Posts Tagged ‘TV’

Short spoiler free review: only go and see this if you can live with an action picture entirely lacking a heart or soul which justifies its existance by lashing itself to a far too cool barrel before throwing itself into a river above a waterfall. Which isn’t a good thing TM.

So I went to see Wanted tonight. More on that later…

I also bought a crab to have for my dinner tonight. Stick with me through this, hopefully I’ll make some sense at the end. I bought a crab because I remember having crab in the hotel we used to go to on holiday when I was little. I had one of the crab shells for years. I had a memory of crab as some sort of exotic, cool experience. Somewhere along the way the crab shell was broken and found its way into a bin. I still had the memory though.

So back to Wanted. I have a liking for escapist action films. The Matrix, Hard Boiled, The Killer, Under Siege, Hot Fuzz… the list just goes on and on. Each in its own way has a certain cool quality. Wanted does cool. It has cool special effects (the curving bullets), it has some cool cast members (Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terence Stamp), there were some cool ideas and some well constructed action scenes (for the last two you can watch the film). The problem was it left me feeling like I felt after I’d eaten the crab: unfulfilled.

The problem with the crab was it smelt like the memory and it looked like the memory but it didn’t taste like the memory. It just tasted of crab.

Wanted did cool like The Matrix. It did body count like Hard Boiled or The Killer. Unfortunately it left out heart and soul entirely – instead it had a by the numbers plot woven together by a committee who forgot to read the instructions on how to use a loom. It had some mystical mumbo jumbo spun in a loose knit pattern to try to justify wholesale slaughter and the death of innocent bystanders in a nihilistic aberration (I was tempted to say train wreck but that was just one reference too many) that placed no sign of any value being placed on human life. It cynically tried to press buttons: the assassins have a code. The death of a few, chosen by some higher power, saves the many and stops bad things happening to nice people so they don’t end up as assassins.

You may ask “Isn’t that true of all the films you mentioned earlier” – I’d disagree. Under Siege – Stop bad people stealing weapons of mass destruction. The Matrix – save humanity from aliens who have taken over the world. The Killer – he only kills bad people. Hot Fuzz – for laughs. Sorry let me try that again: Hot Fuzz – to satirize action films by showing how silly they are when placed in an incongruous setting. Yes and but also because its funny to see a whole older generation of Britain’s finest actors in a shoot out that isn’t embarrassing to watch. So the grammars a bit ropey at the start of that last sentence – its like the plot of Wanted.

Fortunately, unlike the crab, the next action film I see hopefully wont mistake cool for at least some sort of moral structure. No matter how flimsy.

That’s where I ought to finish. I should at this point not write anything else. Anything more is just me messing up my central thesis and sounding even more pompous than I already have. After all its just an action film that like 99% of its relations will be consigned to late night TV, three quid DVDs in the sales a year from now and taking up space on some film archive shelf and being added to lists of action films kept by people who keep such lists. No where near the top 100 I hope.

However a few parting thoughts that flitted through my mind…

David O’Hara – wasted in more than the literal sense at the start of the film.
Marc Warren – no picture on IMDB? Actually Marc Warren – why did he do this film? To say he’d worked with the cool people or because he gets a gun fired inside his head for part of an action sequence? Thousand Year Old Cult of Assassins – except the Hashshashins didn’t come into being until around 1090 so that would be a rounding error of sorts? OK I’m just being picky but if they predate the group the word comes from wouldn’t this be a film about something called something else. I know I’m losing it somehow here. I really should give up. Sorry I’ve more…

Weavers who a thousand years ago could convert binary found in the cloth produced by a loom and discover that it was a list of names of people to bump off (I did say there were spoilers) – yes the ancient Indian writer Pingala knew about binary some time BC. However we have to wait to 1605 for Francis Bacon for a mention of a system to use binary to encode letters of the alphabet. Six hundred years after our order of killers has been bumping people off. Even then if (whatever mystical force is directing the appearance of binary in the cloth) hasn’t sent a cypher key how do they know that they are bumping off the right people? Plus back when names were more flexible (as little as a couple of hundred years ago) how did they know they were bumping the right people off. Sorry I shouldn’t pick apart the fluff. Except when the fluff is used to justify so much violence someone should have made certain the weft hold the rest of the plot together.

CSI Spoiler Warning.

