Andy Serkis, the Oscars, and VFX: Round 2

Recently the argument about Andy Serkis’ potential eligibility for an Oscar nomination, for his contribution to the character Caesar in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, re-ignited with the announcement that Fox would be lobbying the Academy on Serkis’ behalf. I got embroiled in it a little bit on Twitter and Facebook, but I’m not here to reiterate my stance, because it really doesn’t matter. Whether or not Andy Serkis is officially recognized for his contribution to Caesar’s final performance, the VFX artists will not be for theirs. It’s not a question of whether or not they should, the simple fact is that they won’t. The Oscars are about three months away. That probably wouldn’t be enough time for an organized effort to make a difference in the rules, much less our directionless mess of an industry.

Whether you think Serkis deserves it or not, whether you think the artists should have a piece of that or not, those are opinions, but this is a fact: this is a fight we should have had years ago. We didn’t. And now it’s too late. We already forfeited on the issue of RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. It sucks, but continuing to argue and whine about it will get us nowhere. We can’t, and shouldn’t, have the fight over this film. But we can, and should, have the fight for the next one, and the one after. That’s a fight we could actually win.

If you write a script and it gets made into a film, it will pass through many hands before it reaches the screen. Including, in many (even most) cases, other writers. Sometimes a dozen or more other writers. So who gets the credit? Because credit is not just about credit — whoever gets a credit is eligible for a share in any residuals and awards. The WGA has a whole process for determining who contributed substantially to the finished film, and who thereby gets a credit. So you could potentially have some six writers (the max allowable credits, last I checked) sharing an Oscar nomination, even though some of them may never have spoken to each other before. That hasn’t yet happened, as far as I’m aware; the movies that have such great swaths of writers tend not to be Oscar-bait, but that’s another topic for another day.

But more importantly, those writers share a stake in the film. Not much of one — another for another — but it’s something.

SAG has no such arbitration process, because it’s never needed one. The actor either gave a performance, or someone else gave it. But it’s not that easy anymore. As we move into this new world of performances which are substantially digital, perhaps the notion of an “actor” should expand to regard “performers.” Before the issue of Oscar-worthiness even enters into it, before the film is even released, there would be an arbitration process during which everyone involved in the creation of the character — the original actor, the animators — makes their case as to why they should be considered to have contributed substantially to the final performance. You could have four or five credits for a “single” character, all of whom collectively would be the nominee/recipient of any awards should the performance garner them. And all of whom, much more importantly, would share in the success of the film as actors do now.

It wouldn’t be a perfect system, obviously. If you had a dozen animators but only one could demonstrate a substantial contribution — by shot count if nothing else — then the other 11 are assed-out; or if the system had a maximum number of credits like the writers do, those who didn’t make the cut would likewise lose out. But hell, it’d be something, and a damn sight better than what we have now. Better three out of five get a cut, and better luck next time to the others, than nobody does, ever.

If we could work that, then down the line at the Oscars a “Best Performance” Oscar might be offered to a team rather than an individual. We wouldn’t need a new category to start with, but as these performances become more common perhaps one could eventually be warranted (just as Best Animated Film didn’t exist, until finally there were enough of them annually that it did).

I’d maybe call it “Best Collaborative Performance” — so you could include not only digital characters but puppets and animatronic characters as well (puppeteers, by the way, are already covered by SAG), making it about the performance and not the technology. Maybe also subdivide it, the way the short film categories do, into Best Collaborative Performance: Live Action, and Best Collab: Animation.

But that’s all fairly complicated and tough to implement (SAG won’t like it, for one thing), all just wishful thinking. What I’m getting at is, to go on about the Oscars is to miss the point. The Oscars just reflect the industry — if we want to change the way they see us, we have to change the way the industry does. First you get respect, then you get awards. It doesn’t go the other way round. To get any kind of respect and recognition at all, for animators or anyone else in the pipeline, we’ll need to do what the writers and the actors did decades ago to get their bite at the apple: organize. It’s all very well to whine about how the industry doesn’t respect us, but let’s take a good look in the mirror and ask ourselves: why should they?

This industry works many of us to the bone, often pays crap wages, often ignores our legal rights as members of the labor force (which rights, side note, also only exist because people organized and fought for them), and otherwise fails to appreciate our contribution not only to the art form but to the bottom line. They do all that while asking for the moon, and what do we do? We give them the moon, and more besides, and we may piss and moan on Twitter — when we’re pretty sure they’re not looking — but when the project is over we come back, hat in hand, and meekly implore them to do it to us again. Why should they respect us when we keep proving they don’t have to?

