is in assuming that the only alternative to atheism is Christianity. I might ask him what "turns him off" about Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam. Perhaps he would give reasons that regarded the behavior of certain of those religions' adherents, but ultimately I think it would come down to "I just don't buy what they're selling." As the saying goes, we are both nonbelievers in Apollo, Thor, Mithra, Shiva, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, among thousands of others. I only take it one God further than he does (or three, depending on your perspective).

My issue, first and foremost, is not that Christianity has "turn offs." It is that theism in general lacks sufficient evidence to indicate the existence of any god, much less any one(/three) in particular.

Though I both experienced and continue to research theistic beliefs, I have yet to come across any evidence that has "troubled" me with regard to my current lack of belief. I would be more than willing to acknowledge such evidence, should it ever be presented, but I'm not holding my breath.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about what's written in the Bible that I find repulsive, and I'm pretty sure from a literary standpoint that God is actually the villain of the story. And there's a lot about the intolerance and arrogance that Christianity has a tendency to engender in its followers that "turns me off." And I think that it damages critical thinking skills, and does not allow for sufficient questioning or doubt. But none of that has anything to do with the reason I don't believe in it.

Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig: "What's the real reason you don't believe in God? How and when do you lose your faith in God?"

Well, first of all, I object to the way this question is phrased. Asking for the "real reason" implies that I have or would give a "fake" one.

That aside: I don't believe in God because I have not been shown any compelling reason that I should. It's the same reason I don't believe in unicorns, faeries, goblins, or Lord Voldemort.

The second question is equally presumptuous, as it assumes that the atheist being questioned has ever had faith in any god in the first place. It happens to be true in my case, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a very loaded question.

I've already written my answer to this, but the short version is that I lost my faith in God when I went seeking for evidence to strengthen my faith, and sharpen my apologetical skills, and found at every turn that none existed. And so I was forced to determine -- against my heart's desire, at the time -- that God, too, most probably did not exist.

Author and Christian pastor John Ortberg: "How can you create a meaningful life in a meaningless universe?"

My question in return is: how does the meaningfulness of the universe impact the meaningfulness of one's own life?

Sure, the fact is that millions of years from now, not only will I be long gone, but the entire human race will be gone. There will be no one left to remember my name or my deeds, and the universe will continue to do what it does as if humanity had never existed. But that's true whether God exists or not, isn't it? The fact that my life doesn't mean anything to the dust of Mars is a fact, whether there is a God or isn't.

Does that really preoccupy anyone on a day-to-day basis?

Quite honestly, I think life has more meaning when that meaning is ours to determine and create, rather than just fulfilling a grand "plan" in which our every action is already anticipated and accounted for. Where is the meaning there, when your part to play is given to you by some outside entity rather than self-determined? How is this life "meaningful" when it is supposedly the lesser of the two lives one will live?

I create a meaningful life by making use of my life to improve and enhance the lives of those around me. It is fleeting for all of us, and that should make us more determined to make it as enjoyable as possible. Meaning is whatever we make of it.

Resurrection apologist Gary Habermas: "Utilizing each of the historical facts conceded by virtually all contemporary scholars, please produce a comprehensive natural explanation of Jesus' resurrection that makes better sense than the event itself." "These historical facts are:

-Jesus was killed by crucifixion
-Jesus' disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them
-The conversion of the church persecutor Saul
-the conversion of the skeptic James, Jesus' half-brother
-The empty tomb of Jesus.

These "minimal facts" are strongly evidenced and are regarded as historical by the vast majority of scholars, including skeptics, who have written about the resurrection in French, German, and English since 1975. While the fifth fact doesn't enjoy quite the same universal consensus, nevertheless it is conceded by 75 percent of these scholars and is well supported by the historical data if assessed without preconceptions."

That's a lot of assertion, and a lot of bandying-about of the word "fact" without actually backing it up.

Who are these "contemporary scholars"? I want names, and the reasons that they "concede" these "historical facts." Better yet, skip the appeal to authority and just tell me what the evidence is that makes those assertions "facts." As far as I can tell, they are not facts at all, just a semantical ploy. Borrowing from another atheist blogger's answers, I will rephrase your "facts" in the form of questions, because that's really what they are: questions to be answered.

Was Jesus killed by crucifixion? Skipping the questionable nature of the very existence of Jesus at all (and yes, it is questionable), it is reasonable to believe that he might have been crucified. It was an actual method of execution, so it is not outside the boundaries of possibility that a rabble-rouser named Jesus was executed by means of crucifixion.

Did Jesus' disciples believe that he rose and appeared to them? Again granting that he existed at all, sure. His followers may very well have believed that Jesus rose and appeared to them. But the Aztecs believed that human sacrifice made the sun rise. Scientologists believe that our bodies are filled with alien ghosts. Just because a person or group of people believe something does not mean that it is true.

Did the church persecutor Saul convert to Christianity? Once again, the first assumption is that such a person ever existed, although admittedly it is likely that he did. Saul of Tarsus may genuinely have converted to Christianity, and may genuinely have believed that he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. But again, because someone believes something does not make it true. As no one was with him when he had his vision, it seems perfectly possible that he hallucinated the experience. He was walking in desert heat, maybe he got sunstroke. That he genuinely believed it happened does not mean it really happened.

My pet theory, on the other hand, is that Saul realized that he could benefit much more by conning believers than by killing them. Paul realized he could make some serious cash off the whole "tithing" thing if he got in at the high levels of the church, which he did. He's also the one who invented the notion, out of thin air, that Jesus' salvation applied to Gentile as much as Jew. Sounds like he was trying to add more members to swell up the coffers.

I have no evidence of that, but it's certainly a "natural explanation...that makes better sense than [resurrection]."

Did the skeptic James, Jesus' half-brother, convert to Christianity? As I hope is clear by now, I find this point irrelevant. Doesn't make it true even if he did.

Was Jesus' tomb empty? So what if it was? The best and most sensible explanation you've got for a dead body not being where it's supposed to is that it un-died? Grave-robbing is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, if there in fact even was a Jesus and if in fact there even was an empty tomb. I might as well say that [HARRY POTTER SPOILERS]Dumbledore's cracked tomb is evidence of Voldemort's return[/SPOILERS]. If we can't even establish the existence of the tomb, much less its empty or cracked state, then it's fatuous to claim that its emptiness is evidence of supernatural events.

In fact, of all explanations for all the so-called "historical facts," even if their historicity was totally undisputed, the resurrection explanation is the one that makes the least sense, is the least reasonable, and has the least evidentiary support.

These "minimal facts" are strongly evidenced and are regarded as historical by the vast majority of scholars, including skeptics, who have written about the resurrection in French, German, and English since 1975.

Name them, and their writings. Don't just say "there's lots of them, srsly." Doesn't fly.

Christian philosopher and apologist Paul Copan: "Given the commonly recognized and scientifically supported belief that the universe (all matter, energy, space, time) began to exist a finite time ago and that the universe is remarkably finely tuned for life, does this not (strongly) suggest that the universe is ontologically haunted and that this fact should require further exploration, given the metaphysically staggering implications?"

"And, second, granted that the major objection to belief in God is the problem of evil, does the concept of evil itself not suggest a standard of goodness or a design plan from which things deviate, so that if things ought to be a certain way (rather than just happening to be the way they are in nature), don't such ‘injustices' or ‘evils' seem to suggest a moral/design plan independent of nature?"

Well, to the first question. I'm not sure that the belief that all matter and energy began a finite time ago is "commonly recognized." Certainly the universe as we know it had a "beginning," which we call the Big Bang, but it was not a sudden creation of matter -- just a sudden expansion. It represented a change in the state of matter and energy, but not necessarily the beginnings of them.

I'm sure the "fine tuning" argument will come up later in Case for a Creator, so I won't go into it now, but I have a counter-question: if the universe is so "finely tuned" for life, why is there remarkably little life in the universe? Why is so much of the universe hostile to life as we know it? The vacuum of space does not support life, nor does any other planet of which we are currently aware. Even our own planet has large swaths of its surface that are hostile to life. It's a bit like finding a single silver atom in a 20 ton granite boulder, and saying that the boulder was "finely tuned" for silver.

A universe "finely tuned" to support life should presumably be teeming with it. It seems to me that life as we know it has finely tuned itself to survive within the constraints of this universe, rather than the reverse.

As for the question of evil, it's an easily observable fact that there is no universal morality or concept of evil that transcends boundaries of culture. We believe the actions of Muslim terrorists are evil; they in turn think the same of our actions. Who is right?

Everyone defines evil in their own way, and cultures create a consensus, one that can shift drastically (see, for example, the shift in Western culture from considering homosexuality "evil" to merely "undesirable," and now very nearly to "acceptable").

The notion of something being "bad" or "wrong" is not remarkable when each culture, and each individual, ultimately defines it for themselves.

Radio host Frank Pastore: "Please explain how something can come from nothing, how life can come from death, how mind can come from brain, and how our moral senses developed from an amoral source."

Okay, one at a time:

How does something come from nothing? Atheists aren't the ones that say it does. Theists are, and they have no answer for how other than "magic." In the beginning God created etc.

I happen to think that all the matter in the universe has always existed in some form. So I can't answer the question because I don't believe the assertion I'm being asked to defend.

How can life come from death? Life doesn't come from death. Life, as we define it, comes from natural chemical processes that occur in various reproductive cycles.

How can mind come from brain? Dunno how. It's a fascinating question currently without an answer.

But despite the fact that we don't yet know how it does, we do have strong evidence indicating that it does. With MRI and other scanning technology, we can see brain activity occurring when a person engages their higher functions of thought and reasoning, and the areas of the brain triggered have a consistent correlation with the types of thought processes occurring. And we have plenty of documented cases in which brain damage has drastically altered a person's personality and thought patterns (aka what we would call "mind").

How did our moral senses develop from an amoral source? This is a question that would be done a disservice with a short blog answer. Entire books can be (and have been) written on the subject, and I suggest you look into them for a more comprehensive answer. But for the sake of the Q&A, the short-to-the-point-of-oversimplification version is that humans are pack animals, a cooperative species. In our evolutionary past, we would have survived better working together than against each other, and so it would have benefitted us as a species to evolve a sense of how to get along with each other. Hence what we call "morality."

Not to mention basic empathy. There's nothing mystical about "I don't want it to happen to me, so I won't make it happen to others."

Christian apologist Greg Koukl: "Why is something here rather than nothing here? Clearly, the physical universe is not eternal (Second Law of Thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology). Either everything came from something outside the material universe, or everything came from nothing (Law of Excluded Middle). Which of those two is the most reasonable alternative? As an atheist, you seem to have opted for the latter. Why?"

The first question implies that there is a "why," and also that "nothing" being here is even a possibility, neither of which we have reason to claim are or could be the case. As I mentioned above, just because the universe as we know it is not eternal, does not mean that the matter comprising the universe is in some way finite. On what basis would you expect there to be "nothing" here?

The "two" options are not only a false dichotomy -- they are actually saying the same thing. If everything has to come from somewhere, then the "something outside the physical universe" had to come from somewhere. Or else it came from nothing. So if you believe that something outside of the universe created the universe, you're still stating that everything came from nothing, you're just pushing that "nothing" back a step. What's the point of that?

Neither of the two options presented is particularly reasonable, and as a result, I have not "opted for" either one.

What about the third option, that the universe has always existed? That's the answer you would give to "where did God come from," isn't it? "He's always been there." So why can't that answer be true of the universe, and just skip the tacked-on anthropomorphized "cause"?

Well, that was fun. Presumably back to Case for a Creator next week.

Continuing my education: Casablanca

2009-02-04T20:18:00.000-08:00

I didn't go to film school. I've stated my thoughts on film school many times -- though never on this blog, so I probably should do a post just to have it on the record -- but the short version is I think it's a vestigial concept that was useful once but is now generally a waste of money, at least in terms of writing or directing. (I think programs for the more technical skills like editing, cinematography, sound and VFX are still useful because there's an element of learning the technology hand-in-hand with the technique, but that's a caveat for another day.)

My point is, for better or worse, what I know about films and filmmaking is largely self-taught. I've always believed that in order to make movies, you have to watch movies, and if there's anything in my life about which I could be considered "religious," it's probably that. I'm fortunate to have been born in the age of the video rental, and my grandparents kept a membership to a Mom & Pop video store through the 80s and 90s, just for me. My late grandfather had two VCRs, so that he could dupe the rental to another tape, and I could watch the movies over and over without having to re-rent them.¹

Still, my movie-watching education has been a curriculum of my own devising, and I have many "classic" films yet to check off the list. See, for example, my being so late to the party re: The Godfather. So here's the latest in what I consider the lifelong continuation of my film education: Casablanca.

So what did I learn?

Well, just to have it said: I liked it a lot. A few re-watches and I might even love it. Well-structured, moved along at a good pace without feeling rushed. And my God, the dialogue! No wonder this movie is so oft-quoted. It's pretty theatrical, even corny sometimes -- and according to IMDB and Wikipedia, the screenwriters themselves acknowledged as much -- but somehow it just all works.

Some of the exchanges between Rick and the less scrupulous denizens of Casablanca are particularly sharp and witty, though like most of the Golden Age films, it has a certain quality to it that initially makes it feel like "very good writing" rather than "believable conversation." Part of it is no doubt the fact that every line had to be very carefully constructed to get approved under the Hays Code. Part of it is the fact that film was still fairly new, and most writers were playwrights first and had a more theatrical style.

But part of it, I think, is outside the writing and in the performance. I think part of it is the way that performers were essentially property, loaned out and traded like baseball cards, generally lacking any passion for the projects they did. They just showed up and read the lines for their day, and it has the (pleasantly) odd, workmanlike, even formal feel that I've frankly come to appreciate about the old films.

They're almost like feature-length demonstrations of the Kuleshov effect, in which you're presented with films which give you, as an audience member, very little in the way of emotional inflection; and yet by the things that the characters say and do, it stimulates your own emotions and even causes you to project emotions onto the characters who are otherwise not expressing them.²

There's not a lot of screaming, or sobbing, or contorting of faces, or even moving much faster than a brisk walk. But in that stark simplicity -- whether it was by design, or simply an inevitable result of the assembly-line nature of Golden Era filmmaking (and I suspect the latter) -- they created a canvas with strong outlines, leaving it to the audience to complete the picture. And engaging the audience, as I said just recently, is a crucial factor in whether or not they give a damn about the movie while they're sitting in their seats, to say nothing of when they leave the theatre. I can definitely see why people might prefer this style to the more raw, even if perhaps more "real," style of acting today.

A modern disciple of this style would be David Mamet, from whose book On Directing Films I apprehended "inflection" as a filmmaking term (though I don't know for certain if he coined it). He generally seems to allow a single character a single emotional outburst in his dialogue-heavy films; otherwise the performances are very calm, restrained, and straightforward. Yet in that calm, because of the situations he creates, there is somehow anger; or fear; or arrogance; uncertainty; desperation; triumph -- all created by juxtaposition of the words and images, rather than the actors actively emoting. And because the emotions are not expressed, they are breathtakingly potent, boiling beneath the surface. (I still need to do my review of last year's phenomenal Redbelt, in which I can get into this more deeply.)

This is also, I would venture a guess, why many people of my generation and younger find these kinds of movies "boring." They are not used to having to do part of the storytelling work, are used to taking emotional cues from the actors' faces and tone of voice rather than their choice of words. It is a different kind of movie, a more challenging kind of movie for both the audience and (if he's doing it intentionally) the filmmaker. It relies on both sides of the equation placing a certain degree of trust into the other, and a certain degree of effort into the creation of something that can become intensely personal to everyone who views it. And it keeps the movie alive and relevant, because part of its vibrancy comes from the viewer, not from the screen.

In short, I learned for myself why Casablanca is a classic. I'm glad that I watched this before many other films, because a less-quotable film may not have caught my attention and helped me understand my role in the filmmaking experience -- both expanding it as a viewer, and perhaps contracting it when I'm in the hot seat. I think I will appreciate films of the era more, having experienced Casablanca first, and I do think it will improve my own filmmaking. It deserves its place in the pantheon of great films.

Instead of closing out this post with one of the old standard quotes -- "looking at you, kid," "beautiful friendship," etc. -- I'll go with one that Peter Lorre's character says in his one scene in the film (though I bet they used his name prominently in the advertising).

I use it because I think it relates perfectly to the odd way that the actors' and filmmakers' dispassionate, occasionally even hostile relationship with Golden Age material could sometimes, somehow, produce films of profound, lasting truth and power:

You know, Rick, I have many a friend in Casablanca. But somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust.

That's right, my grandfather was pirating movies decades before it was cool. He even duplicated the FBI warning telling you not to do that, the deliciousness of which I appreciated when I got older.

On a footnote side-note: despite my grandfather being perfectly capable of understanding how to daisy-chain two VCRs together and having one record to another, while still outputting the movie to the television so I could watch and dupe simultaneously, the clocks on both VCRs flashed 12:00 for the entirety of my formative years. ↩

The Kuleshov effect technically only refers to two images juxtaposed, via editing, without inflection, or any sort of visual "editorializing" telling you what to think; and yet their juxtaposition creates an implied statement or emotion. But I would say that this applies equally to two lines of dialogue presented in the same manner. ↩

Bale-istic Remixes

2009-02-03T17:13:00.001-08:00

Welcome to this wonderful thing we call the web. Within 24 hours of Bale's outburst it has already been remixed several times.

My favorite so far is Christian Bale vs. Bill O'Reilly.

And from master celebrity re-mixer RevoLucian, who during the campaign season brought us Sarah Palin Remixed, we now have Bale Out.

Turn-around is fast on these things.

UPDATE: RevoLucian has put up a link to download a high-quality MP3 of Bale Out. Get it now!

I'm with Bale

2009-02-03T02:17:00.001-08:00

Apparently there was a bit of a row on the set of Terminator 4 last summer. Christian Bale blew his top at the DP, apparently for walking onto the set during a take. And now TMZ, that perfect encapsulation of our celebrity-obsessed culture, has the audio.

First impression: that audio is really clean.

Second impression: I'm siding with Bale.

Now, I wasn't there. I don't know what really went on. And I know a lot of people hear that audio and think "Holy shit, what a fucking diva asshole. I would never work with that dick and I've lost a ton of respect for him." But quite honestly, I disagree.

Acting is hard. If you want to do it well, it's hard. You've got to live in the space, you've got to really believe everything you're saying every moment that the camera is on you. Worse yet, in the film world, you have to believe it in five minute chunks, aka takes. You've got to know your lines, take direction, make sure you're made up, make sure you hit your marks, and maneuver around the lumbering apparatus that is a shooting crew -- while simultaneously looking like you aren't doing any of that at all. While looking like the character you're playing a real person in a real situation.

Gary Oldman has lamented the fact that the crew gets to take hours to do their jobs, and yet he's expected to show up, say his lines, get it right the first couple times and move on. Everybody always makes a big thing about how an actor in a biopic -- whether it be Carrey in Man on the Moon or Langella in Frost/Nixon -- never breaks character while on set. The fact is that this is the only way they can be sure they're doing their job properly. If they don't focus themselves wholeheartedly to respectful personification, it is far, far too easy in the staccato world of production to just fall into impersonation. The actor's job is to forget that they are acting, so that you, in turn, can also forget that they are acting. Sometimes, with very complex characters, that means they have to never acknowledge they are acting as long as they are on the set, or else they will not be able to maintain the character's reality before the cameras.

On a big-budget picture, I imagine the pressure is immense. There's an awareness that you are burning cash at a terrifying rate just by standing there. You've only got the brief period between "action" and "cut" to actually focus in and put yourself in the world. You need to use that time to immerse yourself in the fantasy world of the film. Because you care about doing a good job, doing the best job. The quality of your work matters to you no matter what the project, so within the limitations you are going to cast everything out of your mind, and just be in that other world, with everything you've got.

So imagine, that in that brief period between "action" and "cut" that is yours, that moment you need everyone to disappear from your awareness so you can be that character, imagine that the DP goes wandering onto the set, right in your line of sight, right in the middle of the scene. And he thinks it's okay because the camera can't see him.

He's showing total disrespect for your craft, to the extent that he doesn't even seem to acknowledge that your work is important -- doesn't acknowledge that you're even working at all. Listen to his excuse -- he's "checking the light." You can't wait for "cut," guy? You can't just look at the frigging monitor?

If you're an actor that cares about the quality of your work, how do you NOT go apeshit over something like that?

David After Dentist

2009-02-03T01:02:00.000-08:00

I saw this kind of behavior more than once at/after parties while I was in college. It's much, much cuter and funnier when it's a seven-year-old tripping out on anaesthesia, though.

Secular Sunday: Day of Rest

2009-02-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

No post today, sorry. I've got a bunch of other things I'm in the midst of writing, and some FX work for both Sandrima Rising and another project I'm not allowed to talk about yet. Yesterday's post on evolution will have to suffice in its stead.

I won't make this a habit, and in fact I've discovered the function that lets me write a post but publish it much later; in future I'll do my best to make sure I've got the post written before Sunday.

So for today, enjoy your Superbowl, or your To Catch a Predator marathon, or whatever it is you do today.

Newsweek drops the ball

2009-01-31T00:24:00.000-08:00

What the hell, Newsweek. You act like you want to be taken as a serious journalistic source for, you know, news. And yet you go publishing this utter nonsense about a supposed re-emergence of Lamarckist theory?

The short version of Lamarckist theory is that it is "evolution via acquired traits." The article gives a good example of the theory, which is that giraffe's necks got longer because short-necked giraffes stretched their necks to reach the trees, and their offspring were born with the longer necks. This is tantamount to claiming that if a very light-skinned person spends a lot of time in the sun and gets tan, he or she will have tan-skinned offspring. The theory is obviously absurd to us today, but before Darwin hit on natural selection, the jury was still out on how exactly evolution took place (although the fact that it did take place was not generally under dispute).

The explanation of Lamarckism is about the only thing this article gets right.

First of all, what the hell is this Sharon Begley character doing writing Newsweek's science articles? A glance at other articles to her credit include "Can God Love Darwin, Too?" and "Science Finds God." I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

She starts this article with the following:

Alas, poor Darwin. By all rights, 2009 should be his year, as books, museums and scholarly conclaves celebrate his 200th birthday (Feb. 12) and the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species" (Nov. 24), the book that changed forever how man views himself and the creation.

That's right. Not the universe. The "creation."

Oh, but it gets better. From Begley's biography:

Sharon Begley, widely known for her ability to break down complex scientific theories and write about them in simple prose, returned to Newsweek in March 2007 from the Wall Street Journal, where she wrote the "Science Journal" column for five years.

This woman is supposed to be an actual science writer. It would seem that by "breaking down complex scientific theories," the writer of this biography (no doubt Begley herself) means "completely misunderstanding and misrepresenting complex scientific theories, so that they can be explained simply and reach the conclusion she desires."

Though granted, I'm only going off one abysmal article. Maybe her others do better, but I haven't read them so I can't address them. Let's talk about the current article.

Some water fleas sport a spiny helmet that deters predators; others, with identical DNA sequences, have bare heads. What differs between the two is not their genes but their mothers' experiences. If mom had a run-in with predators, her offspring have helmets, an effect one wag called "bite the mother, fight the daughter." If mom lived her life unthreatened, her offspring have no helmets. Same DNA, different traits. Somehow, the experience of the mother, not only her DNA sequences, has been transmitted to her offspring.

Second paragraph in, and already she's got so much wrong. Only the mother's DNA sequences are transmitted to her offspring. Her experiences affect the expression of those DNA sequences. Ms. Begley, science writer extraordinaire, seems not to grasp the fundamental difference between a phenotype, and a genotype.

I'm not a programmer, so I can't put this into an actual programming language like a clever blogger, but the developmental process we're talking about basically works like this:

For TRAIT A:
-if CIRCUMSTANCE B is present, express TRAIT A
-if CIRCUMSTANCE B is not present, do not express TRAIT A

That's the very very very simplified version of what we're dealing with here. Begley's article makes it sound like if a water flea's mother is in threatening circumstances, the offspring is spontaneously born with a spiny helmet, apropo of nothing as far as the DNA is concerned.

But the truth of the matter is quite different: the gene for the spiny helmet (TRAIT A) exists in every water flea. It is part of the genotype of that organism. The ones whose mothers were not put in a threatening situation (CIRCUMSTANCE B) simply did not express the trait, meaning that the organisms of the same genotype are of a different phenotype.

It is a well-known principle of gestational development that chemical triggers cause genetic traits to be expressed, or not. For one example, a chemical trigger applied to a human fetus at the right time will cause the fetus to express male traits, i.e. it makes a boy; if that chemical trigger is not applied, the fetus will develop to be a baby girl.¹

It is also well-known that environmental factors can affect both the gametes of an organism, and the development of offspring even after the egg has been fertilized. That's why you shouldn't smoke or drink during pregnancy: it screws up the chemical processes of the body, and as the fetus develops, some important functions may never be triggered on; or some traits that ought to stay off get turned on.

I really shouldn't keep using code analogies since I'm not a programmer, but here goes: Since evolution has been a blind process, extraneous information has not necessarily been culled from the genome to keep things tidy. Each version of the software has added or altered code as needed, but not necessarily subtracted if not needed, only made it inactive. There's a lot of legacy code in our genes, some of which can be very harmful if it is re-activated.

All that to say that the existence of a life-threatening situation simply results in a particular chemical trigger that kicks in during some water fleas' gestational development, causing them to express different traits than water fleas without that chemical trigger.

It is not a level of science that is outside the understanding of a layperson, and certainly not an observation that gives those who accept Darwinian evolution "heart palpitations" as she claims. If a human woman experiences a great deal of stress during pregnancy it can affect the child's development, too. This is no different in principle, the only difference is that the water flea genome has a contingency trait should that situation arise (TRAIT A for CIRCUMSTANCE B).

Begley makes another example about the diets of pregnant mice affecting traits in their offspring, by altering the DNA of their eggs (gametes). Begley "emphasizes" that "this is not a mutation," and Begley is frankly stupid to do so. Of course this is a mutation. The alteration of DNA is the definition of genetic mutation.

Let me emphasize something in my own turn: what she is talking about are not acquired traits. The mother flea does not get a spiny helmet from somewhere else and pass that onto her kids. The mother rat does not turn brown and pass that onto her kids. They undergo experiences which alter the development of their offspring, either at the DNA level or during key stages in development, to express dormant or recessive traits. That is just standard genetics. Nothing new or revolutionary here at all.

So let's skip right to the end here:

The existence of this parallel means of inheritance, in which something a parent experiences alters the DNA he or she passes on to children, suggests that evolution might happen much faster than the Darwinian model implies. "Darwinian evolution is quite slow," says Whitelaw. But if children can inherit DNA that bears the physical marks of their parents' experiences, they are likely to be much better adapted to the world they're born into, all in a single generation. Water fleas pop out helmets immediately if mom lived in a world of predators; by Darwin's lights, a population of helmeted fleas would take many generations to emerge through random variation and natural selection.

It's true that natural selection usually moves fairly slowly. The point, which anyone with even a passing understanding of evolution would manage to grasp, is that those many generations to create the genetic code for helmeted fleas have already occurred, leaving us with the water fleas as we observe them today. The helmets are not a new trait, they are an existing trait that is either expressed or not.

It is certainly interesting that they developed in such a way that allows environmental factors to inform the expression of the trait, rather than just automatically having all water fleas be helmeted. But this is in no way an affront to the theory of evolution via natural selection, and is in fact easily accounted for as a positive survival adaptation. The fact that this article attempts to make it sound like it could invalidate or undermine the theory is not only sensationalism, it's just plain bad science, and Newsweek should be ashamed.

The human Y chromosome is a modified X chromosome. This throws something of a wrench into the arguments of those creationists who would claim that scientific discoveries are only proving information that has always been in the Bible. Gestational development indicates that Adam, in fact, comes from Eve. ↩

DorkmanScott.com working again

2009-01-30T12:15:00.000-08:00

Sorry to those of you who took my advice and updated your bookmarks only to find yourself 404'd. There was a problem with my account at 1and1 and it took a few days to fix. All good now!

I heart Scrivener

2009-01-26T08:29:00.000-08:00

I’m a fairly disorganized person by my nature. I’m easily distracted — though I’ve never been formally diagnosed, I’m fairly certain I have ADD. My thought patterns will often skip from one thing to the next, and sometimes it can be hard to focus in.

I personally think a little mental anarchy can be good for creativity. I think it allows you to make unique and interesting connections, to synthesize old ideas into new in surprising ways (sometimes surprising even to myself, for my part). But at the same time, it’s hard to sit down and actually put things together one after the other; worse yet, it’s sometimes hard for me to keep track of where I keep all my ideas.

I have dozens of spiral notebooks and idea journals with only a few pages written upon apiece. I keep trying to get in the habit of carrying a notepad with me for when inspiration strikes, but ultimately that only results in barely-used notepads being left all over the place. I have a lot of ideas that I want to help shepherd into fully-fledged stories, but often I’ll completely forget them until I stumble across a notebook during a move or a cleaning binge. (Such a discovery will usually result in the end of said binge, as I suddenly become involved with the idea again.) Or I’ll have a great idea for a story moment that I totally forget about, but later I come across it and wonder how it’s possible to forget it since it was the solution to a major story problem.

There’s also the matter of organization. Even once I’ve got all the ideas and I think the story is there somewhere, I have a lot of trouble putting the pieces together. Like the notebooks and journals, I can’t count how many stacks of index cards I’ve bought, thinking I’d write down scenes and pin them to a corkboard and shuffle them around until the goddamn thing made sense, just like the real writers do. (I’ve even bought a corkboard, still in near-mint condition.)

But I don’t like writing by hand. It’s too slow, too clumsy. I’ve been using computers since I was three years old (and happy 25th, Apple!), I type WAY faster than I can write by hand. Cursive never took and my attempts to write that way are sheer chaos. So I prefer to work at a keyboard.

