On Watching Films

Like many people, I like watching films for entertainment. Unfortunately for me, it seems that the film industry is hell-bent on making this as difficult as possible. They have succeeded to a large extent - I now watch far fewer films than I used to a little over a decade ago.

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The Golden Compass

Some days back, I saw the trailer for the film "The Golden Compass". I am eagerly looking forward to watching this film, as it is based on the eponymous book that is the first in the fantastic "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman.

"His Dark Materials" sadly does not seem to have achieved as much popularity as some of the other less-deserving sagas. I for one didn't even know that such a series existed until Ananth had pointed it out to me and given me his copies of the books to read. Once I had read it though, I liked it immensely (my review of the series on Amazon.com; the same on my web-site). I some times even use the names "Lyra" and "Pantalaimon" in my code and scripts instead of the prosaic "foo" and "bar", much to the bewilderment of the reviewers.

Ananth is so excited about watching the film and its sequels that he has already re-read the books to refresh his memory. He plans to watch the first show of the first day for the film. He eagerly laps up articles about Dakota Blue Richards, the young girl who will play the role of "Lyra", the charming protagonist of the books.

I always have a mixture of excitement and dread when I learn of a film based on a book that I have liked - for me, the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films are the only such films that haven't left me disappointed. When you read a book, you imagine the characters and the scenes in a certain way that might not be shared by the director of a film. A film is also constrained by a limit on the duration of the film, which might not be enough to develop all the characters to the extent the book has done. When those who have not read the book watch the film, they usually either get confused or miss a lot of (what you consider) important references in the dialogues. You still look forward to watching the films because you want to see how the directors have realised the books as films, because you want to revisit the characters and the story and because you hope that the films will get more people interested in reading the respective books.

I will keep my fingers and my toes crossed.

Dhoom 2

Go and watch Dhoom 2 if you haven't already. You get to see from two to four hot bodies (depending on your inclination) and some of the best stunts seen in Hindi cinema.

Besides that, try not be disappointed by the script (such as there is) comprising utterly inane dialogues, the plot (such as there is) comprising completely illogical turn of events, the skill of the actors (such as there is) that makes a chiselled wooden statue look more expressive, the fact that the character played by Uday Chopra is not killed off in this film either, the tendency of every actor in this film to walk or run in slow motion, the unnecessarily numerous and forgettable songs (except for the title song), etc.

See also: VikGup's hilarious review of Dhoom 2.

Superman Returns

I watched this movie over the weekend and was somewhat disappointed. The special effects were decent and more natural than in the original series of movies, as was to be expected, but the plot just had so many holes and the acting was so so-so that I was wondering how Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey who gave us "The Usual Suspects" could have also given us this.

The New Yorker's Anthony Lane has written a far more eloquent critique of the movie than I can ever hope to write, but I would add that Brandon Routh is also about as good-looking as Christopher Reeve and is unfortunately about as wooden an actor. Of course, they are still nothing compared to Keanu Reeves when it comes to having a consistent lack of expressions throughout a movie. Perhaps having a chiseled good-looking face implies that your facial muscles are in a permanent rigor mortis.

There are some things that I would never understand about superhero stories. For one, why do they always have the same villain in story after story either as the main villain or as a willing aide to the main villain? Superman has Lex Luthor, Batman has the Joker, the X-Men have Magneto, He Man has Skeletor, etc. Do fans never get tired of seeing the same villains bugging their superheroes in episode after episode? Do they never wonder that if their superhero is all he is chalked out to be, why he is not able to get rid of this villain for good? Are they in fact aware of this irony and actively relish it?

Another thing that bugs me about superheroes is the need for almost all of them to have a mild-mannered alter ego. Why? And why can't other people recognise them in most of the cases? Clark Kent as the alter ego of Superman is particularly worrisome - does the addition of spectacles so change the facial appearance of a person that even someone close to them, like Lois Lane is to Superman, is unable to recognise them?

Yet another thing that really irritates me about superhero stories is the mess that all the hundreds and thousands of stories and story branches create. Again, Superman is the perfect example of this mess. Are there Supergirl, Superboy and Krypto, the Superdog, or not? Does Superman have a son or not? Has Superman died or not? Et cetera. What is the canonical Superman storyline?

Finally, why do most superheroes wear their underwear outside of their tights? What is it about superpowers that affects their sartorial sensibilities? In our college, a mild form of ragging involved the seniors making the freshers wear their underwear outside of their trousers, tying a bedsheet or a shawl around their neck as a cape and making them run down the corridors of hostels screaming "I am Superman!". Some of my friends would also remember our batchmate, who is now a banker in Bombay, running through the corridors of our hostel one night in an obviously inebriated state and clad only in an underwear and a bedsheet tied around his neck screaming "I am Superman!".

A Philistine Watches "2001: A Space Odyssey"

We watched Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" yesterday. I was terribly disappointed by this movie: most of the scenes were excruciatingly long, the music (when it was present) seemed mostly arbitrary for the scene in question, the "star gate" scene seemed amateurish and long (and looked as if it was designed to induce a headache), the actors were mostly expressionless, etc. On the positive side, I admired the special effects (awesome for 1968) and was pleased to see how they were shown in a matter-of-fact manner instead of the in-your-face style so common these days. I also like the main music score that was composed for this movie and which is the recurring theme throughout the movie.