You think it’s bullshit Andy Serkis might get the lion’s share of the recognition for Caesar? You’re pissed off about it? GOOD. It IS bullshit. You SHOULD be pissed off — but not at Serkis. Our position of weakness is not his fault, and it’s not his responsibility. It’s ours. So if we don’t want to be back here again in a year or two when the next digital performance starts to get some buzz, let’s take the anger being directed at him — where it’s doing no goddamn good at all — and point it at the situation we’re in. Use it as a motivation to stand up and say “Enough!” And this time, let’s actually do something about it, besides feel sorry for ourselves on social media. Because if there’s any one lesson we should have known already, but we’ve sure as hell proven to ourselves by now, it’s that nobody else is going to.

The importance of framing

Also more cynically referred to as “spin,” framing “defines the packaging of an element of rhetoric in such a way as to encourage certain interpretations and to discourage others.” (via Wikipedia)

Framing can be used for both honest and dishonest purposes — the aforementioned, more dishonest form of “spin,” for example, is often used to obscure negative information by attempting to portray it as somehow positive. But it’s also important to consider the framing of even a positive statement, lest it come out unclear or appear to be negative.

Case in point, the recent announcement by Indy Mogul that they will be discontinuing their popular series of Backyard FX (BFX) videos. For those who aren’t familiar, the BFX videos show low/no budget filmmakers how to get cool props and effects into their films on the cheap. As a sort of sister project, BFX would also release a short film they’d produced to showcase the prop/effect in action.

The series has been popular with its target demographic, putting clever and inspirational techniques into the hands of people without a lot of disposable income. So you might imagine that the announcement that Indy Mogul would be discontinuing this series was not met with a positive reaction, and you’d be right. Outrage and proclamations that Indy Mogul has “just lost a subscriber” fill the comments.

But here’s the weird thing. Indy Mogul isn’t actually ending BFX. It’s what they said, but it isn’t what they meant, not really.

Not sure what I mean? Here’s the announcement:

Now, maybe I’m misinterpreting what they’ve said, but it seems to me that the only thing they’re actually retiring here is the Backyard FX label. Backyard FX was about teaching amateur and aspiring filmmakers how to get the most bang for their buck, and showing them the final product in a short film. This new thing that they’ve announced will be… showing amateur and aspiring filmmakers how to get the most bang for their buck, by showing all the nuts and bolts of the production of a short film.

The only thing that’s changed here — again, correct me if I’m wrong — is the order of operations. Before they’d make a prop or effect and then shoot a little film to show it in action. Now they’ll be supporting indie directors to help them make their own, original creative projects, and use those projects as case studies for how to get a lot of production value on a tiny budget. This is better. This will get the viewers’ creative juices flowing, to see these principles in action on a variety of projects. This is a natural next step for Indy Mogul and the Backyard FX fanbase. BFX is expanding, evolving, advancing.

But the BFX fanbase didn’t hear any of that. Because the Indy Mogul folks led the announcement saying “We’re ending BFX,” and at that point those fans stopped listening.

In the indie world — and frankly, even in the professional one — it’s not enough to know how to write a script or make a film. You’ve got to be able to sell it. You have to convince people that they want what you’re offering. And you’ve got to be able to frame your pitch properly. A lot of indie folks don’t seem to think about this. They seem to figure that they don’t need “spin” because they’re not trying to hide a crappy product behind a bunch of hand-waving — they’ve got a good product that ought to practically sell itself. But nothing sells itself. You’ve got to prime your listener, to make them understand why what you’re offering is desirable.

Do it well — look, for example, to Apple, whose every product announcement is a master class in framing — and your audience will fall all over themselves with desire, begging you to sell them your product. Do it poorly, and even if it’s exactly what they’ve always wanted, you’ll lose them long before you get the opportunity to tell them so.

I hope that this misstep won’t hurt Indy Mogul in the long run. But should many of their subscribers follow through on their threat to unsubscribe — after IM spent years accumulating their subscriber base, after they probably decided to take this next step precisely because they reached what they felt was a critical mass of subscribers — this could prove to be a catastrophic mistake that was easily avoidable, if they’d just given some more thought to the way they framed the announcement.