I’ve tried lots of writing tools, the ones that do the digital index cards, the ones that are supposed to help you plot the whole damn thing and have it practically ready to print when you’re done, and when it comes to writing software — really, when it comes to any software — the best program is the one that gets the hell out of your way and facilitates what you want to do. To date, the only specialized writing software I’ve really found worthwhile beyond Microsoft Word (though I’m now using Pages, it’s essentially the same thing) has been Final Draft.

I’ve been a user since Version 3, and I just love FD. Its attempts to add fancy feature sets have been spotty. The “reports” it generates can be useful, but the included auxiliary program, Final Draft Tagger, is so buggy and unreliable as to render it totally useless. But the software’s raison d’être, which is to conform your writing to accepted industry screenplay format, is a workhorse that never lets me down.

More importantly, for me, it’s functionally transparent. I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to pull down a menu item, I don’t even have to use hotkeys. If I’m not typing words, I’m either using ENTER to move to the next line, or TAB to change the input type (from “Action” to “Character,” for example, or “dialogue” to “parenthetical”). I forget that the software is there, and I just write.

A few months ago, some folks on Twitter started raving about a program called Scrivener. I checked out the webpage and wasn’t really convinced. To me it looked like just another word processor with a few extra but largely unnecessary features. Between Word/Pages and Final Draft, I figured I had it covered. I wasn’t sure I saw the benefit of a lot of the features, especially a “full-screen mode,” the prominent advertisement of which I found somewhat inexplicable. But people kept taking up the recommendation, trying it out, and raving and recommending it themselves, so I figured I might as well check the thing out.

Even after downloading, I sat on the demo for several weeks before yet more people’s positive tweets compelled me to sit down and go through the software tutorial, which walks you through the feature set and gives you a sense of what Scrivener can do.

Immediately after I finished the tutorial, I paid my $40 to get the full license — I still had 29 more days of the demo¹, but I knew it was $40 well-spent. That was two days ago, and now here I am, coming full circle to recommend it to my fellow (Mac-based) writers out there.

And here’s why.

Scrivener is, in fact, not a word processor. It is actually a database management tool disguised as a word processor. Within Scrivener you can create multiple discrete documents — different chapters of a novel, or scenes of a screenplay, or each one can be a character bio, or each one just a little doodle of an idea — and you can view them together or separately, create as many as you want for whatever uses you want, all organized into folders as part of a “Draft.”

You can also import reference material such as images, video and audio files, even web pages. Once imported, they're kept locally within the Scrivener (".scriv") file, which means you can take the .scriv to any computer with Scrivener installed, and all your content will be there. You can choose to associate the reference material with certain documents or drafts — for example, Anthony likes to use certain songs as inspiration for certain scenes in his writing, so he could have the songs directly accessible from the relevant document. Likewise you can associate documents with one another, so that you can connect, say, a character bio to a scene including that character, in a sort of interconnected pseudo-Wiki to help you keep track of all your thoughts.

This all exists and is easily manipulated within the Scrivener interface, but if you look under the hood, the .scriv file is really an archive file, like a .zip, and Scrivener is the UI to dynamically adding, rearranging, and viewing the content within the archive. It does the work of creating a file structure and all of that behind the scenes, making the creation, addition, or connecting of content dynamic and creative rather than a lot of “housekeeping.”

I love that. I love that I can just throw everything I’ve got at Scrivener, and although it may be a bunch of different documents, different resources, it’s considered a single file by Scrivener, one which I can easily move around and be sure I'm not losing any of my work. I can shuffle and rework at will without worrying if I’ve forgotten something or buggered the organization, as I would do if I were maintaining the file structure myself.

One way Scrivener uses this to its advantage is with the “snapshots” feature, a smaller-scale version of OSX’s “Time Machine” function. If you’ve got a document that you want to try something new with, but you don’t want to lose your old version, you just create a “snapshot,” and you can call up or restore any snapshot at any time. You can have an effectively unlimited number of snapshots because in truth, the software is just doing an incremental save, and putting the older versions somewhere safe within the database. But from the point of view of the user, you can be sure you’re always working with the latest version, with the older versions right within reach. No more confusion over which version of the document is the most up-to-date.

Also, the fullscreen mode is, indeed, fantastic. As I said, I’m easily distracted, and while I’m writing it’s all too easy for me to go clicking on the Safari icon and checking my e-mail instead of getting the words down, or opening any other program and finding any other excuse. There’s so much on my computer I can be doing, I feel like I should be doing more things at any given moment.

So I set the fullscreen preferences in Scrivener to display green text on an otherwise black screen. The toolbar is invisible, as is the mouse arrow (unless I move it), and my fully-loaded laptop suddenly becomes a simple, old-school word processor.² The psychological value of the visual simplicity is hard to describe, but try it and see if you don’t notice a difference in how much writing you can get done that way. I’ve actually written this whole post in Scrivener’s fullscreen mode, and enjoyed the experience tremendously.³

I’m not going to go into a full blow-by-blow of how to use the app, because there’s a tutorial for that. If you’re serious about writing, it will be well worth your while to download the free demo, and take 30 minutes or so to work along with the provided tutorial file, to get a sense of what Scrivener can do. Even try the demo for the 30 days before you make up your mind. I would guess you would quickly see how the program is worth your $40. For me, it's exactly what I've always needed.

I discovered afterward that Scrivener's 30-day demo is "30 days of using the program." A day only counts toward the limit if you fire up the program on that day, rather than it counting 30 calendar days from first use. So if you only used Scrivener every other day, the demo lasts 60 calendar days, etc. So no need to worry about firing it up to have a play if you "won't have time" afterward -- unlike other software, the demo works around your schedule. And for the record, yes. I still would have bought the license on day 2 even if I had known.↩

Fullscreen mode also has a “typewriter style” carriage return, in which the line of text you are currently editing is always in the middle of your screen, as opposed to most word processors where you write your way down to the bottom of the screen and stay there. It sounds like a small thing, but as with fullscreen mode in general, it’s surprising how much you appreciate it once you start rocking and rolling.↩

There is another program which is just a word processor in fullscreen mode, called WriteRoom. WriteRoom's default scheme is the green on black, which is what compelled me to set up Scrivener the same way. If you just want the "distraction free" writing without all the other features of Scrivener, WriteRoom will get you there, although considering the pricing (WriteRoom goes for $24.95), I feel like the extra $15 for Scrivener is worth it. They're from different developers, as far as I can tell, so it's not as simple as upgrading if you change your mind.↩

Secular Sunday: The Case for a Creator: Chapter Three, Part 3

2009-01-25T01:50:00.000-08:00

Picking up in Chapter Three, still in the Wells interview, we address “icon of evolution” number two: “Darwin’s Tree of Life.”

In brief, Wells makes the assertion that, while the ever-branching tree of life, where everything flows and diverges from a common ancestor, is a good representation of Darwin’s theory, it isn’t supported by the fossil record.

This is, in a word, a lie. Part of it is Wells’ denial that any “transitional forms” exist in the fossil record (but we’ll get to that when he starts in on archaeopetryx), and the other part of it is the Cambrian explosion:

"The Cambrian was a geological period that we think began a little more than 540 million years ago. The Cambrian Explosion has been called the 'Biological Big Bang' because it gave rise to the sudden appearance of most of the major animal phyla that are still alive today, as well as some that are now extinct." [page 43]

Okay, this part is admittedly not a flat-out lie. The issue is more in the presentation -- once again, he clearly expects people not to know and not to do any research.

The Cambrian has been called the Biological Big Bang, but unlike the Big Bang, it isn't theorized to have occured suddenly, at an instant in time. Wells, in using the word "sudden," makes it sound like it happened in a very brief period of time, but the Cambrian period is actually a period of about 80-90 million years. An eye-blink in geological time scales, sure; but in terms of the process of evolution, it's more than enough time for life forms to diversify.

He then states that it "gave rise to...most of the major animal phyla that are alive today." I think that he knows people will read "most of the major animal phyla" and understand it as "most of the animals."

Let's go back to high school science class, and scientific classification. The mnemonic device I learned was:

Kings
Play
Chess
On
Fine
Grained
Sand

This is to help remember the scientific classifications in order, from the most general to the most specific:

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

See how far up "phylum" is? It's the second most general form of classification. Even today, with all the billions of named species, and billions more that are probably as yet undiscovered, you know how many phyla there are?

About thirty-five. So it's not really inconceivable that over the course of about 90 million years, life could diversify in a couple dozen ways for a start.¹ Wells makes a true statement, but phrases it in such a way that it sounds like the current forms of life all popped up at once, fully formed (and if you think I'm putting words or intentions into his mouth, he makes his intentions very clear in following paragraphs, as you will see).

This is simply not the case. The forms of life that arose at that time were still very, very primitive.

Continuing his description, Wells says:

"[A]t the beginning of the Cambrian -- boom! -- all of a sudden, we see representatives of the arthropods, modern representatives of which are insects, crabs, and the like; echinoderms, which include modern starfish and sea urchins; chordates, which include modern vertebrates; and so forth. Mammals came later, but the chordates -- the major group to which they belong -- were right there at the beginning of the Cambrian." [page 44]

This quote has the same word-games, although Wells is getting a bit bolder with his disinformation. Notice he throws in the "modern representatives" of the various phyla, mixed up with the discussion of the earlier phylogenic forms. If one wasn't reading closely enough, one might easily misconstrue this statement as saying that modern animals, essentially in their current form, appeared at the beginning of the Cambrian period. The "boom!" again makes it sound like it was something that happened near-instantly, instead of over 90 million years.

He also just skips merrily over the part where mammals "came later." Where did they come from if not evolution? But of course Wells doesn't bother to answer the question. Stunningly, he doesn't even seem to realize he's raised one.

Goaded on by Strobel, Wells continues with a football analogy that really goes for broke in misrepresenting the Cambrian explosion:

"Okay," he said, "imagine yourself on one goal line of a football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, you pass midfield, and you're approaching the other goal line. All you've seen this entire time are these microscopic, single-celled organisms.

"You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see these sponges and maybe some jellyfish and worms. Then -- boom! -- in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear. As one evolutionary scientist said, the major animal groups 'appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus -- full blown and raring to go.'

"Either way, nobody can call that a branching tree!" [page 44]

Ignoring the fact that football fields don't have a "sixteen-yard line," this is a fairly accurate representation of the geological time scale. Richard Dawkins has a similar illustration he uses, and it goes something like this (paraphrasing from memory): if you hold out both your arms as wide as you can, and consider that the history of the universe, starting with the tip of your left middle finger and the tip of your right middle finger being the present, then life appears somewhere around the wrist of your right hand, complex life appears at about the first knuckle of your middle finger, and the whole of human history is the sliver of dust scraped off the nail by a single light stroke of a nail file.

Cosmic. The problem, again, is that Wells doesn't attempt to give any concrete numbers to the abstraction. The "single stride," the recycled "boom!" all try to make it sound like a much shorter time than it was -- an impossibly short time, in other words. And it simply isn't. Not to belabor the point, but that "single stride" is a period of 90 million years. While the reasons why the Cambrian Explosion occurred do still confound evolutionary biologists, it is not seriously considered a problem for evolutionary theory.

Skeptical Strobel makes a comeback, and this time he actually raises a sensible objection, although it doesn't really seem to follow what they've been talking about before. "Maybe...Darwin was right after all -- the fossil record is still incomplete. Who knows how natural history might be rewritten next week by a discovery that will be made in a fossil dig somewhere?" [page 45]

Wells, surprisingly, admits that it is a possibility that a future fossil discovery will "suddenly fill the gaps...But I sure don't think that's likely...It hasn't happened after all this time, and millions of fossils have already been dug up." [ibid]

What Wells -- and most creationists/ID proponents who make this argument -- seems not to realize, is that fossilization is extremely rare. A large number of circumstances must all fall into place to create a fossil. It is, frankly, astonishing that we have found the millions of fossils that Wells admits we have -- all telling the same story and aligning perfectly with evolutionary understanding, I might add. We have never found a fossil of an animal from a later period in strata dated earlier. There are no fossils of, for example, Jurassic rabbits. The fossil record that we do have it completely consistent with evolutionary theory.

And as an aside: "it hasn't happened after all this time." All this time? What arrogance!

Remember that human history has been too brief to even register as a blip on the cosmological radar. We are coming to the party several billion years late, and have only undertaken the study of paleontology at a serious level for a few hundred years. And yet if we haven't figured out the answer to every question in that time, there must not be one?

That's like walking into a friend's house, and immediately he tells you he's been looking for his keys for three days and asks you to help. Before you can even blink, he says "What, you haven't found them yet? Well, they must not be anywhere!"

"After all this time?" What is Wells smoking?

So they spend a couple of pages insisting that the fossil record doesn't support evolutionary theory. Again, a flat-out lie. That's what fossils are: evidence of the progression of life.

Strobel says, amusingly: "Protestations from Darwinists aside, the evidence has failed to substantiate the predictions that Darwin made." [page 46]

I can only conclude that when Strobel says "protestations from Darwinists," he actually means "evidence presented by people who actually know what they're talking about, but which I choose to ignore." This is another typical strategy -- ask for evidence, but when it is presented, dismiss the person giving the evidence, use that to deflect having to address their evidence, and claim that no evidence has been presented.

See also: "ad hominem."

Fuck, are we still not done with this chapter? Next week might be a long entry; I'm going to plough through as much as I can because we've barely hit the halfway mark, and I'm really tired of this clown. Wells could help me immensely by choosing not to speak in sentences that are almost entirely composed of falsehoods and fallacies, in dire need of explanation and correction, but I don't think I can count on that happening.

At least, no more inconceivable than the time scale of "90 million years" is in general. ↩

Viral Marketing -- ur doin it rite

2009-01-21T22:06:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I lied about not posting about Watchmen no more.

But this viral piece from Watchmen comes on the tail of a disastrously failed viral marketing campaign in Australia, of which I was aware because I follow a number of Aussies on Twitter.

Viral marketing is hard to do right. It's hard to predict what people will latch on to and really start talking about and pass on to their friends. I get a lot of people asking for advice on how to make their video a viral hit, and there are factors you can look at. High-quality content is likely to get passed around. Content attached to some kind of celebrity will probably get passed around. Funny or uplifting usually has a better chance than somber. But beyond that, I dunno. The RvD films are a total fluke -- it's not like we planned for them to be smash hits (although we hoped, on the second one), and I'm not sure you can plan that kind of thing -- although the Ask a Ninja guys might disagree with me.

It seems you can't go wrong with cute animals acting strange. You've seen the sneezing panda? Of course you have. Everyone has. Fucking bear has 30 million views on YouTube. I don't even know how many views the frigging dramatic prairie dog/chipmunk/gopher has, because it's been uploaded about 4000 separate times -- but most of the search results have half a million hits or more.

But trying to actually make an ad badass enough to catch on? It happens. Usually when you're dealing with Superbowl spots, you can be guaranteed people are going to seek it out, and if you do other spots throughout the year like that, there's a good chance people will talk about it and they'll look it up online. But that's more word-of-mouth from traditional advertising than viral marketing, which seeks to make the audience do the work. They spread it around, they show it, they talk about it and it becomes part of the zeitgeist, at least for a little while.

Viral marketing for movies had its genesis with The Blair Witch Project. They set up a website -- when the vast interconnected community they call "Web 2.0" was only just starting to appear on the scene -- which basically asserted that the film was a real documentary about real events. The campaign was so successful that not only did everybody know about this micro-budget indie flick, with almost no real marketing to speak of, but for years afterward I would meet people who still thought it was real.

Quite frankly, I think viral marketing for a film can be a beautiful thing. In the old days, movies were more like live theatre. You sat in your seat and the curtains went up and an overture played. Like in live theatre, the overture was meant to both accommodate some stragglers who were finding their seats, but also to set the mood. If it was a musical it would give you hints of the musical themes you were going to hear. But most of all it provided a buffer zone between your real life, and ushered you into the fantasy life you were about to see on the screen.

We don't have that anymore, except in more specialty theatres. Most theatres are little boxes with chintzy decor. You're bombarded with advertisements for various products, other movies, and reprimands about proper etiquette which people seem to ignore anyway. These days movies don't even have opening credits for the most part, which means you just have to hit the ground running when the film starts playing.

Viral marketing like the Watchmen piece below help, I think, to fill that gap. It creates a whole "experience" of the film's reality, allowing you an early taste of accepting and understanding and engaging the world of the film.

When done right, the seams are invisible. For one thing, note that this video never once mentions the film Watchmen. It's not really an advertisement so much as supplemental material, about what is ultimately one of the central concerns of the story (mild spoilers): Dr. Manhattan changed the world, and no one can in that world can imagine it without him.

It sets the stage for the time period (an alternate 1980s) by being a very faithfully-produced replica of a 70s-era news broadcast, complete with "bad VHS" type degrading, which is heaviest early on.

It also frees up the filmmakers to not really have to deal with setting this up too much in the movie. The world will be different, and what we have here is three minutes of exposition which are unlikely to be crucial to the story, but create, as I said, a fuller, more immersive world.

The last "nice touch" is that the video is posted by the user "thenewfrontiersman," which is the name of a sort of widely-read, conspiracy-theory type newspaper in the Watchmen world. The kind of paper that sometimes gets a scoop but is usually just adding editorial paranoia to otherwise innocuous events (i.e. the kind of paper an unfortunate number of people, in our America as well as theirs, tend to believe). If they do more videos, we may get to become acquainted with the personality of The New Frontiersmen, as well as other characters in the film.

This kind of marketing becomes fun, almost interactive. A kind of spontaneous roleplaying has already showed up in the comments, with people pretending that this world really exists, that this news broadcast is a genuine part of our history.

"I gotta say, I miss all those costumed heroes," one says. "Sure they were reckless, but they made things a lot more interesting."

If a video gets posted about Adrian Veidt, we'll probably see comments praising his products and his humanitarian efforts, while others malign him as a sell-out and a heartless mega-corporation, probably even using anti-Wal-Mart rhetoric to give it a realistic flair. They are engaging with the movie and they haven't even seen it. They are becoming part of the tapestry of the film.

Zack Snyder and the producers have already shown a strong grasp of getting people to feel like they are a part of this film -- they held a short film competition to produce advertisements for Veidt products, the best of which would be seen as television advertisements within the film itself. When you get people to feel a sense of ownership over the movie, to feel that they helped make it what it is, you are more successful creatively (because they're more engaged), and more successful commercially (because they're more likely to come).

I'm really very excited about this movie because more than anything, it just seems like they really get it. This clip is no exception.

Sleep Tight

2009-01-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

Secular Sunday: Or, to summarize...

2009-01-18T12:41:00.000-08:00

Secular Sunday: Nobody believes in Zeus anymore...

2009-01-18T10:06:00.000-08:00

Last week, toward the end of my analysis of the latest section of CFC, I spoke of something in quick and dismissive passing, when it actually deserves more focus. So before I move on today (or instead of doing so, we'll see how long this ends up being), I want to go back to it.

Strobel makes the case, sort of, that the abiogenesis of life is nothing short of miraculous. This has been addressed by better and more intelligent writers -- than myself, let alone Strobel -- such as Richard Dawkins, who points out (and I'm paraphrasing here): if the odds of life as we know it arising on any planet, the odds of all the qualities of a planet aligning perfectly to support such life, are one in a billion billion, then out of a billion billion planets, it is not only probable but mathematically certain that on one planet, life will arise. If only one planet in the universe has life, then we are the one in whatever number of planets there are -- those are our odds.

In an infinite universe, it's not miraculous that life arose here. In an infinite universe, it would actually be miraculous if life as we define it didn't arise somewhere. (Of course, if that were the case, there would be nobody to marvel at the miracle.)

But that's not what I want to address (as I said, Dawkins among others has covered it much better). What I want to address is the following quote, attributed to Walter Bradley, "origin-of-life expert:"

If there isn't a natural explanation and there doesn't seem to be the potential of finding one, then I believe it's appropriate to look at a supernatural explanation...I think that's the most reasonable inference based on the evidence [page 42].

No. And no. And NO.

I need to be very clear about this, because this is extremely important. Ultimately this is the primary failure of this entire book, the foundational misunderstanding upon which Strobel is building his eponymous Case:

Science.

Does not.

Work that way.

To make it easily apparent why I have such a strong objection to Bradley's statement, let me rephrase, to have it say explicitly what Bradley is only implying:

If something happens that we don't understand, and its reasons for happening are not immediately apparent, we should feel free to make up any explanation that suits us.

As I said, this is the fundamental departure point, the fundamental mistake Strobel and others like him make. If they don't know the answer, they make it up. Or, conversely, they decide on the answer they will choose to accept before even bothering to look at the evidence.

Any scientist will tell you that many things occur in the world that science can't answer. And scientists will have their hypotheses for the reasons that these events occur, based on a sort of triangulation of the observations that they've made ("because A, and B, and C, it seems to make sense that D is occurring").

Through repeated experimentation they will either verify the hypothesis -- in which case it eventually becomes the accepted explanation, and is considered something we "know" -- or falsify the hypothesis -- in which case they will begin searching for a new answer to test.

What they absolutely do not do is fabricate a "supernatural" and untestable "reason" that has no relationship to the evidence given, nor do they force themselves to adhere to a predetermined "explanation" for new information.

A true scientist is not afraid to say, "I don't know."

And saying that, as a corollary, is not the same as saying, "No one will never know."

Bradley's attitude is the opposite of scientific inquiry -- the death of scientific inquiry. Pick a scientific discovery of significance. Say electricity. Or antibiotics.

Until the 17th century, human beings had little to no awareness of the microscopic world. We didn't know about bacteria, which means that we didn't know how people got sick. Following Bradley's exact line of thought, those who came down with illnesses were thought to be either cursed by God/the gods, or possessed by evil spirits. There wasn't a natural explanation, and there wasn't the potential of finding one. So they pursued the supernatural explanation.

Except that there was a natural explanation, and eventually we found it, because despite people like Bradley, who were happy with their comforting-but-completely-unjustified "answer," some people kept looking.

Admittedly, even attempts to be "naturalistic" can and have been wrong, too. Humourism, for example, was the dominant non-supernatural theory in medicine for nearly the entirety of Western history. A theory which has now, by modern medicine, been completely discredited.

But the important component in this example is that even despite believing that they had the answer, despite having held to and operated under this theory for 18 centuries¹, scientists kept looking to make sure. And when they started to make observations that humourism couldn't answer, to create alternate hypotheses that had a higher success rate of explaining and predicting related occurrences, the long-held theory of humourism was eventually discarded.

A true scientist is not afraid to say, "I was wrong."

This is the strength of the scientific method, the reason that the scientific method is the only reliable method for determining objective truth about reality. Science is not emotional, it is not entrenched, it is continuously adapting -- indeed, science is constantly evolving. Scientific discoveries in one discipline have a ripple effect across our entire understanding of our universe. If a paradigm for understanding the universe cannot accommodate objective observation, that paradigm must be discarded.

In ancient Greece Bradley would have said that obviously Zeus was the source of lightning, because there was no natural explanation for it and no potential for finding one. And at the time he would have been right that there was no natural explanation for lightning and no potential (again, at the time) for finding one. But now we know exactly the natural explanation for lightning, and while that doesn't automatically mean Zeus isn't the one making nature work that way, that's just a case of pushing the "Zeus" answer one step back. Not because there's evidence for the Zeus answer, but because its adherents can't deal with letting go.

As you all know, nobody seriously believes in Zeus anymore. And yet intelligent design is exactly the same thing. They say God did it. Once you show how nature did it, it goes back a stage to "God made nature do it like that," with no evidence to back that up, or even indicate a reason to think so. They call that lack of evidence (aka ignorance) faith, and they are inexplicably proud of it.

People like Bradley are afraid to say, "I don't know." People like Bradley are afraid to say "I was wrong." People like Bradley choose a comforting answer because it is comforting. Not because it is appropriate, correct, or even warranted. People like Bradley are not proper scientists.

Because science doesn't work that way.

As I thought might happen, this post got long enough that I think it's enough for today. But it was important. One of the reasons supernatural explanations are so compelling is that they're easy to communicate, and sometimes more intuitive than the natural explanation. One sentence of creationist claptrap takes paragraphs and paragraphs to answer in a way that is both relatively accurate and intellectually accessible to people who are not scientists.² (Not to mention the challenge of making sure I understand it right, not being a scientist myself.)

Now I can simply point back to this post, or even use the acronym SDWTW, and you will know what I mean without having to spend paragraphs explaining myself. (Even given that, by the end of this whole endeavor, I may very well have written more words about the book than Strobel did in it.)

More CFC next week.

A common defense of religion is that its longevity and tenacity somehow give it credence. How could a wrong idea survive so many centuries? My answer to that, as with humourism, is simply "because people didn't know any better." ↩

One of the creationist tactics in "debates" with qualified scientists -- and apparently one of Strobel's tactics in this book -- is to rattle off in quick succession half a dozen or more wholly-incorrect but succinctly-stated talking points. Their opponent becomes flustered by the assault, frustrated by being unable to communicate the answers clearly in the allotted time (and/or by the ridiculous nature of the claims), or winds up forgetting or not being allowed to answer one of the points, which makes it appear to the audience that s/he had no answer to give. That's why I'm taking my time going through this, I don't want to leave any stone unturned.↩

Last post on the Watchmen debacle

2009-01-16T14:24:00.000-08:00

If you hadn't heard, Warner Bros. and Fox have reached a settlement over Watchmen, and so the March 9 release will not be delayed.

This means that I probably won't be posting about this project again until I'm giving my review on March 9 (midnight showing, what-what). Let's hope that after all this drama (and publicity) that the flick doesn't suck.

DorkmanScott.com -- Your Source for Whatever This Is

2009-01-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

I've gone a long time coasting by without the professional accoutrements -- no website, no business cards, I haven't even bothered to put my professional reel together until just recently (and still haven't posted it online).

But no more! I'm working on getting my act together, and the first step is my registration of dorkmanscott.com as my official site address.¹ As of now, if you type that in, you will just be forwarded back here. But over time I hope to build it up to be more of a site with a portfolio and all that jazz.

It's worth updating your bookmarks and/or muscle memory, as I may also shift the blog from Blogspot to Wordpress at some point. Haven't had major problems with Blogspot, but Wordpress seems to be more customizable and have more reliable servers, both of which may matter if things start to pick up. If you get used to using the dorkmanscott.com portal, then the switch from one to the other will be relatively seamless for you if/when it occurs.

Dorkman.com is being squatted on, MichaelScott.com is some country western singer, and Michael-Scott.com is porn (NSFW!). Straight porn, no less.↩

The Descendants -- the Story So Far

2009-01-14T16:34:00.000-08:00

I keep saying that I want to use this blog to talk about my experiences in the serious-business Hollywood machine. But so far what few I have had, I've kept to myself -- mainly because they're deals-in-progress and there's nothing solid to announce yet. And I'm afraid I'll jinx it by announcing it ahead of time.

But there's one project that, with the beginning of a new year, I think it's safe to talk about, and especially since it's likely to be indicative of how things are going to be from here on -- The Descendants. I've made oblique references to the project, and people following my YouTube page have probably seen the trailer. But I want to talk about the story of the project thus far.

Shortly after we put out RvD2 -- nearly two years ago, gah -- a creative executive from Dark Horse Entertainment contacted me and Ryan, interested in meeting and discussing our plans for the future, including future projects we might want to do.

I put together a number of pitches and we met Chris, the exec, for dinner at a bar near Dark Horse HQ (or the HQ at the time; they've since relocated to bigger and better). I told him some of the ideas, and he listened to them patiently before making a counter-pitch. They had a project that they've been developing from an independent comic book they'd acquired. It was an action-fantasy story about a monster-killing mercenary named Charlie Stone, and Ray Park was attached to star.

Given that the fight with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace is what inspired me (and Ryan) to pick up some sticks and start making lightsaber fights, it's not too much of a stretch to say that I have Ray Park to thank, to some degree, for RvD2 and all that came after.¹ So the idea of working with him was very exciting.

(As an aside, I had actually met Ray once before, randomly, at an EZ-Lube. We both happened to be there for an oil change, and he recognized my shoes as martial arts shoes, which led to a brief conversation.² When we met at Dark Horse to discuss the project some months later, and I mentioned we had met, he actually remembered. "Oh yeah, the shoes!")

At the time, the comic was three issues (another issue has since been published). I had read them and felt very excited and interested in the ideas, although I thought it could benefit from some expansion and development in a film. We discussed what we wanted to do with the film, and the character, and we all seemed to be on the same page with what we wanted. We wanted funny, we wanted a little overconfident, a combination of Jackie Chan and Indiana Jones.

Our first plan was to produce a short film that took place in the Descendants world, but was not necessarily part of the story canon that we were planning. Joey (Andrade, the creator) and I wrote a ten minute script for the project, but given what we wanted to do with it, it was too expensive for a spec project.

I also started to feel leery of it, though I liked the script -- since it didn't represent the overall story of the project, people who didn't like it would get the wrong impression. And people who did like it would also get the wrong impression. So it seemed lose-lose.

But as summer 2007 came up, a new opportunity arose: a company that will remain nameless³ wanted to develop Descendants as a possible web series. The decision was made to produce a 90-second teaser trailer for the project, which would first premiere at Comic-Con, and be some of the first content available on the new site.

The production of the teaser is a tale in itself. Summer 2007 I was in Florida shooting Sandrima Rising; we took a break in July for logistical reasons, which meant I couldn't prep before July. Additionally, Ray was out of town until the weekend before Comic-Con, so we literally only had two non-consecutive days to shoot (the Friday and Monday preceding Comic-Con), and four days for post, to premiere it Saturday.

I don't know how, but somehow we managed it, and the teaser is available on YouTube.