I would but I just can’t be bothered to put the time in to send up CSI like I did Waking the Dead last night. Tonights moan is that what was an almost perfect episode of CSI was spoilt at the last by another bad habbit of TV show makers. For once a CSI where once of the main cast is at the centre of the story was really well done. Then they chicken out at the end.

Too often when a character leaves a long running show the makers feel obliged to give us a last long lingering look at the character. In ER its them walking out of through the ambulance bay. Earlier this year in CSI when Sarah went it was the taxi journey. When the character is leaving by walking away that works. There is a time it doesn’t work though: when the character has a violent end. Now I’m assuming Warwick won’t be coming back. If he comes back from being shot multiple times by someone trained in using a firearm who fired from less than six feet away then the shows credibility will really have slipped. However the long lingering cast moment before hand gave away something was going to happen. As he walked outside in slow motion I thought he was going to get shot. When he got in the car I thought it was going to explode. When someone knocked on the window I went back to the idea he’d be shot.

The sad part is that this can be handled to give the moment real impact. Unexpected violence for loved characters should be unexpected for the audience too. Character’s should have unresolved relationships without wrapping everything up with a bow. That gives the writers’ more stuff to play with. I’ll mention two character deaths from US television that support my argument. Agent Simon Donovan’s death in the West Wing episode Posse Comitatus – killed suddenly in a random act of violence. He was in on ly four episodes. I know its coming now but it still gets me every time. My second example is Lt. Col. Henry Blake in MASH who dies of screen but which has real impact because it’s unexpected.

Fortunately for the world there isn’t anything on TV tomorrow night that I want to watch so you’ll be pleased to know I’ll spare you another rant about someone spoiling otherwise good work at the end.

INT. MAIN OFFICE, CCHQ. NIGHT

CLOSE ON BOYD. TRACK round STELLA, SPENCER, GRACE and EVE finally alighting back on BOYD

BOYD

What have we got?

EVE

Unknown Male Caucasian height one hundred and sixty eight centimetres, weight sixty seven kilos. Killed by a single stab wound to the chest with a combat dagger. No signs of struggle. A length of video tape had been forced down his throat post mortem and then wrapped around his body as though he was a horror movie mummy. I’ve reconstructed the tape and it was credit sequences from popular two part BBC dramas. No other forensic evidence. No DNA. No hairs. No fibres. No odd stones from a graveyard that have turned up in another investigation. Whoever did this knew how to clean up after themselves.

GRACE

So we can assume he knew his attacker or attackers…

SPENCER

Found naked apart from the video tape on waste ground by a canal near Shepherd’s Bush by a man walking his bloodhound at dawn along the tow path. I went door to door to every property within a mile and no one witnessed the body being dumped during the night.

Clutching a plastic coffee cup, STELLA takes up the briefing. She walks to the transparent board where mug shots of of a number of men are displayed.

STELLA

I’ve run his finger prints, checked all missing persons reports for the last fifty years; watched every moment of CCTV footage for all of London for the last week; contacted Interpol, the CIA, the Vatican, the Bavarian Illumninati and Starbucks and no one reported missing who matches the description.

STELLA picks up a white marker pen and with

Gallic flare writes: Leads None

STELLA

Maybe your friend from Mossad might help Sir?

CLOSE ON BOYD, who briefly has a dreamy look as though he might be remembering a brief happy moment in his otherwise pained and tortured existence. Then he remembers Shoestring only ran for twenty one episodes so the DVD residuals and his financial adviser says that’s not enough to make up for the shortfall in his pension.

GRACE

The MO matches the other killings. I’ve plotted the location that all the bodies were dumped at and the only pattern is the vicinity of a television production facility making crime dramas for the British Broadcasting Corporation production facility.

CLOSE ON BOYD, pointing with a vicious looking dagger covered with dried blood.

BOYD

So we have no motive, no identification, no forensic evidence, no murder weapon, no witnesses and we’ve been assigned as the only unit to investigate this ongoing series of bizarre serial killings dating back fifty years.

CLOSE SLOW MOTION ON BOYD, he flips the dagger then stabs it into the interview table.

BOYD

Put that away till we need it again Grace.

GRACE’s GLARES at BOYD

GRACE

Boyd we can’t just keep bumping off the staff who give the entire second parts story away in a thirty second trailer at the end of the first part. Sooner or later the real police will catch on.

BOYD

The police don’t care. First it would take hundreds of them to do what we five do in a single story. Second they hate the b*****d as much as we do for giving away the end. So it sounds like we’ve gotten away with killing the b*****d again this time and that’s good enough for me.