My Week(s) in Movies (5/14–5/28)

MONTY PYTHON: (ALMOST) THE TRUTH* — Actually more of a TV miniseries, but fuggit. This six-part documentary (each about an hour long) traces the history of the comedy troupe known as Monty Python from how they all met, to the inception of the Python “brand,” to how it ultimately ended.

I grew up loving Monty Python (except perhaps for MEANING OF LIFE, which baffles and terrifies me to this day — it’s mainly “Find the Fish” that goes past my surrealist limit) and I loved seeing how these things came together and hearing the war stories and factoids behind it, hearing the very sane motivations for the tremendously insane productions. If you’re a Python fan and a Netflix subscriber (it’s currently on instant watch), this is a must-see.

BRIDESMAIDS — I didn’t expect much from this film, in fact I had no intention of seeing it. It looked like a knockoff of THE HANGOVER — one of which (HANGOVER PART 2) just came out to abysmal reviews.

This one was getting great reviews, which I can’t always trust when it comes to comedies since, to go back to THE HANGOVER, people thought HANGOVER was the funniest thing since sliced clowns and I thought it was alright at best, and at worst a travesty compared to the legitimately brilliant spec script on which it was based.

BRIDESMAIDS is not at all a HANGOVER knockoff — in fact it even thumbs its nose at the expectations of people like me, having the characters plan a bachelorette party in Vegas and then sabotaging the attempt.

The best comedy has a heart among the jokes — something that many of the more adolescent “comedies,” particularly the “spoofs” of recent years, have neglected — and that heart is definitely there in BRIDESMAIDS. Many of the themes and storylines don’t quite pay off as cleanly and tightly as I would have liked, but enough of them do that a story feels adequately told.

But to the important question, is it funny? I’m happy to report that yes, BRIDESMAIDS is very funny. Kristen Wiig has great charisma, even at her most pathetic, and Melissa McCarthy as the brash, does-not-give-a-fuck Megan is a scene-stealer and worth the price of admission. It’s not a perfect film, but as good solid comedies that respect your intellect go, this is the real deal.

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS — Being a big ol’ Potterfag, I naturally have been purchasing the Ultimate Edition Blu-Rays as WB rolls them out. These first two films actually have extended editions which I have not yet watched, but they also each have an ~hour-long installment of a documentary series, “Creating the World of Harry Potter,” each of which picks a particular subject of study (Characters, VFX, Music, etc.) and examines it over the entire series (excepting 7 & 8, which had not been completed when many of these interviews occurred).

The first one was focused almost exclusively on the first film, and how Chris Columbus assembled the creative team, cast the leads, etc. I gave Columbus a bit of credit in reviewing SORCERER’S STONE, for casting the series brilliantly up front; but he deserves more credit still for making the call of hiring Stuart Craig, the production designer who made (and continues to make) the world of HARRY POTTER so visually iconic and unified. I remember going to see the film when it was first released, and being astonished at how perfectly the look of the world matched what I had imagined while reading.

Some leniency also has to be given for how “cutty” the first film was — something acknowledged by Columbus himself. I should have but didn’t take into account the fact that they were dealing with an entire cast of inexperienced child actors. Due to labor laws, they would only get about 3–4 proper shooting hours with the kids each day, and the performances had to be coaxed from them over many takes. So they shot everything in coverage, running multiple cameras, and constructed the movie in the edit. I still think that the editing could have been better finessed and tightened, but I can at least get a better appreciation for why the film took such a pragmatic approach and eschewed style in the name of just getting the damn thing done.

You can tell, coming into the second film, that things have changed on that front. They rolled into CHAMBER OF SECRETS straight off SORCERER’S STONE (SS released on a Friday and COS began shooting the following Monday), so the kids now had 9 months of experience not only performing on a film set, but performing as the same characters, and were able to nail the performances after only a handful of takes. The cinematographer and editor are both different this time around, and it’s interesting now re-watching it to be able to see the difference the newcomers make, as opposed to just having felt it without being able to articulate it in 2002. There’s a lot more long takes, two-shots, camera movement, etc, and a lot more light and shadow interplay in the lighting design. It feels like more mature filmmaking, and while the pace still drags in some places I find it to be a better-edited film overall.

I remember being impressed with Dobby at the time (particularly the shots early on where he beats himself with the lamp), and I think for the most part he holds up, as does the basilisk. And the Quidditch action is light years better than the very 2D-card-feel of the first film’s match.