(It's worth noting that when we made the trailer, we didn't really know what this "web series" would be about, other than vague concepts we were kicking around; the RED camera also hadn't been released yet. So although it was intended as a "proof of concept," the teaser neither reflects the expected visual quality of the project, nor do any of the events in the trailer actually appear in any finished script.)

So the trailer appeared exclusively on the unnamed site for a time. But they began to dick us around regarding our continued deal with them, and it quickly became apparent that they didn't have an actual plan to produce an ongoing Descendants series; they just wanted the traffic from the trailer. We pulled the teaser from their site and started thinking about other directions for the project.

We batted around web series, mini-series, TV pilot, and ultimately we decided that we needed a script, no matter what we did. Since we didn't know what form it would take, we decided to write it as a feature film. Joey and I started working on a treatment for the project. It took multiple drafts, but we finally got a go-ahead on the script.

And then the WGA strike hit.

Now, I'm not WGA, and Dark Horse is apparently not a WGA signatory company. But I still didn't want to risk my future ability to join the union by writing during the strike. So it was agreed that I would not be able to turn in any work that had been done until after the strike ended. And that took several months, as you may or may not recall.

In February 2008, the strike ended and I was able to finish off what I had done -- more or less. The writing of the script had opened up holes that I hadn't noticed at the treatment level, and the first draft was kind of a mess. I actually told Dark Horse that I didn't want to show them this first draft, preferring instead to repair the damage first.

This was kind of unprofessional, and if I'd been hired by a big studio I would have had to turn in that draft and would have been promptly fired, and probably blacklisted. Fortunately, the relationship with Dark Horse is more relaxed (and less official), and they understood that this was my first time writing-to-order, so Chris was willing to wait for draft two.

Like the treatment, it took several drafts and rounds of notes to get Descendants to a place where we were all happy with it. There was a lot to juggle with the adaptation, in attempting to stay true to Joey's original concept, while expanding it beyond the page and the first three issues, giving it a more cinematically-satisfying structure, and also giving us somewhere to go from there.

During this time, Dark Horse had signed a "first look" deal with Universal Studios. For those who haven't heard the term before, this means Universal has dibs on anything and everything Dark Horse develops. Before Dark Horse can take a project anywhere else, they have to take it to Universal. If Universal passes (Hollywood-ese for "no, go away"), then we can take it anywhere else.

The script gets done and Dark Horse takes it to Universal; specifically, "Uni Digital," their new media department. We are assured that UniDigi plans to read it right away -- the Senior VP is going to take the script home with him and read it overnight, which we are told he never does with other projects.

This is Hollywood-ese for blowing smoke up your ass. When you start working in Hollywood, you'll start to get this a lot. People will tell you how excited they are, how they will make your project/script their first priority, how they are taking it home this weekend, this VERY NIGHT, so that they can be sure to read it immediately and be ready to move.

Translation: don't expect to hear back for several weeks. And at that point they'll apologize, because they still won't have read it, and they'll sing you the same song then, too.

I've had the good fortune to have been involved with Dark Horse, who is a legitimate company and in Uni's good graces. Can you imagine how slow the response would be if it was just me and a script? No matter how much "heat" the script had, it'd be months I'm sure.

It probably sounds like I'm bitter about this. I'm really not. I've read a lot of books on the industry that talked about exactly this, so I haven't been taken by surprise. It's annoying, and makes me impatient, but that's how it works.

Anyway, they eventually passed.

So we've been taking it around to other places, and we've found a place that is interested in the project, based apparently only on a verbal pitch of the concept and the attachments (me to direct, Ray to star). It's essentially a foreign presale deal -- they give us the money to make the movie in exchange for the right to distribute the film overseas.

The catch: they're willing to give us $4 million. The script, according to an experienced line producer Dark Horse brought in, is a $40 million project. I feel confident that we can make a film look like much more than it actually costs. I think we could make a $4 million movie that looks like a $10 million movie. But we can't make $4M look like $40M. There are limits -- as the line producer said, "You can get five pounds into a two pound bag, but you can't get twenty pounds in."

So we were faced with a choice that had to be made:

We could attempt to make our $40 million script for a tenth of the appropriate budget. Doing so, we felt, would hurt the project and everyone involved. There was no way we could do justice to the script, or the concept, by making a film that was too ambitious for its own good. So we decided not to go this route.

Another option was to see if we could find another taker for the script. But when the script is attached to a first-time director and a lead actor who, while a great guy with geek cred, is no Tom Cruise in terms of getting butts in seats. All things considered, we figured we weren't likely to get more than $4 million anywhere we took the script.

So that left us with the third option: write yet another script, of a smaller scale, to make for $4 million. At first we thought it might be a smaller version of the existing script, but the concerns of doing it justice, as mentioned above, made us decide to develop and write a brand new script. Above and beyond any of the events in the story, what has always stood out has been Charlie Stone. His voice has been loudest and clearest and given the project its vitality. So we determined that if we wrote another story, as long as Charlie was in the center of it, we would be okay.

While I can't go into either storyline, the new script basically functions as a lead-in to the too-expensive script -- in other words, the IMDB trivia will say that the "sequel" was written before the "original." Some adjustments will have to be made if Descendants is successful and we get the opportunity to do what is now likely to be Descendants 2 -- people who in the current script are meeting for the first time will have met in the previous movie, stuff like that. I think it benefits the story in the long run, as the new script in part expands upon what was originally a side-story. Now it gets its own film, making the eventual "sequel" less crowded story-wise.

So that's where Descendants has been over the last two years, and that's where it is now. We're working on ironing out the new treatment and I'll be writing the new script, with the goal of finishing by Valentine's Day, and hopefully we'll have made a deal by my 26th birthday (end of March) for my first feature film.

And then, the real fun will start.

Grudgingly, I suppose by extension that means I have George Lucas to thank for Phantom Menace. Perhaps a distasteful admission, but an undeniable one.↩

When he introduced himself saying "I'm Ray," I barely restrained myself from responding "I know."↩

They still exist, but I'm not interested in giving them any traffic by naming them. ↩

Secular Sunday: Case for a Creator: Chapter Three, Part 2

2009-01-11T11:32:00.000-08:00

So there's this ~~asshole~~ ~~Christian~~ asshole by the name of Jack Chick, who has produced evangelical tracts for several decades, but who has only come to most peoples' attention since the advent of the internets. These "Chick tracts," freely available on his site, are by turns misogynistic, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, and just about any other -ist, -ic, and anti- you can think of (except, of course, atheist or agnostic).

Also, everything is Satan's fault. Chick is basically The Church Lady, except he's serious.

The tracts are supposed to be little comic-book stories that you can hand out to people, they read them, and, thoroughly convinced, they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

If that sounds a little too pat, that's apparently how easy it is in Jack Chick's mind, because that's how it always works in the tracts. This is how most of the Chick tracts go:

Unbeliever: Religion is stupid!

Believer: But Jesus died for your sins.

Unbeliever: No one ever told me! Praise His holy name!¹

You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Go read them. You'll see.

You can tell that Chick has never met a true unbeliever -- certainly he thinks that everyone actually believes, they're just "rebelling" -- and so he only imagines, poorly, the way such people talk and think.

I bring this up not to specifically go off about the Chick tracts; they're morbidly amusing, but don't really deserve a detailed response. Most folks, even religious, can see that the arguments presented in the tracts (such as that Catholicism came after Protestantism, and is a perversion of Christianity as opposed to, you know, its origin) are absurd. And those who cannot are clearly either stupid, insane, or sociopathic, and deserve nothing more than to be pointed and laughed at.

No, I bring it up because the continuation of Chapter Three, the Jonathan Wells interview, plays out essentially like a Chick tract. Strobel has cast himself in the role of skeptic, but he has never been one, and doesn't know what the word means, and so his performance is shockingly poor.

The gist of the interview is Strobel discussing the images of evolution, presented in Chapter Two, with Wells. And it basically goes like this:

Strobel: This is evidence of evolution, right?

Wells: Nuh-uh.

Strobel: I've never heard it from that perspective! You've totally convinced me!

You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not.

Wells presents no evidence to support his case, only dismisses the evidence Strobel presents as not being evidence, and Strobel, in the most embarassing parody of skepticism I've ever seen, immediately accepts Wells' dismissal as totally valid. As a corollary, he also immediately accepts any assertion Wells makes regarding what is true, without requiring Wells present any evidence to support it.

At this point, the best-case scenario explanation for this book is that Strobel is a credulous idiot. It's starting to seem like he keeps presenting arguments from authority because he genuinely finds them compelling -- he accepts Wells' arguments because he considers Wells an authority.

But at this point -- long since, really -- it has become clear that Strobel is actually a liar and an opportunist. It's become clear that if Strobel expects his reader to be the credulous and idiotic ones. He thinks that his declarations of being "convinced" will themselves do the convincing, in the absence of an actually convincing argument.

And of course, when it comes to his target audience, he's right. Over Christmas, a close friend's girlfriend received another Strobel book "The Case for Christ," which her brother, the giver, encouraged her to read. And the first thing out of his mouth was "The guy who wrote it was a skeptic, and then he became a Christian!"

That means nothing. It might mean he was a bad skeptic, or an idiot, or (quickly becoming my pet theory) a liar.

Not to mention the fact that if it were that easy, I could always counter that I was a Christian, then I became a skeptic, which is completely true. Have all you theists out there automatically dropped your beliefs as a result of my testimony? Does the fact that I am unconvinced mean you are unconvinced?

That's what I thought.

Admittedly, his conversion, if such it was, could mean that the evidence was genuinely convincing. But if it were, we wouldn't have to spend so much time being convinced that the fact that these people are convinced should be enough to convince us.

Arguments from authority are meaningless, and the manner by which many (otherwise sensible!) people find themselves talking about their naked Emperor's exquisite clothing.

I'm going to try not to go intricately into the poor writing or poor argumentation of this chapter as I have been doing before -- not only is this book not restoring my faith in God, it's beginning to erode my faith in humanity. Just know that it's still there under the surface. I'll be doing my best to address only the main arguments, and save my snark about Strobel's foolish conclusions and/or laughably poor writing for only the most grievous passages.

Still, I can't help this one little piece of dialogue:

"If these icon are the illustrations most cited as evidence of evolution, then I can see why they're important," I said. "What did you find as you examined them one by one?"

Wells didn't hesitate. "That they're either false or misleading," he replied.

"False or misleading?" I echoed. "Wait a second -- are you saying my science teacher was lying to me? That's a pretty outrageous charge!" [page 36]

Yes, Strobel is just shocked -- shocked -- that a man working for the ~~Dishonesty~~ Discovery Institute in Seattle, the sole expressed purpose of which is to promote Intelligent Design over evolution, who got his Ph.D specifically for the purpose of "destroying evolution," in the name of the glory of God (who by the way is a Korean man), should state that evolution is false.²

Like I said, most of the dialogue in this book is like that, and I will spare you. Am I not merciful?

But okay, Wells. I'm ready to have my mind blown. Gimme whatcha got.

The Miller-Urey Experiment

Wells' first argument is that the Miller experiment used the wrong atmospheric composition in its "early earth" simulation, the one which produced amino acids, which are the building blocks of life.

It is true that Miller's original theory about the composition of the early atmosphere has since been abandoned in favor of other atmospheric theories. But Wells fails to mention that most scientists agree that the initial formation of organic compounds, and even the early forms of life, probably occurred well away from the atmosphere (e.g. in the deep sea), making the composition of the atmosphere largely irrelevant.

Wells does state that other experiments have been performed which create complex organic compounds -- but points out that some of the molecules formed are cyanide and formaldehyde, which he refers to as being intensely toxic. And they are.

To humans.

But they're also necessary building blocks to important biochemical compounds, such as amino acids. Therefore in this context they are not toxins. Wells even acknowledges that "it's true that a good organic chemist can turn formaldehyde and cyanide into biological molecules," but then states that "to suggest that formaldehyde and cyanide give you the right substrate for the origin of life...well, that's just a joke." [page 38]

What? WHAT? You just said that those two chemicals can form the basis of biochemical compounds, then say that it's a joke.

In context, the punchline of the "joke" is that what you create by mixing them is embalming fluid. Which is true. But what he doesn't mention, because it would be devastating to his case, is that you can also get amino acids, which are the substrate for the origin of life. Of course, despite the fact that Wells has two Ph.Ds, neither of them is in biochemistry, so at best it can be argued that he just didn't know. But if he didn't know he shouldn't go around saying it with such finality and authority.

A simple Google search of "cyanide amino acids" brings up pages and pages of scientific studies discussing how hydrogen cyanide is a precursor to the formation of amino acids. Wells is supposed to be the expert, he's TELLING us he's the expert, and yet he can't be bothered to actually check if what he's saying has any truth?

The other option is that he has done the research, he knows he's lying by omission, and he's doing it anyway. It's not the first, nor I'm sure the last, occurrence of lying for Jesus I've seen in my life. It's probably far from the last that I'll see in this book.

In the next section he goes on to say that if you were to poke a hole in a cell and allow the insides to drain out, you could not form another cell from this material, nor expect one to form, even though "you've got all the components you would need for life." [page 39] But that's not the way cells are formed, and not the way evolution works, and Wells knows this. Evolution involves replication and reproduction, activities in which a dead cell -- especially a dismembered one -- cannot engage.

This section of his argument is just ridiculous, but of course someone who is already ignorant or suspicious of evolutionary biology will latch onto it as making total sense. And that's the alarming part, to me.

And of course, since Wells has dismissed these naturalistic explanations for abiogenesis, there must be a supernatural reason. Not because there's any evidence for a supernatural explanation, mind you. Just cuz.

So, in this section Wells fails to disprove abiogenesis -- by his admissions about the products of abiogenesis experiments, he has in fact provided evidentiary support for the theory. He lies and says it's evidence against, but being an actual skeptic, I did some research. It didn't even take me long to find all the ways he's full of shit (going by number of Google hits on "cyanide amino acids," approximately 666,000 ways. How appropriate).

Since he has no evidence of his own, he instead fills pages with straw man arguments, a clearly misguided understanding of evolution that I do not believe he actually holds (rather, he just hopes that the people reading won't know better and won't bother to check), and rhetoric that assumes the pre-determined conclusion.

I've said this before, but the correct process is: "here is the observation, what does that indicate." Not "God exists, chase observations in support and ignore/deny observations against." So far, Wells -- and Strobel -- are following the latter.

I'll finish up the Wells chapter next time. For now, no points awarded. Try again next round.

That's another odd thing that Jack Chick seems to believe: that the vast majority of people in America aren't aware of the fundamental tenets of Christianity -- Christ's divinity, salvation, etc. Presumably he thinks that the only logical explanation for people not believing is that they haven't heard. Though of course "Jack Chick" and "logical" never seem to have been properly introduced.↩

Shocked.↩

Introducing: Secular Sundays!

2009-01-11T01:33:00.000-08:00

I want to keep this blog mostly a media, movies, and miscellaneous discussion, also talking about my personal and professional experiences in the biz (once I start having some). But the self-righteous religious bullshit that has recently fueled, among other things, the passage of Prop 8 has royally pissed me off.

On top of that, a number of people have approached me in the interest of creating some kind of dialogue about religion, which pisses me off rather less -- I'm all for it. But either way, the topic of religion -- and my lack of belief therein -- is starting to crop up more. Atheism is kind of the new gay, it seems like. It takes a "coming out," because people just assume you're not, and even people who are cool with it still have questions.

In the interest of not turning this into a one-subject blog, today is the establishing post of what I'm calling Secular Sundays. This keeps the topic to a fixed, predictable, and, if you feel it necessary, avoidable schedule. (But c'mon, what are you afraid of?) Plus I admit I get a kick out of the thought that, on the day most people go to church to reinforce their fairy tale beliefs, I'm doing my small part to dismantle them.

For now, Secular Sundays will mostly be devoted to completing my promised analysis of The Case for a Creator. But once that's done, or perhaps even interspersed with that, will be other posts on religious philosophy, theology, first amendment and freethought issues, and other related topics as they come up.

Hopefully one day a week will be enough.

Later today I'll continue with Part 2 of the discussion of CFC Chapter Three, with Jonathan Wells' evaluation of the Miller-Urey experiment.

One more post on Watchmen

2009-01-08T21:04:00.000-08:00

Or at least so I say.

Lloyd Levin, one of the producers of the project, has written an open letter regarding his feelings on the matter. I figured given the he-said-he-also-said that I posted before, it was only fair to share something that was written by someone who was involved.

I just hope this gets settled so we can see this movie.

For Some Reason, I Watched The Happening

2009-01-06T14:58:00.000-08:00

(Note: I actually watched the film and wrote the bulk of this entry several weeks ago, but neglected to post it. My roommate watching The Village for the first time today reminded me, and I want to start reviewing movies new and old more often anyway, so I dusted it off, and here it is.)

M. Night Shyamalan writes like a film school student.

Honestly, I wish he was a film school student, because then I could say he has promise, and be excited about the possibilities. If I saw one of the suicide scenes from The Happening in a student thesis project, I think I'd sully my drawers. This is a guy who knows how to communicate visual ideas in very powerful, visceral ways.

Unfortunately, Shyamalan is not a film school student. He is a filmmaker who has been on the radar for nearly a decade, with half a dozen Hollywood movies under his belt, all of them with budgets in excess of $50 million dollars; and for all of the power of his visual ideas, he seems incapable of even conceiving, much less communicating, intellectual ideas anymore.

The quality of Shyamalan's storytelling has decreased on an almost exponential curve since The Sixth Sense, which I thought was fantastic. I don't care if it was based on an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, it was a fine piece of genre filmmaking. But the success and praise of Sixth Sense seems to have gone to his head, and he thinks he can do no wrong.

Unbreakable was flawed, but still watchable. The payoff was a bit of a letdown, and Bruce Willis' ability to see into peoples' secrets via touch was a straight rip-off of Stephen King's The Dead Zone, but I'm still up for a go at Unbreakable 2.

Signs had tremendous promise in its premise, but was more aptly named than I think MNS realized, because it was here that we started to see the signs that he was losing his way. His cameo became a pivotal character with quite a bit of screen-time. Look, we know you think you're the next Hitchcock, but limit yourself to walking a dog in the background, okay? We started to see that he wasn't really trying anymore in terms of the story, not only creating a bizarre deus ex machina (having a little girl develop a strange, never-happens-in-real-life quirk of leaving half-filled glasses of water all over the place, for no other reason than that the end of the movie wouldn't work otherwise), but alerting the audience to the fact that it was such by having it literally communicated in a "revelation from God."

And I'm late to the party on this, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out again that these superior alien beings -- who have been observing and studying this planet for at least 40 years, and therefore must be aware that 70% of the planet consists of a substance that is lethal to the touch for them -- saw fit to land anyway, and walk around naked.¹ Apparently not a single one of them could envision a scenario where that wouldn't go well, whereas I'm hard-pressed to envision a scenario in which it would.

Then there was The Village...for fuck's sake. First of all, he plagiarized another kids' story. This time a Grade 5-8 novel, Running Out of Time. Spoilers on that page.²

Did you see the trailer but not the film? About how this village bordered a forest filled with some kind of intelligent monsters, who lived a tenuous coexistence until the creatures decided that they'd gotten tired of the villagers' stupid faces and slathered red X's on their doors, in a substance suspiciously blood-like, as a warning that they'd better get the fuck out tout de suite? The tagline, Run. The truce is ending?

Yeah, the movie's not about that. At all. It pretends it is for the first third of the movie or so, but it's not. I wish like hell it was, because that is a fucking fantastic premise. But it isn't. It's about some blind girl going on a journey to get penicillin to cure her boyfriend, who got stabbed by her retarded friend. It was like Shyamalan spent $20 million dollars in marketing to get everyone in the theatres, only to RickRoll them a third of the way in. I wish he had RickRolled us, in fact, because then I might have at least sat in awe at the sheer balls of it.³ After all, a RickRoll is just a practical joke. It was clear with The Village that he actually thought he was doing good work.

And that's the real problem with Shyamalan. He thinks he's doing good and be damned to the critics. Lady in the Water made this point blatantly, with one character being a movie critic who didn't know what he was talking about (another character remarks "What kind of person would be so arrogant as to presume the intention of another human being?") and another character, a writer, being the hope for salvation of all mankind (and played, I'm sure coincidentally, by Shyamalan himself).

Maybe people who respond negatively to your movies aren't idiots, MNS. Maybe you're making bad movies.

But of course, the closest he'll get to admitting that he made a bad movie is by saying, as he has with The Happening, that he did it on purpose. "It's the best B-movie you'll ever see," he says.

Okay, first off: fuck you. Don't tell me what the best B-movie I've ever seen is. I'll be the judge. Technically Star Wars is a B-movie. Likewise Raiders of the Lost Ark. And Croenenberg's The Fly. And Carpenter's The Thing. Your movie is not even qualified to lick the balls of those films, much less stand in their presence as an equal, much less claim to have surpassed them.

I'd say that he should have said it's the best B-movie he's made, but not even that is accurate. That would be The Sixth Sense. The Happening is just another embarrassment in an ever-lengthening lineage.

Secondly, that's not what you were saying before it came out. You were saying this was the first R-rated movie you ever made and you were pushing it to make it as hard and scary as you could. Don't turn around just because you failed and pretend you meant to. That's George Lucas crap.

The Happening is about how the plants decide to kill everyone by emitting a toxin that removes the human preservation instinct. Okay, a little pulpy, but I can deal with that premise. People not having the sense to protect themselves, however, is not the same as people intentionally stabbing themselves in the neck, jumping off buildings, or lying down in front of a riding lawnmower.

The premise is kind of a rip-off of Stephen King's 2006 novel Cell, in which a cell phone signal called "the Pulse" somehow shuts down the higher functions of the brain, turning everyone who uses a cell phone, from the moment the Pulse hits onward, into violently insane madmen and -women. (Also they become telekinetic. Or something. That part's not appropriated in Happening.)

It should be no surprise by now that Shyamalan is a plagiarizing hack, nor that he went after Stephen King's idea, nor indeed that Cell did it better. (Although I suppose we should give him credit for at least ripping of a book for grown-ups this time around.) The acting in The Happening is laughably shitty, the plot and actions of the characters who are not supposed to be the insane ones make no logical sense, and instead of being intense, it's intensely boring.

But from a visual standpoint, Shyamalan has promise and I honestly think he can be great, but he has to get it out of his head that he is great no matter what he does. He is only great if he does a great job, and he has to be willing to listen -- if not to everybody, then he has to find some person or small group of people who can get through to him.

And he has to stop writing his own scripts. Please somebody stop him from writing.

Because it already sounds like he's fucking up The Last Airbender, and someone needs to do something.

I thought about putting a spoiler alert on this post, but fuck it. If you haven't seen these flicks by now, it's obviously not high on your list of priorities, and besides the twists are retarded. I just saved you an hour and a half.↩

There. My conscience got the best of me on the spoiler thing. It's still retarded.↩

I'm aware that RickRolling hadn't been invented yet. (Oh, for those earlier times.) You get my drift. ↩

Dear Cracked: Eat All the Crow

2008-12-28T12:51:00.000-08:00

Part of the primary thesis of yesterday's post is that Fox, while seemingly completely in their rights to claim ownership of the distribution rights to Watchmen, should have said something much earlier. Like, when Warner Bros. first announced that they were making Watchmen, Fox should have said, "Um. No."

Well, as it turns out, they did. Not only was the lawsuit under discussion filed in February, but indications are that Fox did, in fact, speak up when WB first announced their intentions to make the Watchmen film. Essentially the conversation went like this.

WB: We're making Watchmen!

Fox: Hold on, we own that. You need to pay the buy-out price.

WB: You don't own it. Go screw.

Fox: Seriously, we'll take it to court.

WB: Try it, we dare you.

Court: Yeah, they own it.

WB: Fuck.

Fox isn't completely off the dick-eating hook here as a studio; they deserve to choke on Dick Mountain for their treatment of Firefly alone. But they're off the hook somewhat for their actions re: Watchmen, since it looks like they did what we the whingers said they should have done. WB should definitely have done their homework a little better on this one.

Dear Fox: Eat All the Dicks

2008-12-27T17:16:00.000-08:00

So for those of you not following the Watchmen legal saga, the short version is this:

Fox optioned the rights in the 80s. DC thought that the option had lapsed, and took it elsewhere. Warner Brothers made the film, and once the film was made, Fox stood up and say "Hey, we think we still own that."

And a few days ago, the judge in the case ruled that Fox was right.

No one is arguing that they weren't in their rights to do so, but they might have said something before Warner Bros. spent hundreds of millions of dollars making and promoting the film, considering it's not like the production was shrouded in secrecy.

My thoughts on this are best expressed by Dan O'Brien's blog over at Cracked.com. So I'll just be one of many auxiliary blogs linking to that one.

"Watchmen" Fan Cordially Invites Fox to Eat Several Dicks

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-24T15:39:00.001-08:00

I don't believe in any gods or religion, and so the root of the word "holiday" ("holy day") is not particularly meaningful.

But let's be honest, the so-called holidays are mostly secularized at this point, and spending time with loved ones, eating good food, and of course exchanging tokens of affection, are all plenty meaningful, whatever particular mythology you choose (or not) to append to the season.

So happy holidays and enjoy them everyone!

The Case for a Creator: Chapter Three, Part 1

2008-12-15T23:20:00.001-08:00

It's been a while since I had the stomach for this book -- and given I only got through discussing two chapters and reading the third, that's saying something.

But with the holidays looming and the religious right braying about the imaginary "War on Christmas," and with the blog and much of what I have to do either having slowed or taking lots of render breaks, I thought I should come back to this and try to get at least another chapter out of the way before the end of the year. I do still intend to get through the whole book. Eventually.

If you missed the previous two chapters, you can find them here:

Chapter One
Chapter Two

And now we move on to Chapter Three: Doubts about Darwinism.

Like Chapter Two, the introductory pages to Chapter Three are massively tedious. Here's a taste of it, starting at the beginning and skipping a bit here and there:

There were one hundred of them -- biologists, chemists, zoologists, physicists, anthropologists, molecular and cell biologists, bio-engineers, organic chemists, geologists, astrophysicists, and other scientists. Their doctorates came from such prestigious universities as Cambridge, Stanford, Cornell, Yale, Rutgers...[He lists 8 more.]

They included professors from Yale Graduate School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...[he lists 20 more, and a vague "and elsewhere."]

Among them was the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry...[et cetera.] [page 31]

You see, I trust, where this is going. In a book of about 300 pages, 10% of the way in, Strobel has gone for broke with the Argument from Authority, with over a hundred scientists who wanted to...what? Present evidence that discredited evolution? Present alternative interpretations of the existing evidence?

But no, it's nothing of that sort at all. Apparently this lot of ~100 scientists "wanted the world to know one thing: they are skeptical." [ibid]

The argumentation here is so massively flawed as to be positively breathtaking. In one page, not only has Strobel managed to present an entirely invalid and overstated Argument from Authority, but he's made it a twofer and also presented an Argument from Incredulity:

Their statement was direct and defiant. "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life," they said. "Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." [page 32]

Setting aside Strobel's attempt to lionize the dissenters by using such descriptors as "defiant," it's astonishing that over 100 scientists should apparently have no idea how science works. Of course the evidence is given careful examination! That's what evolutionary biologists fucking do. It is given careful examination, and experimentation, and is proven reliable again, and again, and again. If it wasn't, despite what the creationist/ID proponents seem to want to believe, it would be discarded.

Am I supposed to be impressed that over 100 scientists -- many of them from areas of science that are not relevant to evolutionary theory -- are "skeptical"? The National Center for Science Education has a list of nearly 1000 scientists who are not skeptical of evolution, who accept it as a "vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences" -- and that's only a partial list of the ones named Steve.

You want to play the numbers game, Strobel? Because we can, but you lose.

He goes on to make several claims that evolution is and has always been a controversial theory. He (partially) quotes historian Peter Bowler. When I say partially, well:

[A]ccording to historian Peter Bowler, substantive scientific critiques of natural selection started so early that by 1900 "its opponents were convinced it would never recover." [ibid]

Where to begin with the problems here. First off, as I said, this is a partial quote. The first part of the quote, the part that provides context to the second, is in Strobel's own words. It may be an accurate paraphrase, but it may be a fabrication. There's actually no way to tell, because while he does provide an endnote citation for this quote, like the Dennett quote in Chapter Two he does not directly cite the specific work of Peter Bowler in which this quote, and its context, can be found. Instead, the source he gives is:

See: Getting the Facts Straight (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2001), 11. [page 309]

The Discovery Institute, if you are unfamiliar, is a religious organization masquerading as pseudo-science¹. Since their whole goal is to present Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution, it seems reasonable to assume that their pamphlet "Getting the Facts Straight" will be biased. So, once again, I find it alarming that Strobel neglects to quote Bowler directly; either he has not done his due diligence to ensure that he is accurately representing Bowler's statement, or he is intentionally obfuscating the source and context of the quote.

Since Bowler is (according to Wikipedia) a vocal critic of creationism, and proponent of evolution, it seems to me his views would be unlikely to be properly supported in such works.

Even if the quote is completely accurate to Bowler's statement, the fact is that we are 108 years beyond 1900, and the theory of evolution has not only "recovered," but it is still the only cohesive, scientific explanation for the diversity of life as it is observed.

There is no controversy, and anyone who tells you there is, is trying to sell you something. Like this book, for example.

Moving on to the first subheading, and at last, the first interview with someone who will hopefully help build the eponymous Case. This first one is Jonathan Wells, who Strobel not-so-subtly indicates is a man with not one, but two Ph.Ds. The heading is ""Interview #1: Jonathan Wells, Ph.D, Ph.D."

Right. As I said in my wrap up of Chapter Two, Strobel's obviously misleading tactics have compelled me to look into the subjects of his interviews, and the claims they make. We already knew, by Strobel's own admission, that he would only be speaking to people who he knew would say what he wanted to hear. So, what is there to know about Jonathan Wells?

