Real versus CGI Special Effects

Over at BoingBoing I ran into this great post and discussion on old school special effects and what's been lost in changing over to CGI. The starting off point is Ray Harryhausen's wonderful work and things go from there. Rarely are comment threads worth reading on big sites, but this one has a lot of valid points being made.

Personally, I think CGI can be fantastic when used properly and devastating to the suspension of disbelief when poor. Part of that comes from accepting the unreal aspects of older stop motion or miniatures effects for what they are when we visually process them. So when something that is photorealistic doesn't move or behave correctly, the mind freaks out disproportionately. That's the Achilles heel of CGI and I just had that experience watching the trailer to The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug:

It looked pretty good until the scene with the elves in the trees chasing the dwarves in the barrels. Right there the fluidity did not match the rest of the image and jarred me out of full immersion. Quick cuts of real stuntmen would have worked much better, but the temptation of CGI leads to directors using it too much. And this is the work of one of the better CGI directors out there, Peter Jackson.

Motion capture is one way to ameliorate the effect, but so far nothing has completely fooled my eye in a movie. So I'm back to learning to forgive the limitations and hope my eyes eventually do too.

Time of EVE Kickstarter Makes Stretch Goal

Having already recommended the anime Time of EVE and how it blew through its initial $18,000 Kickstarter goal in less than 24 hours, I am pleased to report that it has exceeded $126,000 by a good amount. This shows there is a model for import/export that may be emerging even as the world economy is in decline. Transitional time bring opportunity and I've decided to put my money where my mouth is by upping my backing to the $80 tier.

Yes the book is nice goody to have, but my intention has less to do with greed than with wanting to see this economic model flourish. For niche industries such as anime this could encourage more independent projects such has happened with video games. Crowd sourcing is also an interesting way to weed out ideas since demand has to occur up front rather than just being speculated on.

It might be that Time of EVE is an exception and this model won't work for other animes. After all, it is a brilliant work that is not your average animated fair of any kind. Time will tell, but at least this gem succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

Some Brief Thoughts on Snowden and Heroism

I do not believe Edward Snowden is a hero like some on the political right and left are hailing him. The timing of the disclosures and his running to Hong Kong are straight out of Cold War espionage operations so I suspect China’s hand in this. From his own statements, I see him as an erratic personality more than likely manipulated by a handler working for Chinese intelligence.

Even if he wasn’t, he’s not the white knight people think he is. A Ron Paul supporter and Obama sympathizer, he did not go public with this information when it mattered most before the 2012 presidential election. Timing is everything in life and doubly so in politics, which is why I believe China’s spies have a hand in this.

This would be a perfect opportunity to weaken President Obama for his meeting with President Xi Jinping on cybersecurity. Given how much attention had been focused on Chinese hacking of defense, government, and business servers in the United States it makes sense to skewer Obama with spying on his own people to deflect attention.

Seeking asylum in China while spouting off about freedom indicates that Snowden is either lying or quite stupid. Yeah, going to a country that censors the Internet, has spied on its citizens for many decades, and suppresses any mention of Tiananmen Square is beyond foolish if you are seeking freedom. It looks like someone has been working on his perception of China, if you get my drift.

Meanwhile, there are purportedly idiots in the intelligence community talking about “disappearing” Snowden in public. Oh and another scandal is hitting involving the State Department covering up drug dealing and use of prostitutes by ambassadors and security contractors.Our government is in the best of hands, isn’t it? There is no way to indicate just how much sarcasm fills that sentence.

There aren’t any heroes, folks. So please don’t rush to put Snowden on a pedestal just yet. Remember that Manning and Assange both proved to have motives that weren’t heroic and even Deep Throat turned out to be someone wanting revenge for being passed over for a promotion.

Isn’t it interesting that all the wrong doings of the current administration are coming to light after Obama was safely re-elected?

Technobabble: Video Card Style

There is nothing quite as infuriating as troubleshooting personal computer issues and it can reach exponential heights when nobody else has successfully solved it. That’s the situation I’ve been in for the past month since getting a Nvidia Geforce 650 TI based video card. Part of the pain was making the mistake of testing the 320.xx beta drivers, which ended up being certified in 320.18 without correcting any of their bugs. Check out this forum for multiple threads on the issues involved.

Some of the bugs are show stoppers. By that, I mean they lock up the computer which truly qualifies as a stopper. The worst symptom is that of Windows Explorer locking up while allowing currently running programs to function. They can be used or shut down, but Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn’t work, launching programs fails, and you can’t shutdown. Other folks have had their video cards actually burned out by the drivers.

So I’ve spent the last week or so uninstalling and installing drivers (use safe mode, folks – you’ll be grateful you did) to find something remotely stable. 310.70 was fantastically unstable, 306.97 was slow in games, and 314.22 showed some of the same lockups. I’ve settled on the latter for now, since they crash the least.