The comfort the kids have with the characters proved to be a bit of a double-edged sword, particularly in the case of Rupert Grint. While in the first film he struck me as the most natural of the young actors, he spends most of this film pulling faces for the camera. It’s like someone told him he was the comic relief character and he took that to its logical-but-insane, A Modest Proposal-esque extreme. Some moments from him still feel natural and genuinely funny — when he’s puking up slugs, the faces work; and his combined relief and rage when they escape the spiders, even though it’s only one line, feels the most real and nuanced of anything he does in the film — but overall he went too far and apparently had nobody reeling him in.

I think what really kicks this film up a level is the performances of the adults. We get a number of new characters in, including Arthur Weasley, Lucius Malfoy, and of course Gilderoy Lockhart. I said in the previous movie that the adults didn’t seem quite on board with the magical world; that feeling is gone here. Presumably because they had the chance to see the final product of SORCERER’S STONE and go “Ohhh, I see what we’re doing here. I get it now.”

I think it’s the scene between Lucius and Arthur, trading insults and threats in the bookshop, that really signals that the adults have bought into what they’re doing; and that, in my view, makes the whole thing come to life.

The film has an odd tinge of sequelitis, peppered with moments that are supposed to make us recall how awesome the first film was and squee with delight.

“There’s only one place we’re going to get all this… Diagon Alley.”

(She said it! I know what that is! Squee!)

Hermione fixes Harry’s glasses with oculus reparo (just like her first scene in the previous film! Squee)!

It’s just a little too self-referential for my taste; your mileage may vary.

An interesting detail that I’d never really noticed before: Harry’s signature spell through the series, as it were, is expelliarmus, the disarming spell; but he never officially learned the spell in a class, he learned it from seeing it demonstrated in the dueling club — he learned it, in fact, from Snape.

They made a good point in the documentary, that Chris Columbus being a “safe” director was, in some ways, probably necessary to get this franchise rolling. Dan Radcliffe says something to the effect of “Before you get in someone like Alfonso [Cuarón] to shake things up, you have to have a solid foundation laid.”

One of the directors in the running for SORCERER’S STONE was Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam — in fact, he was J.K. Rowling’s first choice for the position. I can absolutely see why she wanted him; he’s got precisely the right sensibility for the material.

What folks who have only watched the movies, and not read the books, aren’t going to be able to appreciate is that there’s an absurdism underlying the magical world. It is a fundamentally silly place in many ways, at least from a Muggle perspective. A distorted, absurdist take on our own world — and ours, to be fair, makes as little sense to them as theirs does to us.

I’ve heard people argue, for example, that the rules of Quidditch are idiotic, that having a 150-point game-ending move makes all the rest of the game pointless. Let’s set aside the fact that a 150-point lead does not necessarily guarantee a win (if the points disparity is greater than 150 between the two teams, the team with fewer points loses even if they catch the Snitch — this actually happens in Goblet of Fire, but only in the book). The greater point, I think, is that of course it’s absurd and pointless — all sports have rules which are absurd and pointless and arbitrary, and especially certain British ones. It’s certainly no mistake that Quidditch has a strong phonic resemblance to cricket. (Non-Britons, look up the rules to cricket. I dare you to make sense of it.) The magical world, especially early on, is meant to be a skewed satire of our own.

Who better for that than Terry Gilliam? I’ll go ahead and say no one. Gilliam could have brought the absurdity and the bent humor out of the material in a way the first couple films completely fail to do. The best they manage is that there are no vertical lines in the architecture of Diagon Alley. Right. Well done.

But. Gilliam’s also a perfectionist and, let’s be frank, kind of a nutcase. He would have made all the children cry and want to quit acting, run wildly over time and budget, and in the end the film would have been amazing, but would it have been accessible? Would it have been a phenomenon?

I think Terry Gilliam’s HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE would have been a brilliant, unique, oddball film… and it would only have been a film. Too weird for most adults, too intense for most kids, it would be a cult classic that left the franchise totally dead in the water. We would probably never have seen CHAMBER OF SECRETS onscreen, let alone the rest of them.

I would have loved to see Gilliam’s version of the film and the magical world, but if two somewhat-dull-but-accessible initial films are what it took to lay a safe foundation and establish a success that emboldened the filmmakers moving forward… if that’s the price we had to pay to get to see the whole series unfold, then you know what? I’m glad to have paid it.