Well, first off, he is a member of the Unification Church established by Sun Myung Moon -- aka, the Moonies. (Sun Myung Moon's followers believe that Moon is the second coming of Christ, fulfilling Jesus' unfinished mission.)

As Strobel points out, Wells does in fact have a Ph.D a the relevant field of biology. And while Strobel does acknowledge (in an endnote) Wells' association with the Moonies, and even goes on record as disagreeing "thoroughly" with their theology, he does not see fit to reveal that Moon in fact paid for Wells' doctorate, and that, in Wells' own words:

Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.

Oh, and one more thing: Wells is a Senior Fellow at the aforementioned Discovery Institute.

Since I keep railing on Strobel's rhetorical fallacies, I will not commit one of my own by attacking Wells the person instead of his arguments. But if this information cannot be said to undermine the credibility of Strobel's first interviewee, it certainly makes his impartiality on the subject somewhat questionable.

Not that we, the readers, could have expected impartiality when Strobel has already stated that there will be nothing of the sort. But Strobel takes this intellectual dishonesty to dizzying, previously unimaginable new heights. In the run-up to the actual text of the interview with Wells, he throws a quick little end-note on the end of the paragraph. Follow the end-note and Strobel tells us this:

Note that all interviews have been edited for conciseness, clarity, and content. [page 309]

I just about shit myself when I read that. Not only has Strobel openly admitted to selecting only those who would agree with his conclusion, but he has also -- again openly -- edited the interviews "for content," more than likely selecting only those statements that support his conclusion.

This guy was a journalist?

I should point out that we are, at this point, five pages into a thirty-seven page chapter. Given how long this entry is already, I think I'll leave off Wells' actual interview until next time. Savor the anticipation.

I find it hard to imagine what kind of "science" they do, since the foregone conclusion to any mysterious or even mundane observation is "God did it." No need for any kind of research, or even intellectual curiosity. You've chosen the answer before you even bother to ask the question. Seems like it'd be a pretty short day at the office. ↩

What Just Happened...Redux

2008-12-03T00:19:00.000-08:00

New RED announcements have come down the pipe, but first a brief update.

I have been incredibly busy, as usual. "Hella" busy, as I believe the kids are saying these days. NaNoWriMo didn't happen this year, again, because it seems like November is one of my busiest months.

Several projects that seemed to be languishing in development suddenly picked up new momentum, and I've been working on a new script of which I enjoy the idea and want to see how well I can execute it. Prioritizing these projects -- as well as juggling the ever-present Sandrima Rising -- is very difficult, especially for a relatively disorganized person like myself. The first thing I will do when I get money is hire an assistant. Not because I want to feel important, but because I seriously need someone else to keep track of my schedule for me. I'm hopeless with it.

Even though only two weeks have gone by since my last post, it's already been enough time for RED to announce that "everything had changed again," and gave a date to unveil these new announcements, December 3. The November 13 announcements, Jim Jannard assured us, were "insignificant" relative to the new announcements.

This declaration was greeted with more groans and rolled eyes than anything, I think. I tweeted a comment that's gotten some air-time in several podcasts, that "RED is the first company to have proven themselves legitimate only to then turn themselves into a vaporware company." It's all well and good that RED continues to innovate and add value to their product line, but if they don't BUILD anything then it's all academic.

It's only just December 3, but the announcements actually came out yesterday afternoon (it was Dec. 3 somewhere).

And did these announcements knock our socks off and render that long, impassioned blowjob I gave the modular DSMC system "insignificant"?

Well, no. Not really. They announced some updated specs to the current product line, and added a new upgrade path just for the true believers (i.e. RED ONE owners) in the crowd...but that was it. Don't get me wrong, the news was good, I like the new specs, and I like the new upgrade path, but this was not an announcement that needed its own pre-announcement.

Jannard and the RED team acted surprised when they weren't fellated anew by the worshipful throngs who had gathered to hear their new decrees. And it's because today's announcements weren't such a big deal that they warranted a week and a half's hype of the "it's coming" variety. My suggestion to RED: if you've got an announcement to make, make it. If you're not ready to make it, hold off. But unless you're going to do a live keynote a la Apple, stick a fork in the whole "announcing when you will make an announcement" thing (and even then, save that for NAB and/or IBC).

You've got people patrolling RedUser 24/7 as it is -- just announce something without forewarning, I promise you it will spread almost as fast. And the excitement and appreciation will be greater, because the hoi polloi won't have had weeks or months to get emotionally attached to what they think you're going to offer, only to be disappointed.

I think RED has made a great camera and, if they follow through on their promises, will make even greater ones. But if they continue drinking their own Kool-Aid as much as they are, there won't be much left for their fans.

As for the updated specs, the pre-DSMC Scarlet has more or less made a comeback. You can get a ready-to-shoot camera with a fixed lens, shooting 3K RAW footage, for just under $4000. Not quite the "3K for $3K" mantra from NAB (though they do offer the camera and lens combo for that, so they will still be able to use the slogan), but still not only an HVX-killer, but a market-segment killer. Pretty much every camera in the $3000-$10,000 range will be wiped out by the coming of Scarlet, which will offer higher resolution and higher quality than cameras even twice its price. It'll shoot up to 120fps and generally be pretty awesome.

The Full-Frame 35 Scarlet brain has dropped in price, from $12K to $9,750; the FF35 Epic likewise dropped from $35K to $33K. Instead of Redcode 42, the S35 and FF35 Scarlets now record Redcode 80 and 100, respectively. Still unclear what those numbers mean, but hey, there's MORE of them. That's got to be good, right?¹

The new spec sheet basically delineates all of the available internal shooting modes -- resolution, aspect ratio, framerate, etc. -- of each brain. And 350fps at 2K is damned impressive, I have to say. But that's something you rent for anyway.

Of everything, most significant was the announcement of the Epic X package. Basically, the Epic X package takes an Epic S35 brain, packages it with everything you need to make it a functional camera system (CF, battery, and I/O modules), gives it a slightly higher-quality data rate (Redcode 250 instead of 225), and prices it the same as the Epic S35 brain alone -- $28,000. With the RED ONE full trade-in value, that's a springboard to the next generation for $10,000.

In the big pond, that's a steal.

Tempting though the package is, however, my next move as a RED owner will be dictated by the price of the accessories.

An Epic brain -- even an Epic X -- is more than I see myself needing as a general rule. I won't need the higher framerates since I don't generally go for slow motion, I won't need the higher data rates because frankly Redcode 36 is brilliant already, I won't need an anamorphic mode because I can't afford to shoot anamorphic. And if I CAN afford to shoot anamorphic, I can no doubt afford to rent an Epic.

It'd be NICE to have all those things at the flick of a switch and turn of a dial, but consider: if I'm already sanguine with raising another $10K to rise to the next level, then if the accessories necessary to make the "brains" into useful camera equipment cost $5K or so per-camera, we could get TWO Scarlet S35s for less than the price of ONE Epic X. Did somebody say stereoscopic?²

Like I said, it all depends on how much the accessories go for; and even given that, I inherited something of a gadget fetish from my dad, and having something that is "latest and greatest," "limited edition," AND "heavily discounted just for me" might be too much to resist if I can afford to not resist it.

It's more than six months until their target date, likely more than a year until their real date, so I'll have plenty of time to mull it over. And they'll have plenty of time to change it yet again.

Though the numbers may not directly correlate to filesize anymore, I think it's a safe bet that Redcode 80, 100, and up will take up significantly more space than Redcode 36. We're just going to have to put our faith in Moore's Law on this one and hope that affordable digital storage keeps pace. ↩

I know the RED ONE full-value trade-in doesn't apply to the Scarlet brains, but I've thought of a way to make it work.↩

What Just Happened: The Big RED Announcement

2008-11-13T05:20:00.000-08:00

So remember my post earlier this year about how the RED camera was an awesome digital filmmaking revolution?

And remember how their NAB announcements further "changed the game"?

RED's latest announcement just bitchslapped all previous products and announcements and told them to go make it a sandwich.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, a brief timeline.

How We Got Here

At NAB 08, two new cameras were announced in the RED product line. The 3K "Scarlet" -- originally touted as a "professional pocket camera" -- and the 5K "Epic," called the "flagship of the RED family." There's been a flurry of discussion about both cameras ever since on the RED community site RedUser. Scarlet discussion, in fact, was so significant that it wound up spawning off its own dedicated discussion board, ScarletUser.

On both sites, requests for features -- both "reasonable" and "unreasonable" -- were made by the community, changes and revisions made by RED, and while not everyone was thrilled by every aspect of either camera, the forums were buzzing all through the spring and summer.

Then, in September 2008, several announcements came in quick succession from Jim Jannard -- founder of RED and wacky billionaire extraordinaire -- on the RedUser forum.

The first, posted on September 8, announced a "DSLR-killer" that was tentatively called a DSMC (Digital Still & Motion Camera). Speculation as to what this could mean -- and in particular, where the DSMC sat in relation to the Scarlet, specification-wise -- immediately erupted. Scarlet had a 2/3" sensor, after all, whereas to even play in the DSLR sandbox the DSMC would have to be a 35mm sensor, to say nothing of the planned "fixed lens" on Scarlet, when the DSMC would need to be swappable. So it sounded like the DSMC would pretty much trounce Scarlet spec-wise; but if it were more expensive than Scarlet's speculated $3K price point, it would be too expensive to be much of a competitor, let alone a "killer," of the DSLR market.

I personally was already confused by what seemed to me to be significant market overlap between the Epic and the Red One -- now RED seemed to be stepping on their own toes again. It just didn't make much sense.

Three days later, on September 11, Jannard posted a message stating simply that "Epic...has changed." Eleven days after that, on ScarletUser, Jannard announced that Scarlet, similarly, was "not the same," and that everything we "knew" about Scarlet should be wiped from our memories. He later made the same "clean slate" statement regarding Epic. Renders and spec pages of both products were pulled from the RED company website, replaced with temporary images stating that they were "Currently Undergoing Change."

When it was pointed out that no mention had been made of where the DSMC sat in these plans, Jim gave the cryptic answer, "What's a DSMC?"

Based on all that, it was assumed by many in the RED-aware community, myself included, that RED had realized that Epic needed to be more distinct from Red One and were re-tooling it, and likewise had absorbed the DSMC into a revised Scarlet concept.

Finally, Jim announced that all would be made clear on November 13th. Why that date? Who knows. But the RED community -- and really, much of the digital filmmaking community -- has been looking toward the day with some degree of anticipation or other.

So now the day is here. And as of 1:41 AM, all has indeed been made clear.

What Just Happened

The most significant element of the announcement, as it turns out, is the DSMC. If the concept started life as a distinct, stand-alone product, it has since evolved into the over-arching philosophy for the foreseeable future of RED's product line.

Standard practice for electronics manufacturers is to build a full-featured device -- in this case a camera. The commonly understood drawback being that the device is obsolete nearly the moment you buy it. Technological advancement has created an improvement in the sensor, or the processing, or the monitoring, even an improvement in form factor -- whatever it is, it will require that the manufacturer create a completely new device, and you must buy it again.

This also tends to mean that updated devices come every 12-18 months, since manufacturers don't want to constantly be revising their product line. So they wait for a "backlog" of improvements to build up, enough that they can justify creating a new product and you, the buyer, can justify ponying up the dough again.

The DSMC model does things differently.

RED's plan moving forward is to produce not cameras, but components of cameras, which can be configured and re-configured almost infinitely¹. You can buy one set of components and be able to make a still camera, a movie camera, a shoulder-mounted camera, and even a 3D rig. You are not locked in to the configuration that they think is most "optimized" for the most situations. You decide.

On top of that, because the camera is modular in every way, including the sensor (which I'll get to in a second), you also don't have to wait for technological advances to reach critical mass before upgrading to the latest and greatest. If a better LCD monitor comes out, you can buy that and integrate it into your configurations without losing the investment on the rest of the components. A lot of the non-electronic components -- the grips, the shoulder-pads, the mounting rods -- will rarely or never need an "upgrade," so it's senseless to buy all those bits anew when the electronics are improved. Thanks to the modular DSMC system, you no longer have to.

The concept, like all revolutionary ideas, is forehead-slappingly obvious once someone comes out and does it. And to be fair, it's not a completely new concept -- to RED. This is essentially what the Red One was intended to be, but they couldn't quite make it happen.

But hey, the camera makes pretty pictures and if it was a necessary step to take on the path to developing the DSMC system, then I am happy to forgive.

As I said, the system is totally modular, and that includes the sensor. Not only was DSMC not absorbed into Scarlet, but as it turns out, both Scarlet and Epic were absorbed into the DSMC philosophy.

One of the issues that restricted the intended modularity of the Red One was the fact that some parts were easier to upgrade than others. For example, the camera can only record 4K resolution at 30 frames per second. This is not a restriction of the sensor, which can be upgraded and swapped out relatively easily (by trained technicians), but of the camera's internal motherboard which processes the imagery, which cannot be upgraded.

So when it comes to the DSMC, rather than simply selling swappable sensors and wishing the users best of luck, RED will package the sensors with the necessary electronics to record, encode, and control the imagery from those specific sensors, and swappable lens mounts. They call these modules "Brains," and like the other elements they are fully swappable modules. So instead of Scarlet and Epic being individual cameras, they are two lines of Brain modules, and they break down like this.

Scarlet

Scarlet Brains are tentatively to be configured as follows:

2/3" Mysterium-X Sensor,² 3K resolution, 1-120 fps recording, $2,500³
Super-35 Mysterium-X Sensor, 5K resolution, 1-30 fps recording, $7,000
Full-Frame 35 Monstro Sensor, 6K resolution, 1-30 fps recording, $12,000

All Scarlet Brains will record a data-rate of 42 MB/sec (compared to Red One's 36 MB/sec).

Epic

Fair warning: if you understand even some of what I'm saying here, the specs of the Epic Brains may explode yours.

Epic Brains are tentatively to be configured as follows:

Super-35 Mysterium-X Sensor, 5K resolution, 1-100 fps recording, $28,000
Full-Frame 35 Monstro Sensor, 6K resolution, 1-100 fps recording, $35,000
Medium-Format 645 (basically IMAX) Monstro Sensor, 9K resolution, 1-50 fps recording, $45,000

These Epic Brains will record a data-rate of 225 MB/sec -- that's a 625% increase in data rate, and hopefully therefore quality, over Red One.

I complained last time that they shouldn't be calling a camera Epic unless it basically shoots 65mm/IMAX format -- and they've answered that. Not only that, but they threw in one more format, one that makes IMAX its bitch.

Technorama 617 Monstro Sensor, 28K resolution, 1-25 fps, $55,000

Yes, you fucking heard me right. I said 28K. And it'll record at a computer-pulverizing 500 MB/sec.

Red One's 4K is already four times bigger than your 1080p HDTV. How big is 28K compared to that? Stu Maschwitz did a comparison on his Prolost blog.

If that's still too abstract, lay a 14-story office building on its side in your mind. That's roughly the fucking native resolution of 28K.⁴

It's basically a digital, motion-capable version of this camera. The obvious question arises: Why in the hell would you port such a camera format to the digital realm at all, much less at such blasphemous resolutions?

The best I can figure is that this is RED's way of telling me and people like me -- folks that thought we were hot shit calling for RED to step up to the IMAX plate after getting moist at a Dark Knight screening, folks that said that we knew what was "epic," we had seen "epic," and 5K Super-35, good sir, was not "epic" -- that we may feel free to shut our goddamned sissy mouths, and mince our dainty way out of RED Epic's sight.

So What Does All This Mean?

I remember being taught in science class that every cell of your body eventually dies, and is replaced by a new cell. Eventually this happens to every cell in your body, so that after a certain period of time -- as I recall it was a cycle of seven years -- your body is comprised of entirely new cells. After seven years, there is no cell in your body that was there seven years ago. They have all been replaced. But "you" are still "you."

Metaphysical implications aside, this is basically what the DSMC philosophy will mean to the RED camera, starting when it is implemented in (tentatively) Spring/Summer '09. You only have to buy "one camera," and from that point on it is only the components that change. And by the end of it you may have a completely different camera than the one you started with, but your investment and upgrading is spread out over the life of the camera, and you hardly notice.

Even better, with rental solutions you can upgrade your camera temporarily as needed. Say you invest in a package with a 5K Scarlet Brain, as it's most cost-effective, but you decide you want to shoot slow-motion at higher frame-rates than 30 fps. Outside a DSMC model, you would have to rent an entire camera package -- whether it be a Phantom or other high-speed camera, or even an old-style Epic -- the format and image quality and resolution may not match, they may not cut together, and it may bugger the whole pipeline.

But with swappable Brains, you can shoot with the 5K Scarlet, then if you want to shoot high-speed you rent a 5K Epic Brain for a day and swap it in for the high-speed shots. It's all REDCODE, it's all Super-35, all 5K with the same compression type (though quite a bit less on the Epic) and same lenses, and you never even have to change the accessory configuration.

And if (when), down the line, higher framerates or data rates or resolutions become a possibility, you can just rent or buy those new modules, and keep on shooting like nothing's changed.

The example I gave above is, basically, what I plan to do. When the DSMC system becomes available, I will sell my Red One + accessories and use the money to purchase a DSMC package with a 5K Scarlet brain -- I don't know how much those accessories will cost, but more than likely, it will probably be cheaper out the door than my current RED package. I will rent an Epic 5K brain for high-speed shooting, and otherwise be happy with a camera that completely out-specs a camera with which I am already quite happy.

The Editblog has dubbed today "REDmas," and though it's meant to be a bit of a nudge in the ribs at the TOTAL fanboyism and anticipation leading up to this day, I think it is still somewhat appropriate. Especially since, for me, the day is still not over.

Our friends at fxguide/Red Centre have asked me to attend a private RED event on their behalf this evening, where we will be able to talk to the RED peeps, ask some questions, and hopefully get some pictures and even maybe get our hands on some prototypes. Keep your eye on fxguide for the story, and if there's any new insight that impacts what I've said here, I'll do an update post here too.

Finally, the obligatory disclaimer: for all the excitement and profanity this talk has brought out of me, these are currently just plans and specs and CAD renders. None of this actually exists and it's possible that none of it ever will, whether by RED not following through or just changing their minds -- as they've already done once. But they did follow through on the Red One, so they've earned some faith from me.

Their marketing material claims 2,251,799,813,685,248 possible configurations based on the planned accessories; don't ask me how they got that number, they may have just made it up, but even if they did, it still makes the point pretty strongly.↩

RED's first sensor was, and is, the Mysterium. Mysterium-X is the second generation, with improved dynamic range (11+ stops to Mysterium's 10+). Monstro is the third generation, with both improved dynamic range (13+ stops) and improved bit depth (16 bits to Mysterium and Mysterium-X's 12 bits).↩

There is, at this time, still a plan to have a self-contained Scarlet with an included, fixed lens with this same "Brain" config, pricing TBD.↩

Sorry if the cursing is a little more excessive than usual, but seriously. Fuck.↩

Yes We Did

2008-11-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to President Barack Obama.

Congratulations America. And welcome back.

'Nuff said.

My No on 8 Video

2008-11-01T09:08:00.001-07:00

This is a somewhat-successful first attempt at using YouTube's "Direct Upload" feature, and it's my appeal to California voters to vote against the discriminatory Proposition 8. The audio is out of sync and it cuts off the last sentence, but the bulk of the message is there.

The video cuts off at the end, the last bit was supposed to say "The law is meant to protect the people, not to harm them. Vote No on Prop 8."

Also of note is this video, narrated by Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson, and describing a little bit more the history of discrimination we should be turning our backs on, not embracing like a long-lost friend.

California Voters: The "Props" on the Ballot

2008-10-31T02:01:00.000-07:00

(This was originally an e-mail I sent around to some of my close friends. A few of them encouraged me to blog it, so what the heck, here it is.)

One week from Tuesday, Nov. 4, is the big election -- although some of you may be voting early (and may have done so already). There are also 12 proposed laws on the California ballot. The props are long and filled with legalese, and the arguments from both sides are adamant and compelling.

I won't tell you guys how to vote (aside from no on Prop 8 -- it seriously goes against everything America is supposed to stand for), but I can tell you how *I* plan to vote at this point, and why, and perhaps help you make your decisions as well.

So here we go:

Proposition 1/1A:

A proposed bullet train system, to connect the major metropolitan areas of the state. Proponents claim that it would be a boon to the economy, alleviate CO2 emissions, and all-around bring the state into the 21st century.

The prop allows for a nearly $10 billion bond to be taken out, and no new taxes to be levied.

Well, here's the problem. The money's got to come from somewhere. And if new taxes aren't going to be spent, that means it has to come out of the state discretionary funds. That means that the money to pay for this train would come out of education, law enforcement, healthcare, roads, and other "discretionary" projects, and be added to the existing $7 billion state deficit we've already racked up under the Governator's watch.

In addition, it would appear that the bullet train lacks oversight or even a cohesive plan for the actual building. You know those government workers who shut down freeways but never actually seem to be working? We'll get more of that. There is no incentive for the construction companies to actually even start the project, let alone finish it; and no way for taxpayers to take action against them.

While I like the idea of a high-speed rail system in our state -- and really nationwide -- this proposition is not written with the citizens' best interests in mind, and can too easily be abused leaving the state saddled with a nearly $20 billion debt (the initial bond plus interest over 30 years) that we will still have to pay even if the project is not completed, or shut down entirely. A massive infrastructural project like this needs to be better planned and regulated -- and oh yeah, should probably specify exactly where the money will come from. I will be voting NO on Prop 1.

Proposition 2:

Provides for the "humane treatment" of animals raised for food, such as egg-laying chickens and cows raised for veal.

The argument for is basically treating animals humanely. I personally question the logic a little bit since they will eventually be killed and eaten, and it seems to humanize the animals unnecessarily.

The argument against claims that the measure will harm local farmers by creating additional overhead, forcing them to own more land to give more space to the animals, or cut back on their production.

Frankly I don't know what to think about it. But I don't like the idea of creating new laws for special interests on either side of the table. I'm going to go with my default on this, which is to vote NO on Prop 2.

Proposition 3:

Provides a bond for just under $1 billion to fund Children's Hospitals.

This one smells pretty fishy to me. Whenever someone claims that it's "for the children" I'm automatically suspicious, because that's an easy way to stop people from really thinking about the claims being made and just pull the lever "for the children."

This is another bond that will not create new taxes -- but as I said with prop 1, the money's got to come from somewhere. The opponents point out that a previous bond -- prop 61 passed in 2004 -- have apparently not yet been exhausted. They talk about these children's hospitals being able to afford the latest medical technologies -- but it sounds to me like the suppliers are just holding their hands out looking for cash.

I don't like the sound of it, and again, there's unspent money already there for this very purpose. It's not for the children, they're using the children to get more money to fill their coffers, and that's not right. I will vote NO on Prop 3.

Proposition 4:

Requires a waiting period and parental notification before terminating (aborting) the pregnancy of a minor.

The fact is, I agree with the opponents pretty much flat-out on this one. This law would not prevent teen pregnancy, or safeguard young women from sexual predators. It would merely make them more likely to hide their pregnancy, and seek out illegal or out-of-state abortions instead.

This is obviously an attempt by anti-abortion activists to create a chink in the abortion laws so that they can continue chiseling away at them.

Without getting into opinions about abortion itself, the fact is that the answer to this is education, not legislation. I will be voting NO on Prop 4.

Proposition 5:

Reforms drug laws, sentencing, and rehabilitation programs for non-violent offenders.

I am personally of the belief that drug use is a victimless crime. It can lead to crimes that victimize others, but prop 5 will not make California judges unable to sentence violent offenders. Instead, it reduces criminal penalties for non-violent offenders, as well as establishing/funding rehabilitation programs.

I believe in the inherent goodness of people, and I believe that people can get "clean." And under California's existing three-strikes legislation, it's not like they would get to make their mistakes ad infinitum.

I'm all for sending fewer people to jail for non-violent "crimes" and giving people a second chance. I will be voting YES on Prop 5.

Proposition 6:

More money to law enforcement, more things criminalized with harsher penalties (even adding new life sentences).

This goes against what I said above in 5. The answer to the problems is not more incarceration and potential for abuse of police power. And there is no guarantee of oversight of the nearly $1 billion that will go into this program.

Aiding in the creation of a police state is not and will never be part of my agenda. I will be voting NO on Prop 6.

Proposition 7:

Provision for renewable energy generation. Appears to be opposed by the major electrical utilities and the major political parties. I don't trust politicians or the folks who benefit most from keeping the status quo. They call prop 7 poorly-written, but having read it, it appears to close up current loopholes in the production of renewable energy, providing a legal mandate that these energy groups must achieve their goals and not merely try.

It also eliminates exemptions for "electrical corporations," defining them as "retail sellers" and holding them accountable.

We need renewable energy, in California and throughout the world. I'm no lawyer, but as far as I can tell the folks against 7 stand the most to profit if it fails, and the rest of us the most if it succeeds. I will vote YES on Prop 7.

Proposition 8:

Eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry. Constitutional amendment.

Besides my obvious stake in this, it is wrong in any and all cases to pass laws that take away existing rights from a minority group. You don't have to approve of it, but don't make it illegal when it doesn't harm anyone.

I'll be putting out a video on this in the next day or so, but the short version is: VOTE NO ON 8.

Proposition 9:

Victims' rights to notification and testimony.

My default position to constitutional amendments is no, and Prop 9 is no different. While I feel for the victims of violent crime, prop 9 is a redundant constitutional amendment, and has been judged to cost taxpayers (us) in the hundreds of millions, in the middle of a serious deficit; and again, the provisions that it would "enact" already exist, and have since 1982. I will vote NO on Prop 9.

Proposition 10:

Bonds to purchase alternative fuel vehicles.

This proposition will cost $10 billion over 30 years, and fails, according to independent analysts, to provide adequate funds for its actual administration. As with the other bonds that will "not raise taxes," this money will come out of education, roads, healthcare, and other discretionary projects. It is also written in such a way as to possibly be construed to specify *certain kinds* of alternative fuel -- natural gas, ethanol, biodiesel and hydrogen -- and could be used to exclude major clean-fuel vehicle types like hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and full-electric cars.

Prop 7 covers the state's renewable energy issue, and the idea of taking $10 billion out of our economy with no real plan where it's going to come from is a bad idea. As much as I'd like the gov't to buy me a Prius, I will be voting NO on Prop 10.

Proposition 11:

Redistricting, Constitutional amendment.

Basically would allow the districts of state representatives to the federal congress to be redrawn. The weasel word that concerns me here is that it allows of the creation and maintenance of "communities of interest" -- and doesn't define what that means. This sounds to me like it would allow for redistricting based on ideological biases. This power, by the way, is given to an appointed -- not elected -- commission.

I don't like the smell of this. It's a new bureacracy that is not elected and therefore not accountable to the will of the people. And another constitutional amendment, which are hard to undo once done. I will vote NO on Prop. 11.

Proposition 12:

Provides low-interest rate home loans to U.S. Veterans.

It's understandable if folks are gun-shy of the home loan market after these last couple of harrowing weeks, which were caused in part by bad home loans. But as my roommate Brian pointed out, those were high interest rate home loans, not low interest rates. This could actually help the state economy.

Generally speaking, a house is one of the best investments you can make. This program has apparently been in place for a long time and is merely renewed each election. And regardless of your feelings on war or the military -- I happen to be a pacifist and don't get me started on Iraq -- the fact is that the people in the military do what they do out of loyalty to this country, and if they need a little help buying their piece of the American dream when they get done, then I think that's the least we can do.

(It's also a little telling that the opposition apparently consists of one guy. Most ballot measures get at least three people for each side, representing particular interests that want the measure to either pass or fail. He doesn't even have an organizational affiliation. He's just some guy.)

I will vote YES on Prop 12.

So, to recap:

Prop 1: NO
Prop 2: NO
Prop 3: NO
Prop 4: NO
Prop 5: YES
Prop 6: NO
Prop 7: YES
Prop 8: NO
Prop 9: NO
Prop 10: NO
Prop 11: NO
Prop 12: YES

But what I REALLY want to do...

2008-10-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I wrote an actual blog on filmmaking, whether procedural or philosophical. This comment ties back to an earlier post I made about how some people really feel passionate about what they do in the industry. I had another experience of the sort that made me want to elaborate a bit more on the topic.

The common "wisdom" about the movie business is that everyone, whether overtly or secretly, is angling to direct.¹ Because of the pervasiveness of this idea, I think many of the more "lowly" positions on the set -- the PAs, the grips -- are treated with disdain by the higher-ups, who view them as opportunistic (and, for the more insecure artistes, as potential threats). An older hand at it, a career grip, who's been in the business 40 years for example, might be treated with a subtle pity, as though they had failed to reach what was presumably their "true" ambition.

More experienced filmmakers who have worked with proper crews I'm sure know better than this, so I'm talking more to the up-and-comers in the crowd. When you get to the point that you get to command a set, do not under any circumstances condescend to your crew. Do not assume that you are better than them, or that you have achieved what they never could. Because that's probably not the case.

When we were shooting Sandrima Rising, they hired a grip by the name of Popcorn.² And he was phenomenal, I gotta say. Got the work done, kept his focus, never complained. And we would get to talking, as you do on any project, especially a long-term one. And he talked about how his father AND grandfather had both been grips in the film industry. He was a third-generation grip. and he loved what he did.

He loved the fact that he got to be a part of the creative and technical processes, without the rather crushing burden of having to run the show. He didn't mind that no grip, even key grip, is a household name (unlike directors and, to a lesser degree, writers), nor that he was not in the part of the industry that would ever make much more than a "modest" living.³ He just loved being a part of it, and love the part of it that he was in. Had no interest or aspiration for directing, loved being the one to realize the visions of the directors, solve a different problem every day, and most importantly, work regularly.

