notes from underground

This is a test of whether I’ve got Lightbox 2 set up correctly, not a great example of image quality… these are all from my little moleskine sketchbook, but I took them with a handheld camera and spent an absolute minimum of time preparing the images, so enjoy the nice interface and check back again once I own a working scanner.

suspense!!!

Now I recognize that this is pure speculation, as I’ve never actually met any of them, but I’ve heard that “normal people” have nightmares about fairly mundane stuff—wolves, scary sheep, so on and so forth.

Why on earth do I have to have dreams about hard disk failure?!

OK, so I have a well-documented love-hate relationship with the folks over in the Modern Culture and Media department. I want to hate them, but deep down, within the icy, granite bowels of their darkest, most deliberately obfuscated souls, they have some good ideas. Case in point: this paper, on Shadow of the Colossus, immediately irritates me by first off requiring a citation for the statement that game designers are artists, as if we need their permission, their endorsement, to be so! Add to that the simple fact that they’ve taken one of the most beautiful games I’ve played and broken it down into theoretical tripe, and you have a recipe for aggravation. That said, there is a quote in the article that I somewhat appreciate:

Scott Miller, […] co-creator of Max Payne, writes, ‘It’s time game designers grasp the power of creating games with emotional depth, […] and really – I mean REALLY – make them care about their game’s story’

Last night I played through part of Rainbow Six: Vegas II. In one level, your team fails to prevent hundreds of innocent hostages from being slaughtered by a chemical weapon. Here’s an instance where Miller’s point could have been taken more to heart. The fact that such a scene even exists in Vegas 2 puts the game a huge step above its much more traditional, linear and uncomplicated predecessor, but at no point in that level is they player made to feel that there is any hope of saving the poor souls inside.

Now, I don’t want to start an argument about the riskiness of creating psychologically traumatic situations in videogames. All I am saying is that for any game to make an impact on the art form (particularly a game in as formulaic a pantheon as Tom Clancy’s) beyond implementing more clever mechanics and better level design, we need to take more chances. Take risks with your players’ emotions. Taunt them with cake or something. The first time you take the cake away, they may cry. They may even slip up in their grief and get incinerated in a fire pit. But it’s a game. They’ll try again, and the second time, they will have learned something.

The folks I’ve met who have participated in Teach for America emphasized one thing about their experiences above all others: if you trust somebody to rise to a challenge—a kid, a gamer, whoever—they usually will. Even if the outcome of the story is predetermined, allow the player to think, just for a moment, that they have a chance to save those men and women. Let them sweat a bit.

Just a thought.

Here’s the link to my final project on YouTube, and here’s an embedded version:

Enjoy!

I woke up at 4pm on Sunday, and turned in the beast at 9AM this morning– I think that means that of the past sixty-five hours, only six of them were spent sleeping. I can’t pretend I’ve been working 100% constantly, but I’ll be damned if it hasn’t been close. We’ve been through Hell and high water, but my “Typebot” animation project is now complete! There are tons of niggling little problems I want to go in and fix, but the project is more than presentable and I think it looks pretty awesome. A Youtube link will go up once the clip “premiers” at Thursday’s wrap party and class reel screening.

So that’s it, huh? That project was my final undergraduate work. I’ve got a critique with the professor and teaching assistants this afternoon, and then I’m done with college. Weird feeling.

But in the meantime, TO BED!

The first final renders from my animation final project are in! After a surprising turn of events last night, this project has gone from being my second-to-last project to being my final undergraduate project ever. Fairly momentous, though also somewhat daunting… all the more so because the deadline I am racing to meet is in a meager four hours, and I’m only done rendering one shot! You’d think I’d have more to show, I started weeks ago and in this final run-up to the deadline I’ve been awake and working on this for roughly 40 hours. At least the other (cooler) shots should be done in good time to present them at the screening and wrap party on Thursday.

Anyway, here’s the image:

Image links to a higher-res version… it’s a pity the depth map shadows are such low quality, but any higher and it would have been going significantly slower.

I’m getting pretty close on my final project. Here’s a preview of what is to come!

In about five hours, I will be essentially done with college. I still have final projects due next week, in both animation (the “typebot” character design and rigging project) and my independent study (where I am redoing kadamwhite.com as a proper and more professional-looking portfolio website), but both of those projects feel very post-college to me. They are both courses that I took in order to better prepare for the work I intend to do professionally, not courses I took for their abstract academic value. Worlds of Russian Science-Fiction and Fantasy, for which I turned in my final project yesterday afternoon, and The History of the English Language, the exam which I will sit in two hours, are the last two proper liberal arts classes in an undergraduate career that has been heretofore dominated by humanities courses. For all that, I am going into art. It’s a strange feeling to realize how big a change this is, and yet how normal it all feels.

When I got to Brown just under four years ago, I was pretty darn convinced I was going to be either a history or an English major. If I’d taken Russom’s History of English courses a few years earlier, who knows? I might still have gone that route, and be applying to graduate programs right now. I could well have been planning to rely on my talents as a writer for my livelihood, rather than my visual side. Of course I chose East Asian Studies so I could do a bit of everything and then some, and I can’t precisely say that I am disappointed to be going into art–quite the opposite, it’s about bloody time! Still, as I prepare to leave this place I am only just beginning to realize how many other untapped courses and professors I am leaving behind as I graduate. Oh well… If there’s one thing I’ve gotten used to at Brown, it’s feeling like there’s never enough time!

Now, off to rock this exam. Back in a jiffy.

John Gaeta, on Speed Racer:

We felt that the pivotal barrier in moving toward more expressive, less real, visuals was the perception that today’s audiences require photorealism from their effects in order to prevent a drastic disconnection from the photographed drama . . . but that notion is really connected to the reality of the story universe itself. The Wachowski’s were aiming at a whole different wavelength of narrative which they were attempting to port from their childhood imaginations. Besides, we wanted to have fun, and we wanted to do it across an entire picture.
Thus, we attempted to devolve away from the techniques of precision integration of all live and fx elements and evolve toward a more emotional-graphic underscoring of moments. Like things were done in older days of animation, before computers.

Overly wordy to be sure, and I can’t say how well I think they succeeded until I’ve seen the movie next week, but the man hit the nail on the head: photoreal effects shouldn’t necessarily be the target. If your audience goes in expecting to be transported beyond normal “photographed drama,” as in films like The Matrix, Sin City and evidently Speed Racer, they will be willing to buy in to effect that don’t conform to realistic cinema but instead strengthen the visual impact of the film because of the discontinuity and nonconformity between the photographic elements and the effects. Take a risk, and try to take your audience to a place they haven’t been before. Chances are that they will come with you.

Full interview with Gaeta about Speed Racer is available on VRMag’s website.