BOYD Smiles a strange smile a bit like a predatory great cat that just spotted the biggest saucer of cream.

THE END

Another Saturday night, another episode of Doctor Who using one of the classic Doctor Who styles: Doctor and assistant run around chased by guards while the story unfolds. Fortunately there were none of the shaky sets that used to come with those stories in the old days and even better none of the bad green screen work from the first two episodes of this years run. A well put together episode with a few modern moral lessons thrown in and symbolism that was almost too heavy but wasn’t pushed too hard especially given the tea time slot.

And now for this weeks Doctor Who related grumble ^*1 … I do wonder if the schedulers know what their up to: moving the time the show is on each week so far this year seems a little cavaliar. I know its supposed to be "a gateway to Saturday night TV" but do you move the way into a fun fair each week? If you do will you notice the people who go to the wrong place and arrive late or not at all because its a success anyway?

Going off on a complete tangent I was shopping in M&S today looking for some clothes. I’d swear the v-neck jumpers they were selling were exactly the same as I was wearing in 1986 right down to the garish colours and the synthetic fabric mix. I know time travels the in thing with Doctor Who and Ashes to Ashes on the telly but we’re in real trouble if mens’ fashion design has slipped back to the mid-80s. Whats next a Snood revival with Nick Kershaw ^*2 fronting the M&S ads? Its not just a bad fashion statement it’s a Marks and Spencers taste disaster…

*1 well they fixed the FX but what would Saturday be without a little rant.

*2 with all due respect to Mr Kershaw whose new albums I still buy and whose music has been amongst my favourite choice for writing to for years.

Went to see Omid Djalili at the Liverpool Philarmonic tonight with Kim of the Split Writing Personalities and DarkDwarf. I liked the TV show but it didn’t seem as funny as some of the appearances I’d seen on post water shed TV. The live gig was funnier than the TV show.

The Boothby Graffoe, the opening support act, had a good 20 minute stint that got everyone in the right frame of mind. Then after a slightly interval (20 minutes) Omid made his appearance and kept us laughing pretty much continuously for the next hour and a half. He finished it all off with his trademark dancing as an en core. Well worth seeing live.

Just which up would that be?

Hopefully you wern’t looking for the lyrics to a 1988 hit by Yazz and the Plastic Population and thought the title included punctuation. If you were I hope you’ll accept my appologies and leave quiety back to google or whatever search engine sent you here…

I’ve spent part of the long Easter weekend trying to get pyODE to play nicely in Vue. If I don’t bring rotations into the set up everything plays nicely and a simple simulation of bouncy sphere works fine. If I foolishly try to use cubes and apply a little rotation to them: BAM! rotations get skewed, objects vanish mysteriously as rotations take on impossible values.

I was going to do some writing or editing this week end or maybe a render or two. Its not like there was anything worth watching on TV, my regular viewing all got cancelled for Easter. I could even have wasted it on the latest meem to catch DarkDwarf in its insidious tentacles. Instead I’ve been reading up on vector, coordinate systems and other stuff I thought I’d not need to worry about again since I was in my early 20s. The problem, I suspect, lies in up not being right. Vue uses Z for depth and Y for height. pyODE uses Z for height and Y for depth. Somewhere in the conversion errors are creaping in and hence good data in gives garbage out.

Now if I can just figure out which way is up I’ll be fine.

I’ve covered a selection of theatrical lighting rigs already that use three lights. I was sent an e-mail asking if I’d show a definitive version of the classic three point lighting rig used for film, television, photography and computer graphics. I’m not going to claim to have any experience of using this rig, I have seen it used by a TV crew but that’s my entire level of real world knowledge. One thing I do know is that whenever I’ve tried to find a definitive explanation of it I’ve discovered quite a few variations on a theme rather than one three point lighting rig that everyone swears to. From what I’ve read it originally evolved from the three point theatrical rig when film and later TV emerged.

The basics don’t vary that much. Light sources from three directions are used. These are usually called the key light, the fill light and the backlight. The key provides the main light source from the front. The fill comes from the front and softens the shadows cast by the key as well as filling in any other dark spots. The backlight comes from somewhere behind the subject, it adds highlights to the edges and separates the subject from the background. Sometimes, when a studio set up is being simulated, a forth light is added called the background light.