A director works on one project at a time, generally, and follows that through to completion, which can take a year or more. But crew can move from production to production, three or four months of shooting apiece and moving on to the next. The work is far more regular and, from a certain perspective and mindset, more rewarding. Like I said, every day a new challenge, instead of working on the same shots and sequences endlessly as you hone it into completion.

Another story, and the one that made me think of this topic again. I've been renting the RED to a no-budget feature titled Solitary.⁴ The crew is small, but so is the location, and as such I pretty much just stay the hell out of the way when I'm on set as camera support -- a project which I frequently designate to Anthony, so that I can stay home and work on Sandrima. But this weekend I went out with the camera on my own for scheduling reasons, and I met a grip who is doing his only weekend on the set.

The guy is a perfect case study in not judging a book by its cover. He's young, early to mid-twenties; good-looking, to the extent I'm surprised that he's behind the camera instead of in front. Very quiet, spends the day lugging equipment and such back and forth around the location. Easy to assume that he's a nice enough guy, but probably not very bright and therefore is best suited to manual labor.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, before working in film he took three years of engineering in college, as well as a year and a half of advanced physics studies, before putting college on hold to work in film for a while. His father was (is) a DP and he grew up on-set with crews and is comfortable with the "culture." He loves the physical labor part of it, but also -- as with Mr. Popcorn -- the synthesis of creative and technical problem-solving. He was more knowledgeable about filmmaking technology than most directors I know, and we had a brief but stimulating conversation about cameras, compositing, and shooting techniques. And still he, too, has no apparent interest in doing anything in the film business but what he's doing now.

While the grips carry equipment around and set up the lights, it's not mindless grunt work. They have to understand electrical currents and wiring in order to run cabling and power distribution appropriately; they have to understand the physics of light in order to get the precise lighting effects the DP requests⁵; and they've been on so many sets and solved so many problems that they can really bring a lot of diverse experience to bear on your current project.

If I remember to (and going back through earlier posts I discover a number of topics I've been "meaning to" talk about that haven't happened yet), I'll get into my thoughts on the "Auteur Theory" sometime. But whatever the case, when you get to make your movie, always treat the people working on the set with respect and dignity; and if they have suggestions, keep your ears and mind open.

Because despite the fact that you're the "guy in charge," there's still a good chance they're smarter than you.

A corollary to this holds that everyone in Los Angeles is working on a script. This one I think is true -- if you walked up to a random person in the supermarket and asked them how their script was going, I would wager 4 out of 5 times the response would be an astonished "How did you know?"↩

Seriously. I also know folks who go by Bear and Dragon. And then there's the concept artist Crash McCreery. You can get away with that stuff in this business. Hell, I go by Dorkman, so it's not like I can talk.↩

I say "modest" because, with film budgets what they are, a key grip with his own kit is gonna do alright for himself. It won't be in the millions, but a high five figures, even low six, is not out of the question↩

Not to be confused with an in-development project of my own that is titled Solitary, a title which really suits the project too well to change it. Not that most of you know anything about that project since it's nowhere near production and may never happen at all. But if it does, you'll know not to confuse them.↩

Some DPs are very involved with the process and will dictate what to do at a very detailed level. But some DPs prefer to invoke more of a feeling, and a general sense of where the light will come from and what the quality of the light will be, and the grips interpret that into the actual rigging of the lights. ↩

I've got a new blog

2008-10-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

National Novel Writing Month is around the corner (November 1), and I'm going to participate this year. I've already written up an introductory post over at the shiny new Nano blog.

The new blog is NOT a replacement for this one; I will still be posting here whenever the urge strikes/schedules permit, about all the various subjects I wind up posting about. But I wanted to hold myself accountable by posting my speed-written novel somewhere public. Instead of choking up my "personal" blog with daily story installments, I created another blog for the purpose.

The first post on the new blog contains all the caveats I wish to express to potential readers of the speed-story, so head on over there if you're interested, and if you're not, you won't be missing anything in terms of my "regular" blog content, which will stay right here.

It is Not for Lack of Bibles

2008-10-20T19:14:00.000-07:00

So a few months ago I got a package from Amazon.com. I heart books, so I'm always excited to see a box with the Amazon smirk on the side of it. But I hadn't actually ordered anything, so my excitement was also tinged with curiosity. I opened the package and discovered I had been gifted with a copy of The Case for a Creator (which I will get back to deconstructing soon).

At the time I avoided mentioning who had sent the gift, out of respect for his privacy, but since he's had no qualms involving himself in the discussion of the book I guess it's no secret that it was sent by fellow TFN'er Drew Mazanec.

The discussion has been on hold because I've had other things occupying my time. I had to finish up the course I was doing part-time over at fxphd, and I've still got a lot of work to do full-time on Sandrima Rising.

So imagine my surprise today when I was again greeted by a smirking Amazon shipment -- this time a gift of the Apologetics Study Bible, once again from Drew.

Although I have a cynical view of religion and belief, I am less cynical and more willing to give a benefit of a doubt to the religious and believers. I have no doubt that Drew is sending me these tomes with the best of intentions. More than likely, out of a concern for the fate of my immortal soul. Though I consider the concern misplaced, I do not doubt that it is genuine.

But I went to a Lutheran middle school and a Catholic high school. From those schools, I own a Lutheran Study Bible and a Roman Catholic Bible; I also have a Bible that my mother got when she graduated high school. In addition, my roommates own three Bibles between them, and if I want to get really academic about it, my brother not only also has a KJV Bible, but owns copies of the Bible in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

So in printed Bibles alone I've got handy access to ten different editions in four different languages. And just about every English version of the Bible is readily available online. My favorite of which, and the one I read, is the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which looks at the text objectively, letting it stand or fall (mostly fall) on its own merits.

It is not a lack of Biblical availability or knowledge that causes me to not believe in Christianity. Indeed, it is the fact that I am familiar with the Bible that causes me to dismiss it. It is not for lack of Bibles, it is for lack of evidence that the Bible is reliable in the first place.

I was a Christian for most of my life, and a devout one through the end of high school and college.1 I understand the mindset and I know the arguments presented. I am not denigrating Drew's concern, or his generosity. Clearly he believes strongly enough to put his money where his mouth is, literally; and in pursuit of what I assume, based on my personal experience as a Christian, he sees as helping me.

But if I needed a Bible (and as I said, I really don't), I could afford one. Land of opportunity FTW. Next time you've got extra cash laying around, instead of spending $30 to send me a book, donate it to a humanitarian cause. Preferably one that provides food where it is needed.

Obviously, the real aim is to address and/or answer some of my questions and concerns. So take out the middle man, Drew. Let's just talk about this. We both have blogs, we both have AIM, we both have e-mail. Name the medium and let's have an actual discussion about this stuff. My only condition is that we be allowed to share the discussion, in whole or in part, on our respective blogs. Clearly you believe in what these books are peddling, so you should be able to articulate it in your own words. It's not fair for me to tear an argument apart when the person making the argument has no opportunity for rebuttal. So let's have a dialogue. It'll save you money in the long run.

My intention is not to "call Drew out" or put him on the spot. But I think it could be educational for both of us, and maybe for our respective readers, to hash this out directly rather than dashing exclusively behind various authors and authorities. Which is not to say that calling upon experts would be out of the question, but the bulk of it should be our own expression.

Plus it'll give me more to post about.

The invitation is open to anyone else who cares to discuss these ideas with me, as well. Just let me know.

And if anyone feels compelled to send me free books in the future, I would much prefer something from my Amazon wish list.

On that subject, I'm also looking for recommendations for new (to me) fiction; I've been reading a lot of non-fiction and technical stuff lately and want to "get away" a little bit.

At least a few of the folks out there who are currently Christians will, I'm sure, refuse to believe that I was ever "truly" Christian, much less devout. If I truly had a relationship with God I could never turn away, goes the reasoning. I can't really begrudge that thinking, because ironically, that was my thinking when I was devout. All I can say is, believe me, I was. Anyone who knew me at the time could vouch for it.↩

The 305

2008-10-14T05:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is kind of old and mostly a fluff post to put something new on the front.

I'm a fan of the movie 300. I took some convincing, all the people talking about how "badass" the trailer looked put me off a bit, and even coming out of it I felt like Sin City was a more significant stylistic achievement, but as time has gone on, I've thought often of 300 and rarely of Sin City.

The easy assumption for my preference is the greater prevalence of muscular men in loincloths and capes in one over the other, but honestly that's not really my gauge. While both were loyal to the graphic novel, and both were shot on greenscreen, 300 was less restrictive than Sin City. 300 used the visionary work of Frank Miller as a springboard, Sin City as a straitjacket. I forgot, while watching 300, that it was shot on greenscreen. I never really lost that sense of confined space with Sin City.

Anyway, a discussion of the relative merits of the two films might have been more relevant a year and a half ago when 300 was actually released in theatres, so I'll skip it. The point in bringing up 300 is to bring up this parody film, 305, which combines the story of 300 with the sensibility (and to an extent, character "archetypes") of "The Office" (American version).

It becomes obvious pretty quickly who's who, especially in the cases of Darryl and Testicleese, who are direct duplicates in both appearance and manner of Dwight and Jim, respectively.

More than likely you've already seen this video, but for those who haven't:

But there's more to it than just a YouTube video. I think this deserves a distinction for being a YouTube video that actually led to a feature film. That's right, there's a full-length 305 movie out there for your viewing pleasure.

For the record, I don't think you should run out and buy the film, but if you see it at Blockbuster, and you're a fan of 300/The Office/both, I think it's worth your time.

My concern was how they would extend the "Office meets Sparta" conceit beyond the five minutes of the original short. Even in the short itself, it threatens to overstay its welcome, but thankfully never does. I thought the full feature would be tired repetition of the same -- not even "joke," per se, but "premise."

"What if the story of 300 was told like the Office?" "What if cavemen sold car insurance?" You get what I'm talking about.

Thankfully, the writers (and I don't have to put it in quotation marks like I would with certain "parodies" out there) actually bothered to come up with a story.

The movie starts off with the short -- and why not, you've already got five minutes of your feature in the can. Although they did bother to improve the composites -- but then immediately leaves the "guys guarding the goat path" conceit and has the characters embarking on their own misadventures. It's campy, it's occasionally cliche, but it's fun. There's some genuine amusing jokes in there, and while it's not really much more than some college guys having fun with a camera -- well, what's wrong with that, anyway?

Plus you gotta show some respect. These are young guys working with almost no money with nothing but a green tarp in a small room, and they managed to make a genuinely entertaining and enjoyable feature film. Frankly I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more attention just based on the "biography" of the project, but I guess somebody making a feature for no money isn't really "news" anymore.

Oh, and also the fight scenes, while not ones for the books, were still pretty decent, especially when you factor in the limitations of the shooting environment.

Anyway, I picked up the flick with apprehension and it surpassed my expectations. Not one to go out of your way for, but if you can't think of anything else to rent on a Saturday night, see if they've got this on the shelf.

Last Night's Debate

2008-10-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

Not really much to say, I think the pundits have it right and the country does too. Palin didn't self-destruct, Biden won the debate in terms of actually being able to do the job.

I'm actually planning to do a YouTube video re: the election, hopefully get that done this weekend when I've got the opportunity.

She's On The List

2008-09-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

If that episode of Friends is to be believed, everybody has a list of celebrities that, if the opportunity presents itself, they would sleep with.¹ I don't know if that episode is to be believed, in the sense that I'm not sure everybody has such a list, but I certainly have one.

Obviously that list is of male celebrities, and is pure fantasy since most of them are (apparently) straight, and no, I won't tell you who.

I have, however, another, shorter list of female celebrities that I would hook up with. On the Kinsey Scale, I'd consider myself a pretty solid 5, even a 5.5, but not a full 6. There are a select few ladies out there who are just so goddamn amazing, even I couldn't resist.

Tina Fey is definitely on that list.

Tina Fey, in fact, is on a sub-list of that list. I wouldn't just hit that, I would get down on my knee and propose and raise a family with her. Seriously, I love this woman. And I hope, if I ever actually get to meet her, that this admission doesn't make it awkward.

And, that her husband isn't around.

Anyway.

It's not like she's a new addition to the list, however she's come back to the fore with her spot-on impersonations of Sarah Palin² on Saturday Night Live. Everyone saw the first Palin-Hillary sketch a week or two ago, but last night she appeared again, this time in a satire of Palin's trainwreck of an interview with Katie Couric:

Funny shit, but also a little scary. Why do I say scary? Because here's the relevant excerpt from the real interview with Couric:

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

You see what I mean by scary? The SNL sketch practically doesn't count as satire because it's almost fucking verbatim to Palin's actual answer.

Seriously, here's the transcript of what Palin says. Now play the SNL sketch and read along:

That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

The way they sync up is almost like playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching Wizard of Oz, except instead of freaking out because that's totally trippy, man, you're freaking out because there's a very real chance she will end up President of the United States if John McCain wins and then dies. And the odds of each one are, at this point, pretty much 50-50.

Even just reading it on its own, it's impossible to parse. As Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars put it:

She literally babbles incoherently, just stringing together a bunch of totally unrelated talking points that couldn't make a coherent sentence at gunpoint. It's gibberish. It's word salad. It sounds like she's playing one of those refrigerator magnet games with a bunch of words and phrases and trying to tie them all together.

And yet the campaigns are still neck-and-neck.

Sorry to cock-knock my male readers, luring them in with dirty Tina Fey talk and then abruptly seguing into politics again. But the Palin sketch just got me thinking. So much depends on Thursday's debate.

Ironically, it's in the season 3 episode "The One With Frank Jr.," and not the season 2 episode "The One With The List."↩

Who I would also totally hit -- WITH MY FIST! AMIRITE?! HIGH FIVE!!↩

Election 2008: Presidential Debate #1

2008-09-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

Political post. If you don't want to hear it, go read Dr. McNinja instead.¹

Last night was the first of three Presidential debates for the 2008 election, between Democratic nominee Barack Obama, and Republican nominee John McCain. If you haven't seen it, it is available in its entirety on CNN.com.

The first question that's asked is who won. I'm not sure that's the right question to ask, but I'll bite. There are two answers here. On the one hand, from as objective a standpoint as I could figure, it seemed more or less like a draw. McCain was out of his league when it came to the economic discussion that dominated the first half hour of the debate, but he came back strong when they started talking about Iraq, and managed to get the upper hand a bit with "the Surge worked nanner-nanner," to which the ever graceful Obama could only reply "Yes, it did." I think they were about evenly matched in terms of Russia/Pakistan talks. So like I say, a draw.

But a draw, in this case, can also be seen as a win for Obama. John McCain is and has been behind in the polls as the afterglow of Sarah Palin's nomination began to wear off (which, as is often the case, occurred when she opened her mouth and spoke); his "suspend the campaign/debate" bluff got called and he wound up losing the skirmish and appearing at the debate after all. McCain needed a home run, and he was most likely to get it from this debate, as it was (supposed to be) about foreign policy, which is (supposed to be) his specialty. He needed to show that Obama was in over his head when it came to foreign policy, and that he, John McCain, had what it took.

And while perhaps J McC did show -- at least to those already inclined to think so -- that he "has what it takes," so did Obama. No major gaffes on Obama's part. He remained cool, collected, and for every question, he had an answer.²

As I said, McCain needed a home run, this was his best chance to hit one -- and he didn't. Policy-wise, they tied. "Not a game-changer either way," the pundits are saying. That means the game remains as it was: Obama started ahead in the polls, and remained ahead in the polls, and so the tie was, in a sense, a victory for Obama.

Of course, the debates aren't really for staunch Republicans or Democrats, who have already made up their minds and are just watching the way one might watch a football match, a gladiatorial match, or an episode of Destroyed in Seconds. They're not really weighing the two candidates' stances on the issues, they just don't want to miss the very real possibility of political carnage.³

No, the debates are for those beautiful bastards, the undecideds -- who, ironically, are the ultimate deciders. They are the third-or-so of the population that one of the candidates needs to win over. And according to the polls, Obama convinced more of them that he could handle the gig than McCain did last night.

Nonetheless, McCain is clearly of the Orwellian belief that you can control make something true merely by saying that it is true. For example, his campaign ran online ads declaring him the winner not only before yesterday's debate, but before he'd even confirmed that he would attend the debate.

So it's no surprise that, post-debate, the McCain campaign ran the following advertisement:

I think, however, that this ad backfires in a number of ways.

First off, we'll address the obvious elephant in the room: these statements are taken out of context. All three of them were followed by "but." Obama agreed with McCain's sentiments, but not the conclusions he drew or the actions he intended to take. But I suppose that kind of quote-mining is just par for the political course, so we won't belabor that. Let's talk about some of the other problems with it.

As one YouTube commenter pointed out:

By attacking Obama for agreeing with McCain, isn't his own campaign affirming the idea that McCain's policies are WRONG?

Well said, random internet person. Well said.

It also shows a fundamental (the politicians and pundits like that word) flaw in McCain's thinking. Specifically, that being willing to concede that someone else is right, and/or that you have occasionally been wrong, is some kind of weakness. That's exactly the bullshit pigheaded arrogance that has made Dubya the worst President, certainly in the recent history if not in the entire history of our nation.

It's okay to admit that you were wrong. In fact, to me, that shows more leadership potential and a better understanding of the nuances of human interaction than Bush or McCain seem to display.

On top of that, this ad, at least in concept, is plagiarized directly from this ad that VP nominee Joe Biden put together during the primary elections:

Let's stand back and think about this for a second. John McCain puts out an ad stating flat-out that Barack Obama is not ready to lead. And yet:

- John McCain chooses Sarah Palin as his running mate in a blatant attempt to cash in on Hillary's popularity.
- John McCain abandons his "experience" platform and adopts a "change" platform identical to the one that Obama has been using since the beginning.
- John McCain uses the "[blank] we can believe in" structure, recognizing its effectiveness in Obama's campaign
-Even last night, he appropriated Obama's rhetorical "Main Street/Wall Street" dichotomy, recognizing it as an effective sound bite, as well as another of Obama's frequently-repeated phrases, "Let me be clear."
- His "victory ad" is copied from his opponent's running mate.

In other words, McCain has spent his campaign following the other side's lead. If Obama isn't ready to lead, then why is McCain following right behind him at every move?

Also, it's a non-sequitur. The "punchline" of the ad has nothing to do with the preceding content. How does "I agree with Sen. McCain" automatically lead to "No"? It doesn't. They're two separate ads.

Here's my theory as to what happened: As a visual effects and graphics guy, I know that those graphics would have taken some time. So the fact is that they were already planning that ad, and had made the graphics and recorded the narration before the debate even happened, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to get the ad up so instantaneously.

They had already planned to release an ad stating that Obama was not ready to lead, already created the beginning and end bits, and were just waiting for Barack to put his foot in his mouth at the debate, so they could use that clip in the ad as their proof.

And the best they got out of him was his occasional concession that McCain had the right idea, but not the right approach, and just left the latter part out.

This is exactly the problem with their thinking -- the thinking that we already have in the White House. They make a plan and they refuse to deviate from it, even when it is clearly no longer the best strategy. "Stay the course." Fuck's sake.

Last comment on the debate: body language. Watch the debate with the sound off and just judge each one based on body cues. Obama was cool, relaxed -- hate to be trite, but "Presidential." He looked right at McCain, both while speaking to McCain and while McCain was speaking. He stood up straight and proud, and came across as someone I would be proud to have representing our country abroad.

McCain, on the other hand, was small, hunched over, tense, and looked more pissed-off as the night went on. He blinked a LOT, especially at the beginning -- generally a sign of either uncertainty or outright deceit -- and refused to look at or even directly address Obama. There are several ways to read that, none of them particularly good:

- On a purely primal level, social inferiors will not look their superiors in the eyes. You see this in wolves, lions, dogs, and apes. Subordinate males will not look at the dominant male. So just coming from the animal instinct level, John McCain recognized Obama as the alpha male on the stage.

- McCain is known to have a fiery temper, and despite his death's head rictus of a smile, he was all but vibrating with rage as Obama positively refused to be ignorant of the issues. It may be that he avoided looking at Obama because he would have utterly lost his composure if he had done so.⁴

- McCain was showing a total lack of respect, even contempt, for a formidable and worthy opponent. You don't have to like someone to respect them, and we don't need another 4 years of global petulance and disrespect from our Commander-in-Chief.⁵

I'm trying not to present a false dichotomy here, but I really can't think of any positive reason that McCain should have totally avoided eye contact, or even addressing Obama directly, especially when the format of the debate was that the two candidates would take five minutes in each topic to address each other directly. If any of you can put a positive spin on McCain's attitude, I'd be glad to hear it.

I was not myself undecided and this debate has not swung my vote. It's only made me more baffled -- and terrified -- that the race could be as close as it is.

As has been said by others, I don't believe that Obama is the pure-souled superpolitician who will finally bring back the unicorns. But I believe that this country needs a drastic change in direction, and Barack Obama represents that in far more ways than John McCain.

And if Obama really does bring back the unicorns, to boot -- well, I will be happy to admit I was wrong.

In the meantime, I'm very much looking forward to Thursday's debate.

And even if you do want to hear it, go read Dr. McNinja afterwards, because that's some funny shit. Make sure you read the alt-text!↩

Well, not quite every question. I was annoyed at the way both of them dodged the very direct question "What specific programs will you have to cut [read: what specific campaign promises will you be breaking] as a result of the economic crisis?" But both of them did it, so that one's a draw too.↩

For this reason, I'm inclined to think that the Biden-Palin debate will be the highest rated of all the debates this election season. One internet wit predicted it will end with Palin curled up and sobbing in a corner, while Biden dons parachute pants and does the Hammer Dance across the stage. ↩

McCain also apparently didn't realize that his tactic of "make up lies about the opponent's positions and declare them as truth" wouldn't work if his opponent was standing right there to contradict him, which Obama did on multiple occasions, finally neutralizing many of the false talking points McCain has been spreading around the last few months.↩

The more cynical or knee-jerk among us would probably say McCain was exhibiting racism, but I think, all else being equal (no pun intended), McCain would have behaved the same way with a white man. ↩

More GB3 News

2008-09-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted lately, as I've been busy with Sandrima (just locked a 3D track of what I think will be one of the stand-out shots of the project) and there's not much to post about.

Well, I take that back. There's actually been a LOT to post about, if we're going to talk politics, hasn't there? But the baffling actions of the McCain campaign have moved so fast that it really felt more appropriate to address them via Twitter than try to write up a meaningful blog about it, especially since I am having trouble understand what it all actually means besides "McCain is losing his marbles" and I don't want to stoop to that unnecessarily. Also, the mainstream media is FINALLY pulling their heads out and noticing that this is ridiculous, no longer forcing the Daily Show to be the sole source of sanity and accountability in this race, so I felt like the MSM had it covered.

So I've been out, although I probably will write a blog re: tonight's debate -- which, despite McCain's confidence, is anyone's game.

But I thought I'd follow-up on the Ghostbusters 3 story from my last blog with some new and exciting information.

One of the biggest stumbling points to another Ghostbusters film has always been Bill Murray. My understanding is this: like Indiana Jones, for which a sequel could only move forward with unanimous approval from Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford, Ghostbusters is split among the controlling interests of Reitman, Aykroyd, Ramis, and Murray. A third Ghostbusters film could only be made if all four of the principals approved of it, and for the last 20 years, Bill Murray wasn't having it.

When Ghostbusters 2 was produced, he was openly unhappy with the process of the production, as well as the final product, and declared that he was done with Ghostbusters. When the subject of the sequel came up, Murray either said no flat-out, or yes on the provision that Venkman be killed near the beginning of the film and return as a ghost.¹

Things got more promising when Aykroyd, high off a viewing of TMNT, proposed that GB3 be made as a CGI feature. Though I'm on record around the web as hating that idea -- I would rather not have GB3 at all in that case -- Murray said that he would be willing to provide the voice for Venkman in that case. This opened the door to his willing reprisal of the role of Peter Venkman in the upcoming Ghostbusters video game, and apparently re-awakened his enthusiasm for the franchise, as he talks about in this video from Fantastic Fest (the GB talk starts at about the 5:00 mark):

It's funny, I always assumed that Murray was just kind of a crotchety guy and moved on from GB because of diva-esque "artistic differences," not getting enough screen time, whatever. But the interview here is so frank and open that I'm realizing that's wrong. It seems that the fact is that Bill Murray loves Ghostbusters, and he loves the Venkman character, and he was hurt and angry by the way the characters he so enjoyed, and the strength of the story possibilities, were marginalized and disrespected in favor of the effects and a lazy re-hash of the original.

Now, don't get me wrong, I personally like GB2, but based more on the mere fact of its existence than its relative merits. Objectively I can see where he is coming from. It was more slime than substance, and a clearly inferior sequel. And he didn't trust, for the last few decades, that a GB3 would be anything more than another hollow exercise in visual effects (and given the direction Hollywood movies have steadily taken, who can blame him?).

But it sounds like he's willing to give it another shot, and that he's in the same place I'm at with the talk of Office writers taking a crack at it -- new blood might be exactly what the franchise needs, not to re-invent itself, but to stage a triumphant return that more people would love to see than I think even the studio realizes.

If Bill Murray is on board, then this is the best news imaginable for the franchise.

Considering that his problem with GB2 was what he saw as the overuse of visual effects, this seems like an odd request. I've long thought that this notion of killing off the most popular character was just a bluff that he knew they would never call, thereby saying "no" without having to say it.↩

Another Ghostbusters Post

2008-09-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

So I never posted about this, got distracted by other things. Tweeted about it, but never put up a blog post. It may not even be blog-worthy at this point, but that McCain video is really depressing me and I want to put something else up for a bit.

Ghostbusters 3 might actually happen.

The comedy pedigrees here are interesting. You have two writers from the American version of "The Office," and according to a number of sources, Judd Apatow is at this point orbiting the project in some capacity, which means that if they go in an "old guys hand the reins to new guys" direction with the flick, we can probably expect Seth Rogen to suit up as one of the new Ghostbusters. According to Aykroyd, that would be "a dream," as he says in a recent interview with E!

The weird thing, of course, is that all the people who you would expect to be at the core of a GB revival are just shrugging and saying "Yeah, I hear someone's working on that." I think all of them have long since let the dream go, but it sounds like they'd do it if it came to fruition.

I won't go into what I think of Ghostbusters as a whole because I already did that, and I would venture a guess that I was correct in thinking that the anticipation and excitement for the video game is, at least in part, what made the studio realize that there is still an audience, and push the languishing project forward. Though anyone who observes the pattern of studio greenlighting probably would have guessed the same. Instead I'll comment on the direction things appear to be taking right now.

In short, I think it's very promising and exciting. Apatow and his crew display a strong understanding of what made 80s comedies "80s comedies," and that sensibility comes through in movies like Superbad and Pineapple Express, which manage to be both throwbacks and something new and fresh at the same time. I would much rather see the Apatow crew suit up than any other superstar "Dream Team" that's been rumored over the years (Will Smith, Ben Stiller, Chris Farley and Janine Garafolo were all purportedly going to be the new GBs at some point, and while I loved Mystery Men, it wouldn't have been right for Ghostbusters).

Ghostbusters is not about arbitrary all-star teams, it's about funny people in scary situations. You need comedians -- not just stand-up comedians but comic actors -- and particularly comedians who can riff off each other. The Apatow stable is the perfect fit for that. I would say they're this decade's answer to the comic collaborations of the 80s, and I think writers from "The Office" are the perfect choice to create fertile ground for that kind of riffing.

As to that, I find the choice to go with new writers rather than Aykroyd and Ramis to be, honestly, a risky proposition but one that could be tremendously rewarding. We've seen what happens when certain filmmakers return to a beloved franchise, and make the movie that shows what the franchise is in their mind, and it turns out that the franchise is a very different thing in the mind of the audience. Aykroyd has had a GB3 in mind for nearly 20 years, and that might make it stale. He might want to make the movie he's always wanted to make, and not the movie he ought to make in the here and now.

New writers could bring a fresh perspective to it, while ideally maintaining what made Ghostbusters so iconic and lasting -- strong characterization and comedy. Writers who grew up with Ghostbusters as a phenomenon would understand that phenomenon from an audience perspective, and potentially have more success at upholding it than the original creators (particularly Aykroyd), who may still not have been able to shake of the vestiges of the original intent.

With fans writing for a franchise, you of course run the risk of it being no better than fan fiction, bringing in or referencing every joke, character, and breakfast cereal ever related in any way to the franchise (and believe me, I know how fanwanky a GB3 script could get). But that's where the writers being from "The Office" bolsters my confidence. They've already shown that they can respect the spirit of a property while breathing their own life into it and creating something new, and I will be paying very close attention to this project as it progresses.

If this does happen, totally going to a midnight show, and totally going in costume. I guess I'll have to build another proton pack.

Why McCain must not be elected...

2008-09-10T21:23:00.000-07:00

If it's not obvious, my blog is likely to get more politically-oriented in the next couple months leading up to the election. Because the fact of it is, folks, this one matters.

For my non-American readers, I apologize since I'm sure our politics bore your pants clean off. I'll try to intersperse lighter fare. But the fact is that if McCain wins, we are literally going to be in a world of shit.

You may not trust Obama. He's a politician and as the saying goes, if someone or something seems to good to be true, it probably is.

But we have had great Presidents in the past. We've had Lincoln, and Kennedy -- both of whom, incidentally, had less experience than Obama -- and I believe that leaders like that still exist. I believe that someone like Obama can be genuine, and I would rather take a chance on him, even given the slim possibility that he's lying about his goodness, than throw the future away on a man who is almost certainly telling the truth about his evil.

You may not want Obama -- but do you really want the alternative?

Think about it.

Thank You, Daily Show, Part 2

2008-09-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

Awesome.

