“I can’t believe my job is to make you feel good about yourself”
-Lawrence’s boss Alana
I Like Movies is a film about an naive, overly optimistic kid named Lawrence who is absorbed in the world of movies and his own ‘creative’ viewpoints. Unfortunately, he’s socially abrasive, clueless as to how the world/life works, and goes on about creative visions when he hasn’t even held a simple job or seems to make anything anyone wants to see. He shares too much to the point of embarrassing himself and his friends.
I think the movie hits a couple of important themes that are relevant today. First, that when we’re young we often embarrassingly think our thoughts and ideas are unique and amazing – only later to realize how cringe we really were.
Secondly, I think the quote from the boss nails what being a manager is like today – especially for those that grew up in the isolation of covid. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they’re struggling at a much higher rate than other generations – even when rated by their own peers. So the question is, how does one help those that are struggling like Lawrence along?
The 1964 Outer Limits episode ‘Soldier’ was written by Harlan Ellison and was loosely adapted from his 1957 short story ‘Soldier from Tomorrow‘. The similarities were so close that a settlement was reached despite James Cameron who disagreed with the ruling.
Give the original a watch and see just how close (and far) they were.
I loved the Twilight Zone as a kid. Every year one of the local stations would put on a Twilight Zone marathon and play episodes back to back, 24×7, for the entire memorial day weekend. I used to try staying up all night to watch every episode. I usually made it about 18-20 hours before finally drifting off on the couch.
The Outer Limits was also known for tales of the strange and unusual, but I found they weren’t nearly as compelling (If I’m honest, half of the Twilight Zone episodes weren’t really compelling either). But recently I ran across this episode titled ‘It Crawled Out Of The Woodwork‘ and I have to say that it’s incredible. The story could easily be made into a full-length movie and be pretty terrifying. The antagonist was frightening – and even for it’s era.
The story is based on a great question – likely based on the strange and frightening discoveries occurring during the nuclear age. Namely, while delving into the secret depths of the universe, we may find or unleash terrifying things. Even more, those things might just ‘crawl out of the woodwork’ of our experiments in unexpected and uncontrollable ways.
Here was one of last year’s winners. It’s probably not going to replace real moviemakers yet, but it’s absolutely a great creative tool to try out ideas and visualize scenes.
There is a new stop-motion game like The Neverhood and Armikrog or recent movies from Laika. Harold Halibut is a adventure game that uses stop-motion and physically captured model objects to tell the story of a community that crashes their spaceship into a planet covered by the sea.
They made all the objects and stop-motion characters by hand, with real cloth, paint, sculpting, etc. When they realized how much work the stop-motion animation was going to be, the big idea was to 3D scan their hand crafted scenes, objects, and characters in the classic T pose, then use standard digital rigging systems to apply motion captured animations instead of painstakingly hand-animating every frame.
While this was a brilliant method to reduce the massive amounts of time and animation effort required, it still took them over 14 years to complete the game. They freely admit that most of that time was spent just figuring out the workflows since they weren’t well versed in game development tools. Still, what takes Laika hundreds of workers years was completed by this team with a fraction of that effort. They were able to add use all kinds of amazing effects and create scenes nearly impossible for true stop-motion animation.
Watching the resultant gameplay, some of the scenes are gorgeous. The close-ups and dialog shots are amazing and the facial animations are butter smooth. There are even tiny idle animations and movements that you would never do with stop-motion and a great depth to the game by letting you freely walk around – something impossible with hand-modeled animation. But there is maybe the only gripe: it’s too smooth.
Part of what makes stop-motion animation so quaint and ‘comfy’ is the little imperfections and limitations like clothing that interacts differently and animations that randomly pop and hitch. With this method, I notice the animations (especially walking animations) are a little too smooth and they often lose that stop-motion quality. There are times when they stretch the mesh too much and it becomes obvious the model is just getting stretched/bent. Individual clothing layers do not interact separately – they bend together as one. It feels like a solid plastic model – instead of having individually reacting layers of clothing/hair/etc. There is also none of the random occasional popping of clothing/animations mysteriously between 2 frames.
There could be ways to fix this by turning off random parts of motion blending between keyframes and having shaders that could randomly add some pop/hitching. Layers of materials could be animated separately. Still, it’s a noticeable distraction and difference between real stop-motion.
Also very noticeable is that the lighting is computed not physical. Especially in the larger/wider scenes, lighting is clearly rendered and it makes things look flat. Objects do not cast the physically correct kinds of shadows or receive mixes of soft and hard lighting edges as if the physical objects were place together and lit as a whole. This makes the rendered versions of the 3D objects (especially in wide shots) look flatter than they would if the real scene were physically created and lit.
This is definitely a novel new technique that is likely going to transform some of the industry. I think it has some amazing possibilities for speeding up dialog and closer-up shots; but probably not good at totally re-creating the aesthetics of stop-motion. I do think some of the smoothness/deformation and lighting issues could be fixed – but that will take a lot more work. Interestingly enough, Laika goes the OTHER direction. They computer generate/animate their faces in modeling tools, then physically 3D print them to put onto the objects into the physical world.
This is the kind of entertainment that the internet had in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. Not political, full of vitriol, not overrun by bot comments, not divisions and raging against the latest -ism of the week. Just fun, intelligent slices of gold.
One of the first would be this sketch called Dungeons and Dragons (also known as Summoner Geeks or Attacking the Darkness). It was a simple audio comedy sketch parodying the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game experience, produced in 1996 by the Dead Alewives. It originally comes from an album of sketches titled Take Down the Grand Master.
This animated version came about in 2000, when Volition released a 3D animation test turned promotional video for the Summoner video game. They cast characters from both Summoner and Red Faction to play the different roles from the sketch. The video was included in the game, and can be found by viewing the credits. It was one of the earliest forms of Machinima – even before that was even a thing.
Then came The Gamers. In their skit they play four college DnD players that must guide their characters to defeat the evil of The Shadow. They navigate dangerous forests, ancient ruins, a missing player who’s at his girlfriend’s, and not get killed by the girl down the hall. They later went on to make JourneyQuest, Dorkness Rising, and a host of other videos – but I think this original is still the best.
Journey back to a time when the internet was still amazing.
Did you know Japan made 50’s style musicals? I was recently introduced to Kimi Mo Shusse Ga Dekiru – 君も出世ができる – or it’s English title: ‘You Can Succeed, Too!’. It follows the adventures of some aspiring young professionals trying to make it in the business world that’s split between tradition and modernity. Even though the movie is 60 years old, if you’ve ever worked in corporate world you’ll recognize each of the characters: the over-zealous corporate climber, the guy just trying to do the right thing, the aging boss, and the up and coming VP trying to apply the latest corporate techniques learned abroad.
It has some absolutely AMAZING set and costume designs, the music is composed by a famous avant-garde composer and famous jazz performers to the lyrics of a renown Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa. The story is even more fun if you understand the traditions embedded in Japanese corporate culture.
The whole thing is astounding, super-catchy, and fun. I’m shocked it hasn’t gotten more recognition elsewhere.
You can watch it here on Rarefilm and at the Internet Archive. I only wish it were available on DVD/Bluray somewhere.
I found out about this gem from the guys over at Important Cinema Club podcast when they broadcast on Twitch (and then were promptly banned for a copyright strike)
Abandoned Films is back with another trippy, AI-generated movie trailer. This time, they took the 1997 sci-fi classic The Fifth Element and applied a 1950’s big-screen aesthetic.
While definitely not perfect, these AI generated trailers are amazing ways to generate and explore artistic concepts.