The first major difference is about where the key should be placed. Some explanations I’ve read place it above the subject at around thirty degrees to the horizontal. Others say to place it where a real light source would be shining from. It is usually placed to one side of the subject from the front.
The fill is a light placed to the front at roughly ninety degrees from the key. It is placed lower than the key at around eye level and its angle to the horizontal is closer to than the key. The fill is usually a softer light source. It is also usually not as bright as the key.

The backlight is the third and final light, sometimes called the rim light. Again different explanations place the backlight in different places. Some examples, particularly those for portrait photography of subjects with hair, place it as a horizontal light close to the rear of the subject shining straight forward. Others place it to the rear of the subject pointing straight forward but raise it above the subject and shine it down at a steep angle, almost like a godspot from behind. The final popular location is to place it behind the subject one hundred and eighty degrees to the fill and at ninety degrees to the key.

If a background light is used it is behind the subject and shines onto the background to illuminate it.

The next source of schism between the descriptions is in the relative brightness of the three lights. Some sources quote formulas and ratios for the different lights depending on if a high key or a low key style is preferred.

Adding to the complication of creating a three light rig in computer graphics, such as when using Vue, are the imperfection of rendering in simulating real world lights.
Some problems, like the fill light casting a shadow can be avoided in some packages by simply turning off the source’s shadow casting. This can be done in Vue 6 Infinite, Vue 6 xStream, Vue 6 Pro Studio and Vue 6 Esprit with the light tune module. It can’t be done in Vue 6 Esprit or Vue 6 Easel.

To simulate a soft fill source it may sometimes be necessary to use several faint light sources as the fill light placed at slightly different positions but all shining in the same direction.

In the real world backlights gain a lot of impact from shining on the tiny hairs the surface of a subject’s skin and through a full head of hair with many separate strands. Computer generated hair on skin surface however is usually none existent and head hair is often either simulated with layered transparency mapped polygons or is made up of significantly fewer hairs than a real person. So as to get a rim of highlights to separate the subject from the background a single backlight behind may not be enough. Instead it may either need to be raised up and angled down or a series of sources may need to be placed around the subject to shine onto the subject’s edge.

Three point lighting’s biggest shortcoming is that it is an overused cliché. Its style is that of millions of unoriginal studio portraits and almost as many uninspired 3d renders. I’ve read that with better technical innovations it has fallen into disuse in a lot of television and film production.

I’ve not had time to write this and produce any example renders. Despite my misgivings about this rig I do think it can sometimes be useful and so for next time I’m hoping to produce examples of several of the variations I’ve mentioned today.

Read:
Vue Lighting Rig #16: Three Point Lighting- Part 2 and Vue Lighting Rig #16: Three Point Lighting- Part 3

Having switched to Google Reader I find the list of blogs I follow expanding. Here are three which I’ve started on recently that I think are worth sharing…

• That very British and yet somehow subversive institution which is Stephen Fry
• John August – screen writer currently out on strike in the US
• Ken Levine – TV Comedy writer

I was walking home from work today and was struck by something silly. I was playing a mental word game to keep my mind of the torrential rain. Thats important because towards the end of the walk I pass a row of take aways and so there is a real danger of replacing a healthy meal with something hot and waist line expanding if I’m feeling cold or misserable. So I was playing the lost consonant where you drop a single consonant from a well known phrase or saying and I started on TV Taglines. So “The X Files” tagline “The Truth is out there” become “The Ruth is out there” – clearly a prescient reference to the vanishing character Ruth from Spooks.

After a while I hit on a change to the Heroes line “Save the Cheerleader. Save the World.” although this time I had to add a “h” making it into “Shave the Cheerleader. Shave the World.” Which left me with a mental picture of Hiro using his time travelling / teleporting abilities and his sword to shave Claire after her regenerative powers get out of hand and every hair that ever falls from her regenerates. Silly I know but it saved me from the temptation of pizza, fried rice or fish and chips.

1. Boy Meets Girl – Waiting for a Star to Fall
2. Bob Marley – Iron Lion Zion
3. Beverly Craven – Promise me
4. Tasmin Archer – Sleeping Satellite
5. Jennifer Warnes – First We Take Manhattan
6. Level 42 – Running in the Family
7. Pearl Jam / Neil Young: Rockin in the free world
8. Michael McDonald – Sweet Freedom
9. Mark Cohn – Walking in Memphis
10. tanita tikaram – Good Tradition
11. Starship-Nothing´s Gonna Stop Us Now
12. John Farnham – You’re The Voice
13. Midnight Oil – Beds are Burning

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!