These next few months are going to get interesting. I can't wait to see what happens, in particular, when Biden and Palin share the stage.

Thank You, Daily Show

2008-09-04T11:13:00.001-07:00

I'm a big fan of the Daily Show. I've been watching it semi-regularly since it first went on the air in 1996 with Craig Kilborn in the chair. At that point it was more of a rip-off "SNL's Weekend Update," reporting current news and adding a punchline. They had interviews like they do now, where the interviewer would ask the interviewee absurd questions, but they were clearly editing tricks, where the interviewees were not actually asked those questions.

When Jon Stewart took over, the show became more overtly political, and also grew a pair. Now when a ridiculous question pops up in an interview, we can rest safely assured that the correspondent actually asked that question.

It's gotten to the point where The Daily Show is the only news commentary show I trust. Jon Stewart is astoundingly intelligent; whenever a guest comes on who has written a book, Jon has read the book in preparation for the interview. He asks his guests harder and more sincere questions than anyone else in the news media; he has, on a supposedly fluff "comedy show," taken powerful politicians to task in front of a live studio audience.

Most importantly, they do their research. If a politician or news analyst makes a statement directly in contradiction to another of their own statements, they dig it up and share it with the world.

Case in point, this video from last night's show, taking the media to task for their double standard in letting VP-nominated Sarah Palin off the hook for...well, everything.

I'm voting Obama, and enthusiastically so, and anyone who isn't -- well, I just have nothing to say to them, because obviously we neither speak the same language nor live in the same reality. But regardless of your politics, regardless of which way the pendulum swings, it's good to know that The Daily Show is there to call people on their bullshit. And I've seen them hit the Dems just as hard, and with good cause.

If I believed there was a God, I would thank him for The Daily Show. Since I don't, I'll settle for just thanking them.

Speaking of which, I'm really bogged down with work and haven't had time to continue Case for a Creator. Considering I don't want to just post glib or dismissive posts, I'll hold off continuing the reading for a while until I can review and post more substantively.

But first, a correction...

2008-08-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

So I'm trying to get on through Chapter 3 but, I have to say honestly, it's a slog. I'm trying to read with an open mind but so much of what is being said is so blatantly, cynically dishonest that my poor insulted intellect recoils at just about every paragraph. You'll see what I mean when I finally get through, but it's slow going.

In the meantime, I have to take back something I said early on about Strobel's use of the term "Darwinism." What I said about objecting to its use, since evolutionary scientists are not bound to Darwin's statements because they are Darwin's in the same way that Christians are bound to Christ's statements because they are Christ's, I still contend and uphold.

I cannot, however, say that Strobel is being dishonest or misleading in his use of the term, as in doing some review of various written and spoken works, I've discovered that Richard Dawkins, of all people, also refers to the theory of evolution by way of natural selection as "Darwinism." So while I think it is a dangerous and misleading term, I can't fault Strobel for using it, and if I'm going to be demanding the journalistic high ground from Strobel, I need to reach for it myself.

As the papers say, I regret the error.

How to Convert an Atheist

2008-08-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

Before moving forward with Case for a Creator, I want to address a question that I have a feeling will come up. In fact it already sort of has. I don't know (despite having read two chapters of the book) what evidence Strobel intends to give, so now is the time to establish what kind of evidence I would be willing to accept for the existence of a deity, and more specifically a particular deity as espoused by a particular religion.

Ebon Musings has two great articles that I read through on this subject that I think are just about perfect. Since I got on Strobel's case about not properly citing sources, I'll link you directly to the source so you can read it at your leisure.

The first is, How to Convert an Atheist. The article proposes a list of evidence that would convince him that a given religion was true. I'll summarize the bullet points here, but head over to the page for a full explication of each one.

I agree absolutely with the list, which is why I am duplicating it here.

First, things that would convince the author (and me) immediately of a given religion's truth:

- Verified, specific prophecies that couldn't have been contrived.
- Scientific knowledge, in holy books, that wasn't available at the time [of their writing].
- Miraculous occurrences, especially if brought about through prayer.
- Any direct manifestation of the divine.
- Aliens who believed in the exact same religion.

Next, a list of anecdotal evidence that, while not eligible for insta-conversion, would get the author (and me) to think there might just be something to a particular religion:

- A genuinely flawless and consistent holy book.
- A religion without internal disputes or factions.
- A religion whose followers have never committed or taken part in atrocities.
- A religion that had a consistent record of winning its jihads and holy wars.

And third, the list of items that will not be seen as convincing, by the author or myself:

- Speaking in tongues or other pseudo-miracles.
- People's conversion stories.
- Any subjective experience.
- The Bible Code or similar numerological feats.

He also lists "Creationism of any sort," but I'll take that one off the table. Strobel gets his shot at convincing me, as long as his evidence is solid. Worth noting, though, that disproving evolution does not inherently prove creationism or intelligent design.

I would add to that list that I do not find arguments from personal incredulity to be compelling. If you say to me "I can't see how [blank] could be true without God," my answer is "Do some research." Nor do I find the argument from beauty to be compelling. A gorgeous sunset, the intricacy of a snowflake, or other astounding elements of natural beauty are not valid evidence of God.

As I said, there is a second article about how NOT to convert an atheist. This one interests me because, looking through, this is like a checklist of exactly the tactics Strobel seems to be employing:

- Don't tell atheists what they think; let them tell you what they think.
- Don't assume that atheists aren't familiar with the beliefs of your religion.
- Don't make assertions you're not prepared or willing to defend.
- Don't ignore sincere questions.
- Don't use threats, personal insults, or ad hominem attacks.
- Don't try to be an armchair psychologist.
- Don't ask atheists to do something for you if you're not prepared to offer the same courtesy in return.¹
- Don't refuse to acknowledge your mistakes.
- Don't assume that any one atheist speaks for all atheists.
- Don't refuse to consider the atheist viewpoint honestly and seriously.

So, let's see how Strobel approaches this.

Drew may well find a gift of an alternative viewpoint in his mailbox after I've finished Case for a Creator, unless of course Strobel manages to convince me. The God Delusion is, after all, in paperback now.↩

The Case for a Creator: Chapter Two

2008-08-27T02:12:00.001-07:00

Remember yesterday, when I said that it seems that Strobel seems very concerned with telling us about himself, and how very very atheist he was? Chapter Two begins thusly:

Rewind history to 1966. The big hit on the radio was Paul McCartney crooning "Michelle." On a television show called I Spy, Bill Cosby was becoming the first African-American to share the lead in a dramatic series. Bread was nineteen cents a loaf; a new Ford Fairlane cost $1,600.
As a fourteen-year-old freshman at Prospect High School in northwest suburban Chicago, I was sitting in a third-floor science classroom overlooking the asphalt parking lot, second row from the window, third seat from the front, when I first heard the liberating information that propelled me toward a life of atheism. [page 17]

I check the cover to make sure the subtitle is, in fact, "A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God," and not "The Pointlessly Detailed Life of Lee Strobel." Maybe they teach you to pad your word count with "colorful details" in the papers, Lee, but I was told that this was going to be an investigation of scientific evidence that points toward God. It would be great if you could get on with that.

It's clear throughout this chapter that Strobel really wants to hammer home just how he was "toooooootally atheist, guys! Like seriously!" Like Durin pointed out yesterday, I can't shake the feeling that this is setting up an implicit Argument from Authority. I mean, if someone THAT atheist could be convinced, this MUST be good evidence.

It in fact has the opposite effect -- I begin to wonder if Strobel was actually ever an atheist at all. The atheism Strobel describes is a standard Christian caricature of atheism, as evidenced below:

I reveled in my newly achieved freedom from God's moral strictures. For me, living without God meant living one hundred percent for myself. Freed from someday being held accountable for my actions, I felt unleashed to pursue personal happiness and pleasure at all costs. [page 25]

It is this statement in particular that leads me to think that Strobel was never actually an atheist; rather, he is attempting to convince me that he was an atheist so that, as I said above, I will be compelled by his radical conversion. Having never been an atheist, he instead describes how he thinks atheists think, which will convince those who already believe (also having likely not been atheists themselves), but actual non-believers will have to conclude that if he ever was an atheist, he was a grotesquely stupid one.

The subject of morality without God deserves a post of its own (and even that is probably selling the subject short; books have been written), so I won't sidetrack this one with the subject. Suffice it to say that no atheist I know actually sees it as an "excuse" to misbehave -- the fact that so many of the religious seem to think that the only thing keeping them from raping and/or murdering every man, woman, child and pet they come across is the threat of God's punishment only belies the fact that they are not good or moral people at all.¹ The moral person does good because it is good; the man who does good because he's afraid of what will happen to him if he does bad is not moral, he is merely a coward.

Buuuut, that's getting off the subject a bit. My point is that Strobel's attempts to convince me that he was an atheist have in fact convinced me of the polar opposite, and I will have trouble putting aside the fact that I believe he is being dishonest with me. Fascinatingly, he even describes himself as being "smugly arrogant" -- exactly the two words I used yesterday to describe the atheist characterization he was laying on so thick.

Ultimately, however, it doesn't necessarily matter if Strobel was or wasn't an atheist (which makes it yet more annoying that he spends so much time on the subject). The more important question is, does the scientific evidence he presents indeed point toward a Creator? Well, I'd like to tell you, but at this point he still hasn't presented any.

Actually, I take that back. In this chapter, Strobel presents the evidence that led to his apparent atheism when he learned it in his science class. This chapter is called "The Images of Evolution," and he refers to several iconic concepts (or "images") that, to him, represent(ed) the undeniable fact of evolution:

Image 1: The Miller-Urey Experiment -- in which scientist Stanley Miller reproduced, under laboratory conditions, an approximation of the atmosphere of the early Earth, and via application of electricity was able to spontaneously produce amino acids, the building blocks of life.

It should be noted, before moving on, that the Miller experiment is one testing the abiogenesis hypothesis -- the notion of life arising from non-life on the early Earth. Abiogenesis is a separate theory from evolution; evolution does not concern itself with how life started, only with explaining the diversity of life that arose after the moment that life began.

Image 2: Darwin's "Tree of Life" -- referring to an illustration in On The Origin of Species, showing life's theoretical common ancestor as the bottom of the tree, and all the diversity of life growing and diverging and blossoming upwards from there.

It's here that Strobel again tips his hand to, if not intentionally misrepresenting evolution, at the very least misunderstanding it:

It seemed obvious to me that there's such a phenomenon as microevolution, or variation within different kinds of animals. I could see this illustrated in my own neighborhood, where we had dozens of different varieties of dogs. But I was captivated by the more ambitious claim of macroevolution -- that natural selection acting on random variation can explain how primitive cells morphed over long periods of time into every species of creatures, including human beings. [page 20]

See, the creationist folk realized some time ago that they could not deny that evolution does occur. It is, as he points out, an observable fact. So instead they have inserted an arbitrary designation between microevolution and macroevolution -- two terms that, in a scientific context, do not exist. There is only evolution.

All evolution is small changes within a population of organisms.² As he says, over time the sum of those small changes can result in organisms so totally different that they are scientifically classified as different species.

As an analogy, imagine that you are five feet tall at the age of fifteen. Every day for a year you measure your height, and on a day to day basis you will see little difference between one day and the day immediately before or after. Yet at the end of that year you find you are six feet tall. Even though the changes were small, at the end it resulted in the need to recategorize you (from "five foot tall person" to "six foot tall person").

Evolution is this concept writ large, with billions of organisms over billions of years. The notion of a separation between "micro" and "macro" is a semantical dodge, designed to allow creationist (or intelligent design) proponents to admit to what they can no longer deny, while continuing to deny what they don't wish to admit.

Image 3: Ernst Haeckl's Drawings of Embryos -- up to a certain point, the embryos of vastly different organisms can look almost totally indistinguishable. This is taken as demonstrating how similar we all are genetically, and by extension the likelihood that we share common genetics, since that would logically result in common development up to the point where our genetics diverge.

Fast-forwarding back to 2008 (we're in 1966, remember), it's worth noting that we now have pictures of these various embryos and their striking similarities, not just taking an artist's word for it.

Image #4: The Missing Link -- referring to archaeopetryx, the famous transitional form between reptile and bird.

Strobel spends the rest of the chapter establishing his argument, which is that you've got to take a stand and choose between evolution or God. He acknowledges that there are some who believe that evolution and God are compatible, but he immediately determines that because evolution leaves no need for God, it leaves no room for one.

And not just any God, mind you, but the Christian God specifically:

Certainly Christians would say that God is not a hidden and uninvolved deity who thoroughly conceals his activity, but rather that he has intervened in the world so much that the Bible says his qualities "have been clearly seen...from what has been made." [page 22]

But what would Muslims say, Mr. Strobel, and what does the Quran say about God's qualities? The Hindus and the Vedas? You haven't even proven that there is a God at all, let's not jump to conclusions about which God it is.

Of course, he isn't concerned with those other possible Gods, because Mr. Strobel has already determined for himself that the Christian God exists, and is seeking only to find and deliver validation for that belief.

If Strobel's intentions are becoming more plain, his methods are becoming more dubious:

I was experiencing on a personal level what philosopher Daniel Dennett has observed: Darwinism is a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview." [page 24]

Note, again, the selective quotation. Strobel puts the word "Darwinism" into Dennett's mouth to ingrain it further. More alarming, though, is the citation found if you follow this quote to the endnotes, which gives this source:

Quoted in: Phillip E. Johnson, "The Intelligent Design Movement: Challenging the Modernist Monopoly on Science," in: William A Dembski and James M. Kushiner, editors, Signs of Intelligence, 34. [page 308]

If the significance of that citation isn't immediately apparent, let me explain. Strobel has not quoted Dennett in his argument -- he has quoted ANOTHER person quoting Dennett, that other person being an Intelligent Design proponent, making the quote in a pro-ID essay.

Why cite the quote secondhand? If Johnson did not include a citation of his own so that it could be traced back to the source -- and context -- of Dennett's remark, then the use of the quotation in both Johnson and Strobel's works is highly suspect. If Johnson DID include a citation, and Strobel chose to cite from Johnson's essay instead of researching the quote directly himself -- and, in so doing, making it more difficult for a reader of his own work to trackback the quote -- then the use of the quote is, again, suspect.

Granted, Signs of Intelligence is readily available on Amazon, but why quote a quote instead of going directly to the source? As a journalist Strobel should know better, which leads me to believe he intentionally evaded properly citing Dennett's remark -- which may in fact have had nothing to do with "Darwinism" at all.

It's not that the quote even really affects the argument being made -- it is, at least as reported here, a statement in support of the non-ID view of things -- but it certainly does not instill confidence in Strobel's journalistic integrity, nor his devotion to "not only...ask questions...but to go wherever the answers would take me." [page 29]

None of this necessarily negates his argument -- good evidence is good evidence no matter the source -- but it certainly makes it clear that Strobel is not playing a fair game.

Nowhere does this become clearer than in the home stretch of the chapter, in which Strobel says:

My approach would be to cross-examine authorities in various scientific disciplines about the most current findings in their fields. In selecting these experts, I sought doctorate-level professors who have unquestioned expertise, are able to communicate in accessible language, and who refuse to limit themselves only to the politically correct world of naturalism or materialism. [page 28]

Emphasis mine. The problem with this approach is that, despite Strobel's attempt to couch it as "politically correct," or previous attempts he's made within to characterize "naturalism" as only a particular "sect" of scientific study, the fact is that science by its very nature concerns itself with the natural, material, measurable world. Once you introduce supernatural hypotheses, science goes out the window because they cannot be tested and are therefore not scientific.

In choosing his "experts," Strobel has in fact chosen specifically only those who are already sympathetic to his beliefs. A truly neutral, journalistic approach would be to talk to people on both sides of the issue and let the facts speak for themselves. Strobel instead reveals his bias by limiting his conversation to those he knows will agree with his pre-ordained conclusion, silencing the opposition by simply not speaking to them.

Astonishingly, he follows that declaration with this one:

After all, it wouldn't make sense to rule out any hypothesis at the outset. I wanted the freedom to pursue all possibilities. [ibid]

So. He didn't want to rule out any hypothesis -- except the natural or material ones -- and wanted to pursue all possibilities -- except the natural or material ones.

...

I...

...

Wow.

Strobel cautions the reader that "getting beyond our prejudices can be difficult. At least, it was for me...I didn't want there to be a God who would hold me responsible for my immoral lifestyle." [page 29]

Again with that. I can't speak for other atheists, but I don't lead an immoral lifestyle -- even by Christian standards. I don't lie to people, I don't cheat people, I am not sexually promiscuous, I don't get shitfaced-drunk or hurt people or do any other "immoral" things, certainly no more than your average Christian and I would bet, pound for pound, less so than most of them.

Strobel wants to assert that I'm afraid to admit God exists; I'm not. I live a good life, I am a decent person, and I'm confident that any God worth worshipping would take that into account when the time comes. If God exists and he/she/it is truly righteous, then I'll shrug, say "my bad, good to meet you," we'll have a laugh and move on with eternity. And if God exists and is not righteous, then fuck him/her/it anyway.

Either way I'm unafraid of the notion that God might be real. But if I'm going to believe, I'm going to need evidence -- and despite the book's subtitle, Strobel still hasn't given any. Instead he's written two "chapters," really glorified forewords or prefaces, which combined have made me more wary of his claims, and more likely to do due diligence on what's being said and who is saying it, than I think they were intended to do.

That being the case, future installments of my analysis may not be daily. I need research time, and I'm doing this around After Effects renders, so that time doesn't come easy. The next chapter is called "Doubts about Darwinism." I'm doing my best to approach this openly and without bias, but when the author refuses to do so, when he announces his prejudices in the same breath as he asks me to set aside my own, it makes it much more difficult.

Nor does it make much sense, since -- at least in Christianity -- all they have to do, whatever the transgression, is be genuinely sorry afterward and all is forgiven. But that is also a topic for another day. ↩

I notice he uses the word "kinds" of animals rather than "species," "kind" being the Biblical designation; another flash of the cards he seems to be stacking.↩

The Case for a Creator: Chapter One

2008-08-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

I begin my reading of Strobel's The Case for a Creator with, appropriately, Chapter One: "White Coated Scientists versus Black-Robed Preachers."

My first impression upon reading this book is one of surprise. Considering Strobel is supposed to be a journalist, he doesn't strike me as a very good writer (in the very first sentence, he describes the atmosphere of a newsroom as being "carbonated with activity"). But maybe he's just being overzealous in trying to create a narrative and draw the reader in; after all, this book is presumably more about factual evidence than anecdotal experiences.

The first portion of the chapter is devoted to descriptions of said newsroom, filled with newspaper jargon that I guess is intended to reassure me that he did, in fact, work at the Chicago Tribune. He talks about how his boss sends him, a fresh-faced new-to-the-beat reporter, to West Virginia to cover a brouhaha:

"Crazy stuff..." he said. "People getting shot at, schools getting bombed, all because some hillbillies are mad about the textbooks" [page 8]

Strobel -- the one in the narrative -- demonstrates significant contempt for Christians and Christianity. On the back of the book is a quote by Strobel which I suppose will be in the text: "My road to atheism was paved by science...but ironically, so was my later journey to God."¹

The back cover also provides me with the first red flag as to what I'm reading here, where it says the following:

In recent years, a diverse and impressive body of research has increasingly supported the conclusion that the universe was intelligently designed. At the same time, Darwinism has faltered in the face of concrete facts and hard reason.

I suppose from the title it should have been obvious that this was a creationist tome, and it will apparently be playing the "intelligent design" concept. The flag, moreso, is referring to the theory of evolution as Darwinism.

The theory of evolution should no more be referred to as "Darwinism" than the theory of gravity should be referred to as "Newtonism." Appending "-ism" to the end of the name implies that it is -- like theism or atheism -- a dogmatic and rigid belief system. A religion, if you will.

But evolution is not a religion, having no central tenets of behavior and no ceremonial observations -- unless you include the scientific method, but every branch of science utilizes that, and I don't hear any of them being touted as religions. It's also worth noting that Darwin did not create the theory of evolution, as evolution had been observed for some time before he came on the scene. Darwin proposed the mechanism (natural selection) by which evolution occurs. Natural selection currently offers the best understanding of how evolution occurs, but scientists have no dogmatic loyalty to Darwin's theory, nor to Darwin himself. Should evidence arise that natural selection could not account for, natural selection would come into question and new explanations would be examined.²

Back into the book, and the subheading of the next section that sends up the next red flag: "Is Darwin Responsible?"

Strobel describes arriving in the West Virginian town and interviewing folks about why there was such violence and turmoil over what textbooks were teaching. Evolution, of course, but they also banned other books because students were being asked to analyze them and think critically.

To Strobel's credit, he is not the one blaming Darwin for what's going on in the town; that is the argument given by one of the townfolk he interviews, who says:

"If Darwin's right, were just sophisticated monkeys. The Bible is wrong. There is no God. And without God, there's no right or wrong. We can just make up our morals as we go." [page 11]

Since this is not Strobel's argument (at this point) I won't address the glaring holes in it (at this point). In fact, Strobel articulates -- at least in part -- what was going through my mind as I read this and other quotes he puts down:

In the last part of the twentieth century, in an era when we had split the atom and put people on the moon and found fossils that prove evolution beyond all doubt, a bunch of religious zealots were tying a county into knots because they couldn't let go of religious folklore. It simply defied all reason. [page 12]

He next describes a religious rally that he and an accompanying photojournalist were nearly tossed out of until the local preacher calmed the crowd and let them stay. (The detail of using KFC buckets as collection baskets is a nice touch.) He finishes off the chapter still "in character" as an atheist, looking forward to the day that the concrete facts of evolution show those lot that their whole basis of faith is ridiculous, that miracles are impossible.

I feel the need to point out that the fact of evolution actually proves nothing of the sort. The truth of evolution does nothing to demonstrate that miracles are impossible, as they are two completely different things. It's here that Strobel tips his hand as to perhaps not being entirely truthful about his approach. Strobel protests a bit too much, characterizing himself as smug and arrogantly anti-religious -- going so far as to insult the believers specifically, rather than just their beliefs. I'm sure they exist, but the characterization of atheists as thinking "haha jesus w/e noob grr i hate everyone" constantly is not accurate to most of the atheists I know, least of all myself, and seems to be more of a common Christian caricature of what they seem to think must go through the minds of atheists, than anything like atheists actually think.

So overall, a lot of groundwork laid that Strobel is, at this point in the tale, a non-believer of religion ("just like you," is the implication), but no arguments yet in the case for a creator. I guess in a sense that made this first chapter the foreword. Presumably he will begin making the book's eponymous case in chapter two, which we'll look at next time.

I can give that to him as irony, in case you're wondering.↩

In fact, my example of Newton is a prime one, as the established system of Newtonian physics is insufficient in certain situations, such as "at very small scales, very high speeds, or very strong gravitational fields" (from Wikipedia). This has required new models of understanding, like general relativity and quantum mechanics, and not a dogmatic adherence to the use of Newtonian equations.↩

Book Reading: "The Case for a Creator"

2008-08-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

So, interesting development. One of my readers/a fellow I know from TFN and other places has sent me a book of apologetics, Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator, subtitled "A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God."

I've been meaning to read some more apologetics, Christian and otherwise (I'm very interested in reading some Muslim apologetics, and of course the Quran itself), and this is a fair enough place to start, especially since Drew went out of his way to send me this book as a gift (nicely wrapped by Amazon and everything!). This will also give me an excuse to do more blogging -- as I go through the book, I'll discuss my impressions of Strobel's argument. If they're convincing, you'll get to see a real-time conversion right here! Won't that be exciting!

The book is relatively brief, with short (~30 pages) chapters, so I should be able to get through a chapter and my impressions every, or every-other day. There's eleven chapters, so this should get me through the next few weeks, assuming I intersperse it with other stuff as it comes up. Maybe I'll even get one up later today.

Thanks Drew!

I never did follow-up...

2008-08-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

At Comic-Con, RvD2 won the Star Wars Fan Movie Award for Best Visual Effects, which is a previously non-existent category apparently created solely to award us for it.¹

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth; MC Steve Sansweet had some amazingly kind things to say about both RvD and RvD2. I'm paraphrasing here, but it was to the effect of "When they announced that they were going to do a second one, we all wondered how they could possibly top themselves. But they did. Great work."

I may be reading into things, but that very brief kudos holds a lot of information between the lines. To wit:

-I assume that the "we" means, generally, "folks at Lucasfilm," potentially up to and including Lucas himself (to whom Sansweet has a direct line)

-They were aware of -- and apparently liked -- RvD well before RvD2 hit the scene

-They were paying enough attention to us to notice that we had announced a sequel in the works. This also means:

-They were aware of our call for donations before the film, and are almost certainly fully aware of the fact that we are selling DVDs. Regardless of the fact that the donations were true, voluntary donations, and the content being sold is legally ours to sell, both could have raised some hackles, and the fact that LFL has not only turned a blind eye to our activities but actively praised those activities' product is worth my gratitude.

I may be cynical about what LFL is offering the fans these days, but there can be no denying that they do know how valuable those fans are.

So thank you, Steve Sansweet, Atom, and Lucasfilm. I probably wouldn't have given two shakes if you didn't like the films, but it does mean something to me that you did.

Oddly, a category that did exist in previous years, and the one for which I actually thought we would be in the running -- Best Action -- was omitted from this year's competition. ↩

Everyone Can Relax, I've Seen The Godfather

2008-08-02T23:46:00.000-07:00

Hello, everyone. My name is Michael "Dorkman" Scott, I'm 25 years old, a filmmaker, and until earlier today I had not seen Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather.

I have lost count of how many times someone has nearly leapt across a table and wang-chung'd me after I have been forced to make that confession in conversation. Even those who were kind about it treated me like the filmgoing equivalent of the 40 Year Old Virgin: they were nice about it to the level of slight condescension, assuring me that I'd see it "when I was ready."

Well, as the subject line says, everyone can relax. I've seen the fucking movie.

Obviously, with the kind of reaction people would have to my not having seen the flick, I went in with some pretty high expectations. Some films, like Pulp Fiction, and more recently The Dark Knight, manage to live up to and even, miraculously, sometimes surpass even the highest of expectations. The aforementioned Pulp Fiction was another on the list of "You mean you HAVEN'T SEEN -- ?!" reactions until finally I did see it about five years ago -- and understood what all the fuss was about.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are films like 2001, Blade Runner, and recently the obscenely-lauded Pan's Labyrinth, for which, for the life of me and even with multiple viewings, I cannot begin to understand the hype and passionate love people have.

So it was up in the air as to what I might think of Godfather now that I've had a quarter century of people telling me I'd better see it if I knew what was good for me. Fortunately, I liked it.

There's very little I can say about the film that hasn't already been said, so I won't bother to review or analyze it here. I think I need time for it to sink in before I can say I love the film, but I do think it's a great film. I wasn't blown away by it like I was by Pulp Fiction; it fits into a rarer category of a film that exactly hits my expectations, neither falling short nor exceeding. Another film to do that was The Shawshank Redemption. Didn't blow my mind, but I didn't get bored, and in a three-hour film that's always noteworthy. And of course the performances were flawless.

Now I guess I'd better see Godfather II, if I know what's good for me.

So what's this Sandrima Rising thing?

2008-07-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Over the years since RvD, and especially following RvD2, Ryan and I have gotten numerous proposals to be involved with other peoples' fan films. Generally speaking, we've said no. Fan films take a lot of time, even if it's "just a saber fight," and if we're going to spend that kind of time on a project it'll be our own.

Then I got an e-mail about Sandrima Rising. As I mentioned before, the actual complete title of the project is The Renaissance Chronicles: Sandrima Rising. The idea was that they were going to pitch it, to George Lucas, as an ongoing Star Wars series about the adventures of this freighter, the Renaissance, and her crew. I'm already on record on several occasions saying that I don't think that'll happen, and I don't, but as I said yesterday, that doesn't mean I think the project is without value.

One thing that intrigued me about the project is that it followed the Han Solo characters. In point of fact, it's basically Firefly with lightsabers and wookiees -- which is fine by me. I loved Firefly, I love lightsabers, and I can live with wookiees (though dealing with the costume is a nightmare), so it seemed like something that would be a lot of fun.

It was (and is) also an extremely ambitious project. I think everyone who gets into the fan film world -- myself included -- gets it into their head to do a feature-length fan film, but only a few have been able to see it through. Sandrima Rising is shortly going to join their ranks.

I'm going to skip over the story of the film's production, because I've only recently stopped having nightmares about it; I will probably talk about it someday, but I need a little bit more hindsight on it all before I can really say anything. I will say that some good came of it for me, even from the bad. I learned a lot about what can go wrong on a feature film project, and I learned that I can take it and still want to make movies at the end of the day. I met one of my best friends on the set, and walked away with many other good friends.

The original plan was for me and Ryan to choreograph the fight scenes, train the actors, and shoot the fight scenes as "action directors". Ryan wound up being unable to get away from work to come out to the shoot, but we did still choreograph the fight scenes and I showed them to the actors. As I mentioned in a previous post, I wound up doing far more than just choreographing and shooting the fight scenes. And I'm not the only one -- almost everyone on set was taking on multiple roles to make this happen. Jeremy, who played Jacen the captain of the Renaissance, became our AD about halfway through. Andrew, one of the Renaissance crew, built the sets alongside Ed, who played Kyp, a rival captain. Our producer filled a role as a Sabacc player, and even I wound up in front of camera as an ill-fated archaeologist.

But I digress. I'm not here to talk about the production, I'm here to talk about the product. The film was shot last summer, edited in the fall, and since the New Year has been in post-production.

By way of introduction to the project, there are a couple of videos available on YouTube. The first is a "placeholder trailer" for the film. The scheduling for the project was a bit ambitious and they had said that they would have a trailer available as of December last year. None of the effects were completed at that time, but they made good on their promise and put together a trailer from the raw footage (greenscreen galore), and lifted the CG shots from Serenity.