The painfully long shots reminded me of the "art movies" we had to see in our childhood. At that time, the state television channel Doordarshan (literally "tele vision" in Hindi) was the only thing we could watch on TV. They used to show a movie every Sunday afternoon in one of the regional Indian languages. Being a Malayalee family, we used to watch every such Malayalam movie out of sheer loyalty. Unfortunately for us, Malayalam (like Bangla, but unlike other languages like Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, etc.) seemed to be blessed by a lot of award-winning directors who insisted on making "meaningful cinema" which was anything but meaningful to the vast majority of the population. It was very painful to sit through such movies.

I still remember a particularly painful scene from one such movie (whose name I cannot recall). The first shot shows an empty and untarred village road receding into the distance. After quite a while you notice a small speck on the horizon, very slowly increasing in size, until you can make out that it is a man on a bicycle slowly approaching your viewpoint. He finally passes your viewpoint after about five long and painful minutes. The next shot shifts the viewpoint so that now you see the same cyclist slowly pedal his way through the same road away from you till he again becomes a small speck on the horizon and till you admire the empty road for quite a while again. This shot lasts another five painful minutes. This scene makes you wonder what the point of the director was. Was it to drain all remaining enthusiasm for the movie from the viewer so that he does not apply much thought to the rest of the movie? Was it to filter the true admirer of meaningful cinema, who is masochistic enough to sit through such scenes, from the wannabes? Was it simply to fill up an extra reel of celluloid? Needless to say, after about 10 or 15 of such movies, our family lost all enthusiasm to watch Malayalam movies aired by Doordarshan. Only the advent of cable television brought relief and the ability to watch normal Malayalam cinema on TV.

Back to "2001: A Space Odyssey". In a couple of shots, there is this chorus of male noises in the background that has been warped to sound somewhat like the collective humming of a swarm of bees. That bit is rather painful on the ear as is the very shrill noise emitted by the black monolith on the moon when it is unearthed by humans. I personally also found some bits of well-known western classical music compositions a bit weird and out-of-place for the respective scenes.

The point of this long rant is that I believe that Kubrick could have so easily made this movie much shorter, much more bearable and much more accessible without losing anything of the story. Such a disappointment.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Visual Effects in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe"

Thanks to Anirban Deb, I attended a presentation yesterday that was given by some of the guys from Rhythm and Hues India where they demonstrated how they created some of the visual effects in the recent movie "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe". It was organised by ASIFA India and supported by CG Tantra, Animation 'Xpress and Women In Animation. The auditorium was full of interested people - students from the various animation training institutes in Bangalore, professionals from the animation and visual effects industry and "outsiders" (like yours truly) who were just curious about such things.

The presentation was enlightening in several ways. Some interesting tidbits included:

• The lion Aslan was entirely CG! There were around 5 million strands of hair on this model and around 15 different types of hair. The model comprised the skeleton of the lion, the key muscles on its body, the skin and the fur. Its expressions were modelled on Gregory Peck's role as Atticus Finch in the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird", since they did not know who would provide the voice for Aslan till quite some time into the production. Fortunately for them, Liam Neeson's voice was not too far off the mark for the rendered expressions.
  


• They used around 65 different types of characters in the final battle scene. They used the MASSIVE software to simulate a realistic battle scene comprising almost entirely of tens of thousands of animated characters. They used Level of Detail (LoD) to reduce the load on their render farm.
  


• Their render farm for this project comprised around 2000 machines (I do not remember if they were dual-CPU Pentium 4s or Opterons). They also have a daemon on each employee's workstation that uses the idle time on that workstation to help with the rendering jobs. They use a custom Red Hat and SuSE distribution and all their employees use Linux on their desktop. All their assets are stored on centrally available file servers that virtualise access using a custom asset locator instead of ordinary file paths (this lets them easily move around stuff when discs get full for example). All the tools in their pipeline have been created in-house. All of this allows them to add capacity to their render farm as needed without wasting a tonne of money in software licenses or being at the mercy of a vendor to implement a feature they need immediately. It also insulates them from vendor bankruptcies which is apparently common in this industry.
  


• Since rendering each frame in a shot was computationally very expensive, they used several aggressive techniques to reduce re-renders. For example, while using something like Phong shading, instead of rendering the whole frame in one go, they would separately keep the contributions of ambient, diffuse and specular (from each of the lights in the frame) and then combine these in a computationally trivial step to create the final image. This allowed their artists to tweak the colour, intensity, etc. of each light source to get the perfect look without having to submit a new job to the render farm.
  


• Blend shapes are simple to use, but inaccurate, means to show character movement and expressions. Muscle deformations are more complex to use but volumetrically accurate. These guys created a tool that interpreted blend shapes to derive the corresponding muscle deformations to get the best of both worlds.
  


• Normally PCs use 8-bits of intensity levels per Red, Green and Blue component to illuminate a pixel. Apparently this is not sufficient and produces banding effects due to loss of precision over several calculations. They were therefore using a 16-bit logarithmic intensity level per component for all intermediate calculations.
  


• If one is to believe the presenters, apparently the visual effects guys are pretty low in the pecking order in a movie production. Something as simple as telling the director to not use bright green as the key colour when the background itself is green sunlit grass was beyond them.
  


• I didn't understand it fully, but they apparently made a monetary loss on this project. It is also apparently a very low margin, high effort business requiring extremely talented artists.
  

It is also heartening to know that Blender 3D is getting better and better, especially for character animation, and we can actually do some of this stuff at home. Synfig, a 2D vector animation tool, also became Free recently though I do not know how good it is.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)