Checking the latency on my PC with LatencyMon reveals large problems with Nvidia’s driver kernel, nvlddmkm.sys. I’ve disabled powering down the video when the PC is idle and that’s helped stability. So far I’ve kept the PC going for its longest stretch by enabling the screen saver to make sure the card doesn’t go dormant.

Digging for solutions exposed another large issue and that was what was causing Mass Effect 2 and 3 to fail to run. It turns out that starting with Windows 7 the power management in the operating systems from Microsoft park the cores in multicore CPUs. This saves power for laptops, but is pointless for desktops. A utility called parkcontrol made all the difference in the world in allowing the games to run.

The big surprise from using that was how much faster and responsive the PC has become at doing everything else. From Internet browsing to graphics editing, everything is much faster now. Why this is an issue with Nvidia and not with AMD Radeon video cards is a mystery to me.

If I had things to do over again I would buy an AMD Radeon 7790 based card. The Gigabyte 650 TI hardware is excellent and never spiked in heat like some with the 320 drivers, which is a testament to its cooling system. But I never had driver issues with Radeons like this.

A Source of Referral Spam

Ever wonder where the strange links in your Blogspot stats come from that don’t really link to your blog? Ever wonder why someone would do such a thing? Wonder no more.

r-e-f-e-r-e-r . com showed up on my stats today and this site blatantly lays out what is going on. For $29.95 you can spam forty million websites with links to your site to artificially drive traffic – or at least that’s what they promise. You may have heard of similar schemes for Facebook likes and Twitter follows to boost apparent status.

Screen capture follows and is safe to click on:

The part selling ads pointing out mostly webmasters visit this site is something I find vaguely hilarious. Most won’t be pleased to be visiting, I suspect.

Please don’t help them out by visiting their site.

Beowulf: Director’s Cut (2007) Review

Before underdressed CGI blue cat people fought “the man” in 3D and made a billion dollars, another underdressed CGI hero fought against “the woman” in 3D and barely managed a profit worldwide. Despite its underwhelming box office, this movie inspired by an ancient Anglo-Saxon poem is the more interesting of the two. Gory, boisterous, beautiful, and dark, it was hampered by trying to be both a meditation on human frailty and a popcorn action flick. UPDATED June 2013 with Blu-ray details and HD screen captures.

In those forgotten days before television, before movies, before radio, and yes even before comic books, heroic tales still circulated. Traveling bards who could recite great tales were highly valued and the superstars of their day. Committed to memory, countless tales that thrilled audiences of the past have been lost. But a few lasted long enough to be transcribed to paper and Beowulf is the oldest in the English culture.

If you are a dedicated fan and purist about the heroic poem, please stop reading here. It will save you time wailing and gnashing your teeth – besides, Grendel of the movie is much better at doing both of those. This movie is more of an “inspired by” story than an adaptation.

Set in 6th Century Denmark, the film begins with with chanting driven orchestral music (composed by veteran Alan Silvestri) and the main title flashing on screen. In 3D at the theater, it looked very good I must say. Quickly the title fades and we are presented with an ornate golden horn drinking cup featuring a dragon. It is apparent that we are supposed to pay attention to this object and I recall thinking “It’s a plot device!”

As the camera pans up, we are introduced to our first look at how the all CGI film renders humans. A very pretty and regal looking Nordic lady is holding the cup during its filling, all the while looking none too happy to be doing so. Soon we find out why and her identity.

A Worthy Anime

While I’ve been aware of Kickstarter for some time now and even been interested in a few projects, there has been nothing that I was willing to put my money on until now. Time of EVE is a wonderful webcast science fiction anime about a café where humans and humanoid robots mingle in a homage to Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. After marathoning the episodes the day after the Kickstarter announcement for an international Blu-ray of the movie version, I knew I had to contribute.

At the moment, the funding stands at $99,112 with my contribution in. The goal was $18,000 by June 22 and was blown through in 22 hours. That should give you an idea of what people think of the anime. Because of the overwhelming support, an English dub is going to be included and further stretch goals are being worked on. Personally, I’m hoping for a soundtrack CD for the next goal.

Time of EVE is wonderfully written and animated, so don’t expect crude Flash animation – this is the quality of theatrical release along the lines of Studio Ghibli productions. Heavy on character development, the film features humor and gentle emotion throughout rather than action.

The story begins when a curious high school student tries to account for the movements of the female humanoid housekeeper robot and walks into a mysterious unmarked back alley café. Inside there is one rule: don’t discriminate between humans and robots. As the mystery deepens, the question of what makes an individual a person is raised, tolerance is tested, and outside political intrigue raises the stakes involved. Along the way, everyone’s personal story gets told.

Check out the first episode for free at Crunchyroll and the whole thing if you are a paid subscriber.