Dwight, the director of the project, spends a little while introducing the project in this video. If you want to go straight to the trailer itself, let it load to skip forward; the trailer starts exactly two minutes in.

Additionally, you can see a work-in-progress version of one of the lightsaber fights Ryan and I created for the film. I say work-in-progress because the sounds and music are temporary, and were put together for a screening at a recent convention.

As I mentioned yesterday, I haven't talked much about this project before. A large portion of that is the fact that I didn't want to overhype it, but there's also the fact that I didn't know exactly how it was going to turn out. I didn't want to stick my neck out for something that could have turned out to be an incoherent pile. The shoot was so messy that I didn't know if the movie would come together at all. But against all odds, it did, and I think it's going to really be something special.

The trailer includes shots from Serenity, but the finished film will have completely original visuals created for the film by Dastoli Digital. They happened to release their film "Omega 35" just as we were wrapping up Sandrima and looking toward post-production. The CG work in their film was great and the producer Moe called them up to get them on board, and they've been doing a bang-up job, delivering professional visuals for the film.

The film is feature-length, but it's cut together in such a way that it can be released in 10-minute chunks. While a feature would be difficult to sit down and watch in a go on the web, I think the staggered release is a great idea. The characters are interesting, the visuals are coming together powerfully, and I think each chapter is going to leave the audience wanting more, and the chapter after is going to give it to them.

As I've said before, I think Sandrima Rising will be the last fan film project I do, aside from RvD3, and I think it is fitting to go out with a bang. If the success of the recent Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is any indication, I think audiences will really flock to Sandrima Rising. It's got some great performances, some great visuals, some great saber action, and I think the story -- especially in serialized chunks -- will really interest and entertain people. My experience in production aside, I think that the finished project is going to be one of the most popular fan films ever released. I really think this is the culmination of this generation of fan films -- everything so many other projects have wanted to be but couldn't quite cut it.

Is it perfect? Certainly not. There are things we could have done differently, equipment we could have used to enhance it (I wish we'd had the RED back then). But as a low-budget production, I think it'll blow people away.

Fingers crossed we can finish it soon, and find out if I'm right about that. I'll keep everyone posted as we get nearer to release.

Check in this weekend for the continuation of what has randomly become Fan Film Week here on my blog, and find out how RvD2 fared in the Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge.

My thoughts on Fan Films

2008-07-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

So I've had some people actually asking me where I've been, why I haven't been updating my blog as much. Which is a little silly, seeing as how I frequently check in and explain, and the story never changes. However, while I'm sure it sounds like I've got a lot on my plate -- and I do -- one project in particular is the focal point of my time, around which the rest of the work I'm doing currently orbits. That project is the fan film, Sandrima Rising.

I know that I've been vague and avoided mentioning it too much until now, to the extent that it's more than likely sounded like a project happening somewhere in the background. The main reason being that I've seen too many fan films get destroyed by long-term hype, so I advised the producers that it would be good to wait until we're fairly far along into post before we start talking about it. But we're getting pretty deep into the final stages of post, and I've been given the go-ahead to talk a little about the project.

So I'm going to do so -- in my next post. Before that, though, I'd like to talk a little about fan films in general.

As I write this, I am counting down the days until Comic Con, and the Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge, formerly the Star Wars Fan Film Awards. I don't know why they changed the name, but they revamp the contest just about every time. As part of the contest, George Lucas himself views all the finalists and selects his favorite for a special award. RvD2 is entered in the competition as a finalist, and so whatever happens, we know for certain that by 8:30 PM on July 24, 2008, George Lucas has seen RvD2 at least once.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm not going to get into the broad history of fan films, because I don't know it. If you're interested in up-to-date as well as retrospective fan film news and postings, check out Clive Young's site Fan Cinema Today, as well as his upcoming book, Homemade Hollywood.

What I plan to talk about, instead, is how I wound up getting into fan films, and why I think they're important.

To some extent I've always been interested in filmmaking, although prior to the digital revolution it seemed totally inaccessible to the average person, and so the idea of becoming a filmmaker myself never actively entered my mind. Even when the modern breed of fan films first came along, with Troops, I didn't really think "Hey, I could do that." It wasn't until I saw my first fan-made lightsaber fight that I sat up and took notice.

As I mentioned back when I wrote my love letter to Ghostbusters, my first feature-length script was a fan script for Ghostbusters 3. After watching The Phantom Menace, I began to write another fan script, this one in the Star Wars milieu.¹

Like Ghostbusters 3, it was only intended to be a script. Some stories want to be told as short stories, some as novels, and some want to be screenplays. This one wanted to be a screenplay. Regardless, it never really occurred to me to make the film myself.

Until, that is, I saw "The New World," a lightsaber fight by the original saber master, Clay Kronke. To be more precise, what I saw was the effects test that preceded "The New World", which for some reason was called the "Matrix Test". I say for some reason because it bore no resemblance to The Matrix, other than I guess it was two guys sparring. The choreography was ripped directly off of Phantom Menace, the music was "Duel of the Fates", and it was sped up in post.

But the lightsabers looked awesome.

And it was at that moment that I realized: this script didn't have to stay a script. I could make this movie.

I won't bore you with the gory details of my ill-fated feature-length fan film -- another blog another day, perhaps -- but suffice it to say that by the time production folded indefinitely, I had spent money intended to buy a car on a camera², and racked up another $10,000 or so in debt besides, which I only recently paid off with the help of the next project I have said I will be discussing in my next post. I spent half of my high school and all of my college experience frequently sitting in front of a computer, more often than not rotoscoping lightsabers. There were points where I wouldn't -- months at a time -- but eventually I would get back to it. Not just the abandoned feature, but numerous other fan film projects with which I was involved.

And all in all, I think it was worth it.

The obvious reason for that would be RvD and RvD2, but this goes back beyond those films. What working on fan films did for me was to awaken in me the desire to make films -- and the understanding that I could make films. I didn't need anyone's permission. I didn't need anyone's money. Both things help, of course, but as long as I have a camera and a computer, I have a movie.

The fact of working within Star Wars specifically instilled me with (probably altogether too much) confidence. Here you have a world that hundreds of people spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to create -- and I'm doing it from home. The scope is more limited, perhaps, and the effects not quite as polished, but the movie's getting made. The story is getting told.

RvD and RvD2 have gotten attention, and that attention has gotten both myself and Ryan careers doing what we want to do (mine admittedly a slower burn than his -- he was nominated for another Emmy this last week!), but I really count the less concrete impact of the confidence I mentioned earlier as the most important thing I have gained from working in fan films.

Now, as to why I believe that fan films are important just in general.

For one thing, they act as cinematic training wheels. The blank page can be daunting when attempting to write a script (or anything else --a blog post for instance). To have to create a world with its own internal rules, characters with history, situations, alliances and enmities...it all stacks up until one would rather just give up and go play Rock Band. But when the rules and designs and locations and broad-stroke characters are already defined for you, well then you're ahead of the curve. You can mold the clay without having to have dug it up yourself.

You still have to create new material -- conflict, new characters -- but you can do so in familiar territory. One doesn't want to spend an entire career doing this kind of thing, but as a start? A golden opportunity to start experimenting creatively. You've got boundaries that prevent you from screwing up too much, and you start to understand, if you decide you must break an established rule, why that rule is there and what purpose breaking it serves.

I've heard it said that if you want to learn to write well, sit down and copy a book you like. I did that when I was learning to write short stories (a few times unethically, as I believe my grade-school teachers suspected but could never confirm) and, ethical quandaries aside, I do believe it helped me out when I finally came to flying off on my own with my own writing. You learn by doing. Even without consciously thinking about it you get a sense of why things work when they are structured a certain way, why they ring hollow when structured another. It, to sound like a hippie for a moment, expands your mind.³

And that's what I believe fan films can accomplish for a filmmaker. Play with what already exists, get an understanding of why things are done the way they are. Make mistakes in a creatively "safe" environment. And learn, and grow.

We talk about fan films like they're some new, crazy, Web 2.0, Age of You Tube thing, but it seems to me like this has already always been the case. How many filmmakers talk about how they saw [movie that influenced them] and ran home and picked up the Super-8 camera and shot themselves and their little brother as Batman/Sam Spade/James Bond/Blob Victim #3/whatever? Sure, those projects were never widely shared in the pre-internet age, and probably long since have disappeared from the face of the Earth. But the fact is that it starts with imitation. Then it moves to innovation.

On top of that, fan films, quite frankly, make good business sense. You've got people who are so damned enthralled -- obsessed, even -- with something you've made that they have thrown their passion into creating an homage, into extending and engaging with your creation. That's publicity if it's nothing else. That's people being reminded of your product.

Some businesses don't get this. They send Cease and Desist orders to stop Little Jimmy from playing at Spider-Man (on camera) in his backyard.

But George Lucas, whatever else he may be, is a shrewd businessman. He knows fan films are out there, and he knows that they help him, not hurt him. He was the first to "officially" recognize them, initially only the safe-under-fair-use parodies, but recently even then infringement-grey-area "serious fan fiction" films. He could C&D -- even sue -- any one of them if he really wanted to. But you catch more flies with honey...

In fact, Lucasfilm even made an unprecedented move earlier this year in SUPPORTING, essentially, infringement of their copyright. Lucasfilm discovered that material from Hyperspace -- the official site's "Exclusive Content" subscription service -- had been posted to YouTube. They asked YouTube to remove said content, and YouTube, in a fit of pique brought on by way too many other active or threatened lawsuits circling at the time, proceeded to remove all content that had anything at all to do with Star Wars. The outcry from fans was massive -- and Lucasfilm actually stepped up and said "No no, only the Hyperspace stuff. The rest is okay. Put it back."

Say what you will about Lucas the filmmaker (as I have been known to do), but he "gets it" when it comes to fan films. Although I do think there is still a line.

Which will bring us, tomorrow, to Sandrima Rising.

As one of the regulars over at TheForce.net recently posted: "I was just asked an interesting question - "What film changed your life?". The answer horrifies me - the film that has quite literally changed my life is The Phantom Menace." I, too, am horrified that any interview for the rest of my career that asks me that question, that's how I'll have to answer, and then spend five minutes making it clear that I do not in any way consider it a good movie, nor one that actively influences my filmmaking. ↩
I got in an accident and the car was written off as totalled. I got $7000 from the insurance company. $5500 went to a PAL-standard Canon XL-1, in order to get close to a 24p image (this was about a year before the DVX100 hit the market), $1500 went to a death-trap of a car that nonetheless lasted me about 5 years before eventually the engine fell out on the freeway.↩
Even still, I find that if I am stuck for writing, I will pick up a book whose prose I admire and just copy the text from page to processor. I will of course immediately erase it all, but it gets the juices flowing without expending creative energy ramming up against a wall.↩

Lots to mention...

2008-07-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

Been hard at work on everything in the world these last few weeks, seems like. Some of the highlights:

Kung Fu Red: The first of many collaborations to come between myself and Anthony, we shot this the very first weekend we got our brand-spankin-new RED camera. I wanted to shoot a fight scene and he obliged. It was originally just supposed to be a camera test but we wound up liking the edit so much that we finished it out with sound, music, and color grading.

I've embedded the YouTube for your convenience and viewing pleasure. If you want to see it in higher quality, check it out on Vimeo.

The Descendants: Turned in the latest, and IMO greatest, draft. I'm super happy with it, I'm waiting on Dark Horse to see what they have to say.

Sandrima Rising: Working with the Dastolis and churning out finals. Some of the CG work in this is really top-notch. There's a "city chase" sequence in the middle that I think will knock people's socks off. My hat's off to those guys.

fxphd: I've mentioned fxphd in the past, but this time around it's even more special: Ryan and I are teaching a course this term! So if you can afford it (and for the level of training phd offers, aside from us, it's an amazing deal), come sign up and we'll drop some knowledge on you.

48 Hour Film Project: Already kind of addressed this. We really wound up liking the film we made, with the exception of the opening scene. We re-shot the scene and will be posting the revised version on YouTube probably in a couple weeks (I have too much going on to finish it right now). We will also probably post the 48 Hour version after that, just for comparison.

Troika: This is a project that Anthony wrote and directed a selection of scenes from in order to pitch it to financiers. As a writer I'm super-critical of my own work, and that of others, and there's not a lot of scripts that really entertain or interest me. I like reading good scripts, but a lot of scripts just don't cut it.

I have to say, Troika is a great script.

Among the scenes shot are a fight scene, a dialogue scene, and a car chase. The car chase was shot on greenscreen, and there are plusses and minuses to that. On the plus side, the fact that they were shooting green is the reason Anthony called me to be on-set, and that led me to being on-set for all of the subsequent shoots, and ultimately concluding that not only did I want to make movies with those guys, I didn't want to make movies without them.

On the minus side, it was my first day on-set and I wasn't totally committed to the project, or to them, at that point, so I came on board as a consultant for the first half of the day and then buggered out. I did have something else to do, but I can't remember what it was and it doesn't matter; I should have stayed there all day. So while I consulted and gave them advice, once I was gone they were on their own in a foreign land, and mistakes were made. Now, in between Sandrima renders, I'm working on the car chase stuff, and its difficulty is my punishment for leaving that day. Karma!

Still, it's nice to have something that isn't lightsabers to put on my reel.

He's also written another script that he's working on developing and may shoot in the next few months, and which I also think is great.

So that's where I've been the last few weeks and why my posts have been scarce, and will probably continue to be scarce through July. I am still active on Twitter, and will be getting more active back here once all of these projects -- which have bottlenecked into July -- are completed.

Oh, also, Ryan and I will be at Comic Con this year, as is swiftly becoming traditional. If you see us, do say hi.

RvD2 in the Atomfilms Contest

2008-07-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

For those not familiar, Lucasfilm got wise to the fan film phenomenon about five years ago and started an official contest for the best in fan films. At the time it was something of a joke, since they only allowed parody fan films and not serious, and many of the fan films submitted were created for the contest and in no way representative of actual fan filmmaking.

The rules (and rewards) have gone through several permutations, including changing from their insistence that content be exclusive to allowing non-exclusive content, as well as allowing, for the first time last year, "serious" fan fiction films to be submitted. So this year we decided to enter the contest.

So if you have a few minutes, pop over to the official Atomfilms site (now simply Atom.com¹), register if you haven't already, and give us a vote or two if you liked our stuff. You have to be registered and signed in to vote.

NOTE: If you have a pop-up blocker, you have to disable it in order to get the voting option. Also, the site seems to not play nice with Safari, but Firefox is fine.

I apologize in advance for subjecting you to the profoundly shitty experience that is the new Atom. Apparently they've been turned into an offshoot of Comedy Central, so everything on there has to be "funny". Which, like most "comedy" sites, only means that it's tedious.↩

Stuck

2008-07-01T23:00:00.001-07:00

So this is the 48 Hour Film that won Audience Choice in our group, wrenching the validation I so crave from my small, girlish hands.

*sob*

Seriously though, you can see why it won -- and again, why I voted for it. The Steadicam shot is extremely well-executed, smooth all the way through with no bumps; throughout the film the camera and blocking are creating new frames that are all very nice.

Also worth noting, I never saw a camera shadow. And the actors did a really good job of not shadowing each other. For a shoot at a time with such long shadows (I'm guessing it was around 4PM), that's pretty impressive.

There are no "clunkers" in the dialogue, at least nothing that can't be excused for the short writing window, and the performances are all really strong. You'd expect a line or two to be below par but it got into the film because the rest of the take was good; but here, all the performances are solid.

The music toes the line between "catchy" and "repetitive", but I think it stays on the right side of "catchy", and gives a good pace to the film. It's also a very active film, without any real dead time. Which is pretty impressive since it covers a lot of ground and it's mostly just following a guy walking.

It gets a little cute at the end, but it's forgivable. All in all, you can tell the director knows what he's doing. It's worth studying -- and for a 48 Hour Film, that's damn impressive.

I liked it when it screened, I'm glad it won Audience Choice, and I'm glad it's up on YouTube so I can share it with you guys. Enjoy.

48 Hour Film Project: Live Interview

2008-06-26T21:08:00.000-07:00

Right, so. I haven't posted about the 48 hour film project even though it went on two weeks ago. Couple reasons.

First, the usual excuse about having lots of work to do on Descendants, Sandrima, etc.

Secondly, I wanted to wait and see if we won the Audience Choice award before posting, because what a great end to the story that would have been. But we didn't, so there you go.¹

did a podcast interview about the experience that I thought covered the bases nicely, plus it's much nicer for both of us if it's audio instead of text -- you can do other things while you listen, and I don't have to type the thing in the first place.

So, instead of writing it up, you can listen to my interview over at Filmmaking Central.

And if you found my blog via Filmmaking Central in the first place, hi! Feel free to peruse the archives, and I hope to see you around here again.

The one that did win was a film called "Stuck", a detective story executed in a single unbroken Steadicam shot. I heart unbroken Steadicam shots, especially when well-executed -- and this one was great, especially for such a short timeframe to orchestrate the thing -- so I can't begrudge them for winning. Hell, I voted for them.↩

Can all the cool people please stop dying

2008-06-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

First we lost Stan Winston...and now George Carlin.

We all know celebrity deaths come in threes. I don't even want to think about who might be next.

Where the Hell is Matt

2008-06-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

I know I said I'd blog about the 48 Hour Film Project. And I will. But this came to my attention and I couldn't not share it.

Maybe I'm just a sentimental bitch of a man, but I thought this video was really moving -- in part because of the triumphant music, but mostly because of the triumph of the video itself. It's one thing to watch a guy dance badly on the internet. It's another to watch him dance badly around the world. But it's really something else entirely to watch hundreds of people from around the world, of all difference countries and cultures and ages and races and genders and backgrounds, lay all that aside and dance badly with him.

I'm sure most people watch this video and see a neato little viral. I watch this video and I see hope that human beings might just make it, after all.

48 Hour Film Project: Intro

2008-06-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

The 48 Hour Film Project (48HFP) has been around for 8 years now -- pretty much as long as I've been involved in filmmaking. It's grown from a local thing (according to Wikipedia, it started in Washington, D.C.) and grown into a worldwide, year-round touring event.

For those who don't know, here's how it works: You are given a genre, a character, a prop, and a line of dialogue, and you are told to make a film that contains all of those elements.¹ The film must be produced, from start to finish, in 48 hours.²

I've basically wanted to do this ever since I started doing films, but never been able to for whatever reason. I lacked resources, a team, the confidence, the time. But this year I knew it was coming up and I thought "Goddammit, I want to do it." We had just teamed up with Ski-ter and Anthony and I was jazzed to fucking shoot, so I checked with them, they were all down with it, and I entered us in the competition.

This is going to be a couple of blogs, and I think I'm actually likely to make it happen. 48HFP is like an anti-procrastination boot camp; I'm a lazy guy in general, truth be told, and I need to get my ass kicked sometimes to keep moving. I never work better than under a deadline. So every time I thought "Ehh, I'll do this later" I immediately thought back "Motherfucker, there is no later. Cut the fucking scene!"

I remember reading a screenwriting book once that carried that message, essentially. It was talking about how writers used to be contract employees at a studio, who went in from 9 to 5 and just wrote for 8 hours. None of the pansy artistic whims we get away with now, where as long as you finish sort of near the deadline you're okay. You sit your ass down and you write every day if you want your paycheck.

Ultimately the message is: saying you don't want to do it now is stupid, because you're not going to want to do it later either. You're never really going to want to do it. So man up and just fucking do it. That's something I knew but it's good to be reminded every so often.

I will be writing more and talking about this weekend's journey in the days to come. Be sure to tune in.

I'm pretty sure that the early iterations of the project only provided genre and either a prop or a line, but not all of the above. Also, previously I think everyone competed in the same genre, now everyone has different ones that they draw from a hat.↩
You are allowed to cast performers and lock down locations beforehand, and you are also allowed to use pre-existing music and sound effects provided you own the rights and/or they are royalty-free. But the writing and shooting and finishing must all be within the 48 hour period. ↩

Thoughts on the new iPhone: Moore's Law in Action

2008-06-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

As we have been hearing and anticipating for the last six months (if not more), Apple has been developing and is finally ready to release their 3G iPhone, with GPS.

Last year I bought an 8GB, first-generation iPhone the day they were released. It cost me $599, although they later dropped the price and gave me $100 in Apple Buxx¹ for being an early adopter. 8GB was as big as they came, and the EDGE network was sort of like dial-up speed-wise.

Today they announced their 16GB iPhone, with 3G (technically almost 3 times faster than EDGE, though we'll see what happens when a half-billion iPhone users are all checking Twitter at the same time), true GPS (none of this cell-tower triangulation ghetto-ness), and a $299 price tag -- as they say, twice the speed, twice the storage, half the price.

This follows perfectly with Moore's Law and, as such, I'm perfectly sanguine with it. As a matter of fact I think this is a little faster -- Moore's Law, depending on the version, is either 18 months to two years -- but the point is the same. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I bought the first gen iPhone. I knew that I was spending way more money than if I waited a year, for fewer features than if I waited a year.

But my iPhone has been so valuable to me over the last year, I would have made the same choice knowing what I know. The ability to load videos on the phone has been huge for me, both as a filmmaker and a film watcher. The touch screen was, as expected, a revelation, and the ability to check the web anywhere, at any time, has changed everything. Sure, it was slow, but it was available where it wasn't before.

I would not part with my iPhone for the world, and with the new generation coming in at half the price, it feels more like a bonus than a slight. I was prepared to pay what I consider "full price" for it, and now I'm paying half that.

Keep it up, Apple. I'm happy with it as it is and it will only get better.

That's not really what they called it, but they should have. Fire your marketing, Apple. What have they done for YOU besides brought you back from the brink of obsolescence and bankruptcy to take back a significant share in both the professional and consumer computer and electronics markets? I said besides that.↩

Orson Scott Card is an Asshole

2008-06-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a whole long thing telling Orson Scott Card to go fuck himself, but I realized that going through it point by point is not worth my time.

So I'll keep it brief: I haven't read the Lexicon, so maybe Rowling's lawsuit IS groundless, but Card's argument is complete horseshit and I can barely stand it; as part of the article, he brings up court cases that found in favor of Rowling (as in the case of Nancy Stouffer, whose case was dismissed and who was fined for committing fraud against the court), peppers in little self-promotional "the brilliance of MY work..." comments, and takes credit for a story structure that predates the ancient fucking Greeks in drawing the comparison between the broad strokes of Ender's Game and those of Harry Potter.

Orson Scott Card is a pompous jackass, Ender's Game was completely predictable and self-indulgent, and his work will be a footnote in literary history at best, when Rowling's is venerated by each new generation.

Oh, and also, basing stories on the same general literary structure -- a literary structure made famous in the work of Joseph Campbell, not yours -- is not the same as actively plagiarizing your work verbatim, republishing it, and reselling it for profit. You moron.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Indy IV in Summary

2008-06-03T23:25:00.000-07:00

I like his beanie.

Thoughts on Indy IV

2008-05-30T11:10:00.003-07:00

So this post is a week later than is probably relevant, but a full and busy week it's been. Shot a bunch on the RED last weekend, and shooting some more starting tomorrow. I've been cutting this and keying that and sitting down to talk about Descendants with several folks who took the time to read and review the latest draft. Busy busy.

This is actually a re-post of a post I made over at the fxphd forums, when asked what my "likes and dislikes" were with the film. I wound up covering everything I wanted to say, so while it's less of a structured "movie review" (which is why I didn't call this post a review), I think it's pretty much all there.

-------------

Oh man, where to begin. Well, I'll start with likes:

Some of the FX were really top-notch. The mushroom cloud (despite its logistical problems that I'll get into below) was phenomenal, as was the climactic shot of the UFO lifting off and the rocks whirling around it. The water filling the canyon looked great too.

Unlike a lot of others, I actually liked the concept of an alien movie. Look, if I can accept God as a McGuffin -- twice! -- and another movie where people are pulling other peoples' hearts out of their chests, I can accept aliens.

And I even like the reasoning Lucas had for it -- the movies set in the 40s were made like movies from the 40s, so a movie set in the 50s should be like a movie from the 50s. The 40s were action-adventure serials, the 50s were science-gone-wrong and alien invasion tales.

The skulls looked really cool and the room of the crystal skeletons was like something out of classical mythology -- powerful stuff.

Now the dislikes:

As an FX artist and a filmmaker, I have a lot of friends who are filmmakers but not so savvy on FX, and they tend to want to do a lot of stuff with FX that isn't necessary. One of my favorite stories to tell them is that Spielberg always appreciated the fact that the limitations on Jaws ultimately made it a better movie, forced him to be more creative, and he kept that lesson with him even as he became STEVEN SPIELBERG. Even though he could get any budget to do anything he wanted, for a long time he would limit himself to 400 VFX shots in a film. If there was a shot that put him over the limit, he had to either figure out a way to do it without VFX, or figure out how to do another moment without relying on FX. In keeping himself limited he ultimately kept his creativity strong by thinking around "we can do it with CG."

As I said, I've told all my filmmaking friends about this, so sitting in the theatre and watching CG gopher shot after Tarzan Shia shot made me feel like an asshole, because obviously that's gone totally out the window.

Spielberg made a big deal about how he and the DP swallowed their pride and watched all three movies, so SS could go back to his early style, and the DP could duplicate the previous DP's style. I didn't see any of that. It felt like a modern movie trying too hard -- is it so much to ask not to throw a diffusion filter on the camera, Kaminski? The original films are very simply shot, straightforward but powerful, the lighting naturalistic. This one had cuts where there would have been camera moves, and heavy heavy HEAVY filtering where there should have been none at all. As far as matching the originals stylistically, I give it an F.

Now one of my biggest issues. These days your MOVIE heroes are always total badasses who know how to handle any situation you throw at them. Your Vin Diesel characters, your Angelina Jolie characters. They're always calm, cool, collected, and there's never a question that they're going to come out on top of any situation.

In pitching the direction I want to take Descendants, I've always said that I don't want Charlie, the main character, to be That Guy. I want him to be Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones has a tendency to get in over his head, in situations for which he's not wholly prepared. When he gets into a situation where he's pretty much fucked, you can see on his face that he knows he's pretty much fucked, and only by sheer luck or cleverness does he manage to escape. When the hero clearly thinks that he might be about to die, the audience thinks that maybe he's about to die. We're there with him and when he gets out by the skin of his teeth, we cheer our fool heads off.

So imagine my disappointment when Indiana Jones turned out to be That Guy this time around.

First off, the fridge. There's so much logistically wrong with it my head might explode. I mean:

-Even generously assuming that the lead lining is enough to protect him from the radiation, it protects him from the shockwave AND the heat as well?
-Even generously assuming that the lead lining saves him from all three, he would have been killed multiple times bouncing about the desert on landing.
-Even generously assuming he survives that, the lead lining only protects him while he's in the fridge. If he got out as close to the blast as he would have to in order to get the iconic mushroom cloud shot that they did, he's dying of radiation poisoning. I don't care how hard they scrubbed him down at FBI HQ.
-Where's the hail of all the other fridges that were also thrown clear totally intact? He happened to be in the only one?
-You could have totally removed that scene and it would have changed nothing in the story.

There's a movement starting to make the term Nuking the Fridge the film franchise equivalent of Jumping the Shark. I think that's appropriate. That's shit you pull in a Jason Statham vehicle, it's not something that happens to Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones doesn't survive the plunge over three waterfalls. The bad guys die going over the waterfall, and Indy uses his cleverness and luck to avoid going over the falls at all.

I never once felt like Indy was in any genuine danger. You have him survive a nuclear blast in the first ten minutes of the film, and then you expect me to worry about him in a fistfight? Sorry, no.

None of the actors felt like they had anything to do. I really like Shia in general but a big part of that is the wit and personality he brings to his characters, very little of which was present here. Great to have Karen Allen back, but so little was actually done with her character that it felt superfluous and fanwanky.

Then there were all the great ideas that were brought up and then dropped just as quickly, almost every scene. It seriously felt like they'd just taken one scene from each draft they'd done over the last 20 years and grafted them together in semi-chronological order.

For example, Cate Blanchette's character is supposed to be a freaking psychic. That's established in the very first scene where she tries to read Indy's mind. There's even implications that maybe she's telekinetic. That disappears totally after the opening scene. Sure, she mentions mind control later when infodumping about the importance of the skulls, but her own psychic abilities are nonexistent. It makes her seem more like that weird emo girl at your high school that no one wanted to eat lunch with, than a genuinely threatening villainess. And her first-year acting school Soviet accent didn't help, either. I love Cate, I would think she could do no wrong, but man.

Or how about the next scene, where Indy finds the crate by throwing gunpowder in the air? Where's the moment where they all point their guns at him only to realize that he's destroyed all their ammo, enabling his escape? And if not ALL their ammo, at least make them have to reload.

Or how about the interrogation scene, where Indy is subjected to McCarthyist paranoia? Sure, he loses his job, but come on. You could build a whole subplot around the idea that Indiana Jones is declared an Enemy of the State, and have the Russians AND the Americans trying to stop him from doing what he's gotta do. But no, Janitor gives him a few of his favorite Scrubs lines and that plotline is dropped entirely.

On and on and on.

I think what upset me most, though, is how little Spielberg seemed to trust the audience. Damn near every scene was an expository infodump that just screamed "Look how much research we did on the subject!" and advanced the story very, very little.

But the most egregious examples are when Indy spoon fed us exactly what we were supposed to understand.

"Damn, I thought that was closer." Come on. That same moment in Raiders would have been totally silent. Indy crashes into the truck. He and the two bad guys sit in stunned silence for a second, then he grins sheepishly at the driver before elbowing them both in the face and shoving them out. Nothing need be said.

"Those darts are poison!" Okay, seriously, blowdarts are always poisoned. That's what blowdarts are for. I think it's safe to assume that we get it.

