A scene from
Polar Express.
In his
Game Engine column in the current issue of
Filmmaker, Graham Leggat addresses the covergence of film and games. "The two industries are converging and there's no turning back," writes Leggat. "This is a huge kick for the casual observer, but even dispassionate natural historians of contemporary media, seeing the two species gamboling together in the wild, are feeling a sense of excitement, perhaps even liberation. And why not? It looks like progress. It gives you hope. Like anything, though, the novelty of cross-industry adaptation can wear thin. After you've watched several dozen ants launch themselves noisily downstream on leaves you start wishing for an ant that can swim. There's not much to do, however, but be patient and put your trust in evolution."
Walter Murch, talking with Scott Saunders in the print edition of the current issue of
Filmmaker, elaborates: "There's a bifurcation which has always been part of filmmaking, but has been kind of latent in the process, which digital technology is forcing out into the open. It's the choice between what I call
black-box films and
snowflake films. What I mean by black box is a device that gives you absolute control over everything that you do; every pixel is there because you want it to be there. And obviously digital technology allows that to happen. If you force that to its logical conclusion, it becomes a theoretical black box into which you simply
think the film. You don't have to
make anything anymore; you just think it and there it is. And if you want to change something you think it different. It's kind of a bargain with the devil, and filmmakers will have to comes to term with what that implies about collaboration and about film as a reflection of the world as it exists at the moment a film is made. We're not there yet by any means, but Pixar and
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are waystations in that direction. ...
"The metaphor of the snowflake is that a snowflake freezes faster than the molecules can stay in control of the process. That's why they're all different. If water freezes with more control, it turns into an ice cube -- which to my mind is just a series of excitable bathroom tiles. The snowflake has this beautifully random element to it -- and in that lack of control there is something greater than absolute control. What the future holds is something in the spectrum between those two poles, between the snowflake and the black box."
"At a recent event inaugurating the new Electronic Arts Development Lab building at USC's School of Cinema and Television, filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis addressed this topic," writes Cassie Carpenter in this week's
Backstage magazine. 'My influence, when I was a film student here, was a television influence,' said Zemeckis, who borrowed game design techniques for his upcoming motion-capture film
The Polar Express. 'In the '80s, cinema became influenced by the pace and style of television commercials. And in the '90s, it was the pace and style of the music video. And I think the next decades are going to be influenced greatly by the digital world of gaming.'
"When asked how long before the two mediums are equal, Spielberg said, 'I think the real indicator will be when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17.'"
The prospect of that happening anytime soon seems unlikely.
"Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks come as close to commercial infallibility as seems possible in Hollywood," reports David Rooney in today's
Daily Variety, but [they] appear to have taken an ambitious misstep with
The Polar Express. Straining with all the elaborate, new-fangled wizardry at its disposal to become an instant Christmas classic [ironically] steeped in old-fashioned storybook charm, this visually impressive yet emotionally frigid fable could perhaps more accurately be tagged
The Bipolar Express. ... While digital animation has made considerable strides in the past decade, the trick of creating emotionally vivid, realistic human characters has yet to be achieved. Pixar's
Toy Story movies got by with peripherally featured humans, but attempts to move beyond that, like Sony's 2001 interactive computer-game-derived
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within have been cold and distancing."
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posted by Steve Gallagher @ 10/25/2004 01:30:00 PM
Comments (1)
<<"When asked how long before the two mediums are equal, Spielberg said, 'I think the real indicator will be when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17.'"
The prospect of that happening anytime soon seems unlikely.>>
Go play Final Fantasy VII.
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posted by Pedagogen @ 8/08/2008 2:19 PM