RIP Sidney Lumet

I still haven’t seen a lot of Lumet’s work — just NETWORK and THE WIZ — but even just between those and his fantastic book I know that we’ve lost a giant of filmmaking, who was still active as recent as 2007, at the age of 82. I’ll be satisfied with my career if I can make movies half as good for half as long as Lumet did.

o hai

Welcome back everyone. With the blog not updating for over a month and my dorkmanscott.com domain being locked up and 404′d due to a billing problem with 1and1 (“dealing-with-it” in progress), I’m sure just about no one is still checking in. But I’m still here and I should be posting more between now and the end of the year.

I know you’ve heard that song before but this time, I mean it! You’ll see!

The Most Popular Bridge on the Internet

I don’t check my blog stats very often, but when I do I see a consistent pattern. By far, the most-viewed post on the blog is this one, about the ID-iotic argument for “common design,” discussed by way of the relatively well-documented evolutionary pathway of whales.

And why is that the most-viewed post on my blog? Because I mention, in passing, the George Washington Bridge, and include a picture of it. The number one search that leads to my blog, by far, is “George Washington Bridge.”

Naturally, I’m being a little facetious with the title of this post. It’s not like I’m getting massive traffic from it. We’re talking an average of 20 hits a day. Still, that’s 20 hits a day looking up this bridge and winding up here.

Since I’ve now mentioned it by name and re-posted the picture, I assume that future searches will also lead to this post. So, Googlers of the future, just for my own curiosity: why are you googling the George Washington Bridge?

MK:R Follow-Up

So, not to put too fine a point on it, I was right.

REBIRTH was an independently-produced fan film (albeit produced by film professionals) made with the goal of selling Warner Bros., who owns the MK property, on this director’s vision for their long-in-development franchise reboot.

The tl,dr is “I called in favors and most of this was done for free.” Still, an interesting read, and worth checking out to hear the director make his case. He said one thing that I found particularly reassuring, and hoped would be the case, answering the concern that this real-world grounding was a “betrayal” of the supernatural basis of the property.

From the article:

I know there’s a lot of concern about the mysticism and the special powers and all that kind of stuff.  Well, like I said, this is really designed — the short so far is really designed like a prologue to the movie. Now, in a movie version, I am going to have that mysticism there, but it has to be done in a very tasteful way.  I wouldn’t like it too campy or too cheesy.  I know this is a weird analogy, but it’s the best one I can think of right now.  It’s kind of like when in Harry Potter, there’s two universes that coexist with each other.  There’s the real world, and then you get on the train and then you go to Hogwart’s, and that’s where all the magic is.

I had my fingers crossed that something like this might be the case — as he points out, this is just a prologue, and I could see it being a very interesting second-act reversal when the portal to Outworld opens and we discover that there’s more to this tournament then just a bunch of human psychotics. And Sub-Zero and Raiden would be difficult to justify if they were planning to stick solely to real-world origins for the characters. So it’s good to hear this confirmed.

I hope he gets his shot at it.

Fuck this commercial (2)

Hey guys. Busy with stuff. Hope to post more, even if briefly now and then, but follow my Twitter if you want to keep up with me more regularly and reliably.

Anyway, just needed to get the one off my chest. This may be a running thing on the blog, talking about commercials I see over and over and grow to hate more and more.

This time, it’s McDonald’s “Don’t Talk to Me” spot:

SAVE THE CAT! review: down for maintenance

For those looking for the STC review that was up briefly this afternoon, I’ve had a few second thoughts about it. It’s a fair point that if I’m going to reprimand Snyder for his tone, I should probably be more conscientious about my own.

I know that people who read this blog regularly (or just know me in general) were less than surprised to see me express myself like an asshole, and probably filtered my point out of it just by sheer force of habit. But dammit Ringo, I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd. And I don’t want to feel like I’m just trying to stir up controversy to get attention.

So while I may just put the old one back up, I’m going to take another crack at that review, trying to hit the same points without undermining myself quite so much, and hopefully have it up tomorrow.

EDIT: It’s back up, unaltered but with an addendum. But since I have a new rule of not un-publishing things, that means this post stays, too, as an interesting artifact.

Skeptical Sunday: 100 Science Lectures

Not much time to write a big thing this week, so instead I’ll just share this link to a collection of science lectures to entertain and expand your mind. That should keep us both occupied for a while!