"Their treasure wasn't gold, it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure." He seriously said the same thing twice, phrased in reverse, just to make sure we didn't miss it.

And of course, one of the most shocking dialogue choices to me: "What am I being accused of -- besides surviving a nuclear blast?" The script has the audacity to remind us of how ludicrous the preceding scene was.

Overall I could do a DVD commentary, scene-by-scene regarding how absurd it all is, and that's not the case with the other Indy pictures. Okay, maybe Temple of Doom. But you'd think after almost twenty years they could do better than that. It had all the elements of an Indy movie, all the characters -- again, almost to the extent of fanwankery with all the nods to Raiders -- but it never actually felt to me like I was watching an Indy movie. It was just another of the long list of movies trying to capture the Indy magic, but failing. The tragedy is that this time, it was official.

Weezer Video: Pork and Beans

2008-05-23T12:02:00.001-07:00

Okay, so you know that "music video from a prominent band" I mentioned?

As some of you have no doubt surmised, it was Weezer, for their single Pork and Beans. That is really us, but since it was shot in HD and then downscaled to YouTube I've been cut out of almost every shot.

Fun fact: they apparently wanted Star Wars Kid initially; when that didn't pan out, they called us. Works for me!

We also managed to talk them into letting us do the lightsaber effects for the video ourselves, although ultimately I did all the lightsabers and Ryan did all the drumsticks (which they wanted in red and then changed).

That is *really* everyone it's supposed to be. Doing the shoot was incredibly surreal given that we had all seen and enjoyed each others' videos, and everyone there was incredibly cool and fun to talk to. (And yes, they'd all seen the South Park episode they were in.)We all exchanged e-mails, which may just turn out to be your high school yearbook "K.I.T.!!!" gesture, but hopefully not.

Anyway, we all had a great time and even though we're not in there for much of it, we're proud to be a part of it and we hope it gets a bazillion views.

Out of town...

2008-05-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

I'll be in Florida Tues-Thurs shooting some VFX plates for Sandrima Rising, the Star Wars project for which I am doing the visual effects. I'll be back Thursday night but won't have time to blog in the meantime (I will probably do some Twittering).

I wanted to post a review of Redbelt, which I saw this weekend, but I have too much to say and not enough time to write it down. Go watch it and we'll talk about it when I get back on Friday, because I thought it was amazing.

I now pronounce you...

2008-05-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

So great non-filmmaking news today: the Supreme Court of the state of California (where I live) has just overturned the standing ban on gay marriage, declaring it "unconstitutional".

Now, I'm not looking to get married any time soon, but it's seven flavors of bullshit to have that option refused to me. So it's great that the state Supreme Court sees it the same way. But of course, there are the jackasses who now want to change the state constitution to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples.

First of all, it always astonishes me that these people insist that the proponents of gay marriage are attempting to "redefine" what marriage is, when in fact they are the ones changing laws and amending constitutions in an attempt to -- say it with me -- redefine marriage to fit into their small-brained, bigoted worldview.

I have yet to have a single person give me a valid reason that "marriage" should be restricted to opposite-sex couples. Hint: "The Bible says" automatically invalidates your reason, because the Bible isn't the basis of American law. But that's a digression I'm in no particular mood for, because cooler heads have prevailed today.

In a surprising turn of events, Governor Schwarzenegger, who has repeatedly vetoed attempts to legalize gay marriage, has stated: "I respect the court's decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling. Also, as I have said in the past, I will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this [ruling]."

Indeed, although he has not supported gay marriage, citing Proposition 22, he has supported domestic partnerships, declaring that the Supreme Court and the voters were the ones who needed to decide about gay marriage. Prop 22 is out and it sounds like he plans to stick to his word. Maybe I need to take back some of the things I've said about him.

Original story here.

The future has landed...

2008-05-12T23:42:00.000-07:00

Still pretty tired for a long weekend, but I had to share that this morning I received a call from FedEx informing me that I had four packages from "RED.com" awaiting me at the local depot. The whole drive back home I was giddy with equal parts anticipation and sleep deprivation (hell of a shoot this weekend).

And now, in my hands is RED ONE #1028. We shot a short "unbox" video of me cutting open the cardboard and getting my hands on the cam that I will either post or forget all about, we'll see.

RED users have established a tradition of giving their cameras names, which started with the codenames RED gave their own early prototype cameras. It's not mandatory, but I like the idea. This first run of REDs is something of a "limited edition" and I enjoy the notion of having a camera that is more personal than just a serial number.

I'm a massive Lovecraft fan and I really feel like the camera should have a Lovecraftian name, but I think "Cthulhu" or "Yog-Sothoth" would be a little too over-the-top for the RED ONE camera¹, and "Pickman" and "Carter" are a little too generic as names (although Carter, being a master of dreams, is probably the most appropriate if you know the lore). I also don't want to name the camera after a story or character I might actually shoot someday, since that's a little self-referential and weird, which is another reason those are out.

So, I've settled on "Alhazred;" the character was a madman who had wild visions, and although you never see him, his presence, as author of the Necronomicon, is felt behind every story Lovecraft wrote. I think it's an appropriate moniker for a camera. Plus who can resist the fact that the name includes the syllable "red".

So yeah, short post, and we haven't shot anything with it yet (a few more missing pieces have to make their way to my doorstep), but it's coming, people. Oh, is it coming.

Although if we upgrade to an Epic, I think I could be justified in having that camera take the name of a Great Old One or an Outer God.

"Azathoth" has a great ring to it.↩

Busy week again

2008-05-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Been fixing Descendants. The script was "about 80% there" (the producers' words, and I agree), so the last couple weeks have been about that last 20%. Like anything else, the bulk of the work is the "easy" part; it's the last 10-20% that separates "alright" and "outstanding", and which takes the most work.

Additionally, in partnering with Wade/OIP, we inherited their future slate of projects, and vice-versa, as productions on our own slate. That was part of the deal -- and part of the appeal. But although I have about a dozen feature film ideas to develop post-Descendants, they have a half-dozen feature scripts already written. Besides lighting a fire under my ass to step up and get on the ball, it's also meant scripts to be read and thoughts to be shared on them. All of which conspires to take up all my writing energy for the week.

I had a mix-up in my schedule where I thought I would be out of town on a shoot next weekend -- but it turns out that the shoot is actually this weekend. So I've been scrambling a bit to sort that out.

On top of that, Ryan and I had a last-minute call to cameo in a music video by a prominent band. I hate being all vague and industry-talk about it, and I haven't signed an NDA, but it's a cool opportunity and I don't want to piss them off by blogging about it if they didn't want the news to get out. The shoot is tomorrow morning (call time 6:30 AM) and I've had to do some more rescheduling to fit that and the other, pre-existing shoot together. I'll post more specifics when I'm sure that I can.

So this is another brief "here's my excuse for not posting" post. Like I said, I'm out of town this weekend, but I'll try to write at least one in-depth theoretical post if I have some downtime.

Blinding Light in Partnership with Wade Val'iant/One Inch Punch

2008-05-03T22:10:00.000-07:00

So we're not big enough to be making any headlines in Variety or Hollywood Reporter, but still, this is a big deal for us, and all our respective fanbases, so here's a pseduo-press release.

As of today, Blinding Light Productions is officially in partnership with Wade Val'iant and One Inch Punch Productions for all future film projects.

Wade Val'iant and One Inch Punch are, respectively, the production companies of Ski-ter Jones and Anthony Alba, two gentlemen who do outstanding work, with the recently-mentioned Animus as a great example.

I've worked with a lot of folks¹ in the nine years (god, nine years -- time flew so I must be having fun) that I've been doing film and visual effects stuff. I've made friends with a number of them, made "call me if you're working on something" connections with many, but prior to today the only person I've made the "if you're on board, I'm on board" partnership with has been Ryan². But working with Ski-ter and Anthony has changed that.

Filmmaking is like fighting a war (I still owe you folks a blog on that), and in war you want people you know have your back when the shit inevitably starts coming down around your ears. Until recently the only person I had that I knew could handle the battles with me was Ryan, but I know that I can trust Anthony and Ski-ter, because they've been doing it too.

As I said in my post on Animus, I was a fan of Anthony's work before I met him, and I've become a fan of him since. He's a great collaborator, very positive and passionate, and I click with him the way I click with Ryan. And similarly to the way Ryan and I work, where you get Anthony, you get Ski-ter, and I couldn't be happier. Ski-ter brings an attitude that reminds me why I love doing what we do.

I've been crewing a concept shoot for their feature, and last weekend we shot a fight scene. It was outdoors, it was hot, it was tiring, it was miserable, and I couldn't wait to do it again. There's an energy you get when everyone's moving in the same direction, with the same goals in mind, egos put aside and everyone focused on what's best for the project. It's the energy I get with Ryan, and it's the energy I get with Ski-ter and Anthony. It's a joy to work with all of them.

The last few weeks we've talked casually about the future, about us working together, but yesterday we sat down and officially discussed it. We all agreed that it seemed like a great idea, and now we are officially producing all each others' projects.

I'm thrilled, proud, and honored to have them on our team, and to be welcomed as a part of theirs. If you've thought the stuff we've done to date has been good, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Most of the industry has a habit of using the noun "cats" to refer to the general filmmaking populace -- often with a subtle negative connotation. I'm still fighting the compulsion, but I have to admit that I almost did it just then.↩

We do also essentially have this with Travis, but he's in Texas so there's an inherent degree of separation there where we can't really do anything besides post work.↩

Back to India -- Kalluri Vaanil

2008-04-29T23:18:00.000-07:00

So, I've continued watching "Animus" and I have decided that I do in fact love the film. The more I watch it the more I notice, both in terms of what he did and what he was trying to do. It ain't perfect, but it's still good stuff.

Anyway, moving on.

This next video's most popular iteration on YouTube is titled "Crazy Indian Music Video". It's actual title is "Kalluri Vaanil" and it's by the artist Prabhu Deva. Before I researched the short (and given that I don't speak the language, I actually have no idea how I managed to decipher it enough to search for it properly), I would describe the film thusly:

"Imagine that a dance choreographer had one week to live, and he chose to put every idea he'd ever had into one last blow-out music video. I think this video is pretty close to what it would be like."

It's kind of weird at first, especially the high-pitched treatment the female vocals get, but dammit, it's catchy as hell, and the dance moves are really energetic. This makes ME want to shoot a crazy music video of some kind, because it looks like they're all having a hell of a good time.

Animus

2008-04-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

As the folks reading this may or may not know, I'm a sucker for martial arts movies, particularly kung fu stuff. A former roommate of mine had a similar obsession, and had a library of old Shaw Brothers and other obscure or rare titles that I still miss today. Among that library was a DVD called Everyone is Kung Fu Fighting, a collection of amateur martial arts short films. Most of them were pretty crap, but there was one called "Cradle of the Blind" that I really dug. The choreography was solid, and of the same tastes that I find fun and interesting in fight choreography. I was also really impressed by some of the clever camera work.

Well, at one point when surfing Craigslist for something to stave off my pre-RvD2 boredom, I came across a posting by the same Anthony Alba who had made "Cradle of the Blind," looking for a writer to help him with a book idea he had. I got in touch with him, we met up and although that specific idea has not yet come to fruition, we've kept in touch the last couple years, shared some WIP stuff, and I'm pleased to say that one of the WIPs that I saw a few years ago is finally a finished film, called "Animus".

When I saw the rough cut of "Animus", I have to say I didn't get it. But I liked the final version a hell of a lot. There are interesting choices made in the shooting and editing that I keep watching over and over. Give me a few more days and I might even say I love the thing; I'm not sure I'm ready for that kind of commitment just yet.

One thing I can say for sure: Anthony is insanely talented, as a director and especially as a fight choreographer and martial artist.

Case in point: if you've seen Equilibrium, you may remember the fight scene at the very end with the Big Bad, where the two characters were supposedly doing a wild and highly technical gun-fu fight against each other -- when in fact they were playing patty-cake, batting each other's weapons away lazily as the camera dollied frantically about them.

Starting at 2:11, "Animus" has the fight scene we SHOULD have gotten at the end of Equilibrium.

I'm not going to comment or review the film itself here, other than to say that the film managed to hold my interest for over 20 minutes in a dinky low-rez YouTube window, and that's hard to do. I enjoyed it and I told Anthony I would use my Intarweb Powerz to try and get the word out.

I've been helping him with a concept shoot for a feature he's co-written with his brother Ski-ter¹, and I think our respective teams -- me and Ryan with Anthony and Ski-ter -- have a long and fulfilling future of collaboration and partnership ahead. Once you see some of Anthony's work, I think you'll be as excited about the prospect as I am.

If you have a YouTube account (and all the cool kids do), be sure to click through to the actual film page and leave a comment for him, so he knows his work is seen and appreciated. That's really all us filmy-types want.

Without further ado, "Animus":

If you have the RvD2 DVD, Ski-ter shot some of the pyrotechnic BTS. He's the guy behind the camera who says "You gotta love that sh*t."↩

Touching base

2008-04-25T19:55:00.001-07:00

Sorry I haven't updated this week. I've had other duties to attend to.

Anyone following my Twitter feed knows some of this already, but I'll go for it anyway.

Firstly, I've officially wire-transferred the money to pay for the RED camera and all the accessories. In my previous post on the tripod I meant to mention this, but if you live in California and your main source of income is TV or film production/postproduction, the California State Board of Equalization is your friend. Specifically, Regulation 1532, and most specifically, Section 6378.

What is Section 6378? It is a form you fill out and present when making a purchase of any equipment that you will use more than 50% of the time for "teleproduction". It is a sales tax exemption of 5.25% -- meaning that instead of 8.25%, you pay 3% in sales tax for said equipment/products. Tripods, computers, cameras, accessories...aaaalllll gooooood.

Considering the size of the purchases I've been making, that one little form has saved me nearly $3000 in sales tax. Which means I have a cushion for making payments AND a little extra for accessories I didn't know about before.

The wire transfer takes a few days, they'll probably ship by the end of next week and it'll probably be in a week or so after that. Then we play.

Next bit of news. I finished and submitted my latest draft of The Descendants. Everyone liked the script in general and hated Act 2 in particular.

I don't blame them. Act 2 is fucked. Act 2 is always fucked. It's probably the hardest part of any script -- at least for me. Usually I'll generally know the beginning, generally know where I want to get to at the end, and it's bridging the middle bit that's the nightmare.

But I think it's almost there. I give the middle section a bit more purpose and we're ready to take it to the next step. I got some really great notes from the producers and some readers and I think this next draft might really be the one.

I've read for a few friends in return, one script and one treatment. Luckily both by good writers. Both stories have potential, and I like wrestling with other peoples' ideas, seeing what I can do to make them more interesting to me. Giving notes is always a subjective thing, so I just focus on what I think would fascinate me and get me talking after a film.

Good stuff all around but a lot of writing (especially the giving notes part; I try to be thorough), so my writing muscles needed a rest from the blog.

I'll probably go light this weekend, but I've got a few YouTube vids to share so that should make up for my silence this week.

The Tripod Man

2008-04-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

I was going to blog about 3D/Stereoscopic filmmaking today, but I'll save that for later, and instead share an anecdote that happened to me yesterday.

Having gotten an uber-loan for my RED, I'm in the process of actually spending all this money on the equipment that I borrowed the money for in the first place. And let me tell something to all the folks in the "DV Rebel" tier that I'm springboarding from: these ain't your momma's tripods.

I come from a place where cameras weigh, like, 5 pounds on the outside, and you can buy a Bogen tripod and get decent results with it. Though admittedly most of the time you end up going handheld anyway, because you want to move the camera and you can't afford a dolly/jib.

The RED camera body is 10lbs, and that's just the body. By the time you add batteries, rails, lens, mattebox, follow focus, EVF, monitor, and drives, you could be looking at upwards of 40lbs for the camera, at about $1K per pound. You're not going to pop that onto a $300 still-camera tripod and hope it holds.

I also want the camera to get some play in the rental market, and an unspoken evaluation of one's "package" seems to be the quality of your "sticks" (the innuendo is lost on neither of us). But the fact is, if you want professionals to take your camera rental package seriously, you've gotta have serious camera support.

I found a place that has a bundle package specifically designed for owners of the RED camera, based on feedback from RED owners on what they're glad they bought and what they wished they hadn't. The package was under a discounted rate as a bundle, so not only did I happen to get a package which contained EVERYTHING I was already planning to buy, at a discounted rate, but they also threw in carrying cases for the equipment. It's like the carrying cases cost me negative money, because I saved a couple thousand off what I planned to buy and got them on top of it all.¹

I'm buying the O'Connor Ultimate 2060HD Fluid Head with 150mm Ball Mount, on the O'Connor Cine HD aluminum tripod sticks, also with ball mount. Apparently at this level of equipment, you buy the tripod head separately from the tripod legs. The tripod head can then be taken off the sticks and thrown on a dolly, jib, crane, "hi-hat", etc. as necessary.

There are two kinds of mounts.² There are ball mounts, which allow you to rotate the bottom of the tripod and level it on potentially uneven surfaces, and there are Mitchell mounts, which are solid, flat connections that expect a level surface. And it's regarding this choice of mounts that I wanted to tell a little story.

I was at the reseller and putting the package together, and another customer there and I started making conversation. He had been a focus puller for 13 years before making the move to DP, and he asked what kind of mount I was getting on my tripod. I told him I was getting the ball mount, then admitted that I had no idea what the pros and cons were in either direction.

There are two ways someone can respond to that. The amateur version is to roll your eyes and start off with "You DON'T KNOW..." and then launch into a condescending explanation, while all the while giving off an air that you're doing me a favor digging into these totally basic depths of your knowledge.

The professional version is to explain the facts based on one's experience, with a view towards helping someone else understand the same things you do.

This guy was a professional. He spent a good fifteen minutes weighing the pros and cons of the two different tripod mounts for me. He was ultimately a Mitchell man, and said that most of the rented equipment that you'll find on a film set, such as cranes and dollies, will come with Mitchell mounts. So for interoperability and speed of use, he was all about Mitchell. He even went so far as to inquire into whether or not I would have the option to swap the mount, or if my ball mount could be adapted to a Mitchell.³

Two things about the guy struck me. Well, really one, but it manifested in two ways.

First of all, the guy was a focus puller for 13 years. Think about that. For 13 years his main job was to stand next to a film camera and make sure the shot was in focus. And make no mistake, that is a crucial job on a movie set, and requires a hell of a lot of technical know-how and skill, but it's hardly glamorous -- even by the already unglamorous standards of below-the-line film labor. Now, the focus puller is also known as the 1st AC, a more hoity-toity title, but also a more appropriate one, as he is essentially in charge of keeping the camera loaded, clean, and running. The fact that he was a 1st AC for 13 years, and willing to downplay it by saying "focus puller" instead, tells me that what we've got is a man who just loves being in the movies.

Likewise, his passion for tripod mounts was both amusing and moving. Again, here's a guy who cares so much about something that is both incredibly important (for what we do), and incredibly obscure. A guy who just loves being a part of the art and business of movies, and loves sharing what he knows with others.

I love meeting people like that.

I won't quote the price here, but the company was Abel Cine Tech. If you're a RED owner or plan to be one soon, call them for bundle pricing and availability. It's still in the many-thousands-of-dollars range, but it's pro equipment for a discounted rate, and the cheapest I found anywhere.↩

"Package", "sticks", "mounts", yes. Freud would have a lot to say about tripod terminology. ↩

As it turns out, the O'Connor 2060HD comes with a Mitchell mount, to which the ball mount attaches. In purchasing the ball mount version, I am effectively purchasing both, which is the best of both worlds.↩

NAB Rundown

2008-04-16T13:51:00.000-07:00

NAB is still going on out in Vegas, but I'm home in L.A. as of 3 A.M. this morning. Which was probably a mistake -- the big Final Cut Pro User Group Super Meet is happening tonight and I would have liked to go -- but I couldn't justify another $100 night out of town when I've got so much to get done.

But people have been asking my thoughts on some of the big announcements at NAB:

Scarlet: RED's new 3K, "pocket" camera. Fixed lens, 2/3" sensor, REDCODE RAW to flash media, up to 120fps recording with 180fps possible in "burst" mode.

This is not only an HVX-killer, it's an everything-in-this-market-segment-and-the-one-above-it killer. Assuming the increased dynamic range that's being rumored with the new Mysterium X sensor, the only thing keeping this camera (which RED says will retail for under $3,000: "3K under $3K") from destroying a huge chunk of the high-end camera market -- including the Sony F23 and Viper FilmStream -- will be the fixed lens.

Will we have a use for it? At that price, with those specs, no one with even a semi-serious interest in filmmaking/shooting can afford not to have it. It's not the RED ONE, it's not going to get 35mm depth of field, but it's a massive step up from the HVX at HALF the price.

I'm aware that Panasonic has come out with two new solid-state cameras, as replacements for the DVX and the HVX. HD, heavily compressed (the HVX replacement DVCPRO HD, the DVX replacement the MPEG-2-based AVCHD), proprietary P2 card format, 1/3" sensors, tops out at 60fps recording, and that only in 720p mode, and even the cheaper one costs more than Scarlet. They might as well pack up and go home. And don't get me wrong, I love Panasonic to death. They made 24p happen in the prosumer market. But Scarlet fucks them raw.

Likewise Sony, with their announcement of the EX3. HD resolution, 1/2" sensor, solid state recording. Lame, lame, same as Scarlet. The only thing the EX3 has that Scarlet doesn't is the option for interchangeable lenses. But is that worth the $10,000 difference in price to most lo/no-budget shooters? I didn't think so.

Epic: 5K, Super35 format. Up to 100fps at full-frame 5K resolution.

This one makes less sense to me than Scarlet does, and even with RED's exceedingly generous and, I have a feeling, unprecedented upgrade path -- buy a RED ONE now for $17,500, and trade it in towards the cost of an Epic next year at full, non-depreciated cash value as long as it still "works" -- the $40K price tag makes it unlikely too many people will jump on that ship.

Based on the limited specs released so far, the Epic will boast the new Mysterium X sensor, meaning greater dynamic range, higher possible framerates, and higher possible bit rates. The thing is, Jim Jannard (founder/owner of RED) has stated that around the same time that Epic/Scarlet start shipping, R1 owners will receive a sensor upgrade as well. I'm sure the upgrade won't be free, probably a couple thousand, but it will put a Mysterium X in your R1 -- gaining you the dynamic range, frame rates, and bit rates, presumably.

So what's Epic for, at that point? 5K recording? Call me unimaginative, but I don't see what use 5K is when we don't even have reasonable workflows for 4K yet, and most films shot on 35mm even today only scan/master in 2K.

Epic, as far as is known right now, is a camera with a 40% reduction in weight and a relatively unnecessary 40% boost in resolution from the flagship R1. Not that both of those things aren't great, BUT, when you factor in that even with a full-value R1 trade in, and subtracting the money you'd pay anyway for an R1 sensor upgrade, you're still looking at another $19,000 or so to pick up an Epic, I really don't think anything I've seen, thus far, would be worth that, when you could grab another R1 body for the same price.

I personally think it would make more sense if Epic were a 65mm equivalent camera instead of Super35. For one thing, it's the format that a lot of the old school epics were actually shot on. Films like Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments¹, 2001, and Ben-Hur. If you've ever been on a movie-ride like the recently closed Back to the Future at Universal Studios, or 3D "spectaculars" like T2-3D: Battle Across Time (also at Universal), you've seen imagery shot on the 65mm format.²

It's also basically the format of IMAX production, and in that may be facing a resurgence. Christopher Nolan was so impressed by the IMAX presentation of Batman Begins, scaled-up digitally with high-quality algorithms, that he committed to actually shoot chunks of its sequel, The Dark Knight, directly to the IMAX format.

Unlike a mere boost to 5K, an affordable Digital65 camera genuinely creates a whole new market tier, AND a good reason for the additional resolution boost. What they announced at NAB is really just RED TWO, and not a camera I would personally call "Epic".

In terms of price, while compared to the RED ONE I don't think that the small tech advances justify a more-than-doubling of the body price, when put into perspective it's still a steal for $40K. The Sony F35, Sony's Super35 response to RED, retails for $350,000, and it's still only an HD chip with HD output. And you'd never see them offering full-cash-value trade-ins -- or any trade-ins at all -- to owners of their F900 series cameras (which retailed at around $150,000). So can you really complain about RED's business model or pricing structure? No. It's still a steal anyway you slice it.

But does upgrading to the Epic from my RED ONE make a lot of sense to me? Not from where I'm standing right now.

Stereoscopic (3D) Filmmaking: Stereoscopic (aka stereo, aka 3D) production and post-production was a concept that had surprising prevalence on the show floor. It seemed like every booth had one product geared toward stereo -- projector systems, display systems, dual-channel color correctors, etc.

I'm going to do another post on the resurgence of 3D, but I wanted to mention that the people who produce product for this industry are not all looking at it as a gimmick. Many of them are starting to see it as a big, big deal.

Vegas: Just a quick note on Vegas. I spent most of the time in the city either on the show floor, at parties in the evenings, or in my hotel room. I was amused by the notion that I should be in Vegas and completely fail to do anything Vegas-y. And I kind of liked having the freedom to do that, to go to Vegas and not feel compelled to "Do Vegas". Plus I saved a lot of money that way.

Anyway, glad to be back, getting back into the swing of things.

Ten Commandments was technically shot on Vistavision, which is 35mm film run sideways through the camera so that the image prints on the same surface as would normally print two 35mm frames, for a 70mm widescreen frame. Vistavision never caught on as a capture/display format, but found new life in the special effects industry. Before computers, composites had to be made optically, and at each stage any grain or noise from the source would be added on top of the grain in the printed film. Vistavision had smaller grain proportional to the size of the image, so it could go through more optical generations with less of a quality hit. Even with digital compositing now being the standard, big movies like Spiderman 2 and The Matrix still sometimes shoot FX plates on 65mm/Vistavision for the quality boost. ↩

Anyone remember the original 3D spectacular, Captain E-O? Also 65mm.↩

My Technology > Yours

2008-04-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

So, as those following me on Twitter ( [dead-eyed shell of a man] JOIN US [/shell] ) will already know, I have just today been approved for a loan in the amount of approximately $55,000 in order to purchase my RED ONE digital cinema camera.

Two things about this:

1) Fucking
2) Sweet.

How do I feel right now? Some gut-churning combination of "euphoric" and "terrified". I've never had a responsibility for that much money at a go in my entire life. My biggest debt -- the one that took me five years to pay off -- was $10,000. This is five times that, and my repayment term is three years. There's a lot of pressure to make a success of this, but hopefully I find that I thrive that way.

Anyway, got a script to finish and then I've got three days in Vegas for NAB. Won't be blogging, will be Twittering.

Too Much Time on My Hands

2008-04-09T10:34:00.001-07:00

Here in L.A. we have a radio station called "Jack FM". Their whole thing is "Playing what we want." There are no DJ's, no talking, and no requests. Basically someone put an iPod shuffle on the radio. But it is one rockin' iPod shuffle.

Even though I've been listening to Jack for three or four years (however long it's been on the air, it was formerly the classic rock station Arrow, which I still occasionally call it), I still discover songs I haven't heard before, or re-discover songs I haven't heard in quite some time. So it was with Too Much Time On My Hands, by Styx¹. I knew the lyric "Is it any wonder I'm not the President?" which amuses me because of how the singer does it, sounding like a pouty child. But for the first time I really listened to the lyrics, and I discovered that, like Alanis, they had apparently written a song hinging strongly on a phrase they were using incorrectly.

The phrase "Is it any wonder...?" is meant to be ironic -- it's usually used as part of an explanation, and the expected answer to the idiom is "no."

"The guy was insulting my wife, is it any wonder I decked him?" Et cetera.

But as you can see by reading the lyrics, in most parts the question becomes straightforward. "I spend my time in bars and have nothing going for me. Is it any wonder I'm not a criminal?"

As a matter of fact, it is a wonder.

I guess I can't entirely say it's being used "wrong" since, grammatically, it still kind of makes sense. It's not like the out-and-out wrong usage of Ironic in the song of the same name. But that's not what the phrase is understood to mean, so it seems a little weird to use it that way.

"Is it any wonder I've got too much time on my hands" is, however, fairly non-sensical. Because he doesn't explain where this time has come from. If he had talked about being fired from his job, or something, this might have worked, but he just jumps in on having too much time on his hands, and never bothers to explain where it came from. So "is it any wonder" is out of place.

The only time it's used in its most common form is the line about being President. Maybe that's why it's the one I remembered best.

I do have more important things to write about than Styx songs, I swear. But at the moment it's more important that I do them, than blog about how I ought to. So in the meantime, anyone else got song lyrics that just bother them every time they hear the song²?

Best known to my generation, perhaps, for Come Sail Away, Eric Cartman's favorite song. ↩

Another good example is Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die: "If this ever changing world in which we live in." Agh.↩

Fucking Twitter

2008-04-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

Alright, I gave in and got a Twitter account because I'm a connectivity whore.

What is Twitter? It's like blog-lite. Any time anything I think even remotely interesting goes down, I can post an update to Twitter and you can see it. As they say on the site:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

~~As I understand it, either Facebook or Friendster has a similar function available. So it's like Facebook-lite, too.~~ It would seem that there is a Facebook client for Twitter, through which your Twitter updates, and those of your friends, can be followed directly from your Facebook page.

Why did I get a Twitter account? Besides the aforementioned whoredom, it struck me this evening, when I came home a good five hours later than I expected to, that perhaps my roommates might be interested in keeping up with where I am and what I'm doing.

But I imagine when I do something interesting -- such as going to NAB next week, or when I'm on location of a production -- occasional updates might be notable.

You can find my page at twitter.com/DorkmanScott. If you're already a Twitter member, let's "follow" each other. And if you're not, come hop on the bandwagon.