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Live Not by Lies

Live Not by Lies

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Perhaps you have seen the fantastic series Chernobyl. One of my favorite parts was the ending when Valery Legasov gives this amazing speech. His summary on the cause of the Chernobyl disaster? Lies.

This scene is a direct and clear reference to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn amazing “Live Not by Lies“. It was published the day he was arrested and exiled in 1974. In it he exhorts his fellow Soviet citizens to no longer cooperate with the Soviet regime’s lies.

It’s definitely worth a read in the world that seems increasingly happy to wrap themselves in the blanket of what we want to believe. We pick echo chambers that reflect what we want to hear and cut off the very lifeblood of truth from ourselves by shutting opposing voices out or canceling people. Instead of actually believing that truth is something that can and will stand on it’s own no matter what is thrown at it – we now hold to ‘our truth‘ which is little more than opinion and almost always collapses in the face of any real study or facts. We cling to these opinions and avoid thinking critically about our own position nor engage in the charity work of dialog and debate with opponents so the best answers can be found by all.

We now even choose to believe lies when those lies fly in the face of science – such as proven environmental or biological science. But reality doesn’t care what we believe or feel – it exists outside ourselves. If you choose not to wear your seatbelt because you don’t believe in them – the physics of a car crash will correct your mistaken opinion. If you choose to ignore vaccinations or deny your chromosomal makeup – your genes or biological invaders will exert themselves no matter what you want to believe.

When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there.
But it is still there.
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.

The question is: how bad is the price when that happens? Some lies only hurt ourselves or do injuries to another’s reputation. Chernobyl shows, however, even seemingly simple lies can also cause disastrous consequences – often far greater than people imagined who simply hid a small design problem.

Lies have a cost. Live Not by Lies.

Amazon Productions

Amazon Productions

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Amazon Studios has a new 34,000-square-foot virtual production stage in Culver City. Well, maybe not new. It’s the historic Stage 15, built in 1940 was once home to movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Robocop”.

Like other projects that have traded the problems of green screens for much better filming alternatives, Stage 15 has been revamped with a wall of more than 3,000 LED panels and motion capture cameras that re-create the outside world indoors. It allow actors to interact with the environment rather than pretend in front of a green screen.

Adult Swim’s Yule Log

Adult Swim’s Yule Log

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After starting out like any other Yule Log video with cheery music playing over a warmly lit fireplace for the first couple of minutes, the Adult Swim Yule Log special slowly devolves into the story of a young couple that fall prey to a series of disturbing and increasingly strange circumstances while spending the holidays in a remote cabin.

The special actually marks the feature-length debut of Casper Kelly, who has shown his mastery of subversively creepy comedy with the likes of a Blair Witch Project parody starring Mystery Inc., called The Scooby-Doo Project and, most famously, the hilarious and horrifying 2014 short film, Too Many Cooks.

The filmmaker has also written for cartoons like CatDog, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies, as well as co-created the live-action Adult Swim series Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell. One of his first contributions to more earnest horror was in the 2018 movie Mandy where he crafted the bizarre in-universe commercial for a branch of mac-and-cheese called “Cheddar Goblin.”

You can watch the Adult Swim Yule Log (aka The Fireplace) on HBO Max or here:

https://www.adultswim.com/videos/specials/adult-swim-yule-log

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Stanley Kubrick explains the endings of 2001 and The Shining

Stanley Kubrick explains the endings of 2001 and The Shining

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If you want to read some epic nut-ball theories that put the average tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to shame, you don’t need to go much further than the average Stanley Kubrick movie analyst.

There’s a lot of modern movie critics out there that believe that movies can mean whatever you want them to mean – and boy do people make some tenuous connections. While relativist interpretations are the most popular logical fallacy in our post-truth world, I would argue that approach is nonsense – and now we have a little more proof from a director most often cited by critics as supporting their nutty interpretations.

Stanley Kubrick’s movies are often multilayered and difficult to comprehend, but it turns out he absolutely did have a message for each of these movies. He does, however, say that he is reluctant to reveal his interpretation: “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas, they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized, one feels it.” That part I very much get. The experience of something is far different than logically thinking about it.

So what were his intended meanings?

The meaning of the ending of 2001 – This one is NOT hard to interpret. Why? Because Arthur C Clarke wrote the book the movie was made from and very clearly lays out what is going on visually. Personally, I think a lot of the reason the movie 2001 was so confusing was due to effects limitations Kubrick struggled under. I bet we could re-do the gate transport sequence today and make it much more amazing and clear what’s going on. But anyway, here’s what Kubrick said about the ending of 2001:

“The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities — creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form, and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.

“And they choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture, deliberately so inaccurate, because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty but weren’t quite sure, just as we aren’t quite sure what to do in zoos, with animals, to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. And anyway, when they get finished with them, as happens in so many myths, of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being sent back to Earth. You know, transformed and made into some sort of superman. And we have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is a pattern of a great deal of mythology. And that was what we’re trying to suggest.”

The ending of the Shining:

“Well, it was supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle where he is part of the hotel’s history. Just as in the men’s room when he’s talking to the ghost of the former caretaker who says to him, ‘You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here.’ One is merely suggesting some kind of endless cycle of evil reincarnation, and also — well, that’s it. Again, it’s the sort of thing that I think is better left unexplained, but since you asked me, I’m trying to explain.”

But you don’t have to take my word for it, we have it recorded from Kubrick’s own lips:

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AI enhanced snowball fight – from 1897

AI enhanced snowball fight – from 1897

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Remember old-school movies that were damaged, in black in white, and everyone ran around at 2x speed? With AI processing, they can fix many of those problems. Olden Days youtube channel has a number of great restored videos like this.

Amazing to see that when fixed, this looks just like a snowball fight one might see today – proving that we aren’t all that different from the people of our past as we’d like to think.

These restoration techniques have come a long way in just a few years.

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AI based digital re-aging

AI based digital re-aging

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Disney published this paper about using AI to digitally age and de-age actors in a fraction of the time it usually takes for normal frame-by-frame manual aging techniques used today.

FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background. Using synthetically generated training data is a method that’s been utilized for things like training self-driving cars to handle situations that aren’t easily reproducible.

The age changes are then added/merge onto the face. It appears this approach fixes a lot of the issues common in this kind of approach: facial identity loss, poor resolution, and unstable results across subsequent video frames. It does have some issues with greying hair and aging very young actors, but produces results better than techniques used just a few years ago (not that the bar was very hard to beat).

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Manual Cinema

Manual Cinema

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Manual Cinema does shadow puppet shows in Chicago. They do some amazing shows such as Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol and many others. They use combinations of puppetry and live acting. Here’s a video on how they produce some of their effects and shows.

Here’s another video of how they create their effects:

Here’s an example of what they can produce in a short film called Eighth Blackbird